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More "Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had lost their semblance to mechanical man-driven machines. They were now the eagles of the air. They were rising, circling, diving in maneuvers that Dorn knew meant pursuit. But he could not understand these movements. To him the air-battle looked as it must have looked to an Indian. Birds of prey in ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... declamation. Every word was cut clear of disreputable alliances with its neighbors. The whole thing was clean as a row of pewter mugs. The influence of indignation upon the voice caused me to reflect that we might devise a mechanical means of inflaming some in that constellation of mummers which is the heritage ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... be any where, while he had no settled plan of life, and very scanty means of subsistence. He made some valuable acquaintances there, amongst whom were Mr. Porter, a mercer, whose widow he afterwards married, and Mr. Taylor, who by his ingenuity in mechanical inventions, and his success in trade, acquired an immense fortune. But the comfort of being near Mr. Hector, his old school-fellow and intimate friend, was Johnson's chief inducement ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... adding wings to my speed, I leaped out of bed, and, scantily robed as I was, rushed out of the chamber, downstairs, and into the open air. I can hardly recollect the process of turning keys and withdrawing bolts. My terrors urged me forward with almost a mechanical impulse. I stopped not till I reached my brother's door. I had not gained the threshold, when, exhausted by the violence of my emotions and by my speed, I sunk down ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... possession were mounted upon the Fort, and in many instances were manned by these aborigines. Hides were sent to Yerba Buena, a trade in furs and supplies was established with the Hudson Bay Company, and considerable attention was given to mechanical ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... than the old structure, and lay the floor of the loft, build bunks to sleep in, make a new meal chest and dresser, and construct other articles of furniture which were needed to replace the stuff burned in the fire. Enoch had a mechanical turn of mind and Bryce made an able assistant. Between them they turned out a new table, several chairs with hide backs and seats, and even essayed a "rocker" for their mother which, although rudely built and with its rockers not exactly even, was declared by Mrs. Harding to be ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... robust energy, and became consequently, in my eyes, an object of tenderest commiseration. From the first he clung to me with strange tenacity, for our tastes were congenial. He brought with him from his Southern home stores of books and shells and curious playthings and mechanical toys, such as I had never seen before, and to spread these out and explain them for my amusement was his ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... existing thesaurus of up-to-date facts and opinions on modern agricultural methods. It is safe to say that many years must pass before it can be surpassed in comprehensiveness, accuracy, practical value, and mechanical excellence. It ought to be in every library ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... origin in a preceding motion, and so on ad infinitum. For the Love and Hate of Empedocles and the Nous (Intelligence) of Anaxagoras, Democritus substituted fixed and necessary laws (not chance; that is a misrepresentation due chiefly to Cicero). Everything can be explained by a purely mechanical (but not fortuitous) system, in which there is no room for the idea of a providence or an intelligent cause working with a view to an end. The origin of the universe was explained as follows. An infinite number of atoms was carried downwards through infinite space. The larger (and heavier), falling ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... singly. I never meant to give in, and never will so long as my strength serves for the fight. Whoever else yields, I will submit to nothing but physical compulsion. If the Freethinker should ever cease to appear, the Freethought party will know that the fault is not mine. Certain parts of the mechanical process of production are dependent on the firmness of others. One man cannot do everything. But I pledge myself to keep this Freethought flag flying at every hazard, and if I am temporarily disabled I pledge myself to unfurl it ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... sets the soul free to rise on the wings of religious faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and religion—a world which to them is always beautiful and good with God's presence—becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead, mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly changing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... new energies, new liberties, and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid and tame again, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... we can do, and when we are set, neither an economic law drawn from political science nor experience seems a very formidable objection. We are a successful people in machinery, and so we take our analogy for political reforms from machinery. We found that by uniting various mechanical elements we could make machines which would do as much as one hundred or one thousand men in the same time. So we think that if we are only acute enough to devise a governmental machine which will work without effort on the part of the people, we can ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... of the soil are made up of a great variety of substances. The larger part of these act simply as a mechanical support for the plants and also serve to bring about certain physical conditions. Only a very small portion of these substances serve as the direct food of plants and the chemical conditions of these substances ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... accustomed to expect a new rhyme in every couplet; but is on a sudden surprised with three rhymes together, to which the reader could not accommodate his voice, did he not obtain notice of the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is something unskilful in the necessity of such mechanical direction. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... The game of giving quotations that no one else in the class has given is always a delight. Don't be misled by the fun poked at the "memory gem method" of studying poetry. The error is not in memorizing complete poems and fine poetic passages, but in doing this in a mechanical fashion. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... magic, even if it be not, as Dr. Frazer thinks, magic in a negative form. We have now to see what traces are to be found of magic in the proper or usual sense of the word—active or positive magic, as we may call it. By this we are to understand the exercise of a mysterious mechanical power by an individual on man, spirit, or deity, to enforce a certain result. In magic there is no propitiation, no prayer. "He who performs a purely magical act," says Dr. Westermarck,[81] "utilises such mechanical power without making any appeal at all to the will of a supernatural being." ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet it may serve as a document. But what will not serve as a document to the modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as plastic as poetry, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... and as vivid as he used in talking to the Georgia farmers. He urged them, just as he did the farmers, to stop moving about and to settle down—"to stop staying here and there and everywhere and begin to live somewhere." He urged them to leave the little mechanical job of window washing, or what not, and go into business for themselves, even if they could only afford a few newspapers or peanuts to start with. He told of a certain New York street where he had found all the people ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... voice before speaking, and then he said, very nearly choking the baby in his mechanical attempt to pull a lock of his hair ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... with a sort of disgust. "An ounce of civet, good apothecary!" Why it should be so with me I cannot say. I am as indifferent to the facts or fancies of spiritualism as I am, for instance, to the latest mechanical application of electricity. Edisons and Marconis may thrill the world with astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else, but straightway I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect the man I was before. The thing ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... In the mechanical construction of his work Mr. Weber has followed the last edition of Massinger, with a servility which appears, in his mind, to have obviated all necessity of acknowledging the obligation: we will not stop to enquire whether he might not have found a better model; but proceed to the body of the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and without proportion, it may have been either compiled clumsily after the poet's death, or put together carelessly by himself amid the indolence which grows sometimes upon old age. It declares the essentials of poetry to be unity of conception and ingenuity of diction, urges that mechanical correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling, gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the chorus, of metre. For matter such as this a Horace was not needed, but the felicity of its handling has made it to many Horatian students ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Churton; it is so—pleasant to be here!" she replied. But she spoke in a slow mechanical way, and seemed to the other strangely cold and irresponsive; she shivered a little, too, when the caressing hand touched her neck, as if the warm fingers had seemed ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... length, to be vested in one such officer. This was James Berry, one of the captains of Fairfax's own horse-regiment, in which Desborough was Major. He had been a clerk in some iron-works in the west of England, and was "of very good natural parts, especially mathematical and mechanical." Before the war he and Richard Baxter had been bosom friends; but, since he had come into the Army and been much in the society of Cromwell, he had become, says Baxter, a man of new lights in religion, regarding the old Puritans of his acquaintance as "dull, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of music now remained. This was mechanical, and might be taken up at any time; the object of it was entirely pecuniary. I reserved to myself the liberty of laying it aside, or of finishing it at my ease, according as my other resources collected should render this necessary or superfluous. With respect to the 'Morale Sensitive', ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... dominates the whole city. It was erected a century and more ago, and designed for a commercial exchange, but it has since been greatly altered, and served as a fortification in the civil wars. It is to-day occupied for the purposes of a prison, where convicts are judiciously taught various mechanical trades. The view from the summit of this rude old building takes in the town, the long, narrow gulch, the gray and rugged hills which reach upward towards the deep blue sky, dotted here and there by the yellow dome of some ancient church, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... once got out an advertising novelty and had samples distributed by the salesmen as gifts to their principal customers. The novelty was an ingenious mechanical device. It attracted so much attention to itself that when a salesman put it on the desk of a prospect before beginning his sales talk, the attention of the other man was drawn from what the salesman was saying and was given to the novelty. The prospect ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... the pilgrims' tales, she was so stimulated by their simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep meaning, that several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and running away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself by Theodosia's side, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in many points: still, I fancy that you and I have much in common. We belong to those who have learnt to 'look upwards'—there goes the ball, up again!—and who find comfort in doing so. Do you know that many men believe that the universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard, guide and lend grace to the lives ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not mechanical; from any in which the mind, not the hand, has been the creating power. I saw you very much interested the other day in the Eddystone lighthouse; did it help you to form ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... eyes—ah, so like our mother's!—averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage—the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand—galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... obeyed the orders to set sail in a sullen, mechanical way, which did not grow more hearty as they saw that every officer carried his pistol in his belt, and watched the execution of every command with ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... influences of the poorhouse. Where a specially strong arm was required, the curate himself was at all times to be relied upon. He was not only a hewer of wood, but often a bearer of wood as well as of water. He was, too, an embodied guild of all mechanical trades, and might have been warranted to use skilfully at ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... upon with no very great favour; for he had been silent and melancholy throughout the drive from Maudesley Abbey to Lisford Church, and had stared at them with vacant indifference, while handing them out of the carriage with a mechanical kind of politeness that ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... suspend the likenesses of his mother and brother on his wall. He generally, you will find, tries to improve on you—which, of course, is not always hard to do. But sometimes he comes to grief in the attempt, as happened in the case of his wonderful "hanging shelves." Ted Hammer, quite a mechanical genius, had made to himself a set of these shelves, which for neatness, simplicity, and usefulness were the marvel of the school. Of course Ebby got to know of it, and was unhappy till he could cap ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... wind is getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to have somebody's head off. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... it for himself. A text-book can point out what constitutes good form, what is pleasing and impressive to the eye and to the ear, and, in a word, what make up the externals of a good delivery; but beyond these mechanical directions it cannot go. A student should observe the following fundamental directions as his first step toward becoming a successful speaker. Afterwards, he should cultivate earnestness, enthusiasm, perception, a sense of humor, and all other such qualities as go to ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the Government. But there are some things that, with the entire concentrated skill and ability of the nation, her citizens can not accomplish; and one of these is the maintenance of steamship mail lines upon the ocean. In ordinary enterprises competition necessitates improvement; and mechanical improvement and skill, in due course of time, enable individuals to compass ends otherwise deemed impracticable and unattainable. These attempts have all been made, in every form, with ocean steam navigation. It was supposed, as elsewhere stated, that, by superior engines and ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... continuous succession of marvels in railway-work, of which the Tray Run viaduct is a dream of lightness and grace, yet so firm in its welded strength that thousands of tons of merchandise pass over it daily without causing, the slightest oscillation of its airy arches. Here, too, the wonders of mechanical skill are placed in striking juxtaposition with the wonders of Nature, whose obduracy has been so signally overcome. The sense of security was heightened in our case by a furious storm which burst upon us. We were seated on the fender or' cow-catcher,' watching ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... agitating the heart and mind with harassing emotions; while the immortal soul thirsts for eternal happiness. Can it be doubted that such dim, vague, unsatisfied longings are the source of much immorality? Mechanical operations, business speculations, commercial transactions, important as they may appear to the utilitarian, are far from responding to the requirements of the intellect, the imperious exactions of the heart. Such men pine unconsciously for a draught of higher life, they grow weary of existence. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... outwardly very calm, but he was changed. His friends said that his vitality and earnestness were bound to suffer in the struggle for self-repression. His sermons were becoming mechanical tasks and the confessional a weariness. He made his protest, as Canon Nicholls wished, but after the talk with his rector he knew it was useless. He wrapped himself in silence, even with Father Jack Marny. He began, half consciously, ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... had some respect for the callant even before I kenned what was in him. But now I honour him for his contempt of weavers and spinners, and sic-like mechanical persons." ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery—the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of those dubious pieces ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... staring heavily before him for a space, then turned with a mechanical movement and dropped into a chair. He was sitting so, bent forward, his hands clasped in front of him when Saltash returned. He had the worn, grey look of a man tired out ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... later he found himself shown into a smartly furnished office where Mr. Gavin Ramsay sat at a handsome desk surrounded by shelves and cabinets whereon and wherein were set out the products of the brains of many inventors—models of machines, mechanical toys, labour-saving notions, things plainly useful, things obviously extravagant. The occupant of this museum glanced at Allerdyke and the box which he carried with an amused smile, and Allerdyke said to himself that Appleyard was right in his description—if the man was ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... railways, after as well as during construction. In this country, as soon as the engineer has made out his "final estimate," he is dismissed with as little ceremony as a daylaborer. We employ the best mechanical engineers that we can find to look after the repairs of our engines and cars; while the road, which is more important, and upon the good condition of which we have seen that the success or failure of a railway as a commercial enterprise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... which always impends over the sea-power of any country is that, after being long unused, it may lose touch of the sea. The revolution in the constructive arts during the last half-century, which has also been a period of but little-interrupted naval peace, and the universal adoption of mechanical appliances, both for ship-propulsion and for many minor services—mere materiel being thereby raised in the general estimation far above really more important matters—makes the danger mentioned more menacing in the present age than it has ever ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... hydrophone, used by some of the smaller and slower vessels of the auxiliary fleet, consisted of a microphone, or delicate mechanical ear, carefully guarded by metal discs from accidental damage, and connected to ear-pieces or ordinary telephone receivers by an electric wire which passed through a battery. Where the wire came in contact with the sea water it was heavily ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... household duties, while this desultory discussion was going on. Suddenly there appeared at the corner of the house old Uncle Billy. In his hand he carried a small package wrapped in newspaper. He bowed and bowed, wagging his head like a mechanical toy. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... said all this in a dull, mechanical way, as if she were accustomed to be called on to render an account ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... fray, in order that they might have more cool and accurate opportunity to form a judgment upon the whole, and transmit their orders, without being disturbed by any thoughts of personal safety. Even so, brave barbarian, in the art of embroidery, (marvel not that we are a proficient in that mechanical process, since it is patronized by Minerva, whose studies we affect to follow,) we reserve to ourselves the superintendence of the entire web, and commit to our maidens and others the execution of particular parts. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... first year after their removal; to encourage and assist them in education, and in being taught to cultivate their lands, in erecting mills and other necessary houses; in purchasing domestic animals and farming utensils, and acquiring a knowledge of the mechanical arts." ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... nearly identical with Goethe's remark that man is properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed, understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude, perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with Pope's condemnation ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and how for lack of support on his flank, for lack of bombs, for lack of men, he had been forced back; and how for eight hours he had disputed every inch of ground till now his men could only cling to these mounds with the dumb mechanical tenacity of utter exhaustion. "You might go to H.Q.," he said at last, "and tell them where I am, and that I can't hold on without ammunition ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... retrospective view at four-score, I have noted many heart-cheering tokens of social and religious progress, and many splendid mechanical and material inventions to make the world better and happier. Yet I have also seen some painful symptoms of decline and deterioration. All the changes have not been for the better; some have been decidedly ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... green before a village meeting-house, and now in a paved square of the metropolis. How often must his heart have been gladdened by the delight of children, as they viewed these animated figures! or his pride indulged, by haranguing learnedly to grown men on the mechanical powers which produced such wonderful effects! or his gallantry brought into play (for this is an attribute which such grave men do not lack) by the visits of pretty maidens! And then with how fresh a feeling must he return, at intervals, to his own ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said nervously, as she made mechanical preparations with pot and kettle. "It would only make matters worse if ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... shapes which seemed to be operated by some kind of clumsy mechanical motors rather than animated by sentient spirits were playing a game of chance and slapping the greasy cards down upon the table to the accompaniment of coarse ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... reassured. Madame seated herself in the armchair by the table well within the light. She smoothed her dress with a mechanical hand. If, as it would seem, her hopes had been futile, so had her momentary fears. A man on any but an errand of peace would have brought some following with him, as ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... at the depth of humiliation to which you have brought the country"—such was the chorus of reproach that was ever ringing in their ears—"with your red tape, your Chinese formalism, and your principle of lifeless, unreasoning, mechanical obedience! You asserted constantly that you were the only true patriots, and branded with the name of traitor those who warned you of the insane folly of your conduct. You see now what it has all come to. The men whom you helped to send to the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... different now," she said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied—or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can understand ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... building constantly. Complete staffs of engineers, carpenters, painters, etc., are almost constantly employed in looking after additions, alterations, and repairs, thus keeping the whole building in perfect condition. All are under the direct management of experts, whose mechanical skill is utilized to assist in rendering the store service complete, and whose services are recognised on an equality with those occupying the most responsible positions in connection ...
