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More "Mechanism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... keep one's feet from going through the ceiling. In a few moments I had satisfied myself that my conjecture about the keys below was correct. The small iron rods I had seen from beneath hung down from this place. There were more of them hanging shorter above, and there was yet enough of a further mechanism remaining to prove that those keys, by means of the looped and cranked rods, had been in connection with hammers, one of them indeed remaining also, which struck the bells, so that a tune could be played upon them as upon any other keyed instrument. This was the first contrivance of ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... the necessity of gearing to reduce the number of revolutions to those possible for a large screw, this member is made very small, and allowed to revolve three thousand times a minute, so that the requisite power is obtained with great simplicity of mechanism, which further decreases friction. The shafts, and even the wires connecting the batteries with the motors, are made large and hollow. Though the primary battery pure and simple, as the result of great recent advances in chemistry, seems to be again coming up, the best aeroplane batteries ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... (1632-1723), and of Jan Swammerdam (1637-80). Leeuwenhoek was a life-long observer of minute life. The microscope (the invention of which was due to a Dutchman, Cornelius Drebbel) was the favourite instrument of his patient investigations, and he was able greatly to improve its mechanism and powers. Among the results of his labours was the discovery of the infusoria, and the collection of a valuable mass of information concerning the circulation of the blood and the structure of the eye and brain. Swammerdam was a naturalist who devoted himself ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... see that on the machine. Part of it, you see, is a Horsten psychomat (stolen from one of my ideas, by the way) and you, the user, become part of the device. Your own mind is necessary to furnish the background. For instance, if George Washington could have used the mechanism after the signing of peace, he could have seen what you suggest. We can't. You can't even see what would have happened if I hadn't invented the thing, but I can. Do ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... you something quite different, something equally novel but more seasonable; no less, in fact, than a nose-muff or nose-warmer. It is a little idea of my own, the Melbrook "Rhinotherm." Briefly, the mechanism consists of pieces of heated charcoal, potato or what-not, encased in some non-conducting material, the whole being then unostentatiously affixed to the frigid end of the nose. Stupidly, I forgot to take a plaster cast of your nose. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... means and methods by which these enterprises were combined and carried out; the world of commerce and speculation is as aloof from the scholar and the recluse as the rings of Saturn or the sun of Aldebaran. Its mechanism, its intentions, its combinations, its manners of action, its ways of expenditure, its intrigues with banks and governments: all these, to men who dwell in rural solitudes, aloof from the babble of crowds, are utterly unknown; ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... was known to the ancients. That was a form of organ, in effect and appearance not very dissimilar to a small portable modern organ, with one bank of keys. Its mechanism, however, was very different in respect to the construction of the pipe stops and bellows. In particular, the steady flow of air to the pipes was obtained from the pressure of water, and a receptacle partly filled with water was an essential part of every Roman organ. From this feature it was called ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... down the furrow, keeping the seeder on course. Near the wheel, and all around the drum, are 13 evenly spaced holes through which the cotton seeds fell into the furrow as the drum revolved. No counting or tripping mechanism was involved, so the device undoubtedly wasted seed. A mule or a horse pulled the planter and the farmer walked behind it. James Nelson of Greenwood, South Carolina, made this planter about 1895. Gift of Ruben F. Vaughn, Honea ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... five cylinders, not arranged directly one above another but in a zig-zag manner, the centres of the first, third and fifth being in one line, and the centres of the others in another line. The cylinders are made to revolve by suitable driving mechanism, and into them is sent steam at about 5 lb. to 10 lb. pressure, which heats up the cylinders, whereby the warp passing over them is dried. This drying may be partial or complete, being regulated by the speed at which the warps pass over the ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... not to punish the past, but to illuminate the future. Many months before being carried out, the coup d'etat had been accomplished. The day having come, the hour having struck, the mechanism being completely wound up, it had only to be set going. It was bound not to fail, and nothing did fail. What would have been an abyss if the majority had done its duty, and had understood its joint responsibility with the Left, was not even a ditch. The inviolability had been demolished by those ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... level on a substantial bracket and in a place, if possible, where it will not require an artificial light to read its dial. The dry meter is usually used in dwellings. The interesting construction and mechanism of this meter cannot ...
— Elements of Plumbing • Samuel Dibble
... he cried; "why, of course I can; there is never any difficulty about that. The finest workmanship in the world is that of the Indian jewelers. I have been among them often; I know all their devices and mechanism, of which the European are bad copies. I have only to look round this thing twice, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... people I have round me here. Poor old Grealy is quite impracticable, though he means well. He talks about nothing but the Fianna and Finn McCool, and can't see that my fellows must have riding lessons, and must be got somehow to understand the mechanism of a rifle. Tim Halloran has been in a sulk ever since I told him what I thought of his conduct at the Rotunda. He never comes near me, and Mary O'Dwyer told me the other day that he called my volunteers a "pack of blackguards." I dare say it's perfectly true, but they're a finer ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... ways of constructing a gun-trap. Of course a gun is the principal part of the mechanism, and the trigger pulled by a string is the main point of the contrivance. In some countries the bait is tied to the string, and the animal on seizing the bait tightens the string, draws the trigger, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... too bad Indians don't write books! If my people had been putting their internal mechanism on paper for a thousand years, you'd have no more trouble getting my point of view than I ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... plainly, now. Its single wing was thick and queerly unlike the air-foils of Earth. A framework hung below it, but it had no balancing tail. And there was a glittering something before it that obviously was its propelling mechanism, but as obviously was not a screw propeller. It swept overhead, with a man in it looking downward. Tommy watched coolly. It was past him, sweeping toward the jungle. It swung sharply to the right, banking steeply. Smoking things dropped from ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... tassels that reach from their humps to their heels. The decorative idea seems to prevail over everything in Jeypore. Nothing is without an ornament, no matter how humble its purpose or how cheap its material or mechanism, its owner embellishes as much as money and imagination will allow. Everything pays tribute to the ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Goujet, whose red eyes had evidently been weeping, all faces turned to her at once. The two agents hoped as much as the household feared to see Laurence enter. This spontaneous movement of both masters and servants seemed produced by the sort of mechanism which makes a number of wooden figures perform the same gesture or wink the ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... stalled. Perhaps the fatal truth of that phrase, and some sense of its applicability to the occasion had interfered with the mechanism which he had set in operation to get rid of the "recitation" for him. At all events, the machine had to run off its job all at once, or it wouldn't run at all. Stopped, it stayed stopped, and backing off granted ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... which we think so highly developed, is, after all, but a great decadence which has lost even the historical remembrance of the gigantic societies which have disappeared. We are stupidly proud of a few ingenious pieces of mechanism which we have recently invented, and we forget the colossal splendours and the vast works impossible to any other nation, which are found in the ancient land of the Pharaohs. We have steam, but steam is less powerful ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Bowker, hysterical from Roxana—Molly gushed out: "Just as we left home, Josh Craig came tearing in. If possible, madder than a hatter— yes—really—" Molly was still too young to have learned to control the mechanism of her mouth; thus, her confused syntax seemed the result of the alarming and fascinating contortions of her lips and tongue—"and, when we told him where we were going he shouted out, 'Give ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... of these mirrors catches the sunshine direct and reflects it on the other, which, as you see, is so arranged that it transmits the rays down the natural funnel or chimney into the cave. By means of chains connected with the mechanism, and extending below, I can change the direction of the mirrors as the sun changes its place in the sky, without requiring to come ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... special branch of study which Wallace himself set going—the inquiry into the local variations, races, and species of insects as evidence of descent with modification, and of the mechanism by which that modification is brought about—there is still great work in progress, still an abundant field to be reaped.... Several able observers and experimenters have set themselves the task of improving, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... but find attractive, somehow. He said: "Why, but this heart thumping here inside me may stop any moment like a broken clock. Here is Euripides writing better than I: and here in my body, under my hand, is the mechanism upon which depend all those masterpieces that are to blot the Athenian from the reckoning, and I have no control ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... nervous," directed the inventor, after he had explained the mechanism to Paul, and also to the city officials who had gathered to pass ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... let it roll down. As the pencil was not round, but polygonal in its form, it made a curious clicking sound in rolling down, which amused Marco, though it disturbed and troubled Forester. Whatever may have been the nice peculiarities in the delicate mechanism of Forester's ear, and of the nerves connected with it, compared with that of Marco's, by which the same sound produced a sensation of pleasure in one ear, while it gave only pain in the other, it would require a very profound philosopher to explain. But the effect ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... skill, or more than a very moderate outlay on tools. I may say here that I have been over the ground myself to find out its difficulties for my readers, and that I made an engine similar to that described in Chapter XV (the most elaborate mechanism included in the book) with very simple tools. Some of the items which I had on my original list were abandoned, because they presupposed the possession ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... which Lucan was born, would have felt the full absurdity of applying such a device to historical epic. Lucan was wise in his choice, and left Olympus severely alone. But his choice roused contemporary criticism. In the Satyricon of Petronius we find a defence of the old conventional mechanism placed in the mouth of a shabby and disreputable poet named Eumolpus (118). He complains 'that young men plunge headlong into epic verse thinking that it requires no more skill than a showy declamation at the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... ground runs in an aeroplane. He had gone up in the Baby Racer twice with Dave, and had proven himself a model passenger. As he had just hinted, too, he had been familiar enough with the mechanism of the biplane to operate some of its auxiliary machinery so ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... she had blundered fatally. She had been a fool, rushing in. And with almost a feeling of dismay she