— How Department Stores Are Carried On • W. B. Phillips
... sofa and watched the two figures as they passed down the long corridor. The mechanical smile of welcome with which she had greeted half the county this evening had not died away from her face; she sat upright on the satin-covered sofa. There was about her an air of strength, of eminence almost, which seemed to place her genuine ugliness above criticism. ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... his treasures, and they included some very childish toys, a number of them showing the mechanical skill of his grandfather's blunt fingers. But among them, too, were treasures from the swamp and woods that were both very wonderful ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... But the loss of the direct intercourse with China had more fatal effects; it prevented large bodies of annual emigrants from China settling upon her shores; it deprived them of an opportunity of visiting the Borneon ports, and exercising their mechanical arts and productive industry; and of thus keeping up the prosperity of the country in the tillage of the ground, as well as in the commerce of her ports. The old Chinese settlers by degrees deserted these shores; and to fill ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... become visible, the cheeks had fallen, the eyes sunk, the features grown prominent, and the auburn curls were streaked with silver threads never previously perceptible to a casual eye. While languid, mechanical talk was passing, Phoebe had been mourning over the change; but she found her own Miss Charlecote restored in the freer manner, the long sigh, the tender grasp of the arm, as soon as they were in the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... light gemmed hand, flashing on him in addition to those other things the perfect polish of the prettiest pink finger-nails in the world, had touched a spring, the most ingenious of ecent devices for instant ease, which dropped half across the scene a soft-coloured mechanical blind, a fluttered, fringed awning of charmingly toned silk, such as would make a bath of cool shade for the favoured friend leaning with her there—that is for the happy couple itself—on the balcony. The great view would be the prospect and privilege ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... countenance almost lapses into a smile as "Kellner" approaches with the beverage. The tutor, it is pleasant to see, has at last put his "Classic" in his pocket, and gives himself up to the undivided enjoyment of the scene, while his "young charge" is wrapped in contemplation of mechanical science as exemplified in the structure of the wheel. And that must surely be the gent who has such a low opinion of the beauty of the Rhine-land, seated at the stern of the boat with his legs dangling over the river. Let us hope ...
— The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones and Robinson • Richard Doyle
... in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part. ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... one she'll none of me." Nay, the odds were probably even longer. Ah, CECILIA, if these lines meet thine eyes, thou wilt know that one heart still is true. In another life, less begirt by material difficulties, we may meet amongst the asphodel, where there is no opportunity for the display of mere mechanical accomplishments. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... of pottery. He was sickly, thin, and short, with wrists like a boy of ten. But from that debile body there issued a bullying voice, tremendously loud, harsh and resonant, as if produced by some powerful mechanical contrivance in the nature of a fog-horn. I do not know what he did with it in the private life of his home, but in the larger sphere of business it presented the advantage of overcoming arguments without the slightest mental effort, by the mere volume of sound. We had ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... believe Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a compliance with fashionable manners, a relaxation ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... common table-turning there was contact, and Faraday easily demonstrated that there was conscious or unconscious pushing and muscular exertion. In 1871 Mr. Crookes made laboratory experiments with Home, using mechanical tests. {107b} He demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that in the presence of Home, even when he was not in physical contact with the object, the object moved: e pur si muove. He published a reply to Dr. Carpenter's criticism, and the common-sense of ordinary ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... by the spectroscope and the photographic camera. Now, this really involves a whole world of change. It means that astronomy has left the place where she dwelt apart in rapt union with mathematics, indifferent to all things on earth save only to those mechanical improvements which should aid her to penetrate further into the heavens, and has descended into the forum of human knowledge, at once a suppliant and a patron, alternately invoking help from and promising it to each of the sciences, and patiently waiting upon the advances of all. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... have been said, of synagogue worship, with its mechanical dulness and its mistaken interpretations of God's word, its shallow and superficial and tedious traditional commentaries, its formalism and vain repetitions; all this, whatever might have been its value for the ordinary unenlightened Jew, how could it have been necessary and what ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... skirts—skirts a quarter of a yard long!—how sweet!—and heaps and heaps of muslin, you see, for her summer dresses. Won't she look an angel? Oh, and you told me to get some things to keep Archie quiet in the train.' She produced a drum, a trumpet, and a mechanical ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... draperies, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... rather than the exception in the United States, and neither cost nor pains are spared to set it forth to the best advantage. The American women dress well, dance well, and in all that relates to what may be called the mechanical part of social intercourse, they appear to great advantage. Nothing can exceed the self-possession of these pretty creatures, whose confidence is never checked by the discipline of society, or the restraints of an education which is terminated almost as soon as it is begun. There is no childhood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... shaken in that period of fourteen years. Localization, and reference to centres would not, it was found, explain things sufficiently.[Footnote: The work of Pierre Janet was largely influential also in bringing about this change of view.] This involved a too rigid and mechanical conception of the brain as a mere "box," and Bergson attacks it very forcibly under the name of "the box theory." "All the arguments," he says, "from fact which may be invoked in favour of a probable accumulation of memories in the cortical substance, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... is the case in the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord, a loss in which tissue is never repaired by the formation of new cells; and in the muscles the same is true. The least differentiation is seen in those cells which serve the purpose of mechanical protection only, as the cells of the skin, and in these the formative activity is very great. Not only must the usual loss be supplied, but we are all conscious of slight injuries of the surface which are ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... majority submitted to the tyranny of the minority. And thus debating impracticable proposals, barely listening to long speeches, doing absolutely nothing, the days succeeded each other; and legislators who wanted work, longed for the steady and mechanical regularity of their well-ordered offices, their vast factories, their sanely-conducted communications with all parts of the world, to which English genius, sense, and industry have brought the goods of England. The contrast ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... related point of view, which the authors have tried to make clear in recounting the story of the sea. In regard to naval principles, also, this general survey should reveal those unchanging truths of warfare which have been demonstrated from Salamis to Jutland. The tendency of our modern era of mechanical development has been to forget the value of history. It is true that the 16" gun is a great advance over the 32-pounder of Trafalgar, but it is equally true that the naval officer of to-day must still sit at the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Mr. Henry Winstanley, of Littlebury, Essex, whose mechanical abilities had previously been known rather by a series of eccentric contrivances than by any remarkable proof of skill. For instance:—in his house at Littlebury, if a visitor entered an apartment ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... to outlining on the ground that it is too mechanical—that it destroys spontaneity and the flow of the Spirit of the Lord. It has always seemed to the writer that the Spirit of the Lord is quite as pleased to follow a straight path as it is to follow a crooked one. Outlining is not in any sense a substitute for ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... the pace he went off just now, I should think he'll smash up your precious old car before he goes far. And no loss either," said Alice, who was engaged to a soldier in a cavalry regiment, and therefore disdained all purely mechanical ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the paying-out ceased, and nice management was required to keep the ship steady, as she had now no steerage-way; and oh! with what intense interest and curiosity and wonder did Robin Wright regard the varied and wonderful mechanical appliances, with which the whole affair ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... orders. There is in England a certain charmed spectacle which imposes on the many, and guides their fancies as it will. As a rustic on coming to London finds himself in presence of a great show and vast exhibition of inconceivable mechanical things, so by the structure of our society, he finds himself face to face with a great exhibition of political things which he could not have imagined, which he could not make—to which he feels in ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... and Mr. Spenlow gave me some hints in reference to my profession. He said it was the genteelest profession in the world, and must on no account be confounded with the profession of a solicitor: being quite another sort of thing, infinitely more exclusive, less mechanical, and more profitable. We took things much more easily in the Commons than they could be taken anywhere else, he observed, and that set us, as a privileged class, apart. He said it was impossible to conceal the disagreeable fact, that we were chiefly employed ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... stall for mechanical toys and parts of clocks. He has a great many parts of clocks, but the only mechanical toy was his clockwork engine, that was broken ages ago, so he had to give it up, and he couldn't think of anything else. So he settled to help Oswald, and keep an ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... possibly I do not in my heart overrate their importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught, it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part—the art of structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a man to choose or invent a good story, and much ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... organization along Soviet lines. In my view, the revolution will follow the same general channels it has taken in Russia, with alterations of detail, of course. Should France overthrow capitalism, for instance, she will at first establish Sovietism, and subsequently combine with us. To foresee the mechanical angles of such combination, however, is ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... death-devoted, and freed from all the ills that flesh is heir to! I go my way—do what I please—hammer on and on, and let happen what will. What, old head!—wilt ache? I guess I can stop thy aching before long! And all ye mechanical miscellaneities—stomachs and what not! Thou wilt trouble me too? Do thy pleasure, go ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... of training naturally divides itself into two departments:—first that which is mechanical; and, secondly, that which relates to the expression of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... what have you been doing—writing?" Lady de Vaux asked anxiously. Then, as though warned by his strange appearance, she checked his mechanical answer. "Never mind, never mind! You are tired, I can see. Won't you go and lie down for awhile? Come, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical necessity." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the man's evident surprise, he laughed again, throwing his head back so that the muscles of his throat showed under his beard, working, as it were, automatically. It really seemed as if the man's mechanical merriment were no part of himself. He was, in fact, gaining time to propound an explanation which he did not believe in the least, but which happened to be almost the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Europe—navvies, with the beast-like, sunken face, different from any Kaffer's—I know what brought that look into their eyes; and if I have only one inch of tobacco I give them half. It is work, grinding, mechanical work, that they or their ancestors have done, that has made them into beasts. You may work a man's body so that his soul dies. Work is good. I have worked at the old farm from the sun's rising till its setting, but I have had time to think, and time to feel. You ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... a sword into a pruning hook is a matter for a skilled smith, but to change a bayonet into a poker is within the capacity of the least mechanical. All that is needed is to cause the bayonet to forsake the murderous rifle barrel and cleave to a short wooden handle. Henceforth its function is not to thrust itself into the vitals of men, but to ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... M.T. Mechanical Transport. The members of which are ex-taxi drivers. No wonder Tommy's rations melt away when the M. T. ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... his post could be scarcely deemed one of trust,—there was no property for him to abscond with but the telescope; he was removed from temptation and evil company in his lonely waste; his duties were as mechanical as the instrument he worked, and interruption of them would be instantly known at San Francisco. For this he would receive his board and lodging and seventy-five dollars a month,—a sum to be ridiculed in those "flush days," but which seemed ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the problem which we shall try to solve in our future meditations. But first we must submit two preliminary observations. They will furnish us with two other theories concerning the application of all the mechanical means which we propose you should employ. An instance from life will refresh these arid and dry dissertations: the hearing of such a story will be like laying down a book, to work in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... life, not being able to break the mainspring themselves, frequently hire teachers to help them. The teacher who can break a mainspring first and keep it from getting mended, is often the most esteemed in the community. Those who have broken the most, "secure results." The spectacle of the mechanical, barren, conventional society so common in the present day to all who love their kind is a sign there is no withstanding. It is a spectacle we can only stand and watch—some of us,—the huge, dreary kinetoscope ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and pensive, was then seated on a bench near the basin, regarding with a kind of mechanical interest the gambols of two daring birds that came to sport on the curbstone. She ceased for a moment to work on a little child's frock which she was hemming. It is necessary to say that this belonged to the generous offering made to Mont Saint Jean by the prisoners, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... done my utmost to make him understand how I wanted it done, I was surprised to find how very difficult this particular rendering of the music appeared to him. He was absolutely incapable of repeating it after me, and with each renewed effort his singing became so commonplace and so mechanical that I realised clearly that he had not understood this piece to be anything more than a phrase in recitative form, which he might render with any inflections of the voice that happened to be prescribed, or which might be sung either this way or that, according to fancy, as was usual in operatic ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Winds they carried the man to a room where Emily and Alan worked over him, while Lynde heated water and hunted out stimulants in a mechanical fashion. When Alan came down she asked no questions but looked at him with the same strained horror on her face which it had borne ever since Alan had dropped his burden at ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... building where a prominent publishing firm had its office was a negro of more than ordinary intelligence. The firm had just published a subscription book on mechanical engineering, a chapter of which was devoted to the construction and operation of passenger elevators. One of the agents selling the book thought he might find a ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her tragic love affair had indeed transformed her from the appealing girl of yesterday to the recklessly unhappy woman of to-day, forced on to the path of cruelty and vice by unlooked-for circumstances. She performed this deed and that with almost mechanical diabolicism; some say she knew not one day from another. In 1597 she was offered an exceedingly good position by the Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, she felt, her only chance of happiness—to have the opportunity of inventing a few good tortures would ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the new bookkeeping machine of a large Midwestern coffin manufacturer slipped a cog, or blew a transistor, or something. It was fantastic that the error—one of two decimal places—should enjoy a straight run of okays, human and mechanical, clear down the line; but when the figures clacked out at the last clacking-out station, there it was. The figures were now sacred; immutable; and it is doubtful whether the President of the concern or the Chairman of the Board would ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... Relating to the mechanical features of printing types; their sizes, font schemes, etc., with a brief description of their manufacture. 44 pp.; ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... evening prayers to the servants. He felt that he was growing weaker; his brain wandered; the agony did not seem so great. Not all Gino's care could indefinitely postpone the end. His yells and gurgles became mechanical—functions of the tortured flesh rather than true notes of indignation and despair. He was conscious of a horrid tumbling. Then his arm was pulled a little too roughly, and everything was quiet ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... convents, especially in Italian convents? A few mechanical acts of devotion and outward forms, very little real religion, a good deal of deceit, often profligate habits, a little reading and writing, many useless accomplishments, small music and less drawing, no history, no geography or mythology, hardly any mathematics, and nothing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... hear through all the shifting gloom the sound of axes and hammers and saws at work upon that bridge. These army engineers could throw a bridge across a river in half a day. He recognized at all times the great resources and the mechanical genius of the North. The South had good bridge builders herself, but she had bent all her powers to the development of public men and soldiers. Harry felt more intensely all the time the one-sided character of ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... converting the two school-rooms, big and little, into a ball-room, and decorating it richly with green leaves and roses, real and artificial. I congratulated them on the prospect. 'Yes,' said Miss Landon, 'the mechanical getting-up is all very well; I wish all that is termed "dashing" did not lie in the tomb of the Duchess of Gordon. A quadrille is but still life put into motion. Our faces, like our summers, want sunshine. Old Froissart complained in his day, that the English, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... are actually fit for anything. Even he allows this peculiarity of the country does much good, but he maintains that it also does much harm, by causing pretenders to start up in all directions. Of this class he describes Mr. Dodge to be. This person, instead of working at the mechanical part of a press, to which he was educated, has the ambition to control its intellectual, and thus ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... fancy-work, drawing and painting of a utilitarian character, and sometimes book keeping and dress-making. Most of them are free, but for some special subjects a small payment is required. Drawing seems to be a favourite subject, and in most of these technical schools there are classes for mechanical drawing as well as for some kind of artistic work connected with industry. In addition there are numerous art schools, some of them being devoted to the encouragement of fine art, while in others the object kept in view is the application of art ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... this time a sombre excitement burnt in their eyes and quivered in their fingers. Never for an instant did their glances leave the cards. Ellis was drinking whisky again, mixed with soda, his hand continually groping for the glass with a mechanical gesture; the Dummy was so excited he could not keep his cigar alight, and contented himself with chewing the end with an hysterical motion of his jaws. The perspiration stood in beads on the back of Vandover's ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... know there is no unity and no emotion in the excited sea; each wave is composed of hundreds of thousands of single drops of water, and each drop composed of billions of atoms, and every movement results from mechanical laws under the influence of the pressing water and air. There is hydrogen and there is oxygen, and there is chloride of sodium, and the dark blue color is nothing but the reflection of billions of ether ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... was so fortunate as to procure the situation of amanuensis to a literary gentleman, who was employed upon a work of great extent, but of little interest. My labour was entirely mechanical. The confinement and the sedentary nature of my employment wrought still greater change on me; for hours I have sat, like an automaton, copying passages I felt no interest in, held only to my task by the consciousness ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... swamped by London, for it needs a strong head to live among many people. The too vast orb of her fate had crushed her; and she had seen too many seasons, too many cities, too many men, for her abilities, and even with Cecil she was mechanical, and behaved as if he was not one son, but, so to speak, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... stood in such close relations, is doubtful, but he certainly taught us to understand and love him; and this love, though I have also listened to the views of those who attribute the creation and life of the world to mechanical causes, and believe the Deity to be a product of the human intellect, has never grown cold up to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of imagination stood him in good stead then. He simply did what he was told, did it in perfectly mechanical fashion, without asking any questions. With the girl leaning heavily upon his arm, he stepped into the street and almost immediately into a passing taxicab which he had hailed from the threshold of the shop. As he closed the door, he glanced behind him. ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but more likely four thousand living, moving, and having their being as a single individual. Dispersed for an instant as the boat-hook or paddle was driven through it, the mass coalesced automatically and instantly as if controlled by mechanical force, or composed of some resilient substance, and swayed again on its course, while the dead and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... around, it has lost in a great measure that peculiarity. There is now but little done in that way, though it is still recorded in italics among its regulations, that "every student is expected to labour three hours a day at some agricultural or mechanical business." "While the leading aim of this regulation," it is added, "is to promote health and vigour of both body and mind, compensation is received according to the value of ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... the turret rendered it necessary to introduce additional mechanical aids in lieu of manual labor in running out, loading, and ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... and closer, but not a sound did she make, for the giraffe is absolutely dumb, and makes no noise even when dying. On and on she went, trusting to her strong limbs, making curious, frog-like leaps and awkward, jumpy movements, her long neck rocking swiftly up and down as though pulled by some mechanical contrivance, and her tail swishing faster ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... most singular discoveries that has been made among men; a discovery which changed by degrees the whole art of war, and by consequence many circumstances in the political government of Europe. But the ignorance of that age in the mechanical arts, rendered the progress of this new invention very slow. The artillery first framed were so clumsy, and of such difficult management, that men were not immediately sensible of their use and efficacy and even to the present times improvements ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... was by no means the only thing Harvey did. He was the first who discovered and who demonstrated the true mechanism of the heart's action. No one, before his time, conceived that the movement of the blood was entirely due to the mechanical action of the heart as a pump. There were all sorts of speculations about the matter, but nobody had formed this conception, and nobody understood that the so-called systole of the heart is a state of active contraction, and the so-called diastole is a mere passive dilatation. Even ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... during which he sat grave, motionless, reflecting. Now and then he placed his extinguished cigarette to his lips, with the mechanical motion of a man forgetful of time and ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects. We hear the ticking of the clock as tick-tock, tick-tock, or else tick-tock, tick-tock, although psychologists assure us that the clock's wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm in the wheels of the train, and in the purring of the motor-engine, knowing all the while that it is we who impose or make-up the rhythm, in our human ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... particles with certain qualities and capacities, and then stood aside from his work, as there was nothing farther for him to do. The subsequent progress of creation is only the successive development, upon mechanical and necessary principles, and as fast as proper occasions were offered, of these qualities thus made inherent in the primitive constitution of matter. The atoms thus marvellously endowed have gone on, without any further aid from Almighty power, to ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... instincts did not need strengthening, though his sense of humour might get the better of them for a moment; and of secular instruction he seems to have received as little from the one set of teachers as from the other. I do not suppose that the mental training at Mr. Ready's was more shallow or more mechanical than that of most other schools of his own or, indeed, of a much later period; but the brilliant abilities of Robert Browning inspired him with a certain contempt for it, as also for the average schoolboy intelligence ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of some wild dream. Djalma offered no resistance, but allowed himself to be bound and removed with mechanical passiveness. The officer, with part of his soldiers, hoped still to discover Faringhea amongst the ruins; but his search was vain, and, after spending an hour in fruitless endeavors, he set ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... perpetrators of this evil were the consequences of men trying to do what was impossible; trying to correct evil while being evil themselves; vicious men were trying to correct other vicious men, and thought they could do it by using mechanical means, and the only consequence of all this was that the needs and the cupidity of some men induced them to take up this so-called punishment and correction as a profession, and have themselves ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... passed from the alluvium to the sandstone, and at once met with all the prevailing plants of the granite, gneiss, limestone and hornstone rocks previously examined, and which I have enumerated too often to require recapitulation; a convincing proof that the mechanical properties and not the chemical constitution of the rocks regulate the distribution of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... seems to be "It's going." Only the word "going" should be repeated, and the treatment should conclude with the emphatic statement "gone!" The word "going," rapidly gabbled, gives the impression of a mechanical drill, biting its way irresistibly into some hard substance. We can think of it as drilling the desired ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... Museum of Hull House is shown a very ingenious diagram, representing the development on the mechanical side of the process of spinning, one of the oldest of the arts. It consists of a strip of cardboard, about a yard long, marked off into centuries and decades. From 2000 B.C. up to A.D. 1500 the hand spindle was the only instrument used. From 1500 up to the middle of the eighteenth century the ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... as her husband lifts each spadeful of earth, she throws the seed into the hole thus made. He holds the hoe suspended a moment while the seed drops in, and then replaces the earth over it. The two work in perfect unison, each following the other's motion with mechanical regularity, as they move down the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... deductions by Galileo, and more recently the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey. This last came as a revelation to scientists, reducing this seemingly occult process, as it did, to the field of mechanical phenomena. The same mechanical laws that governed the heavenly bodies, as shown by Galileo, governed the action of the human heart, and, for aught any one knew, every part of the body, and even the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... The mechanical ears of the metal things may have picked up the sound of his voice: but in any event, green flame flashed about them on the instant. Feeling a sudden protective impulse, Dan started toward Helen. That was his last recollection, before what seemed ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... a pheasant feed out of one of those mechanical boxes which open when the bird stands on the rail in front of the box, went and stood in the same place, as soon as the pheasant quitted it. Finding that its weight was not sufficient to raise the lid of the box, it kept ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... beauty—are enrolled from their childhood beneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation—sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... A mechanical process, that of handling milk at a model dairy farm, was effectively presented by Constance D. Leupp in an article entitled, "The Fight for Clean Milk," printed in the Outlook. By leading "you," the reader, to the spot, as it were, by picturing in detail what "you" ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... asked of Peter, kept pricking him and breaking through the stupefaction of this sudden tragedy. He kept nodding a mechanical agreement until the undertaker had arranged all the details. Then the little man moved softly out of the cabin and went stepping away through the dust of Niggertown with professional briskness. A little ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... of men, a prolonged and complicated historical enterprise, is thrown into historical relief upon the background of a mechanical cosmos. Nature, as interpreted by the {10} inorganic sciences, presents a spectacle of impassivity. It moves, transforms, and radiates, on every scale and in all its gigantic range of temporal and spatial distance, utterly without loss or gain of value. One cannot ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... noblest sculpture, came from that age; all the priceless relics that we call classic. And in its stead we had the mechanical age. Man likewise became a mechanism, emotionless, with no taste for Nature. Meat was made synthetically, and so ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... long; he must be varied in his moods, his topics, and his interests; he must have a great deal to say, and must have a power of saying it that shall arrest a depressed and dolorous spirit. Englishmen, of course, would with mechanical unanimity call for Shakespeare; Germans could hardly hesitate about Goethe; and a sensible Frenchman would pack up the ninety volumes of Voltaire. It would be at least as interesting to know the object of a second choice, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... this, my retrospective view at four-score, I have noted many heart-cheering tokens of social and religious progress, and many splendid mechanical and material inventions to make the world better and happier. Yet I have also seen some painful symptoms of decline and deterioration. All the changes have not been for the better; some have been decidedly for the worse. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... its monetary counterpart, and its importance is commonly estimated in terms of money, it will be evident that the growth of capitalism might be studied with great advantage in its monetary aspect. Corresponding to the changes in productive methods under mechanical machinery we should find the rapid growth of a complex monetary system reflecting in its international and national character, in its elaborate structure of credit, the leading characteristics which we find in modern productive and distributive ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the less linked by one inseverable bond; it is the microscope; and while, amid the inconceivable diversity of its applications, it remains manifest that this society has for its primary object the constant progress of the instrument—whether in its mechanical construction or its optical appliances; whether the improvements shall bear upon the use of high powers or low powers; whether it shall be improvement that shall apply to its commercial employment, its easier ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... ugly face in a transport, had fallen to his knees, was crawling forward to the statue abjectly, mouthing phrases of worship and self-abnegation. Close on his heels came Polter and Noldi, eyes rapt, movements mechanical. I stopped, some last remnant of sense remaining in my head, and by a strong effort of ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... escaped mastication, and almost whole had been swallowed. Digestion had carried it to the pylorus where it was momentarily detained, and this mechanical detention had caused all his trouble, as expulsion had ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... classes we can point to great intellectual and artistic advantages, and many pleasant amenities of life now enjoyed by them, thanks to the process of specialization, these advantages can only be enjoyed to the full by comparatively few. To the majority specialization has brought a life of mechanical and monotonous toil, with little or none of the pride in a job well done, such as was enjoyed by the savage when he had made his bow or caught his fish; those who work all day on some minute process necessary, among many others, to the turning out of a pin, can never feel the ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... and his intermittent victories over Typhon; his proceedings and his character were the subject of their minute study. If his waters almost invariably rose upon the appointed day and extended over the black earth of the valley, this was no mechanical function of a being to whom the consequences of his conduct are indifferent; he acted upon reflection, and in full consciousness of the service that he rendered. He knew that by spreading the inundation he prevented ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... you must contrive to be worried very much and made very anxious and uncomfortable, and then you must work very hard for four or five days and for long hours every day at something too petty to be interesting, too complex to be mechanical, and without any personal significance to you whatever. This done, get straightway into a room that is not ventilated at all, and that is already full of foul air, and there set yourself to think ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Cobbett aroused a still lower class to political activity by his matchless style. All philanthropic, educational, and religious movements received a wonderful stimulus; while improvements in the use of steam, mechanical inventions, chemical developments and scientific discoveries, were rapidly changing the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... few minutes The Frontiersman was cutting through the water out into the open. Sconda was at the wheel, with Glen by his side, while Taku, an Indian with special mechanical gifts, looked ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... on the throne, and received the homage of the cardinals, who, kneeling, kissed his right hand. This is a ceremony which is always gone through with in the most formal, mechanical, business-like manner possible. Some palms, not in natural branches, but cut and wreathed in various strange, fantastic forms, lay on the altar. The Pope's chief sacristan took one of these, a deacon another, a sub-deacon a third, and knelt at the foot of the throne. His Holiness read ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... termed "the monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing some half-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product" any attempt to furnish "maternal education" is bound to fall on stony ground. Children brought into the world as the chance consequences of the blind play of uncontrolled ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the most useful inventions, are not those which reflect the greatest honor on the human mind. It is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy that most ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... or on the other with any serious anxiety to disprove them, we shall find much to suggest that the builders of the pyramid were ingenious mathematicians, who had made some progress in astronomy, though not so much as they had made in the mastery of mechanical ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... talking, or speaking unless they have something to discuss, explain, or communicate. I found, again, that a new and much more difficult task, though fortunately