realised it was beyond her ability now to stay what she had put in motion. She was as one who, having wantonly released some complex mechanism, stands aghast and powerless at the consequence of his rashness. And yet, despite the seeming setback to her hopes, the conviction that had urged her to this step was still strong in her; she still ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... undertaking consisted in the concurrence of the largest banking-houses of France and abroad, which would hinder all competition, and prevent hostility on the part of the great money-handlers. It was very curious, and Madame Desvarennes would feel great satisfaction in knowing the mechanism of this company, destined to become, from the first, the most important in the world, and yet most easy ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the mechanism. When the rifle has been wet or exposed to unfavorable climatic conditions, the bolt should be withdrawn and all working parts carefully wiped with a dry cloth, and then gone over ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... by a root in contact with that which would refuse to yield the ordinary food of plants. And as he thus marked all these peculiar adaptations of plants to their respective situations, his mind was by a constant train of thought directed from the beauty and wondrous mechanism of the creature, to contemplate the supreme and ineffable glory ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... modern war that comes to one actually in touch with it is a destruction of illusion: this thing is a thing of mechanism rather than of brilliance; perhaps Petain has led a regiment, a brigade, or a division to the charge. You knew instinctively in seeing the man that you would go or come, as he said, but there was neither dash nor fire, ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... over in my mind for a long time this uncertainty of the traditional mathematical methods of calculating the motions of the celestial bodies, I began to grow disgusted that no more consistent scheme of the movements of the mechanism of the universe, set up for our benefit by that best and most law abiding Architect of all things, was agreed upon by philosophers who otherwise investigate so carefully the most minute details of this world. Wherefore I undertook the task of rereading the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... no motive within the complicated mechanism of Cesare's mind upon which I could play? Was there nothing which he held sacred, no terror in earth or hell which could daunt ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... almost from a fixed day in each year, and continuing to rise steadily for months, it gradually spreads over the lands, covering the entire soil with a fresh coating of the richest possible alluvium, and thus securing to the country a perpetual and inexhaustible fertility. Nature's mechanism is so perfect, that the rise year after year scarcely varies a foot, and is almost exactly the same now as it was when the first Pharaoh poured his libation to the river-god from the embankment which he had made at Memphis; but though this uniformity is great, and remarkable, and ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... she took it, and with her right forefinger began to trace the lines. Her gaze had that intensity with which a little child peers into the mechanism of a watch or an astronomer ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... to control the power by which the machine is run, and is then given an intelligent understanding of the mechanism of the machine or machines she ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... An invention, too, always presents itself to an inventor at first in the most complicated form, and frequently many years are passed in attempts at simplification. What a wide interval is there between the steam locomotive with all its complex mechanism, and the magnificently simple rocket car! A century of ceaseless invention is comprehended between the two! Before the simplicity of our cars was arrived at, inventors had to give up boilers, fire-boxes, valves, ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... in the creek was barely three feet deep, Officer Valden sprang from the car, holding his right hand, which had been caught in the brake mechanism. ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... day or night, the sun's rising and setting throughout the year, its entrance into the signs of the zodiac; the arch which they and the sun in them makes above or below the horizon, with several other curious motions."[14] He was very curious in examining the mechanism of a watch, and it is said he could take one of these ingenious machines to pieces, and put it together ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... material and substantive relations between signs and language, it is to be expected that analogies can by proper research be ascertained between their several developments in the manner of their use, that is, in their grammatic mechanism, and in the genesis of the sentence. The science of language, ever henceforward to be studied historically, must take account of the similar early mental processes in which the phrase or sentence originated, both in sign and oral utterance. In ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... engine-shop—there should always be a full complement of craft for the work of instruction. When workshops are in operation in connection with a school an opportunity is usually provided, also, for a novice to gain some knowledge as to the mechanism and working of the aero-motor: and this of course will be useful ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... chain or chains stretched from harmonic post to post, which describe the figure or outline of the musical image. The element of rhythm gives the whole body its life,—regulates the choice of varying lengths, defining the infinitely varied "tapping" of the musical mechanism. ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... once known, dwells in the body until death, and Ben was a born fisherman. The old delight that can never die crept back to him the instant he felt the clumsy rod in his hands and the faint throb of the line through the delicate mechanism of his nerves. And apparently for no other reason than that the river hordes wished to welcome him home, almost at once a gigantic ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... a travelling piano was wheeled through Coombe and set up a tune in that lonesome spot. Though it was but a mechanical piece of music, with the cogs as it were of the mechanism well marked by the thump, thump, it seemed to cheer the place—till she went out to the gate to look at the Italian woman who danced about while the grinding was done, and saw that she had a sound pair of boots on. That very morning her mother in crossing the road had set the Flamma rheumatism ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... power,' if I may so describe it, must then be, not a mechanism which nothing can resist, but a living being! It must also be a creature striking panic, terrifying, formidable: you ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... recross a hundred yards. But when they reached the earthen throne again at last, and had hoisted the fakir back in position on it, there had been no casualties, and the morale of the men in Sergeant Brown's command was as good again as the breech-mechanism of the rifles ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... but it was lost. The ocean saved it, only to demolish it at leisure—like a cat playing with her prey. Its fate was to suffer there, and to be dismembered day by day. It was to be the plaything of the savage amusements of the sea. For what could be done? That this vast block of mechanism and gear, at once massive and delicate, condemned to fixity by its weight, delivered up in that solitude to the destructive elements, could, under the frown of that implacable spot, escape from slow destruction seemed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to the first drawing. "This is the barrel of the weapon, Master," he said. "As You commanded, it is rifled so that the missile will spin. Here the missile is inserted at the breech, according to Your direction. Here is the mechanism which turns and aims the weapon, as You commanded. It is shown in greater detail on this second sheet.... And here, on the third, is the missile itself. It is hollow and filled with explosive powder, as You ordered, and ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... remarks on the revolutionary government at the time of its adoption. The text of this political phoenomenon must be well known in England—I shall, therefore, confine myself to giving you a general idea of its spirit and tendency,—It is, compared to regular government, what force is to mechanism, or the usual and peaceful operations of nature to the ravages of a storm—it substitutes violence for conciliation, and sweeps with precipitate fury all that opposes its devastating progress. It refers every thing to a single principle, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... of artillery-horses—the legs that tell of muscularity and lasting stamina. Their drill was very loose, and skill in musketry left much to be desired. They had no perception of distance-judging, and some were so grossly ignorant of the mechanism of their weapons that they knocked off the back-sights of their rifles, alleging that they hindered them from taking correct aim. The Marquis de la Hormazas—a meagre, tall, elderly man—was commandant ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... brought the gladiators contending in the arena closer to the imperial canopy. Now observatories, with their revolving domes, crown the heights at every centre of civilization, and the mighty telescope, poised on exquisite mechanism, turns infinite space into a Coliseum, brings its invisible luminaries close to the astronomer's seat, and reveals the harmonies and splendors of those distant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... The mechanism of these various formations is explained in all elementary books. Polybius enters into a mechanical discussion when he contrasts the phalanx and the legion. ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... become "queer specimen sportsmen," after the pattern of Cyrus Garst; and find a more entrancing excitement in studying the live wild things of the forest than in gloating over a dying tremor, or examining a senseless mass of horn, hide, and hoofs, after the life-spring which worked the mechanism has ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... best results from any machine unless he understands its mechanism. We shall draw aside the curtain and show you the mind ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... kime was imperiously called for; and the want of it is a subtle evasion, for which Mr. Styles is fairly accountable. As he has been silent on this subject, it is for us to explain the plan and nature of this terrible and unknown piece of mechanism. Kimes, then, are neither more nor less than a false print in the Edinburgh Review for knives; and from this blunder of the printer has Mr. Styles manufactured this Daedalean instrument of torture, called ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... their province. Of course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us conscious of the two worlds of sense ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... She talked to me about this elephant gun, and explained its mechanism. You can imagine how she soothed my aching heart. My heart, if you recollect, was aching at the moment—quite unnecessarily if I had only known—because it was only a couple of days since my engagement to Wilhelmina Bennett had been broken off. Well, ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... quarter-master called them on deck saying that the weather had moderated and that there was a ship in sight, and there, away across the tumbling seas, the Albatross had struck his vision, remote, storm surrounded, and sunlit, almost a vision of the past in these days of mechanism. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... than in the evening: Fasting, than after a full meal. Can we give any reason for these variations, except experience? Where then is the power, of which we pretend to be conscious? Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders the power or energy of the will equally unknown ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... opus, "Capital,'' added bulk and substance to the theses of the Communist Manifesto. It contributed the theory of surplus value, which professed to explain the actual mechanism of capitalist exploitation. This doctrine is very complicated and is scarcely tenable as a contribution to pure theory. It is rather to be viewed as a translation into abstract terms of the hatred with which Marx regarded the system that coins wealth out of human lives, and it is in this spirit, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... to be mentioned is the bridge, which forms no small part of the vibrating mechanism of the instrument, and needs the utmost skill in its arrangement. Its usual position is exactly between the two small niches marked in each sound-hole, but this arrangement is sometimes altered in the case of the stop being longer or shorter. ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... open-circuited armature windings, grounded field windings, short-circuited field windings, open-circuit or poor connections in field circuit, one or more field coil connections reversed, wrong type of armature or field coils used in repairing generator, generator drive mechanism broken-then the generator ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... are too often forsaken for the inward and subtile analysis of motives, characters, and actions. The workman was not sufficiently master of his art to forbear the vanity of parading the wheels of the mechanism, and was too fond of calling attention to the minute and tedious operations by which the movements were to be performed and the result obtained. I believe that an author is generally pleased with his work less in proportion as it is good, than in proportion as it fulfils the idea with which he ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... woman like herself, who had just consented to be a man's wife; but it was impossible to her to regard this as anything but an aping of things which at other times had a solemn meaning. She found herself gazing at Geraldine as one does at some singular piece of mechanism with a frivolous purpose. And it was not only the individuals that impressed her thus; these two represented life and the world. She had strange, cynical thoughts, imaginings which revolted her pure mind even whilst it entertained them. No ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... of the mechanism and operation of the principal types of cylinder printing machines. 64 pp.; illustrated; 47 ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble, literally deserved its name of "impression-stone." Modern machinery has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jerome-Nicolas ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Athena with the brutish giants, her contest with Arachne, the deeds of the heroes of Athens—Erechtheus, Theseus, Codrus: these were some of the pictures. The car moved noiselessly on wheels turned by concealed mechanism. Under the shadow of the sail walked the fairest of its makers, eight women, maids and young matrons, clothed in white mantles and wreaths, going with stately tread, unmoved by the shouting as though themselves divine. Seven walked together. But one, their ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Glycas and their like told of mechanical birds that flew and sang and even laid eggs. More credible is the story of Aulus Gellius, who in his Attic Nights tells how Archytas, four centuries prior to the opening of the Christian era, made a wooden pigeon that actually flew by means of a mechanism of balancing weights and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There may yet arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit was precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, however that ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... there was an inhuman, devilish deftness in the rhymes. The mighty mechanism of English verse had been employed to proclaim my remoteness ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... disk inclosed by it may indeed be made an element of decoration, though a very meager one; but its relative mass, the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful. Here[8] is at once the simplest, and, in mere patient mechanism, the most skillful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,—a piece of the purest rock-crystal, chiseled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,) into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing; sculpture for ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... manufacturer, successfully developed a number of improvements in steam engines for ocean going vessels, founded the Winton Motor Carriage Company in 1897, and patented a number of inventions in connection with automobile mechanism. The works of the company at Cleveland, Ohio, now cover more than thirteen acres. The first to expound and formulate the application of the law of conservation in illumination calculations was Addams Stratton McAllister (b. ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... Augustine's Confessions gives us the key to the whole story. "Sed ex amante alio accenditur alius" ("Confessions", iv. 14, 911). "One loving spirit sets another on fire." Jesus brings men to the new exploration of God, to the new commitment of themselves to God, simply by the ordinary mechanism of friendship and love. This, in plain English, is after all the idea of Incarnation—friendship and identification. Jesus has a genius for friendship, a gift for understanding the feelings of men. Look, for example, at the quick word to Jairus. As soon as the message comes to ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... at first between the two paths seems to us unquestionable. The indecision is visible in Cartesianism. On the one hand, Descartes affirms universal mechanism: from this point of view movement would be relative,[107] and, as time has just as much reality as movement, it would follow that past, present and future are given from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and that ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... control of only one workman, could produce blows of varying forces without alteration in the rapidity with which they were given. It was also necessary that the vibration and shock of the hammer head should not be transmitted to the driving mechanism, and that the latter should be free from noise and liability to derangement. The various uses to which the movable fulcrum hammers have been put, and their success in working[1]—as well as the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... insects—and of deep coloured shells; were attractive wonders enough; but from the skeletons beside these, it was quite clear, that Delme had acquired considerable knowledge as to the internal construction of the animals themselves—that he had studied the subsisting relations, between the mechanism and the movements—the structure, and ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... in our attempt to discover the essential character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out, would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming available for it: but many ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... containing what appeared to be books, and indeed were so; mostly very small, like our diamond duodecimos, shaped in the fashion of our volumes, and bound in sheets of fine metal. There were several curious-looking pieces of mechanism scattered about, apparently models, such as might be seen in the study of any professional mechanician. Four automata (mechanical contrivances which, with these people, answer the ordinary purposes of domestic service) stood ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... painter; they sit on their hips, never on their chairs. When any one speaks to them they turn their whole busts instead of simply turning their heads; and when their gowns creak one is tempted to believe that the mechanism of these beings is out of order. Mademoiselle Habert, an ideal of her species, had a stern eye, a grim mouth, and beneath her wrinkled chin the strings of her cap, always limp and faded, floated as she moved. Two moles, rather large and brown, adorned that chin, and from them sprouted hairs which ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... it too light for an emergency gun against the larger dangerous animals, such as buffalo and rhinoceros. If one has time for extreme accuracy, and can pick the shot, it is plenty big; but I refer now to close quarters in a hurry. I had no trouble whatever with the mechanism of this arm; nor have I ever had trouble with any of the lever actions, although I have used them for many years. As regards speed of fire the controversy between the lever and bolt action advocates seems to me foolish in the extreme. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... had been inducted, was all that could have been desired for the scion of a noble house, whose pampered whims and vices were to be ministered to by the lavish hand of a fond parent, and where the display of mental abilities was no more necessary than in the propulsion of the mechanism of one of Her Majesty's establishments erected for the ambulating exercises of petty delinquents, yet to a young and high-spirited nature, such as John Ferguson's, the very absence of any intellectual requirements ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... By what wonderful contrivances the entire system of man is made to pay tribute to this divine and charming cancer! See by what admirable instrumentalities it feeds itself from the surrounding, quivering, dainty flesh! See how it gradually but surely expands and grows! By what marvelous mechanism it is supplied with long and slender roots that reach out to the most secret nerves of pain for sustenance and life! What beautiful colors it presents! Seen through the microscope it is a miracle of order and beauty. All the ingenuity of man cannot stop its growth. Think of the amount of ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... kitchen clock, which ticks loudly, shows the hours, minutes, and seconds, strikes, cries "cuckoo!" and perhaps shows the phases of the moon. When the clock is wound up, all the phenomena which it exhibits are potentially contained in its mechanism, and a clever clockmaker could predict all it will do after an examination ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... invisible, dissolving all, except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to the soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop of water. A ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... twelfth century, small portable organs of limited compass were much used; although the tone of these instruments was necessarily slight, and, owing to the shortness of the pipes, high in pitch, the principle of the mechanism was similar to that of the larger instruments. They were hung by means of a strap passed over the shoulders; one hand pressed the keys in front of the pipes (which were arranged perpendicularly), and the other hand operated the small bellows behind ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... fortune; or those of the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions. And though all kinds of passion, even the most disagreeable, such as grief and anger, are observed, when excited by poetry, to convey a satisfaction, from a mechanism of nature, not easy to be explained: Yet those more elevated or softer affections have a peculiar influence, and please from more than one cause or principle. Not to mention that they alone interest us in the fortune of the persons represented, or communicate ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... resolved to live, and to sustain a desperate struggle with the Rennepont family, Rodin acted in consequence. For a few moments Father d'Aigrigny and the prelate believed themselves under the influence of a dream. By an effort of unparalleled energy, and as if moved by hidden mechanism, Rodin sprang from the bed, dragging the sheet with him, and trailing it, like a shroud, behind his livid and fleshless body. The room was cold; the face of the Jesuit was bathed in sweat; his naked and bony feet left their moist ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain, and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of his formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and behold! there his mind, quite on its ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily military ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... our smashing the dome and opening it to space killed Ku Sui and everyone inside, and destroyed all the mechanisms, including the coordinated brains. But the mechanism controlling the asteroid's invisibility was not destroyed. The ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... in fact, wise to keep the mind open and suspend the judgment. We are standing on the threshold of the Arcana, and at any hour the search-light of our intellect may penetrate the darkness, and reveal to our wondering gaze the depths of the inner mechanism of Nature. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... It may well be, as Macaulay predicts, that the enlightened world will indeed resent and cease to practise "illusions" on the imagination, or on any other faculty. It may be the case also that the stock poetical diction and mechanism of Addison's time, with the "Delias" and "Phyllises," "nymphs," "swains," "lyres," and other tinsel elegancies in which it delights, will be—nay, are already—the abomination of a discerning world. But if by "poetry" is meant what should be meant—the vivid, impassioned and rhythmical ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... would have woman industrious shut her up to a few kinds of work. My judgment in this matter is that a woman has a right to do anything that she can do well. There should be no department of merchandise, mechanism, art, or science barred against her. If Miss Hosmer has genius for sculpture, give her a chisel. If Rosa Bonheur has a fondness for delineating animals, let her make "The Horse Fair." If Miss Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry ladder. If Lydia will be a merchant, let her ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... these and other particulars of the vessel. At either end the boat had a cabin, the air in which remained good for about three hours, and in the middle of the boat was a large paddlewheel rotated by clockwork mechanism, which, it was claimed, would run for eight hours when once wound up. The iron tips at the ends of the vessel were intended for ramming, and the inventor was confident he could sink the biggest English ship afloat by crushing in her hull under water. The boat was duly launched, but on trial of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... dependents is attached to the household of the rich Filipino. The master has his special body servant to be present at all times to do his master's bidding, in short, to be the visible mechanism of his master's volition. So, too, the lady of the house has her servant woman to do the slightest bidding of her ladyship. Then there is the cook who is almost invariably a man, a house boy or two, and the coachman. These functionaries, with their assistants ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... dare say I should understand the mechanism of a dress-suit, even if I'd never seen one," said the man, amused, yet ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... nihsratam" (All that is vibrates with life, having come out from life). When we know this world as alien to us, then its mechanical aspect takes prominence in our mind; and then we set up our machines and our methods to deal with it and make as much profit as our knowledge of its mechanism allows us to do. This view of things does not play us false, for the machine has its place in this world. And not only this material universe, but human beings also, may be used as machines and made to yield powerful results. This aspect of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... mechanism of eternal forms— The shifts that courtiers put their bodies through— Were alien ways to him: his brawny arms Had other work than posturing ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... whatever characters we trace on it. This equality of minds gave rise to the same monstrous doctrine in the science of metaphysics which that of another verbal misconception, the equality of men, did in that of politics. The Scottish metaphysicians powerfully combined to illustrate the mechanism of the mind,—an important and a curious truth; for as rules and principles exist in the nature of things, and when discovered are only thence drawn out, genius unconsciously conducts itself by a uniform process; and when this process had been traced, they inferred that what was done by some ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... understand the Germans. Some of their traits may possibly be explained by their history. Their passionate devotion to the State, their amazing vulgarity, their worship of mechanism and mechanical efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individual character, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who have achieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... where the colonel took leave of the Captain; and the latter, intending to repair to his vessel, followed the course of the market almost to its lowest extreme. In one of the most public places of the market, the Captain's attention was attracted by a singular object of mechanism. It seemed so undefined in its application, that he was reminded of the old saying among sailors when they fall in with any indescribable thing at sea, that it was a "fidge-fadge, to pry the sun up with in ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... weight of the superincumbent body, the rest are thrown forwards, as fresh and more advanced points of support on to which it may be pulled. The running of the insect is a very ingenious and beautiful adaptation of the principles of mechanism to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... static tests can be used for transverse bending, compression, tension, shear, and cleavage. A common form consists of three main parts, namely: (1) the straining mechanism, (2) the weighing apparatus, and (3) the machinery for communicating ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... I was astounded and puzzled. Had the hour been the same as when I had last seen the clock, I should have concluded that the hands had stuck in one place, while the internal mechanism went on as usual; but that would, in no way, account for the hands having traveled backward. Then, even as I turned the matter over in my wearied brain, the thought flashed upon me that it was now close upon the morning of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... conditions imposed by an epic and a dramatic poem. Thus, in regard to this last point, Zicari has already noted (p. 270) that Salandra's scenic acts were necessarily reproduced in the form of visions by Milton, who could not avail himself of the mechanism of the drama for this purpose. Milton was a man of the world, traveller, scholar, and politician; but it will not do for us to insist too vehemently upon the probable mental inferiority of the Calabrian monk, in view of the high opinion which Milton seems to have had ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and character of masks. See the Onomasticon of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite mechanism of the fittings. The abundance of excellent workmen possessed by Athens, in everything which had a reference to the plastic arts, will warrant the conjecture that they were in this respect inimitable. Those who have seen the masks of wax in the grand style, which in some degree contain ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Doctor. "No. When this sort of clock has run down, it is no more to me than an ingenious piece of mechanism, to be investigated with the bistoury. When blood is once cold and stagnant, it is no longer human blood; when flesh is once dead, it is no longer that flesh which we desire in our lovers and respect in our friends. The grace, the attraction, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... face remained rigid, so the frightened girl quickened her pace until she was well in front; then, turning, she saw that their lids covered two-thirds of the eye-balls, and that the mechanism of the man was driven by an impulse of which, if it were his at all, he was surely ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... saw our journey commenced. Eveena's wardrobe, with my own and my books, portfolios, models, and specimens of Terrestrial art and mechanism, were packed in light metallic cases adapted to the larger form of carriage whereof I have made mention. I was fortunate in escaping the actual parting scene between Eveena and her family, and my own leave-taking was hurried. Esmo and his son accompanied us, leading the way ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of your soul to your body. That is infinitely mysterious, is it not? An emotion rises in your soul, and a flush of blood marks it. That is the subconscious mechanism of your body. But to say that, does not explain it. It is only a label. You follow me? Yes? Or still more mysterious is your conscious power. You will to raise your hand, and it obeys. Muscular action? Oh yes; but that is but another label." He turned his ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... great measure for their beautiful freedom of motion, for that wondrous grace and charm. Did you ever think what a complexity of muscles, bones, joints, tendons and other arrangements, enter into the formation of the knees, hoofs, legs of a horse; what a piece of mechanism the strong, supple ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... pressed it again and yet again. And in the interval following each period of pressing the finger's owner hearkened, all ears, for the answering click-click that would tell him the sleeper having been roused by the ringing had risen and pressed the master button that released the mechanism ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... seen in its glorious effects upon the body. A ghastly array of diseases was not paraded before the imagination. There 176:12 were fewer books on digestion and more "sermons in stones, and good in everything." When the mechanism of the human mind gives place to the divine Mind, self- 176:15 ishness and sin, disease and ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... is a most essential part of the mechanism, and its shape and height are needed in handling the long rods, piping, casting, and other fittings which have to be inserted perpendicularly. The borer or drill used is not much different from the ordinary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... authority, who begin to puff themselves up as the proper lords of the land, and to order matters so that the princes themselves do as little as may be reign." From this passage it will be seen that the modern bureaucratic State, in which government is as nearly as possible reduced to mechanism and the personal relation abolished, was ushered in under the auspices of the civil law. How easy it was for the civilian to effect the abolition of feudal institutions may be readily imagined by those cognizant of the principles of Roman law. For example, the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... ground, a cynosure. The executioner pointed to it, and two men picked it up and slipped it into its groove, and hoisted it to the summit of the machine. The executioner peered at it interminably amid a universal silence. Then he actuated the mechanism, and the mass of metal fell with a muffled, reverberating thud. There were a few faint shrieks, blended together, and then an overpowering racket of cheers, shouts, hootings, and fragments of song. The blade was again lifted, instantly ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... had so loved, seem to-day so desolate?" Her eyes fell on the clock. The little bee was swinging from left to right and from right to left over the gilded flowers, with the same quick even movement as of old. She suddenly felt a glow of affection for this little piece of mechanism, which told her the hour in its silvery tones, and beat like a human heart, and the tears came into her eyes as she looked at it; she had not felt so moved when she had kissed her father and mother on her return, but the heart has no rules ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... classic culture and his archological learning, had little comprehension of the means and methods by which these enterprises were combined and carried out; the world of commerce and speculation is as aloof from the scholar and the recluse as the rings of Saturn or the sun of Aldebaran. Its mechanism, its intentions, its combinations, its manners of action, its ways of expenditure, its intrigues with banks and governments: all these, to men who dwell in rural solitudes, aloof from the babble of crowds, are utterly unknown; the very language of the Bourses has no more meaning to them ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... 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 ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... look closer into the real mechanism of this form of variability, and of this constant tendency to occasional reversions, it will be best to limit ourselves first to a single case, and to try to gather all the evidence, which can be obtained by an ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... Symphony by Mendelssohn, who is by far our best writer now, and in some measure combines Beethoven and Handel. I grow every day more and more to love only the old God save the King style: the common chords, those truisms of music, like other truisms so little understood in the full. Just look at the mechanism ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... its velocity is rapidly checked and its energy absorbed. A certain amount of energy is thus transferred from the transforming atom to the gas. We recognise this energy in the gas by the altered properties of the latter; chiefly by the fact that it becomes a conductor of electricity. The mechanism by which this change is effected is in part known. The atoms of the gas, which appear to be freely penetrated by the alpha ray, are so far dismembered as to yield charged electrons or ions; the atoms remaining charged with ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... with in the engine-shop—there should always be a full complement of craft for the work of instruction. When workshops are in operation in connection with a school an opportunity is usually provided, also, for a novice to gain some knowledge as to the mechanism and working of the aero-motor: and this of course will be ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... represent any hazard to his present body mechanism," Toolls replied. "If and when he dies, it ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... peculiar importance. As the blue-prints of the invention, from which detailed plans were worked, passed into the shops, they came into the hands of this man, who, thus, many times in the course of the day had the working prints of the controlling mechanism in his exclusive possession. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Mechanism in thought and morals,—a Phi-Beta-Kappa address, delivered at Harvard in 1870,—is one of Dr. Holmes' most luminous contributions to popular science. It is ample in the way of suggestion and the presentation of facts, and though scientific in treatment, the captivating style of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... napkins, etc. Some husbands may not mind it; but some men are very sensitive—men on the whole are more esthetic than women—and an indifference towards the wife may have its origin in some vulgar or unesthetic procedure on the wife's part. The sexual act, as mentioned before, is a very delicate mechanism, and it is very easy to disarrange it. The act of micturition before the man is known in many instances to have instantly abolished the man's sexual desire which was present before. And a man told me that because he noticed in a closet a lot of rags soiled with menstrual blood he was unable to ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... walls on either side of the recess in the library to see how the mechanism worked. The bookshelves were open, made of mahogany, the sides elaborately carved with leaves and flowers. Desmond ran his hand down the perpendicular section immediately on the right of the recess. About halfway down—to ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... and mechanism of ancient fighting; the word melee employed by the ancients was many times stronger than the idea to be expressed; it meant a crossing of arms, not a ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... still less on account of his personal prestige, but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... minute lexicographical knowledge I am deeply indebted for discovering not a few blemishes which would have been "nuts to the critic." The learned Arabist's notes will be highly interesting to students: mine ( SectionV.) are intended to give a superficial and popular idea of the Arab's verse mechanism. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... advanced step by step. He occupied his leisure hours in the study of bibliography; he read books on the old printers and their works; he spent hours with the bookbinder and printer at Overstone, studying the mechanism of a book; he even studied architecture, in connexion with the ventilation and lighting of libraries, and began to teach himself German, in order to be able to master the stores of book- lore ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... the Chateau a charming theatre had been built. Everything was ready for the rehearsal. An enormous revolving platform held three wooden squares which would serve as frames for the tableaux vivants. The mechanism had been arranged by an eminent Parisian engineer. A curtain decorated by Maurice served as background. There were eleven little dressing rooms, seven for the women, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... interior of the jamb. He felt an immovable iron knob, but no more. He groped about gently for some bolt or spring. When before he had passed through the passage with his guide, he had omitted to notice by what precise mechanism the jamb was to be opened from within, or whether, indeed, it could at all be ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... down and tinkered with the engine. It was not the first time the lads had been inside a tank, so they were fairly familiar with the mechanism. ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... whistled through the air and stuck in the mast, doing no hurt. After this no more bolts came, for in his eagerness Adrian had broken the mechanism of the bow by over-winding it, so that it became useless. They leaped into the water, Ramiro with them, and charged for the land, when of a sudden, almost at the tip of the little promontory, from among the ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... humanity. If I may speak in paradox, the true poet is more truly ourselves than we are. The astronomical telescope is constructed upon the same principles as the terrestrial one, only it is more powerful and more perfectly made. Not only the lenses, but all the details of the mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... nature, who has endowed him with the most precious gifts. Intrepid wrestlers, both, and masters of their instrument, they each employ a different manner. M. Vieuxtemps never lets you forget that he plays the violin, that the wonders of mechanism which he accomplishes under your eye are of the greatest difficulty and have cost him immense pains, whereas M. Sivori has the air of being ignorant that he holds in his hands one of the most complicated instruments that exists, and he sings ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... look confoundedly alike to them, no doubt. If they studied us as little as we study them, if they ignored us as contemptuously as we do them, upon the theory that we, too, are part of the mechanism, the next man would be as likely as we to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... attempt to discover the essential character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out, would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming available ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... with some freedom the prevailing opinions of the day, he added, "To me it appears no unjust simile to compare the affairs of this great continent to the mechanism of a clock, each state representing some one or other of the smaller parts of it, which they are endeavouring to put in fine order, without considering how useless and unavailing their labour is, unless the great wheel, or spring, which is to set ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... modulation, the pedals must be employed. Harmonics and shakes are very difficult to execute on the harp, and—last, but not least—it is not provided with dampers. The external form of the clavi harp resembles that of the harp, and all the cords, or strings, are visible. The mechanism which produces the sound is put into motion directly a key is depressed, and acts in a similar manner to the fingers of a harpist; the strings being pulled, not struck. The clavi harp is free from all the objections inherent in the ordinary harp. The strings are of a peculiar metal, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... and also the seat and the springs. The wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made and all of the more delicate mechanism I made myself. One of the features that I discovered necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine altogether ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... said Amelia, and all the ladies rose as if connected with some hidden mechanism which moved them simultaneously.... There was a great deal of pretty diffidence at the door, but the Contessa ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... after a hasty session at the "eating joint," there was a note for each of them tucked under the door, which they had managed to lock pending the attaching of the new mechanism. ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... weaker the heart becomes, the faster it beats. Consequently, the number of times the heart contracts per minute is no measure of the efficiency of its work in circulating the blood. Indeed the mechanism of the heart is such that there must be sufficient time between each of its contractions for its cavities to fill, or it is made to contract on an insufficient supply, and the efficiency ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... express any surprise that a Frenchman should be so well acquainted with English—he scarcely observed that the name was French. Simon's age seemed daily to bring him more and more to that state when life is mere mechanism, and the soul, preparing for its departure, no longer heeds the tenement that crumbles silently and neglected into its lonely dust. Vaudemont came with but little luggage (for he had an apartment also in ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Now, whence proceeds such an invincible averseness to that opinion in so many men of sense? It is because they suppose, with reason, that motions so exact, and according to the rules of perfect mechanism, cannot be made without some industry; and that artless matter alone cannot perform what argues so much knowledge. Hence it appears that sound reason naturally concludes that matter alone cannot, either by the simple laws of motion, or by the capricious strokes ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... was intent on withdrawing certain hardier potted plants merely from the verge of the veranda to a wire-stand well under the roof. Briscoe was at the gun-rack in the hall, restoring to its place the favorite rifle he had intended to use to-day. He could not refrain from testing its perfect mechanism, and at the first sharp crack of the hammer, liberated by a tentative pull on the trigger, little Archie sprang up from his play on the hearth-rug, where he was harnessing a toy horse to Mrs. Briscoe's work-basket ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... immediate and adequate. Yet what was it? He did not ask; he had not got beyond the mere experience, and the old questioning habit was in abeyance. Each new and great emotion has its dominating moment, its supreme occasion, before taking its place in the modulated moral mechanism. He was touched ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... nations of antiquity, and with some of the present day, the Chinese have always held strong conservative opinions. The principle has been held among them from the earliest times that the pattern of a good thing, whether a religion, an art or a mechanism, having once been found satisfactory, should be made official and never afterward changed. This principle, taken in connection with the limited powers of their chief instrument, accounts for the small progress they have made in music ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... whole trivial, stupid, and no doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to get the mechanism ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... conversation, and he felt that, however much license Mr Tippet might permit, he was a man of stern will, who could not be resisted with impunity; so, although he was burning to know the object and nature of innumerable strange pieces of mechanism in the workshop, he felt constrained to make a ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... on every page. His most successful writing is done when he explains contrivances upon which his story depends. He is an original and inventive expert juggler who moves with careless ease to the most effective ends. His characters are little more than pieces of mechanism that act when he pulls the string. They have little emotion and even in their love-making they show their emotion mostly for the sake of the reader's amusement. His negro characters are exceptions to his general treatment and are true to life. He ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... coincides with that period of English industry when, due to the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Watt, powerful changes set in both in mechanism and technique, changes that affected, first of all, the cotton and linen industries, and rendered breadless the workingmen engaged in them. The concentration of capital and land assumed at the time large proportions in England: along with the rapid increase of wealth, on the one hand, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension. No one hitherto has gained such an accurate knowledge of the bodily mechanism, that he can explain all its functions; nor need I call attention to the fact that many actions are observed in the lower animals, which far transcend human sagacity, and that somnambulists do many things in their sleep, which they would not venture to do ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... plodded across the spacious vacancy that unrolled itself farther and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The scrap of view that came within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows like a bit of stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of homesickness ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... in a sudden awe. He would make no answer of his own; he would lend the aid of no obscure mechanism of the brain to any tricking of himself. No answer came, and he sat disheartened, staring at the one visible hill which peered like a shadow from the other shadows in the midst ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... further considerable that, with all his borrowings in this play, the Poet nowhere drew more richly or more directly from his own spring. The whole life of the work is in what he gave, not in what he took; the mechanism of the story being used but as a skeleton to underpin and support the eloquent contexture of life and beauty. In the novel, Paulina and the Clown are wanting altogether; while Capnio yields but a slight hint, if indeed it be ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... disturbance of war's reaction. Herein flows the lifeblood of material existence. The economic mechanism is intricate and its parts interdependent, and has suffered the shocks and jars incident to abnormal demands, credit