one not so indispensable, was still in store for me. The Martials have two forms of writing: the one I have described, which is simply a mechanical rendering of spoken words into artificially simplified visible signs; the other, written by hand, with a fine pencil of some chemical material on a prepared surface, textile or metallic. The characters of the latter are, like ours wholly arbitrary; but the contractions and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of the metropolis. How often must his heart have been gladdened by the delight of children as they viewed these animated figures, or his pride indulged by haranguing learnedly to grown men on the mechanical powers which produced such wonderful effects, or his gallantry brought into play—for this is an attribute which such grave men do not lack—by the visits of pretty maidens! And then with how fresh a feeling must he ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... He possessed two great advantages over most of his adventurous competitors; one was a heavy bank account, representing his earnings in the commission business, and the other a partner, Samuel Andrews, who was generally regarded as a mechanical genius in the production of illuminating oil. At the beginning, therefore, Rockefeller had the two essentials which largely explain his subsequent career; an adequate liquid capital and high technical ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's disposal ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... dollars per year; with railway traffic of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic exchanges of the country, running up to nearly ten thousand millions per year; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in manufacturing, mechanical, and mining industry; with over five hundred millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, with their appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and producing annually crops valued at over three thousand millions ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... of the origin and growth of the principal mechanical arts and manufactures: notice of important inventions; results of each decennial census; tariffs; and statistics of manufacturing centres. It has a good index by which the industrial history of each colony and state ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... some dislike of its shapeless face ... but now there were stirrings in his heart when he thought of it, and he wished that he could be with Eleanor and watch the gradual growth of the baby into a recognising being. His work at the Sensation office had become mechanical, and he worked at the table in the sub-editors' room without any consciousness of it; but he consoled himself for the fatigue and the dullness by promising himself a swift and brilliant release from Fleet Street when ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... to speak this with a kind of lost, mechanical obedience. The description his mother gives of him makes it seem as if the Ghost were drawing his ghost out to himself, and turning his body thereby ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... as we have shown, a light, porous soil should be treated like a spendthrift. All soils, except the last-named, are much the better for being enriched and deeply plowed or forked in October or November. This exposes the mould to the sweetening and mechanical action of frost, and the fertilizers incorporated with it are gradually transformed into just that condition of plant food which the rootlets take up with the greatest ease and rapidity. A light soil, on the contrary, should not be worked in autumn, but be left intact ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... covered half the distance I was almost too fatigued to take another stroke; then the feeling of weariness seemed to leave me, and I swam on as if turned into a machine. It was in a mechanical way, too, that ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... true self only when under the conditions of his slavery. He had toiled a few years longer than he should have done, to attain the ability to keep his head above the waters of life without toil. The mechanical motion of his hands at their task of years was absolutely necessary to him. He had become, in fact, as a machine, which rusts and is good for nothing if left long inactive. Henry was at once pitiable and terrible when he came in sight of the many-windowed building ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the preceding volumes of this series, know, Jack Chadwick and Tom Jesson, his cousin, had won the titles of Boy Inventors through their ingenuity and mechanical genius. Jack's father, Chester Chadwick, was an inventor of note, and unlike the majority of inventors, he had turned his devices to such good account that he had accumulated a substantial fortune and was able to maintain a fine estate, already referred to as High Towers where, with splendidly ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... been reproduced in this little village. God has made all of one blood; what is true of one man is in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the essential elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface, everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only a sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of daily trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich and beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and remorse. That fisherman by the riverside, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Arts, Mechanical and Chemical, Manufactures, Mining and Engineering. Edited by Charles Tomlinson. London, 1866. 3 vols. ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... sideswipe [U.S.]. hammer, sledge hammer, mall, maul, mallet, flail; ram, rammer[obs3]; battering ram, monkey, pile-driving engine, punch, bat; cant hook; cudgel &c. (weapon) 727; ax &c. (sharp) 253. [Science of mechanical forces] dynamics; seismometer, accelerometer, earthquake detector. V. give an impetus &c. n.; impel, push; start, give a start to, set going; drive, urge, boom; thrust, prod, foin[Fr]; cant; elbow, shoulder, jostle, justle[obs3], hustle, hurtle, shove, jog, jolt, encounter; run against, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... proprietors of which tell me that they are making fifty per cent. annually on their whole capital, and yet cannot supply one tenth of the demand for their production. The result of only ten per cent. duties in excluding products from abroad, would give life and impetus to mechanical and manufacturing industry, throughout the entire South. Our people understand these things, and they are not afraid of results, if forced to declare Independence. Indeed I do not see why Northern Republicans should wish to continue a connection with us upon any terms. * * * They want ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... that the beasts should not prove a source of terror to the horses he constructed images of elephants that were smeared with some kind of ointment to give them a fearful odor and were frightful both to see and to hear (for a mechanical device enabled them to emit a roar resembling thunder); and he kept continually leading the horses up to these representations until they took courage. Perseus, then, as a result of all this had acquired great confidence and entertained hope that he might surpass ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... the rich man, or can he live without it? And if obligatory on him, then let us raise a further question, whether this dieting of disorders, which is an impediment to the application of the mind in carpentering and the mechanical arts, does not equally stand in the way of the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... pale little face had become whiter than the sheets; and there escaped from his larynx a wheezing caused by his oppressed breathing, which became gradually shorter, dryer, and more metallic. His cough resembled the noise made by those barbarous mechanical inventions by which ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... all; ancient precedent had made the validity of an enormous number of official transactions dependent upon the application of the royal sign-manual; and a great proportion of the Queen's working hours was spent in this mechanical task. Nor did she show any desire to diminish it. On the contrary, she voluntarily resumed the duty of signing commissions in the army, from which she had been set free by Act of Parliament, and from which, during the years of middle life, she had abstained. In no case would she countenance ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in abhorrence: he utterly abjures and discards them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... think," he ventured to say, "that that would look rather mechanical—rather stagey, in fact? I know nothing about writing; but I should think you would want to deal mostly with the expression of the ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... yell was replied to by the whistle of the up train, that had been due for some time past. She retorted by a renewed shriek, and became frantic in her assurances that no power yet discovered—whether mechanical, moral, or otherwise—could or would, ever persuade her to set foot again in a railway train! It was of no use to assure her that no one meant to exert such a power, even if he possessed it; that she was free to go where she pleased, and whenever she felt inclined. The more that stout woman was implored ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... be foolish to begin digging a tunnel through a mountain with a mere pick and spade. We must assemble for the task great mechanical contrivances. And so with our energies of will; a slight tool means a slight achievement; a huge, aggressive engine, driving on at full blast, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... saw something else?" I always asked this question; it fascinated me to see the sullen fright flicker in William's eyes, and the mechanical backward glance, as though what he had seen might still ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... substances such Corpuscles compose, as much to differ from each other as do some of the Chymical principles: Why may not something happen in this case, not unlike what is usuall in the grosser divisions of bodies by Mechanical Instruments? Where we see that some Tools reduce Wood, for Instance, into darts [Errata: parts] of several shapes, bignesse, and other qualities, as Hatchets and Wedges divide it into grosser parts; some more long and slender, as splinters; ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... tame. A vast litter of paper on the floor, a vast assemblage of hats pitched on the tops of telephone-boxes—these phenomena do not amount to a hustle. Earnest students of hustle should visit Paris or Milan. The fact probably is that the perfecting of mechanical contrivances in the United States has killed hustle as a diversion for the eyes and ears. The mechanical side of the ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... along level roads—may not be at all so serious as to overbalance the many and manifest advantages of the automobile principle. At the same time, as has already been indicated, there is no doubt whatever that when proper automatic shut-off contrivances have been applied for economising mechanical energy in the passenger road-motor, an immense impetus will ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... stretched back brutally so that her bright, devoted eyes—gray and honest eyes, very deep-set beneath their brows—lacked the usual softness and mystery of women's eyes. Her lips were tight set; her chin held out with an air of dogged effort which seemed to possess no relation to her mechanical occupation, yet to have a strong habitual relation to her state of mind. She seemed, in fact, under a shell of self-control, to conceal an inner light, like a dimly burning dark-lantern. Her expression was dumb. She moved about like a deaf-mute. Indeed, ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... this instinct for divination was nowhere so strongly and so perversely developed into a mechanical system as in Etruria, and it is highly probable that this development contributed largely to the rapid political and moral decay of the Etruscan people. The narrow aristocratic constitution of the Etruscan cities, worked by a kind of priestly nobility, seems to have afforded great opportunities ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... finished rigging his bubb, minutes ahead of Frank, or anybody else. On second thought, maybe this was natural enough. Here, where there was no weight, his useless leg made no difference—as the space-fitness examiners must have known. Besides, Gimp had talented fingers and a keen mechanical sense, and had always tried harder ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... character of the atom or molecule is constant, that of the soul is highly variable. There is no room here for remarks on free will and determinism; suffice it to say that Goethe does not preach any doctrine of mechanical determinism in human relations. The scientific analogy must not be pressed too hard. It is really not important, since after all nothing turns on it. Whatever interest the novel has it would have if all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... or prolonged applications of hot water; washing with ordinary toilet soap and hot water, or, in sluggish cases, using tincture of green soap (tinct. saponis viridis) instead of the toilet soap; removal of the sebaceous plugs by mechanical means, such as lateral pressure with the finger ends or perpendicular pressure with a watch-key with rounded edges, or with an instrument specially contrived for this purpose; and after these preliminary measures, which should ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... experience when we see that some one whom we neither love nor trust is endeavouring to unveil them. He therefore would not suffer his mind to rest upon any inquiry in regard to the past, till the emotions which it might produce could be indulged unwatched; and, applying to the mechanical business of the pen, he wrote on to the conclusion, and then demanded, simply, "To whom am I to ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Kennedy. "But I can say this: that there is at large in this city a man of great mechanical skill and practical knowledge of electricity and explosives. He is trying to make sure of hiding something from exposure. We must ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... with his own hands—a fair-sized model, complete in every detail, even to the imitation stokers in the boiler-room, and which would run by the hour if supplied with oil and water. I soon learned that his skill in mechanical construction was great. He was a member of several engineering societies, and devoted some part of his carefully organized days to studying and keeping up ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... weighted by the saucepan, in which Mrs Nixon had boiled hundredweights of jam, he still managed to keep his arms slanted outwards and motionless, retaining his appearance of a rigid body that swam smoothly along on mechanical legs. Darius, though putting control upon himself, was in a state of high complex emotion, partly due to apprehensiveness about the violent changing of the habits of a quarter of a century, and partly due ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Mechanical, improvidently wise, (Servant of Fate), He has not understood the little cries And foreign conversations of the small Delightful creatures that have followed him Not far behind; Has failed to hear the sympathetic call ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... poor business was the printing of a certain coarse label from stereotype plates, and, when there was nothing else to be done, this would be taken in hand for unbroken days together. It was an operation as purely mechanical as any in the world, and the thoughts of the worker had time and chance to roam anywhere. Paul made hundreds of verses. The clean sheet set home to the pins, frisket and tympan down, the turn of the drum-handle, the pull of the bar, the backward turn of the drum, frisket and tympan up, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... Nereid was unique, he explained, permitting it to attain depths where the pressure would crush an ordinary submarine, while mechanical eyes on the television principle afforded a view in all directions, and locks enabling them to leave the craft at will and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... will," said I, pondering deeply as to how this might be prevented. But I am not of a mechanical turn naturally, so I could conceive no remedy save that of putting a plate of iron on the keel; but as we had no iron, I knew not what was to be done. "It seems to me, Jack," I added, "that it is impossible to prevent the keel being worn ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... at all corresponded with this, and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks, although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect with which she heard many of Lear's speeches read aloud. Her mind was still serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... to where, under the light of the hanging lamps, the table shone with napery and crystal; followed him as the criminal goes with the hangman, or the sheep with the butcher; took the sherry mechanically, drank it, and spoke mechanical words of praise. The object of his terror had become suddenly inverted; till then he had seen Attwater trussed and gagged, a helpless victim, and had longed to run in and save him; he saw him now tower up mysterious and menacing, the angel of the Lord's ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... postpone without deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action. Without bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into which constant practice for a year and more ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... embodied and its practices illustrated." Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and the Reformation, "those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism." There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except in a return to Catholic faith. "The mechanical part of Gothic architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles which influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the former works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alone that can restore pointed architecture to ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... herself to this effort, and lifted her eyes, wild and haggard with fear, and there, the moonbeams at his feet, the tall black screen behind him, she saw Paul de Senanges. She saw him; she looked at him quite steadily; she rose, slowly, with a mechanical movement, and stood upright beside her bed, clasping her forehead with her hands, and gazing at him. He stood motionless, in the dress he had worn when he took leave of her, the light-colored riding-coat ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... animals rustled now and then in the thickets, fish leaped in the river, but there was no sound to indicate that man was near. They were not nervous nor restless. Inured to danger, waiting had become almost a mechanical act, and they were able to lie perfectly still, however long ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... bench near a window, along which ran a broad sill full of tools. On this, too, lay an opened book, into which Mr. Tipping would dip now and again, when he could safely leave the boot he was engaged upon to the mechanical skill of his hands. At one end of the tool-shelf was a small collection of books, a dozen or so shabby volumes, though these were far from ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... tall and gracefully commanding height which became the English ideal in the last quarter of the century—her portrait appears on every page illustrated by Du Manner. She had a brilliant complexion, a perfect profile; her smile, though perhaps a little mechanical, was the last expression of immutable sweetness, of impeccable self-control; her voice never slipped from the just note of unexaggerated suavity. Consummate as an ornament of the drawing-room, she would be no less admirably at ease on the tennis lawn, in the boat, on horseback, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was necessary to obtain a pension. There were the superintendents, the supervisors, the special teachers, the principals—petty officers of a petty tyranny in which too often seethed gossip, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... their tackles, muzzle-lashings, and breechings. Over the muzzle of every gun are two strong eye-bolts for the muzzle-lashings, which are 3-1/2-inch rope. When this operation is well performed, no accident is feared, as every act is one of mechanical skill. A gun is sometimes housed fore and aft to make room, as in the cabin, &c. Ships in ordinary, not in commission, are housed over by ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... that the news I announce will give you as much joy as it has already given our dear Roland and me. Sir John, whose heart you doubted, claiming that it was only a mechanical contrivance, manufactured in the workshops at Vaucanson, admits that such an opinion was a just one until the day he saw you; but he maintains that since that day he has a heart, and that ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... inquisitive mind, but when it was asked, whence that power of development, possessed by the Protoplasm which begins as a Moneres and ends as Homo, but entirely absent in other Protoplasm, which resists all mechanical manipulation, and never enters upon organic growth, it was seen that the problem of development had not been solved, but only shifted, and that, instead of simple Protoplasm, very peculiar kinds of Protoplasm were required, which under circumstances ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... is not completely regular; the stage is too often vacant, and the scenes are not sufficiently connected. This, however, would be called by Dryden only a mechanical defect[773]; which takes away little from the power of the poem, and which is ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... sat on the deck with him, looking out over the fleet, the transports, the floating batteries, the mortar boats, and the iron-clads. He saw that the North, besides being vastly superior in numbers and resources, was the supreme master on the water through her equipment and the mechanical skill of her people. The South had no advantage save the defensive, and the mighty generals of genius who appeared chiefly on ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manufactured articles; even uncommon humanity will find it difficult to avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind; and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall be ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... he went swiftly and skilfully to work investigating the damage and putting the machine in order, as far as possible. Chamberlain presently became impressed with his mechanical dexterity. ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... mechanical turn of mind and he realized that doubtless the coupling had broken. That was what had happened. The trainmen had not noticed it and the train had gone on and left the coach. The break had occurred at the crest of the divide and the train had gone rapidly down hill on ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... natural and the spiritual. The latter is only a part of the former (or vice versa); both are one. Our monistic view of the world belongs, therefore, to that group of philosophical systems which from other points of view have been designated also as mechanical or as pantheistic. However differently expressed in the philosophical systems of an Empedocles or a Lucretius, a Spinoza or a Giordano Bruno, a Lamarck or a David Strauss, the fundamental thought common to them all is ever that ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... pages of his work: the scene of the Laocoon, the finale of the last act of the Les Troyens a Troie, the last scene with Aeneas in Les Troyens a Carthage.[64] The empty pomposities of Spontini mingle with the loftiest conceptions. One might say that his genius became a stranger to him: it was the mechanical work of an unconscious force, like "stalactites in a dripping grotto." He had no impetus. It was only a matter of time before the roof of the grotto would give way. One is struck with the mournful despair with which he works; it is his last ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... late at night repeatedly, or for any offence nearly deserving rustication, I have known a whole book of Thucydides given to translate, or the Ethics of Aristotle to analyze, when the offender has been a good scholar, while others, who could only do mechanical work, have had a book of Euclid ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... well. Words will keep pace with things, and with more or less felicity resuming in themselves the labours of the past, will at once assist and abridge the labours of the future; like tools which, themselves the result of the finest mechanical skill, do at the same time render other and further triumphs of art possible, oftentimes such as would prove quite unattainable without them. [Footnote: See Mill, System of ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Spirit in Industry, by Robert B. Wolf, vice-president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, member of the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... American standard. In comedy which appeals to something behind the sense, in the higher grades of acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better than Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the dancers lack that finish, that top dressing of mechanical unison required by American taste. Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. The music at the Follies was Victor Herbert of 1911! Old American popular songs seemed to be in vogue. One heard "O Johnny" and "Over There" at every vaudeville house ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... I could tell you the weight of iron carried by each man. I cannot exactly remember, but it would strike you as being incredible. They were chained two and two together (a horrible association), to lessen the chances of escape; there was no chance of mitigation for good conduct; there was hard mechanical, uninteresting work, out of doors in an inclement climate, in all weathers: what wonder if men died off like rotten sheep? And what wonder, too, if sometimes the slightest accident,—such as a blow from an overseer, returned by a prisoner, produced a sudden rising, un-preconcerted, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... thirty pounds out of the biggest cans—a twenty and a ten. There's your opener," he added, pointing to a rather complicated mechanical can-opener fastened to the bulkhead. "Open everything before you bring ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... themselves. There was another authority, or agent of the public, that is equally perched on the social beam, though not quite so dependent as the three just named, upon the main prop of the people—being also propped by a mechanical disposition of the tripod itself. These are termed the Supreme Arbitrators, and their duties are to revise the acts of the other three agents of the people, and to decide whether they are or are not in conformity with the recognized principles of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... walls. "Another essential basis of mechanical unity in the poem is the construction of the rampart. This takes place in the seventh book. The reason ascribed for the glaring improbability that the Greeks should have left their camp and fleet unfortified during nine years, in the midst of a hostile country, is a purely poetical one: ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... their long sojourn in the wilderness, they should lose the arts of civilized life, they were employed in the construction of the tabernacle. By the minute enumeration of all that was required for the completion of this work, we see that the erection involved an extensive acquaintance with the mechanical arts, and of those, too, which indicate a high degree of advancement in the luxuries of polished life. Thus the generation born in the wilderness were instructed, and preserved from degenerating into mere shepherds, hunters, or warriors. The restless were occupied, and the work proved a bond ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... the same, more or less, all over the civilized world. We have entered into a mechanical age, which is natural enough considering the rapid advances of science and the numerous mechanical inventions, but which is decidedly unfavorable to the development of art and literature. Everything now goes by machinery, from Harvard University to Ohio ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... than by famine. And thus did the Romans, when they had taken such great pains about weaker walls, get by good fortune what they could never have gotten by their engines; for three of these towers were too strong for all mechanical engines whatsoever, concerning which we have ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... ludicrous to see the change that came over the man. He had been prepared to bully her; and with a word she had pricked the bubble of his arrogance. He swallowed his anger and got a mechanical smile in working order. ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... Texas. * * * * * The army with which they first entered Texas is broken up and dispersed by desertion and other causes. If they get another army of the extent proposed, it must be composed of new recruits, and men pressed into service. They will not possess the mechanical efficiency of discipline which gives the Mexican troops the only advantage they have. They will easily be routed by a very inferior force. For a portion of that force, we shall be obliged to look to the United States! It cannot reach us too soon. There is but one feeling ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... machine for ironing the clothes," answered Bob. "They all run by electricity, too. The waste water from the pond runs a turbine water wheel and that's connected by a belt to an electric generator, a machine for changing mechanical energy to electrical energy, you know; and all we need to do is to throw this switch over and the wheel starts turning down at the pond and we have current. Of course, at night we take the current from the storage batteries for lights, after we shut down the wheel, but these motors require too ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... as I watched the interest aroused among Brighton's butterflies by this antique relic, in a position to reflect, not I trust sardonically, but at any rate without any feelings of triumph, upon the symmetrical completion of—I must not say one cycle of mechanical enterprise, but one era. For this high bicycle (which was perhaps built between thirty and forty years ago) wobbling along the King's Road drew every eye. Before that moment we had been looking at I know not what—the Skylark, maybe, now fitted with auxiliary motor power; or the ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... time he sank into a state of despair. To use his own words, in which he thought of his brain power as something mechanical that had been wound up, his head seemed as ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... He had a natural turn for mechanical work, and, backed by Dot's more methodical genius, he prolonged the days of the broken toys by skilful mending, and so acquired an interest in them which was still more favourable to their preservation. When his birthday came round, which was some months after these events, Dot ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... operations, and I believe been urgent to quicken them. But what I remember best of him is his hasty admirable contrivance for field-bakery in pressing circumstances,—the substance of which shall not be hidden from a mechanical age:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... beaten track of thinking, and are arrived only at the reputation of acute grammarians and commentators; men, who have been copying one another many hundred years, without any improvement; or, if they have ventured farther, have only applied in a mechanical manner the rules of ancient criticks to modern writings, and, with great labour, discovered nothing but their own want of judgment and capacity. As Mr. Johnson penetrates to the bottom of his subject, by which means his observations are solid and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... embrace was in a sort of mechanical obedience to her husband's gesture, and her voice was not perhaps meant to be so severe as it sounded when she said, 'You are ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the common inheritance of mankind, and whose names go down through long generations with a pleasant memory. To a certain extent, he was to the great primeval industry of the world, what Arkwright, Watts, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse were each to the mechanical and scientific activities of the age. He did as much, perhaps, as any man that ever preceded him, to honor that industry, and lift it up to the level of the first occupations of modern times, which had claimed higher qualities of intelligence, genius and enterprize. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... how long the superstition that Waller was the refiner of English verse has prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He was a very poor poet and a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on the credit ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... used for fighting plant enemies are of two sorts:—(1) those used to afford mechanical protection to the plants; (2) those used to apply insecticides and fungicides. Of the first the most useful is the covered frame. It consists usually of a wooden box, some eighteen inches to two feet square and about eight high, covered with glass, ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... felt his sorrow renewed for the dear friend and companion with whom, until of late, all his pleasures and griefs had been shared. As he sate plunged in his own thoughts, which were mingled up with the mechanical clinking of the blacksmith's forge hard by, the noises of the evening, the talk of the rooks, and the calling of the birds round about—a couple of young men on horseback dashed over the bridge. One of them, with an oath, called him ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tired. She had spent several hours in the nursery that day, pretending to be a baby giraffe with so much success that Archie had insisted upon countless encores, until, like all artists who have to repeat the same part too often, she felt the performance was becoming mechanical. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... infantile superstitiousness of nature remained in her, and made her cling to the forms, in which, though she knew they did not mean what they pretended, she suspected there might be some sort of mechanical efficacy at last; like the partly undeceived disciple and assistant of a master juggler, who is not quite sure that there may not be a supernatural power behind some of the tricks. Beyond an overflowing animal vitality, and a passion for ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Anastasia this afternoon, and try and make her look at this matter from a strictly business point of view. I can tell her that the sort of thing you are doing is purely literature, that you can't keep such things out of literature, and that the people who engage in the mechanical work of literature cannot help running against those things at one time or another. I can try to make her understand what an advantageous connection this is, and what a great injury to the House of Martha it would be if it should be broken off. I can ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... asked any one to believe a single thing because he thinks it is so, or to change a single feature of design because in his judgment that feature is faulty. The facts given are exemplifications of elementary mechanical principles overlooked by other writers, just as early bridge designers and writers on bridge design overlooked the importance of calculating bridge pins and other details which would carry ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... character of him who receives; or because I am unable to separate my interests from those of humanity everywhere. In some subtle form the I-element enters. Leave it out, and the action would lose its value and become mechanical. What I did would be no expression of self-conscious me. And such undoubtedly is the case with much of our conduct. The reflex actions, described in the last chapter, and many of our habits too, contain no precise reference ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... were of the nature of charms, which acted on the gods by an inherent power, and compelled them to be favorable, whatever their own wishes might be. The gods were, therefore, as much the slaves of external mechanical laws as the Romans themselves. In reality, the supreme god of Rome was law, in the form of rule. But these rules afterward expanded, as the Roman civilization increased, into a more generous jurisprudence. Regularity broadened into justice.[289] But for a long period the whole of the Roman organic ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... was purely mechanical. He knew well enough that the other had purposely gone to Leeson Butte to sell the farm on which they had both ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the summons. The camp was in a tumult of preparation immediately; Houston was lending his great physical strength to the mechanical difficulties to be encountered. A crowd of men was around. Suddenly a woman touched him on the arm, and he straightened himself and looked ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... and sometimes with the other. After a while I get tired of both. When a fit of intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other amusements which I have spoken of,—that is, working at my carpenter's-bench. Some mechanical employment is the greatest possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to tire. When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick, and got so interested ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... to the existence of a god, would on the contrary ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical necessity." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... blade is made from a strip of common three-quarter-inch tool steel; the hilt is turned from an aluminium rod; and there is not a line of engraving on it that could not be produced in a lathe by any engineer's apprentice. Even the boss at the top is mechanical, for it is just like an ordinary hexagon nut. Then, notice the dimensions, as shown on my drawing. The parts A and B, which just project beyond the blade, are exactly similar in diameter—and such exactness could hardly be accidental. They are each parts of a ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... have prevented the establishment on any large scale of a Theosophical Movement—and be not too ready to accept a whirl of political changes, experiment after experiment,—and latterly a spurt of mechanical inventions,—for True Progress: which I take to mean, rightly considered, the growth of human egos, and freedom and an atmosphere in which they may grow. But these they had in China abundantly while China was in manvantara; do not think ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... poetry or prose; it was (Greek). The balance of sentences and the introduction of paragraphs at suitable intervals must not be neglected if the harmony of the English language is to be preserved. And still a caution has to be added on the other side, that we must avoid giving it a numerical or mechanical character. ...
— Charmides • Plato
... well worthy of investigation as purely physical or mechanical ones, and yet we ignore them most ignominiously. We think no expense too great to test an Armstrong or a Whitworth gun; we spend thousands to ascertain how far it will carry, what destructive force it possesses, and how long it will resist explosion;—why ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... engines which assaulted the citadel were planted on the ruins of the smoking houses. The contest was continued by an incessant and mutual discharge of missile weapons; and the superiority which the Romans might derive from the mechanical powers of their balistae and catapultae was counterbalanced by the advantage of the ground on the side of the besieged. But as soon as an Helepolis had been constructed, which could engage on equal terms with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... at once and for ever trying to cram thick heads and poor brains with stuff that cannot possibly be appreciated or understood. Let us teach their mechanical fingers to do something useful, and give them, even the degenerates, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Ralph would convulse them by imitations of the "Member from Cranberry Centre," or fire them with speeches of famous statesmen. Charity fairs could not get on without him, and in the store where he worked he did many an ingenious job, which made him valued for his mechanical skill, as well as for his energy ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... born in Elkton, August 25, 1829, and received his education at the common school and Academy in that town. His youth and early manhood was spent in mechanical pursuits and in the improvement of his mind by a desultory course of reading, and in perfecting himself in the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... learn in convents, especially in Italian convents? A few mechanical acts of devotion and outward forms, very little real religion, a good deal of deceit, often profligate habits, a little reading and writing, many useless accomplishments, small music and less drawing, no history, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... agree with Mr. Symonds when he says that Jonson 'rarely touched more than the outside of character,' that his men and women are 'the incarnations of abstract properties rather than living human beings,' that they are in fact mere 'masqueraders and mechanical puppets.' Eloquence is a beautiful thing but rhetoric ruins many a critic, and Mr. Symonds is essentially rhetorical. When, for instance, he tells us that 'Jonson made masks,' while 'Dekker and Heywood created souls,' we feel that he is asking us to accept a crude judgment for the sake of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... metals. If the arbitrary division of the ages of stone, bronze, and iron, can be made to hold good, we must either suppose that the Irish Celt was possessed of extraordinary mental powers, by which he developed the mechanical arts gradually, or that, with successive immigrations, he obtained an increase of knowledge from exterior sources. The bardic annals indicate the latter theory. We have already given several illustrations of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... young, with whom he liked to correspond. But not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings, unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical. "Sunday," says he, "I generally visit some friends in town, and seem to swim in clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life." It is a question in my mind, if he could have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their antagonist muscles; for after these have been contracted in their usual action, as at every step in walking, they are again extended, not, as most other muscles are, by their antagonists, but by the weight of the whole body on the balls of the toes; and that weight applied to great mechanical advantage on the heel, that is, on the other end of the bone of the foot, which thus acts as ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... heard somewhere, but cannot place, the story of a prominent writer who was so disturbed by the mechanical lawn-mower of his neighbor that he insisted upon the privilege of defraying the expense of its replacement ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... it was finished, saw its defects, and made alterations; but the whole building was afterwards abandoned. M. Leverrier showed me the transit instrument and the mural circle. He has, like Mr. Airy, made the transit instrument incapable of mechanical change for its corrections of error, so that it depends for accuracy upon its faults being known and ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... respects not unworthy of the abilities of its author, was in principle vicious. The new board was half a cabinet and half a Parliament, and, like almost every other contrivance, whether mechanical or political, which is meant to serve two purposes altogether different, failed of accomplishing either. It was too large and too divided to be a good administrative body. It was too closely connected with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it considers and does in its own proper act which are called rational, such as are the arts of speech. And those are operations which it considers and does in material beyond itself, such as are the Mechanical Arts. And all these operations, although the considering them is subject to our will, they in their essential form are not subject to our will; for although we might will that heavy things should mount upwards naturally, they would not be able to ascend; and although we might will ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... firmness and solidity—in the right places. It must be understood at the very beginning that piano playing is far more than sitting before the instrument working the fingers six or seven hours a day. The mechanical side is only preliminary. Some one has said that the factors in playing are a trinity of H's—head, hand and heart. I try at once to awaken thought, to give a wider outlook, to show that piano playing is the expression, through the medium of tone, of all that the poet, painter ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... There is the ultimate danger of what can fairly be called superstition, that is to say giving to religion a magical kind of influence over the material side of life. Rites, relics, images tend to become, in irrational minds, invested with an inherent and mechanical sanctity, instead of being the symbols of grace. But it is necessary to risk something; and though the risk of what may be called a sort of idolatry is great, the risk of not arousing the sense of personal religion at all ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool itself. It is not in the head of the hammer, nor in the handle, nor in the combination of the two that the essence of mechanical characteristics exists, but in the recognition of its utility and in the forces directed through it in virtue of this recognition. This appears more plainly when we reflect that a very complex machine, if intended for use by children whose aim is not serious, ceases to rank in our minds ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the points of the compass of the Milburns' drawing-room to shake hands, burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn he grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward, a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with an amusement not untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she had a remarkable, effective, useful ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... said as he dropped his clothes on the floor. He could not find the way to put on his sleeping-jacket, and that made him pant. Any little thing that roused or thwarted his mechanical action aggravated his sickness till his brain seemed to be bursting. He got things right at last, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... has not escaped shrewd knocks from the wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Greek rhetoric at Rhodes, and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor, where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion; whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men desirous of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... more concerned about where we are going. I tell you we are being taken to some wonderful place. People who can construct such marvels of mechanical skill as this boat will not be behind in other things; then look at ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... more generally a favorite here; she is indeed skilful both as an actress and in the management of her voice, but I find her expression meretricious, her singing mechanical. Neither of these women is equal to Pico in natural force, if she had but the same advantages of culture and environment. In hearing Semiramide here, I first learned to appreciate the degree of talent with which it was cast in New ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... really need special consideration. Imagine how wasteful it would be if we had to attend to every movement in dressing ourselves! You can easily see that there are a great many acts that bring us in relation to others and that should be as mechanical and ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... all the manufacturers of Derby, of the mechanical ingenuity of Mr. James Fox, of Chester Road, on the banks of the Derwent. I paid him a visit, and beheld his powerful iron lathes, twenty-four feet long, used by machine makers for planing iron. Here I saw iron cut in groves or squared with great simplicity, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... the mechanical sciences, and their application to manufactures and the arts, England offers larger scope of observation than any other country in the world. Throughout the vast establishments of our cotton, woollen, linen, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... stated the facts from which we derive our conviction that the conquest of the air, if achieved, is to be brought about through the agency of new and powerful mechanical combinations, rather than by means of the balloon; and though, as before remarked, the experiments of M. Petin and others may probably not be without useful results, we dismiss these brilliant phantasmagoria with the charitable reflection, that the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... Marine boilers of modern construction, proper proportions of. Marine engines. See Steam Engines, marine. Mastic cement for setting marine boilers. Maudslay, Messrs., boilers of "Retribution" and "Great Western," by, Mechanical powers, misconceptions respecting. Mechanical power, definition of, indestructible and eternal; the sun the source of mechanical power. Metallic packing for pistons. Metallic packing for stuffing boxes. Meyer, expansion valve by. Miller, Ravenhill & Co.'s mode of fixing piston rod to piston. Modern ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... when asked such a question, would have either set about detailing the mechanical composition of such and such colors, in such and such proportions, rubbed up so and so; or perhaps they would (and so much the better, but not the best) have shown him how they laid them on; but even this would leave him at the critical point. Opie preferred going to the quick ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... substance, the primary question as to the connection between matter and energy. While freely recognising the presence of this real "boundary of natural knowledge," we can yet, within this boundary, apply quite universally the "mechanical law of causality." The complicated "phenomena of mind," as they are called (more especially consciousness), fall under the "law of the conservation of substance" just as strictly as do the simpler mechanical processes ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... once more—half a penknife, a bunch of keys, but not a farthing. Suddenly I dive into my pocket and take the papers out again. It was a mechanical movement, an unconscious nervous twitch. I selected a white unwritten page, and—God knows where I got the notion from—but I made a cornet, closed it carefully, so that it looked as if it were filled with something, and threw it far out on to the pavement. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... supervises the financial department, and reserves to itself the municipal control.[A] It is a remarkable fact, characteristic of the Russians, that while they possess uncommon capacity to acquire all the details of engineering, and are by no means lacking in mechanical skill, they are utterly deficient in management and administrative capacity. Wasteful, improvident, and short-sighted, they can never do any thing without the aid of more sagacious and economical heads to keep them ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... you can use. He is out of the Middle West; a young man and a graduate of Purdue. He took the Civil degree, but stayed two years longer and romped through the Mechanical. He ought to be pretty well up on theory, ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... always from false taste that the species of reading above complained of proceeds; on the contrary, there may be a very correct perception of the writer's meaning and object, while from want of practice, from mere mechanical inexpertness, there may be an incapability of giving effect to that meaning: hence arises false emphasis, and a thousand ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... in order that they may become, like those of primitive women, so various that they develop the mind and fortify the body. This, however, is an evil which will be righted by the development of the mechanical side of industry, for machines tend constantly to become larger, heavier, speedier, more numerous and more automatic, requiring fewer workers to tend them, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... mind they give the first and foremost place to the imagination. The reason, they say, is mechanical, and cannot rise above the known; that is to say, the real; whereas the imagination is creative and attains to the unknown, the ideal. Its highest work is the creation of beauty. Because it is unruly, and precarious ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... did not keep pace with usurious calculations, and trades were concentrated in the capital. Mechanical skill was neglected in all the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... prophet will always be preparing himself. By learning, by meditation, by self-discipline, the true prophet will prepare his heart for the incoming of the Eternal Spirit, and the glory of Heaven will be as a fire on the altar of the honest heart. Art preachers we have had in too great abundance. Mechanical talkers have brought upon the pulpit the disrepute of dulness. The age now waits for the messenger in whose loving heart there is the glow and the radiance of divinest sympathy. The great actor himself would be the first to admit that ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and documents, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention. They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ancestors ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... these operations, and I believe been urgent to quicken them. But what I remember best of him is his hasty admirable contrivance for field-bakery in pressing circumstances,—the substance of which shall not be hidden from a mechanical age:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... who were old enough to appreciate and enjoy the sight, they went into the Gymnasium, which they found furnished with every kind of machine and mechanical means for developing the muscles and increasing the strength of both ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... curates of the parish came in the course of the day, and read and prayed beside the old man's bed, Jacob Nowell joining in the prayers in a half-mechanical way. For many years of his life he had neglected all religious duties. It was years since he had been inside a church; perhaps he had not been once since the death of his wife, who had persuaded him to go with her sometimes to the evening service, when he ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this; and, while very young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... about his work in a mechanical way, but neglected nothing. When the time came for the store to close, Silas Tripp took three dollars from the drawer and handed it to him, saying: "There's your wages, Chester. I expect it's the last I'll ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... of its beauty and charm must be lost. That is, I think, why the Japanese prose and poetry when translated into English seem so bald and lifeless. We know by experience that even a European language loses in the process of translation which is, except in very rare instances, a purely mechanical art. How much more so must be the case in regard to an Oriental language with its depths of hyperbole and replete with imagery, idealism, and ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Swift was a natural inventor. From a boy he had been interested in things mechanical, and one of his first efforts had been to arrange a system of pulleys, belts and gears so that the windmill would operate the churn in the old farmhouse where he was born. The fact that the mill went so fast that it broke the churn all ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... though, curiously enough, he never thought of becoming a farmer in good earnest; indeed, at this time he seems to have had no distinct bias towards any profession. Mr. Howitt had somehow become imbued with Rousseau's doctrine that every boy, whatever his position in life, should learn a mechanical handicraft, in order that, if all else failed, he might be able to earn his own living by the labour of his hands. Having decided that William should learn carpentering, the boy was apprenticed for four years to ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... store I looked over in this country was one in Boston, having an immense stock of agricultural implements, and tools for every mechanical purpose. I should know something of such matters, having whistled at the plough myself, and used most of the implements; and being therefore curious on the point, I looked in for the sake of old associations. I am positive that every article for agricultural and mechanical use is better ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... beneficial mechanical treatment requires, in addition to considerable mechanical ability, a thorough knowledge of rupture; something few have ever taken the pains ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... and the camps of manoeuvre (peace exercises) furnish but a weak substitute for it, weak in comparison with real experience in War, but not weak in relation to other Armies in which the training is limited to mere mechanical exercises of routine. So to regulate the exercises in peace time as to include some of these causes of friction, that the judgment, circumspection, even resolution of the separate leaders may be brought into exercise, is of much greater consequence than those believe who do not ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and country,—one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged. Surgery invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences of the age of stone,—a relic of which we may find in the practice of Zipporah, the wife of Moses,—to the delicate operations of to-day upon patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress which presupposes a skill in metallurgy ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... after a while, "it's got Tom. Now, why couldn't it have been a man-Dago to sing that air into the tuneful horn of the mechanical heavenly maid yonder? No reason, only it's got to be a woman to sing that man's song of 'Annie Laurie.' A man couldn't any more sing 'Annie Laurie' than you could make cocktails without bitters. The only way we can get either one of them here is in bulk, which we have done. It's canned Art, that's ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of his retirement and made to feel he was the favourite of the monarch, for the risk to life he had undertaken in spontaneous devotion to the State. Not only is such warmth and enthusiasm not the English method, but the Indian Government is a huge machine which goes grinding on in its mechanical way, and is besides, a bureaucracy which has a good deal of pride in regarding any new departure as a dangerous token of disrespect to its old and consecrated tradition of simple obedience to written orders and codified instructions. The highest originality is smothered ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... as if he had come out of a bandbox. He was so very much starched, indeed, that Jeff could not help wondering if a summer in the plains would make him less stiff. As he came nearer and put out a hand to the little boy, who was his wife's nephew, it seemed like a piece of wood with mechanical joints. ...