inflations, and price upheavals. The normal balances have been impaired, the channels of distribution have been clogged, the relations of labor and management have ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... should immediately begin to employ all elements of American power to construct a regional mechanism that can support, rather than retard, progress in Iraq. Internally, the Iraqi government must take the steps required to achieve national reconciliation, reduce violence, and improve the daily lives of Iraqis. Efforts to implement these external and internal ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... yet been able to explain the delicate mechanism of the human soul; its fleeting and varying emotions of joy and sadness, its gleams of hope and shades of despair come and go, controlled by influences which entirely elude human scrutiny. In these days of gloom, rays of hope occasionally penetrated ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... power, had apparently deceived him into thinking that any fragment of science might be treated poetically. In his master the "flaring atom streams" had attained the sublimity of a Platonic vision, and the very majestic sadness of his materialism carried the young poet off his feet. But the mechanism of Aetna remained merely a puzzle with little to inspire awe, and the theme contained inherently no deep meaning for humanity—which, after all, the scientific problem must possess to lend itself to poetic treatment. The ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... single. On the contrary, the more beings are happy the greater is the individual happiness of each: for each is a being of sympathies, and affections; which are increased by being called into action. It is the miserable mechanism of society which, by giving legal possession of what is called property to the holders, puts it absolutely ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Philosophique, Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal, Holbach, and took delight in the Epistles of Saint Paul. She was, while studying Malebranche and Descartes, so convinced, that she considered her kitten, when it mewed, merely a piece of mechanism in the exercise of its functions. The chilling negations and arid skepticism of Helvetius shocked her, and she writes: "I felt myself possessed of a generosity of soul of which he denied the existence." She concluded at this time that a republic is the true form of government, and that every other ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... it a point of honor to resemble the lay figures of a painter; they sit on their hips, never on their chairs. When any one speaks to them they turn their whole busts instead of simply turning their heads; and when their gowns creak one is tempted to believe that the mechanism of these beings is out of order. Mademoiselle Habert, an ideal of her species, had a stern eye, a grim mouth, and beneath her wrinkled chin the strings of her cap, always limp and faded, floated as she moved. Two moles, rather large and brown, adorned that chin, and from them ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... science and American business capacity, have accomplished this result. As a mechanism, this American telephone system is the product not of one but of many minds. What most strikes the imagination is the story of Alexander Graham Bell, yet other names—Carty, Scribner, Pupin—play a large part ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... the trunks of the larger trees are profusely covered with other delicate creepers, chiefly Convolvuli and Ipomoeas; and the pitcher-plant (Nepenthes distillatoria) lures the passer-by to halt and conjecture the probable uses of the curious mechanism, by means of which it distils a quantity of limpid fluid into the vegetable vases at the extremity of its leaves. The Orchideae suspend their pendulous flowers from the angles of branches, whilst ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... numbing despair seizes the faculties and energies in her sepulchral grasp, how is it that superhuman strength is often suddenly infused into the sinking spirit? There is a mysterious yet resistless power given, which winds up and sets again in motion that marvelous bit of mechanism, the human will; that curiously intricate combination of wheels; that mainspring of action, which has baffled the ingenuity of philosophers, and remains yet undiscovered, behind the cloudy shrine of the unknown. Now, there are times when this ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... vibration to the air within the organ pipe. For different pitches, pipes of different lengths are used: for very low pitches long, closed pipes are used; for very high pitches short, open pipes are used. The mechanism of the organ is such that pressing a key allows the air to rush into the communicating pipe and a sound is produced characteristic of the ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... but such as it was he did it very well. It was a curious sight to see the great Zulu sitting there upon the floor, his battleaxe resting against the wall behind him, whilst his long aristocratic-looking hands were busily employed, delicately and with the utmost care, cleaning the mechanism of the breech-loaders. He had a name for each gun. One — a double four-bore belonging to Sir Henry — was the Thunderer; another, my 500 Express, which had a peculiarly sharp report, was 'the little one who spoke like a ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Generally speaking, torpedoes are made of a higher grade of metal, within and without, than that used in the construction of mines. The exterior metal of torpedoes consists of nickel steel and copper, and the interior mechanism includes the same kinds of metal and brass. The exterior shell of a mine is generally made of less expensive material, such as galvanized iron, but the interior mechanism and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of 1915 I went out with the first body of accredited war correspondents, and we saw some of the bad places where our men lived and died, and the traffic to the lines, and the mechanism of war in fixed positions as were then established after the battle of the Marne and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an experimental visit. It was not until June of that year, after an adventure on the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the government. Relics like the Blood of Hailes were destroyed, and the Rood of Boxley, a crucifix mechanically contrived so that the priests made it nod and smile or shake its head and frown according to the liberality of its worshipper, was taken down and the mechanism exposed in various places. At Walsingham in Norfolk was a nodding image of the Virgin, a bottle of her milk, still liquid, and a knuckle of St. Peter. The shrine, ranking though it did with Loretto and Compostella in popular veneration, was ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Colburn, in his excellent work on 'Locomotive Engineering and the Mechanism of Railways,' points out that Mr. Davies Gilbert noted the effect of the discharge of the waste steam up the chimney of Trevithick's engine in increasing the draught, and wrote a letter to 'Nicholson's Journal' (Sept. 1805) on the subject. Mr. Nicholson himself proceeded to investigate the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... and strapping them to the saddles and the wagon seats; the Numbers One, the sergeants in charge of each gun, bustling their gunners, and seeing everything about the guns made ready: the gunners examining the mechanism and gears of the gun, opening and closing the hinged flaps of the wagons, and tearing the thin metal cover off ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... steam-roadster that had been so closely related to her experiences of the night rushed past the house and disappeared along the winding roadway toward the Cedarcrest gate. And she remained there, in a listening attitude, as long as she could hear the droning murmur of its mechanism. When that died away in the distance, she sighed, and turned to reenter the house; but it was only to find that she was no longer alone. Roderick Duncan appeared in the doorway, and came through the ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... phenomenon of regeneration, even in these startling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less so, and neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... honestly, that he could be knocked into their own social shape, and in the process of knocking carried out their own traditions. They might have succeeded if Doggie had discovered any reserve source of pride from which to draw. But Doggie was hopeless at his work. The mechanism of a rifle filled him with dismay. He could not help shutting his eyes before he pulled the trigger. Inured all his life to lethargic action, he found the smart crisp movements of drill almost impossible to attain. The riding-school was a terror and a torture. Every ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... exposition—that the mechanism is not sufficient to explain the principle of the movements and faculties of the soul, the answer is, that it is in the same case with all the bodies in nature. In them the simplest movements, the most ordinary phenomena, the commonest actions, are inexplicable mysteries, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... thwarted purpose came over him. He knew it was not fear. He felt as though he could not possibly be afraid in an airplane, however much reason he might have for fear. He felt betrayed, as though this wonderful piece of mechanism, for which he had paid so dear a price and which he worshiped in proportion, had suddenly turned traitor. It was failing him, just when his need of it was so vital. Just when he had so much to retrieve, just when he had counted on its help in re-establishing ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... nature or in art is like the iridescent hue of mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of the arrangement of the particles,—the flowering of the mechanism of the shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm, delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,—and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... of the Human Body" is helpful in illustrating the value of diagrams and of analogy in the exposition of a mechanism. It may be used also for teaching the student to adapt his work to the audience, for, although prepared at first for an immature audience, its material has since been so adapted that in addition to the general ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... he thought, "how Pete could cram enough brain into one of those things to make it hunt and track so perfectly." He tried to visualize the computing circuits needed for the operation of its tracking mechanism alone. "There just isn't room for the electronics. You'd need a computer as big as the ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... conducted largely by individuals or partnerships. The unit was small; the amount of capital needed was limited. But now the unit was expanding so rapidly, the need for capital was so lavish, the empire of trade so extensive, that a new mechanism of ownership was necessary. This device, of course, was the corporation. It had, indeed, existed as a trading unit for many years. But the corporation before 1860 was comparatively small and was generally based upon charters granted by ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... apparatus was submitted to a skillful electrical engineer and machinist of Hartford, who gave as his opinion that the scheme was entirely feasible, and that a simple and comparatively inexpensive mechanism ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... which the scribes should be competent to decipher the Chaldaean character. Dictionaries and easy mythological texts had been procured for their instruction, by means of which they had learned the meaning of words and the construction of sentences. Having once mastered the mechanism of the syllabary, they set to work to translate the despatches, marking on the back of each the date and the place from whence it came, and if necessary making a draft of the reply.** In these the Pharaoh does not appear, as a rule, to have insisted on the endless titles which we find ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily, and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... normal view of the question. We rise out of semi-conscious infancy into a life of the senses, which goes on to perfection in our childhood. We come into a state in which the mechanism of the body enjoys its freest play, in which the senses imbibe their sweetest satisfactions, and in which life either swells into irrepressible overflowings, or subsides into careless content. Looking at her children at this period of their life, many a mother has said, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... martial music, then each class at the Academy—four companies—came out upon the grassy plain upon the double-quick. Their motions were light and swift, and yet so accurately timed that each company seemed one perfect piece of mechanism. A cadet stood at a certain point with a small color flying. Abreast of this their advance was checked as suddenly as if they had been turned to stone, and the entire corps was in line. Then followed a series of skilful manoeuvres, in which ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... colonists" towards England and not towards republicanism; "firstly, because it slakes that thirst for self-government which seizes on all British communities when they approach maturity; and secondly because it habituates the colonists to the working of a political mechanism which is both intrinsically superior to that of the Americans, and more unlike it than our old colonial system." In short, he felt very strongly that "when a people have been once thoroughly accustomed to the working of such ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... enormous strength and a design so primitive as to be a constant source of wonder. They could only be pulled along at a slow walk and with vast effort by a couple of huge horses, and the load the cart was carrying never seemed to bear any proportion to the mechanism of its transport. The roads are bad, but they will not account for those carts. The little front wheels are a stroke of mechanical ineptitude positively amounting to genius, and when they are replaced by a single wheel, and the whole affair resembles a huge tricycle, one instinctively looks ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... in rendering her name famous through the world. I think it is grand to know, that, while her factories re-echo with the clanking of stupendous engines, and the whirl and rattle of machinery, the immortal mechanism of God's own hand, the mind, is not forgotten in the din and uproar, but is lodged and tended in a palace of its own. That it is a structure deeply fixed and rooted in the public spirit of this place, and built to last, I have no more doubt, judging from the spectacle I see before ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... attended by our greatest dramatist. At any rate the lessons which Shakespeare learnt from Lyly in the matter of plot complication are visible in the Midsummer Night's Dream, which was produced in 1595[130]. The intricate mechanism of this play, reminding us with its four plots (the Duke and Hippolyta, the lovers, the mechanics, and the fairies) of the miracle with its imposing but unimportant divinities in the Rood gallery, its ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... familiarity, took him over his house in Vienna, to show him its improvements since the days of Congress. He remarks it as a strange point in the character of this celebrated statesman, how minutely he sometimes interests himself in mere trifles, especially where art and mechanism are concerned. He had seen him one evening remain for half an hour studiously examining the construction of a musical clock. The Prince then showed his cabinet de travail, which he had retained unchanged. "Here," said he, "is a spot which is exactly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... than after a full meal. Can we give any reason for these variations, except experience? Where then is the power, of which we pretend to be conscious? Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders the power or energy of the will equally ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... circular chamber, a little less than the one below, with three windows at the sides, the doorway he had seen from without, and three pairs of millstones placed horizontally, and connected by shafts with the mechanism above the cobwebby and flour-whitened ceiling. There was a flight of steps, too, here, and Tom now noticed that there was a trap-door overhead, formed with two flaps and a hole in the middle, while a similar one was ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... portions of the works which He has created without us: a work there is for which He would have us to be fellow-workers with Him. The heaven of stars is a spectacle for the eyes of the body, a grander spectacle still for the contemplation of the mind which has understood their wondrous mechanism. We admire them; but if the stars failed to attract our admiration, no one of them on that account would cease to trace its orbit. There is another heaven, a heaven of loving stars and free, the sight of which is one day to fill us with ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the digestive organism of the body is such a delicate and finely adjusted piece of mechanism that any excess is liable to clog its workings and put it out of order. It is made for sufficiency alone. Nature never intended man to be a glutton; and she seldom fails to retaliate and avenge excesses by ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Buren rose and put one of the other packages in little Sky-High's hand. The wrappings revealed a four-fold case of gold, which some curious mechanism permitted to open into leaves, and stand us a tablet, or half-closed. Each leaf held a small and perfect portrait—the four were of the little serving-man's mistress and her children and the master; and it is impossible to describe the blissful expression in Sky-High's eyes when ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... coign of safety ceasing to be a coign of safety caused us to move on in search of another, and I came upon Sergeant Borrowe blocking the road with his dynamite gun. He and his brother and three regulars were busily correcting a hitch in its mechanism. An officer carrying an order along the line halted his sweating horse and gazed at the strange gun ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... thighs, in back, in abdomen, in chest, responding to the exercise moved under the lustrous skin as if themselves were living things. Over and over again the action was repeated, the muscles and body moving in rhythmic harmony like some perfect mechanism running ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... certain organs in science. The problems set to physicists by the engineer who wishes to facilitate transport or to produce better illumination, or by the doctor who seeks to know how such and such a remedy acts, or, again, by the physiologist desirous of understanding the mechanism of the gaseous and liquid exchanges between the cell and the outer medium, cause new chapters in physics to appear, and suggest researches adapted to ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... restaurant car with pantry and kitchen, four second-class cars and a rear van; in all twelve vehicles, counting in the locomotive and tender. The first class cars are provided with dressing rooms, and their seats, by very simple mechanism, are convertible into beds, which, in fact, are indispensable for long journeys. The second-class travelers are not so comfortably treated, and besides, they have to bring their victuals with them, unless they prefer ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... bothered with theories. Abstract and absolute doctrines of right, when imported from France, fell flat upon the average Englishman. He was eager enough to discuss the utility of this or that part of the machinery, but without inquiring into first principles of mechanism. The argument from 'utility' deals with concrete facts, and presupposes an acceptance of some common criterion of the useful. The constant discussion of political matters in parliament and the press implied ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... The rest, to which the cutting tool is attached, is brought slowly along the side of the shaft as the shaft revolves, by means of a long screw which is concealed in the frame of the lathe, and which is turned continually by the mechanism of the small wheels which are seen at the hither end ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... ceased to move, and to make their almost frozen blood circulate in their veins, than an unconquerable torpor congealed them, nailed them to the ground, closed their eyes, and in one second collapsed this overworked human mechanism. And they gradually sank down, their heads falling towards their knees, without, however, quite tumbling over, for their loins and their limbs lost their capacity for moving, and became as hard as wood, impossible to bend or to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... automobile when you don't understand the mechanism," added Joe. "As long as everything goes all right you go sailing along, but let something go wrong, and you're up a tree right away. You haven't any idea of where to ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... future husband, under pain of ignoring the laws of generous propriety and being false to love, ought now to accept these conditions previously planned, and cleverly led up to by Solonet and Madame Evangelista. Like the hands of a clock turned by mechanism, Paul came ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... may be said to have any relation with time, and the trio of Chopin's "Funeral March" was already in uneven progress. The legless man sat on the bare pavement, his back against the handsome area railing of No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and steadily revolved the mechanism of the organ ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... universe.... As Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way, they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of their day: between '76 and '89 they ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of February the springs of life seemed to be ceasing from their play, for, from this day, strictly speaking, he ate nothing more. His existence henceforward seemed to be the mere prolongation of an impetus derived from an eighty years' life, after the moving power of the mechanism was withdrawn. His physician visited him every day at a particular hour; and it was settled that I should always be there to meet him. Nine days before his death, on paying his usual visit, the following ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... It was the sole evidence of political emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but ever since "A Passionate Pilgrim" and "Roderick Hudson" appeared in, 1875, it has been recognized ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... intellect itself, an intellect which has absorbed his spiritual life into itself and will permit no other tenant of his mind to divert attention for a single moment from its luminous brilliance, its perfection of mechanism. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... inches, is not so good for purposes of locomotion as a wooden leg is, while an arm, even though powerless at the elbow, and perhaps much shortened, can be so strengthened and supported by slings and bandages as to give a most useful hand, the complex movements and uses of the fingers of which no mechanism can at all imitate. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... nature and no real affinity with the lower world of animal life? Or does he originate in a similar germ, pass through the same slow and gradually progressive modifications,—depend on the same contrivances for protection and nutrition, and finally enter the world by the help of the same mechanism? The reply is not doubtful for a moment, and has not been doubtful any time these thirty years. Without question, the mode of origin and the early stages of the development of man are identical with those of the animals immediately below him in the scale:—without ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... the image of an ass, which, by touching a certain string, did open its mouth and wave its ears in a manner most curious to behold, wherewith the infant was infinitely delighted, as was I, without inquiring at that time into the exquisite mechanism whereby the extraordinary demonstrations were produced. But in the course of little more than a month he was led, by his inquiring turn of mind, to pry into the mystery; and in the pursuit of knowledge—laudable ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... afternoon the boys went into the woods and while they squatted on Nature's mattress of fragrant pine needles (see illustration, page 230), he told about leaves and their work, cells and their place, roots and their arrangement, tendrils and their mechanism, flowers and their devices, seeds and their travels. The third talk was upon the evolution of plant life, law and logic of creation, perpetuation of life in the lower forms, edible and poisonous mushrooms, and the perpetuation of ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... to see if there was any hidden mechanism in this box," answered the Little Captain. "I wonder if there's a ruler anywhere about?" ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... with her flaccid lips and swaying to and fro. Her dull eyes expressed complete vacancy of mind, and, looking at her, one would have thought that the rocking of her body was not a voluntary action of her own, but was produced by the action of some concealed galvanic mechanism. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... anatomical differences between men and women. He read about the mechanism of love. He read about the mysteries of procreation. All of it was startlingly new to him, and yet he read with a sense of always having known it. He read with absolute acceptance, ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... greatest admiration for the clock placed in the tower bearing its name, and the mechanism of which shows the progress of the sun and moon through the twelve signs of the zodiac. In a niche above the dialplate is an image of the Virgin, which is gilded and lifesize; and it is said that on certain fete days, each blow of the pendulum makes two angels appear, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... mentioning the exact method of feeding the carbide. One type, called "gravity feed" operates by allowing the carbide to escape and fall by the action of its own weight, or gravity; the other type, called "forced feed," includes a separate mechanism driven by power. This mechanism feeds definite amounts of the carbide to the water as required by the demands on the generator. The action of either feed is controlled by the withdrawal of gas from ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... that it has been applied to the propulsion of cars. An invention, too, always presents itself to an inventor at first in the most complicated form, and frequently many years are passed in attempts at simplification. What a wide interval is there between the steam locomotive with all its complex mechanism, and the magnificently simple rocket car! A century of ceaseless invention is comprehended between the two! Before the simplicity of our cars was arrived at, inventors had to give up boilers, fire-boxes, valves, steam-pipes, cylinders, ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... title-page of his principal work this piece of rhetoric: "On earth, there is nothing great but man; in man, there is nothing great but mind". Now one would suppose that there are on earth many things besides man deserving the appellation of "great"; and that the mechanism of the body is, in any view, quite as remarkable a piece of work as the mechanism of the mind. There was one step more that Hamilton, as an Aristotelian, should have made: "In mind, there is nothing great but intellect". Doubtless, we ought not to dissect an ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... could furnish it; and the great effort of American business men was, of course, to obtain some advantage over their competitors in producing such an article or in supplying such a service. The best result of this condition was a constant improvement in the mechanism of production. Cheapness was found to depend largely upon the efficient use of machinery, and the efficient use of machinery was found to depend upon constant wear and quick replacement by a better machine. But while ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... chair, and, eyeing me all the time with that same watchful glance, began to describe to me in some detail an apparatus which he said my father had devised, for taking instantaneous photographs by the electric light, with a clockwork mechanism. It was an apparatus that let sensitive-plates revolve one after another opposite the lens of a camera; and as each was exposed, the clockwork that moved it produced an electric spark, so as to represent such a series of effects as the successive positions ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... follow his time by ear. But if—as frequently happens in modern music—the sound of the chief orchestra hinders the conductor from hearing that which is being performed at a distance from him, the intervention of a special conducting mechanism becomes indispensable, in order to establish instantaneous communication between him and the distant performers. Many attempts, more or less ingenious, have been made of this kind, the result of which has not everywhere answered expectations. That of Covent Garden Theatre, in London, moved ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... wisely, even without a leader, the Martian space-hands met the emergency. They had withdrawn from the open hatchway, but could reach the mechanism that closed it. Parr was too late to jump in after them. Then one of them fired the undamaged ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... thought out? Has the insect indeed perceived, by the light of a flash of reason, that in order to make the tit-bit fall it was necessary to unhook it by sliding it along the peg? Has it really perceived the mechanism of suspension? I know some persons—indeed, I know many—who, in the presence of this magnificent result, would ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... marks a distinct departure in the dramatist's literary progress. As a critic has well observed, it substitutes for situations produced by the mechanism of plot, characters which give rise to situations in accordance with the ordinary operations of human nature. Molire's method—the simple and only true one, and, consequently, the one which incontestably establishes ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... delay. She rushed food and munitions to the front, and on one occasion Kitchener fed two French army corps, or 80,000 troops, for eleven days without the slightest hitch. A moment's thought will show that this means not only the ability to send food, but also to organize the entire mechanism of the preparing and handling ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... in the earth's interior until evening. From time to time one hoisted the pack up or pressed down one's cap into the sweat of the forehead; had it fallen it could not have been picked up again in the mechanism of the march; and then we began again to fight with the distance. The hand contracted on the rifle-sling was tumefied by the shoulder-straps and the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... current of everlasting power, even as the trolley arm of the electric car reaches up and touches the current of power flowing through the wire overhead. The faith that takes the living word brings the power divine into the heart to move all the spiritual mechanism of life's service. ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... that the subject of style is cluttered up with such a mass of preconceptions, that it would be necessary to redefine our terminology, and then, after all, perhaps we should not understand one another. Men have an idea that they are thinking when they operate the mechanism of language which they have at command. When somebody makes the joints of language creak, they say: "He does not know how to manage it." Certainly he does know how to manage it. Anybody can manage ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... course of action, that they can no longer produce the effects which would take place if they were left free from such control. A few examples will make our meaning plain. Let us contrast the operations of chemistry with those of mechanism. In the latter, substances act upon each other simply by pressure, motion, friction, &c.; but in chemistry, affinities and combinations come into play, producing results far beyond any that are seen in mechanics. On mechanical principles, the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... Pranner, the Carinthian, had carved upward of a hundred faces; a chessboard, the completion of which had occupied a Dutchman for eighteen years; golden carriages drawn by fleas; toys composed of porcelain or ivory in imitation of Chinese works of art; curious pieces of mechanism, musical clocks, etc., were industriously collected into the cabinets of the wealthy and powerful. This taste was, however, not utterly useless. The predilection for ancient gems promoted the study of the remains of antiquity, as Stosch, Lippert, and Winckelmann ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... allowed between successive operations. For this purpose couches are provided, each containing a certain portion of the Manipulator. These are operated by means of a short connecting-rod, joining the rock-shafts of the two pieces of mechanism, as shown in Fig. 10. The Vibrator has two small discs, or heads acting through an opening in the couch on which the invalid rests. These impinge with a rapid, direct stroke upon the portion of the body exposed to the action. The top of the couch is adjustable, and is quickly placed at ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... There was already the psychology of Freud and his successors, of course, which gave the first real notion of human semantics. There were the biological, chemical and physical approaches to man as a mechanism. Comparative historians like Spengler, Pareto and Toynbee realized that history did not merely happen but had some kind ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... keep it. He fed the pup and washed it and named it Dugan, and after that he never said anything more about going to Michigan to find Charlie. It was only natural, of course, because kids—normal kids—forget their pain quickly. It's a sort of defense mechanism, Doc says, against the ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... in the next resound the widow's wail And weeping of the fatherless. So walk Sickness and health. One rounds the cheek at morn, The other with a ghost-like movement glides Unto the nightly couch, and lo! the wheels Of life drive heavily, and all its springs Revolving in mysterious mechanism Are troubled. And how slight the instrument That sometimes sends the strong man to his tomb, Revealing that the glory of his prime, Is as the flower ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... life is one thing and the same. The Philosopher Dumdi pronounces it a certain febral vibration of organic parts, operating upon the vis inertia of unorganized matter. But Bardianna says nay. Hear him. 'Who put together this marvelous mechanism of mine; and wound it up, to go for three score years and ten; when it runs out, and strikes Time's hours no more? And what is it, that daily and hourly renews, and by a miracle, creates in me my flesh and my blood? ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... male and female florets seated on the same club, as if Jack's elaborate plan to prevent self-fertilization were not yet complete. Plants may be detected in process of evolution toward their ideals just as nations and men are. Doubtless when Jack's mechanism is perfected, his guilt will disappear. A little way above the florets the club enlarges abruptly, forming a projecting ledge that effectually closes the avenue of escape for many a guileless victim. A ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... and would do so immediately. Mme. de Combray was not at all disturbed; she had long been prepared for this, and ordered Soyer to take some provisions to the little chateau, where she repaired that night with Lefebre. There were two comfortable hiding-places there whose mechanism she explained to the lawyer. One of them was large enough to contain two mattresses side by side; she showed Lefebre in, slipped after him, and shut the panels upon them both. Bonnoeil remained alone at Tournebut. The quiet life he had ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... me, and there are no judges, and there are no boundaries and no limits to me. The /de profundis,/ the effort not to die, the fall of desire with its soaring cry, all this has not stopped. It is part of the immense liberty which the incessant mechanism of the human heart exercises (always something different, always!). And its expansion is so great that death itself is effaced by it. For how could I imagine my death, except by going outside of myself, and looking at myself as if I were not ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... and their tails are equally mobile. The female germinative cell, on the contrary, is immobile and much larger than the male cell. Conjugation consists in the movement of the male cell, by means of variable mechanism, toward the female cell, or egg, into the protoplasm of which it enters. At this moment it produces on the surface of the egg a coagulation, which prevents the entrance ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... quaintly slanted brows in dainty inquiry, with further disastrous results to the young man's cardiac mechanism. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to every other. It is the abolition of the lawmaking monopoly. Until that monopoly is ended, no law favorable to the masses can be secure. Direct legislation would destroy this parent of monopolies. It gone, then would follow the chiefer evils of governmental mechanism—class rule, ring rule, extravagance, jobbery, nepotism, the spoils system, every jot of the professional trading politician's influence. To effect these ends, all schools of political reformers might unite. For immediate purposes, help might come even ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... whatever the formula may be, but one in exactly the contrary direction, a dissolution of society into its individuals, of animals into the cells of which they are composed, of life into chemistry, of chemistry into mechanism, and so on through the scale of Being, reversing the whole course of evolution—should we, in such a case, still have to say that the process of Nature was right, and that she is to give the law to our ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... said the young man, thoughtfully, as he laid out his little pieces of mechanism on the table; "this is an attempt to invent a means of producing ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
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