— A Little Hero • Mrs. H. Musgrave
... charm of being seen, appreciated and applauded by others, Andy loved the vigorous exercise of the spring-board. The mechanical athletic and acrobatic equipments of the show were superb. He made up his mind he could about live among the balancing bars and trapezes, ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... not for. He had none to share them with now! Lover, sister, friends, all were lost and gone! But he went on performing his military duties with an iron rigor and punctuality that made men admire, while they feared him. His life was more mechanical than human. Le Gardeur spared neither himself nor others. He never married, and never again looked with kindly eye upon a woman. His heart was proof against every female blandishment. He ended his life in solitary state and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... ounce aromatic spirits of ammonia in one pint of water and give the mixture as a drench. Repeat in twenty minutes if necessary. In extreme cases a mechanical treatment can be successfully employed by the use of ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... curious record of the fertility of the mind of man when left to its own resources; but it gives ample proof also that it is not under such circumstances it is most usefully employed. This patent office contains models of all the mechanical inventions that have been produced in the Union, and the number is enormous. I asked the man who shewed these, what proportion of them had been brought into use, he said about one in a thousand; he told ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which a child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters, secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing to repeated experiments in public, with every ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him. Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: Whosoever of ye raises ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... later on our reason (unfortunately asleep at the moment) wakes up and says: 'That baby was hired; the weeds and matches merely a dodge. The whole affair was a spectacle got up to extract money from a fool like you. It is as mechanical as a penny in the slot. Instead of relieving distress you have simply helped to perpetuate an infamous system. You ought to know that you can't do good in that offhand way.' The heart gives pennies in the street. The brain runs the Charity Organisation Society. Of course, ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... of St. Louis, came a mirror-like gap; and the other arm of the river curved sharply, the lock gates of the Mint shutting out the view with a bar of foam. Along the Pont-Neuf passed big yellow omnibuses, motley vehicles of all kinds, with the mechanical regularity of so many children's toys. The whole of the background was inframed within the perspective of the two banks; on the right were houses on the quays, partly hidden by a cluster of lofty trees, from behind which on the horizon there emerged a corner of the Hotel de ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... and that it promotes the distribution of both magnesia and potash in the ground, exercising a chemical action upon the soil which extends to any depth of it; and that, in consequence of the chemical and mechanical modifications of the earth, particles of certain nutritive elements become accessible and available to plants that ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... superficial men—the class to which the management of empires is for the most part entrusted—to ridicule theories, and, by a mode reasoning which would place any cabin boy far above Sir Isaac Newton, to insist upon the mechanical parts of government, and the routine of ordinary business, as the sole objects entitled to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... descriptive catalogue of all the furnaces, forges, and rolling-mills of the United States and Canada; secondly, a discussion of the physical and chemical properties of iron, and its combinations with other elements; thirdly, a complete survey of the geological position, chemical, physical, or mechanical properties, and geographical distribution of the ores of iron ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... trite and vulgar melody, devoid of all originality, repeating what has been heard a thousand times already; (2) equally trite and monotonous accompaniments, the harmony limited to half a dozen elementary chords, the rhythm mechanical and commonplace, and the cadences unchanging as the laws of Nature; (3) insipid, sensational titles; (4) words usually so silly that a respectable country newspaper would refuse to print them in its columns—true to the French ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... enthronement of a more self-conscious and theatrical ideal. Lord Rosebery called up before our imaginations the picture of what Alfred would have thought of the vast modern developments of his nation, its immense fleet, its widespread Empire, its enormous contribution to the mechanical civilisation of the world. It cannot be anything but profitable to conceive Alfred as full of astonishment and admiration at these things; it cannot be anything but good for us that we should realise that to the childlike eyes of a great man of old time our inventions and appliances ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... appearances, To make the path straight from effect to cause, Until we come to that First Cause of all, The Power, above, beyond the blind machine, The Primal Power, the originating Power, Which cannot be mechanical. He affirmed it With absolute certainty. Whence arises all This order, this unbroken chain of law, This human will, this death-defying love? Whence, but from some divine transcendent Power, Not less, but infinitely more than these, Because it is their Fountain ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... a word to say about my typewriter—the first, undoubtedly, that he has ever seen. This machine has caused the greatest surprise all along the route, and it is on occasions when the Chinese sees for the first time things of this intimate mechanical nature that he gives one the impression that he is a little boy. The people crowd into my room; they cannot be kept out, although at the present moment I have stationed my two soldiers in the doorway where I am writing, so as ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... I saw him squaring at me with every demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life, as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... perhaps a decade, he would draw in a section of a leaf, and if, as in my case, you happened to have a pretty sister attending the ladies' class in the school, he would add leaf to leaf until your whole paper was covered with his mechanical handiwork, in order to have a little extra conversation with you, although, I need scarcely add, it was not exclusively confined to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the necessary equipment and data they would need to deal with the problems they would face. Like all patrol ships, the Lancet was equipped with automatic launching, navigation and drive mechanisms; no crew other than the three doctors was required, and in the event of mechanical failures, maintenance ships were ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... further time on Wyk. Snap snatched several of his weapons and mechanical devices. We stowed them hastily in our pockets. One was like another to us; we could only guess ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... not very malleable, but extremely ductile, and very tenacious; it is of a greyish color, and nearly eight times heavier than water. Without iron, society could make no progress in the cultivation of the ground, in mechanical arts or trades, in architecture or navigation; it is therefore of the greatest use to man. Iron tools have been used in all European countries as long as their histories have existed; this metal appears likewise to have been known and used by the inhabitants ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... quite near him. Trirodov was walking straight upon Piotr, as if he did not see him; he moved quickly, almost automatically, like a mechanical doll. He held a hat in the hand that hung loose at his side—his face was pale—he had a wild look—his eyes were aflame. He uttered disconnected words. He walked so impetuously that Piotr had no time to turn aside. They came face to face, almost colliding with ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... survival, in the desert men will still find a use for the camel, and the elephant may linger to play a part in the pageant of the East. But the burthen of the minor traffic, if not the whole of it, will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall see even while the road is still remote, swift and shapely motor-cars going past, cyclists, and in these agreeable mountain regions there will also be pedestrians upon their way. Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the various illustrations that the articles to be treated are absolutely isolated from actual contact with the fire or the fire gases and other impurities which must be an objection to all methods of heating by means which are not of a purely mechanical nature. This principle not only recommends itself as scientifically correct and suited to the purpose in view, but is also a very simple and practical one. It affords the means of applying the heat at the point where ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... the cacao is placed on the plantation direct into trucks, which are covered with plaintain leaves, and run on rails through the plantation right into the fermentary. Some day some enterprising firm will build a fermentary in portable sections easily erected, and with some simple mechanical mixer to replace the present laborious method of turning the beans by ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... has not circumnavigated. I announced myself and was disposed of with the highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he should have a mechanical genius. And so on. Therefore I say that M. R. F. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... three-dimensional works of fine, graphic, and applied art, photographs, prints and art reproductions, maps, globes, charts, technical drawings, diagrams, and models. Such works shall include works of artistic craftsmanship insofar as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned; the design of a useful article, as defined in this section, shall be considered a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America: - contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. • Library of Congress Copyright Office
... workhouse servant has some slight reasons for showing acerbity, though she has none for practising cruelty. How could anybody expect a girl to turn out well after the usual course of workhouse training? The life of the soul is too often quenched; the flame of life in the poor body is dim and low; and the mechanical morality, the dull, meaningless round of useless lessons, the habit of herding in unhealthy rooms with unhealthy companions, all tend to develop a creature which can be regarded only as one of Nature's failures, if I may parody a phrase ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... in my full manhood (for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a god that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its head were all the brains of all the strong ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... religion of Jesus and the Apostles, in that, by separating God, as the abstract one Supreme Being, from the world, it leaves no place for the doctrine of God's immanence, or the indwelling of the Spirit of God in man. Hence in Islamism the divine revelation remains purely mechanical, with no natural point of connection in man, and therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... amused me, too, to discover in one of the cavities, among a great collection of costly bejewelled ornaments, such European articles as a pair of common scissors in a pasteboard case, several penknives of the commonest quality, an India-rubber squeaking doll, a child's toy train in tin, and a mechanical mouse. All were, no doubt, considered as treasures by the Arab potentate, yet I reflected that nearly every article in the whole of that miscellaneous collection had been acquired by the most ruthless ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... again, that the Temperance Societies can be made use of by the people for their instruction as well as pleasure. Assemblies of any kind are not the best places either for study or invention. Home or solitude are better—home is the great teacher. In domestic business we learn mechanical skill, the nature of those material bodies with which we have most to deal in life—we learn labour by example and by kindly precepts—we learn (in a prudent home) decorum, cleanliness, order—in a virtuous ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... tone to rouse him, for already he was half asleep again. In his preparation for the day, too, and at his breakfast, he was often virtually asleep while in mechanical action. It was not until the cold dark day was closing in, that he had any distincter impressions of the ride than jingling bells, bitter weather, slipping horses, frowning hill- sides, bleak woods, and a stoppage at ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... removed. In the case of many animals it seems as though the necessity of a fluid environment for living matter did not apply, for the superficial cells of the skin have no fluid around them; these cells, however, are dead, and serve merely a mechanical or protective purpose. All the living cells of the skin and all the cells beneath this have fluid ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... the patient, to fasten a bandage tightly enough to staunch the wound, but Leonardo Botalli, of Asti, body physician of Anjou, was nevertheless fortunate enough to devise a simple mechanical expedient, which proved successful. By his advice; a succession of attendants, relieving each other day and night, prevented the flow of blood by keeping the orifice of the wound slightly but firmly compressed with the thumb. After a period of anxious expectation, the wound again ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... great thing for our infant navy, if we succeed. Since our last conversation on that subject, Captain, at odds and ends of time, I have thought over the matter, and have begun a little skeleton of the thing here, which I will show you. Whenever one has a new idea of anything mechanical, it is best to clothe it with a body as soon as possible. For you can't improve so well on ideas as you ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... of the series of handbooks on industrial subjects being published by the Popular Mechanics Co. Like the magazine, these books are "written so you can understand it," and are intended to furnish information on mechanical subjects at a price ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part 2 • H. H. Windsor
... of such standing that his pronouncements in that field were practically final, a man called before kings to determine the worth of their national treasures and curiosities—and his greatest pride was that he had beaten the hitherto unmatched mechanical chess-player in public contest and had been invited to settle absolutely the nicest problems in ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the road. Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard, and clinging to her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years; her cries had grown hoarse, and had a hard, mechanical action as they followed one another. They were really in no danger, for the boy held his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... none the less linked by one inseverable bond; it is the microscope; and while, amid the inconceivable diversity of its applications, it remains manifest that this society has for its primary object the constant progress of the instrument—whether in its mechanical construction or its optical appliances; whether the improvements shall bear upon the use of high powers or low powers; whether it shall be improvement that shall apply to its commercial employment, its easier professional application, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... eyes wander over the writing, his every faculty of soul and mind and being is concentrated in rapt love upon each word. For not every day will he suffer his eyes to rest upon them, lest too great familiarity with them should dull them with a mechanical nature when seen so often. They are kept for rare occasions, and now, his waking thoughts sweet with the influence of the recent dream, he reckons just such ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... them—dull and silent, they deaden her face. And Jennie, the charwoman, is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her arms, long and withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is twisted and her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest, she seems a mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... round with a slow mechanical motion, as if with a conscious effort of the will. His face was so white, and wore such a look of loss, that it almost terrified me like the presence of something awful. I stood speechless. He looked at me for a moment, and then came slowly ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... fathoms of water when the paying-out ceased, and nice management was required to keep the ship steady, as she had now no steerage-way; and oh! with what intense interest and curiosity and wonder did Robin Wright regard the varied and wonderful mechanical appliances, with which the whole affair ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... although, of course, in this respect and in many other respects, very much always depends on the manner in which the invitation is given. True politeness, however, should be studied even amongst the nearest friends and relations; for the mechanical forms of good breeding are of great consequence, and too much familiarity may have, for its effect, the destruction ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... on the organisation of the mechanical and material side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that women ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... expected did not occur, none of the small advantages accruing, now to this side and now to that, in isolated and accidental collisions being followed up. Half-hearted attacks provoked a sullen resistance which was satisfied with mere repulse. Orders were obeyed with mechanical fidelity; no one did any more than ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however, in the way of all but the resolute and unwearied scholar. These difficulties, in all their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... skilful management of their driver, would carry him and his wares across sloughs and swamps, where a steam-engine would have been clogged by the weight of a baby-wagon. If he broke his harness or his vehicle in the wilderness, he could repair it without assistance, for his mechanical accomplishments extended from the shoeing of a horse to the repair of a watch, and embraced everything between. He was never taken by surprise—accidents never came unexpected, and strange events never disconcerted him. He would whistle "Yankee Doodle" while his horses were floundering ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the other flank the territory was bounded by desert even more inhospitable than the one in which they scratched out their existence, a waste of lifeless sand, habitable only by the D'zertanoj and their mysterious caroj. These last could be animals—or mechanical transportation of some kind, either was possible from Ijale's vague description. Ocean, coast and desert, these made up all of her world and she could conceive of ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... sometimes for miles and miles, and for days together, covering the entire distance lying flat upon their bodies.... From the ceiling of the temple hang hundreds of long strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so many flying prayers when hung up—for mechanical praying in every way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus instead of having to learn by heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to stuff the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... This message about no mechanical science being allowed, for example. Did the Junior mean the colonists wouldn't allow it? Must mean that. What else could prevent it? But when an E, a real E, took charge in an experimental colony, the colonists had nothing further to say about the matter. True, ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... In their days the sprawling suburbs of Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height, abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and turnip fields of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Another mechanical Method of making great Men, and adding Dignity to Kings and Queens, is to accompany them with Halberts and Battle-axes. Two or three Shifters of Scenes, with the two Candle-snuffers, make up a compleat Body of Guards upon the English Stage; and by the Addition of a few Porters dressed in Red ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... fact, a more slippery or guileful egg was never yet devised by nature's unconscious ingenuity. Then, again, the Antarctic chimaera (so called from its very unprepossessing personal appearance) relies rather upon pure deception than upon mechanical means for the security of its eggs. The shell or case in this instance is prolonged at the edge into a kind of broad wing on either side, so that it exactly resembles one of the large flat leaves of the Antarctic fucus in whose midst it lurks. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... in the last generation as the chief of the steam engineering of his day in the United States, the mentor of that profession, I can see more of my mother than in any other of the six brothers. He inherited, like all of us, his father's mechanical tendency and inventiveness, and added to it a persistency and constancy of purpose peculiarly hers, which none of the other children inherited to the same extent; and he had in its fullness the devotional sentiment, the absorption in religious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Lane, E.C., London, the first number of "The Lantern—Appearing Occasionally. Illuminated by Faustin. Price, sixpence." It was a twelve-page paper with four pages of superb illustrations in six colors. I winced when I contemplated its artistic and mechanical excellence, for I knew at what a price that quality had been obtained. A gold mine would be required to maintain that journal, and that journal could by no means ever be itself a gold mine. A copy lies before me as I write and noting it critically ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... carpenter, and the joyner, and rejoice to see, that their work and skill do daily improve; and that by the example and application of his Majesty's Universities, and Royal Society, the restoration and improvement of shipping, mathematical, and mechanical arts, the use of timber grows daily in more reputation. And it were well if great persons might only be indulg'd to inrich, and adorn their palaces with tapestry, damask, velvet, and Persian furniture; whilst by some wholesome sumptuary ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... of leisure. They have nothing to do but to ride round their plantations, hunt, attend the races, study politics for the next legislative or congressional campaign, and decide how to use the prodigious mechanical power, of slave representation, which a political Archimedes may effectually wield for the destruction of commerce, or any thing else, involving the ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... this can best be accomplished by employing the mind as well as the body. The movements should be as varied as possible, thus constantly offering the men something new to make them keep their minds on their work. A movement many times repeated presents no attraction and is executed in a purely mechanical manner, ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... their mechanical way, of bringing down all the spiritual into the material and formal, about the 'practice of the presence of God.' It is an ugly phrase, but it means a great thing, that Christian people ought, very much more than they do, to aim, day by day, and amidst their daily duties, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Ludmilla was found the next day by Mrs. Henderson, crying softly over her work at the mosaic department-work which was only the mechanical arrangement from patterns provided, for she had no originality, and would never attain to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is cut away under side, for a passage in every direction, numerous little pillars of wax being left for its support. How any person in the habit of watching their proceedings, with any degree of attention, could come at the conclusion that the bees raised such comb by mechanical means and then put under the props for its support, is somewhat singular. Their efforts united for such a purpose like reasonable beings, I ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... gone a hundred yards he had recovered a sort of mechanical self-possession, such as comes upon men at very desperate times, when they must not allow themselves to stop and think of what is before them. They were pictures, rather than thoughts, that formed themselves in his brain as he went along, for he saw all the past years again, ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of a Sunday on the green ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... worshippers have a right to expect that their hearts will be united by that Spirit at the throne of grace, so that "with one accord" they may present their petitions and claim the promise to those who are thus agreed. This is the true unity and uniformity which Christians are bound to seek, and any mere mechanical uniformity of words, apart from this, is but the outward trappings of form which are much more liable to satisfy the careless worshipper than to inspire in him any thought of the need of a more real approach ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... 116,349,897 acres acquired since the 4th of March, 1829, the United States have paid $72,560,056 in permanent annuities, lands, reservations for Indians, expenses of removal and subsistence, merchandise, mechanical and agricultural establishments and implements. When the heavy expenses incurred by the United States and the circumstance that so large a portion of the entire territory will be forever unsalable are considered, and this price is compared with that ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and all that did the miracle. You know, American technology and mass production in operation, something to be proud of. Tie Witch right in to the whole picture of the United States as the leader of mechanical—stress mechanical—miracles. ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... notion we would wish to cherish of the character of the poet, it is obvious that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' in all senses, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of adding, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... heroes walked on, hearing every word and trying to appear as if they did not. They spoke to one another with forced voices and mechanical smiles, and did their best not to be self-conscious in the matter of ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... give a cathartic remedy in a cathartic dose for constipation; in that case the reaction, if reaction follows, is not in the right direction, consequently the constipation is often aggravated. I have hardly ever seen, excepting in cases of mechanical obstruction, a severe and troublesome case of constipation that had not been caused by the use of cathartic remedies. So if we give an opiate, or an astringent, for a diarrhoea, we can see that it is a direct ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... passive that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men. Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in the face. This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of judgment: 'What shall it profit a man ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars. The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to dispense with ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... interest to look at this." And as Mount Dunstan took the proffered pamphlet, and with amiable gravity opened it, he rapidly poured forth his salesman's patter, scarcely pausing to take his breath: "It's the most up-to-date machine on the market. It has all the latest improved mechanical appliances. You will see from the cut in the catalogue that the platen roller is easily removed without a long mechanical operation. All you do is to slip two pins back and off comes the roller. There is also another point worth mentioning—the ribbon ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... after I had done my utmost to make him understand how I wanted it done, I was surprised to find how very difficult this particular rendering of the music appeared to him. He was absolutely incapable of repeating it after me, and with each renewed effort his singing became so commonplace and so mechanical that I realised clearly that he had not understood this piece to be anything more than a phrase in recitative form, which he might render with any inflections of the voice that happened to be prescribed, or which might be sung either this way or that, according to fancy, as was usual in operatic ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... intellectual powers of their minds been more amply considered and cultivated, they would have exhibited an uncontrovertible example of the capacity and intelligence of the African. Although, as I have previously noticed, a superintendance directed only to the mechanical arts, applied to the local necessities of the Island, has had the most visible effects, yet, in proportion as their privileges have been extended, authority has become more inefficient, and their labour less unproductive ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... we have seen, all the mechanical difficulties had not been overcome. Many evenings had been devoted to discussing, not the form of its screw nor its dimensions, but whether it ought to be put behind, as the Tissandier brothers had done, or ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733, adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences. In 1739, he received the superintendence of the Jardin du Roi, not long since enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his successor. He had shifted from mechanics ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and through the grounds of the White House, in which presently, having edged through the throng in the ante-chambers, I found myself in that inane procession of individuals who passed by in order, each to receive the limp handshake, the mechanical bow and the perfunctory smite of President Tyler—rather a tall, slender-limbed, active man, and of very decent presence, although his thin, shrunken cheeks and his cold blue-gray eye left little quality of magnetism ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... was easier for Thoreau to make money than it would be for the ordinary artisan. When Thoreau wrote his famous maxim, "To maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime," he did not add that he was himself a man of remarkable mechanical gifts; he made, when he was disposed, admirable pencils, he was an excellent land-surveyor, and an author as well; moreover, he was a celibate by nature. He would no doubt have found, if he had had a wife and children, and no aptitude for skilled ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Calvert dressed himself with uncertain hands but mechanical regularity and neatness, and, under the automatic training of discipline and duty, managed to button his tunic tightly over his feelings, to pull himself together with his sword-belt, compressing a still cadet-like waist, and to present that indescribable combination ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... work to make wonder tales as stories are sometimes made to instruct while they entertain children, they would have left a mass of very dull tales which few people would have cared to read. They had no idea of doing anything so artificial and mechanical; they made these old stories because all life was a story to them, full of splendid or terrible figures moving across the sky or through the sea and in the depths of the woods, and whichever way they looked they saw ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... said to head the development of the century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical progression. Its development resembles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... will suspend the likenesses of his mother and brother on his wall. He generally, you will find, tries to improve on you—which, of course, is not always hard to do. But sometimes he comes to grief in the attempt, as happened in the case of his wonderful "hanging shelves." Ted Hammer, quite a mechanical genius, had made to himself a set of these shelves, which for neatness, simplicity, and usefulness were the marvel of the school. Of course Ebby got to know of it, and was unhappy till he could cap it with something finer still. So he made all sorts of excuses for coming constantly into Ted's ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... was a good thing for her; every time she met the gentle kind eyes and felt the warm clasp of his hand, Diana repeated the assurance to herself. The girl had sunk again into mental torpor; she did not see nor hear nor feel; she lived along a mechanical sort of life, having relapsed into her former stunned condition. Not crushed—there was too much of Diana's nature for one blow or perhaps many blows to effect that; not beaten down, like some other characters; she went on her way upright, alert, and strong, doing and expecting ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... progress and stages of his mind in the different phases of the practice; how he begins by deceiving himself, to end in deceiving others; the first uninquiring ignorance; the gradual admission of ideas, what he is taught or left to imagine; the faith, of what is fancied to be so, the mechanical belief; then the confusion of thought from the intrusion of doubt and uncertainty; the adoption of some undefined notions; and, finally, actual unbelief; followed by designed and systematic injustice in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... line, the angle of pitch, the inclination of the lateral faces to one another—before he discovered the exact proportions and the arrangement of lines which render his monument a true work of art, and not merely a costly and mechanical ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... by reason of our supplying them so cheap with every sort of goods, have forgotten the chief part of their ancient mechanical skill, so as not to be well able now, at least for some years, to live independent of us. Formerly, those baskets which the Cheerake made, were so highly esteemed even in South Carolina, the politest of our colonies, for domestic usefulness, ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... cylindrical stick, it does not become twisted. {6} Accordingly I allowed kidney-beans to run up stretched string, and up smooth rods of iron and glass, one-third of an inch in diameter, and they became twisted only in that degree which follows as a mechanical necessity from the spiral winding. The stems, on the other hand, which had ascended ordinary rough sticks were all more or less and generally much twisted. The influence of the roughness of the support in causing axial twisting was well seen in the stems which ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... on experiments upon a scale of the most magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Spriggs looked helplessly round the table. His wife's foot pressed his, and like a mechanical toy ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... below Miss Mapp's window, and went bobbing along down the steep hill. She walked with the motion of those mechanical dolls sold in the street, which have three legs set as spokes to a circle, so that their feet emerge from their dress with Dutch and rigid regularity, and her figure had a certain squat rotundity that ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... grey, purple and green; very subdued and peaceful; earlier in the day it was marbled by small keen specks of sun and larger spaces of faint irradiation; but the clouds have closed together now, and these appearances are no more. Voices of children and occasional crying of gulls; the mechanical noise of a gardener somewhere behind us in the scented thicket; and the faint report and rustle of the waves on the precipice far below, only break in upon the quietness to render it more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... warranting any inference to the existence of a god, would on the contrary ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical necessity." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the machine for ironing the clothes," answered Bob. "They all run by electricity, too. The waste water from the pond runs a turbine water wheel and that's connected by a belt to an electric generator, a machine for changing mechanical energy to electrical energy, you know; and all we need to do is to throw this switch over and the wheel starts turning down at the pond and we have current. Of course, at night we take the current from the storage batteries for lights, after we shut down the wheel, but these ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... so they were unconsciously the factors in bringing together the work initiated by Owen and by Froebel. The Infant School of Wilderspin, already briefly described, was almost a dead thing, with its galleries and its mechanical prodigies, its object-lessons and its theology; now it was breathed upon by the spirit of the man who said: "Play is the highest phase of child development, of human development at this period: for it is the spontaneous representation of the inner, from inner necessity and ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... been much mistaken praise for the virtue of "mechanical obedience." There is no such thing. Men think in their smallest actions; if this were not so, it would not be possible to lead them. What has been blindly termed "mechanical response" requires ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... enthusiastic on the subject, but he said nothing. He had grown more silent and stonier than ever, if that were possible, during the last few days. And when he did ask a question concerning the every-day affairs of life, one felt it was merely mechanical, and that he scarcely cared whether he received ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... back to Yates the days of his youth, especially when Macdonald, putting the finishing strokes to his shoe, let his hammer periodically tinkle with musical clangor on the anvil, ringing forth a tintinnabulation that chimed melodiously on the ear—a sort of anvil- chorus accompaniment to his mechanical skill. He was a real sleight-of- hand man, and the anvil ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where.[961] He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not that GREAT, like his Odes?' Mrs. Thrale maintained that his Odes were melodious; upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... his intercourse with his own immediate connexions, his actions cannot be surpassed by any of the great heroes of antiquity. He evinced in early youth an active and ingenious disposition, and an extraordinary fondness for mechanical employments and pursuits. This bias of Adooley soon attracted the attention and notice of his father, and this revered parent did all that his slender means afforded of cherishing it, and of encouraging him to persevere in his industrious habits. Whilst yet a boy, Adooley was ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... powny!" "Grippit" was here most expressive. Indeed, this word has a significance hardly expressed by any English one, and used to be very prevalent to indicate keen and forcible tenacity of possession; thus a character noted for avarice or sharp looking to self-interest was termed "grippy." In mechanical contrivances, anything taking a close adherence was called having a gude grip. I recollect in boyish days, when on Deeside taking wasp-nests, an old man looking on was sharply stung by one, and his description was, "Ane o' them's grippit me fine." The following ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... his throne, a magnificent, but a sardonic figure for all that. As he rose, soft, weird music came from an angle where a screen of palm-ferns was placed. Though mechanical, the music was of ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... for women students, including special bursaries and scholarships, while dental and medical studies can be carried on concurrently. The course of study includes the passing of a Professional Preliminary Examination or Matriculation, followed by two years' mechanical work, and two years' hospital practice. The student can be articled to a qualified dental practitioner for mechanics, or can obtain tuition at the Dental Hospital. This branch includes the preparation of models, vulcanite and metal dentures, crowns, ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
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