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Adult   Listen
noun
Adult  n.  A person, animal, or plant grown to full size and strength; one who has reached maturity. Note: In the common law, the term is applied to a person who has attained full age or legal majority; in the civil law, to males after the age of fourteen, and to females after twelve.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Adult" Quotes from Famous Books



... periods of the year. Certain compounds present at one stage of growth are absent at another. Many facts could be brought forward to show the different chemical composition of plants in different stages of growth. The Thuja occidentalis[39] in the juvenescent and adult form, offers an example where morphological and chemical differences go hand in hand. Analyses of this plant under both ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various

... the rough wear and tear of ages. True, we do not outgrow Dante, or Cervantes, or Bacon; and I doubt if the Anglo-Saxon stock at least ever outgrows that king of romancers, Walter Scott. These men and their like appeal to a larger audience, and in some respects a more adult one, at least one more likely to be found in every age and people. Their achievement was more from the common level of human nature than are Emerson's astonishing paradoxes. Yet I believe his work has the seal of immortality upon it as much as that of any of them. No doubt he has ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... prudent, for all nations may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority. The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as they are, not as they are not. To deal with a child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only acting a lie. The church cannot treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped. ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... the other day," he said, "that 80 per cent, of the adult population of Leinster, Munster and Connacht, were paid by the Government to teach the other people how to get their livings, and to see that they did what they were told. That ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... had shown a better spirit. Massachusetts, which had always been the foremost of the northern colonies in resisting French and Indian aggression, had at once taken the lead in preparation for war. No less than 4500 men, being one in eight of her adult males, volunteered to fight the French, and enlisted for the various expeditions, some in the pay of the province, some in that of the king. Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, himself a colonist, ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty

... coast of the Bay of San Francisco, 41/2 m. across from San Francisco city, is the capital of Alameda County, California, a beautiful city with tree-lined streets, surrounded by vineyards and orchards; it has a home of the adult blind of the State, manufactures of textile and iron goods, and fruit-canning industries, and is the terminus ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... right," she declared with self-scorn, "to expect from an adult human being, a reasonable degree of intelligence. I didn't display it ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... tapeworm cysts (taenia saginata) are about the size of a pea and found in the flesh of cattle, which become infected by eating food or drinking water which has been contaminated by the feces of persons harboring adult tapeworms. Then again, the person becomes infected by eating raw or rare flesh of cattle infected with the larva stage of Measly Beef. Great care should be exercised to prevent cattle from becoming infected ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek

... be constantly in a position to aid the uninformed reader how to use the books of reference which every public library contains. The young person who is new to the habit of investigation, or the adult who has never learned the method of finding things, needs to be shown how to use even so simple a thing as an index. Do not be impatient with his ignorance, although you may find him fumbling over the pages in the body of the book in vain, to find what you, with your acquired knowledge of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... me Leave, amongst the rest of your Female Correspondents, to address you about an Affair which has already given you many a Speculation; and which, I know, I need not tell you have had a very happy Influence over the adult Part of our Sex: But as many of us are either too old to learn, or too obstinate in the Pursuit of the Vanities which have been bred up with us from our Infancy, and all of us quitting the Stage whilst you are prompting ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... stated in its simplest form is this: Primeval man lived in small family groups, composed of an adult male, and of his wife, or, if he were powerful, several wives, whom he jealously guarded from the sexual advances of all other males. In such a group the father is the chief or patriarch as long as he lives, and the family is held together by their common subjection to him. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... obtaining an acquaintance with nature, as it is; in fact, in laying a firm foundation for the further knowledge Which is needed for the critical examination of the dogmas, whether scientific or anti-scientific, which are presented to the adult mind. At present, education proceeds in the reverse way; the teacher makes the most confident assertions on precisely those subjects of which he knows least; while the habit of weighing evidence is discouraged, and the means of forming a sound ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... the gangsman all things were reputedly lawful, some things were by no means expedient. He could with impunity deprive almost any ablebodied adult of his freedom, and he could sometimes, with equal impunity, add to his scanty earnings by restoring that freedom for a consideration in coin of the realm; but when, like Josh Cooper, sometime gangsman at Hull, he extended his prerogative to the occupants of hen-roosts, he was apt to find himself ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... at an adult age. There were writers of importance and some who were really great; the energetic and violent Tertullian, beloved by Bossuet; Saint Cyprian, full of unction, gentleness, and charity; Lactantius, skilful ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... nineteen men, and among those who perished was Captain Coles himself, Captain Burgoyne, the commander of the ship, and a son of the then First Lord of the Admiralty—Mr Childers. It is unnecessary to recall to the memory of the adult among my readers the deep feeling of pity and gloom spread by this awful disaster ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molineux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:—"Suppose a man BORN blind, and now adult, and taught by his TOUCH to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... known one every-day experience that no dweller in our thirteen original colonies has had for two hundred years. In Massachusetts they have not seen it since 1641; in Virginia not since 1628. It is that of belonging to a community of which every adult was born somewhere else. When you come to think of this a little it is dislocating to many of your conventions. Let a citizen of Salem, for instance, or a well-established Philadelphia Quaker, try to imagine his chief-justice ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... "seriously impaired," when applied to the hearing of a little child, must be given an entirely different interpretation than it would have if used with reference to an adult who had previously had normal hearing. A degree of impairment that would be unimportant in an adult is a very serious matter in the case of a child. This is because the ear is the natural teacher of speech and language. If the sounds ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright

... is seen through windows. Background: Snow covered house-roofs; gable windows in the distance brilliantly illuminated. In room an old chair, a fire-pan and a picture of the Virgin, with a lighted candle before it. Room is divided by posts—two in centre thick enough to conceal an adult. ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg

... and replenish the earth." I am correctly informed, that a planter in Virginia, who counted, I know not how many slaves upon his plantation, confessed on his death-bed, that his licentiousness had extended to every adult female amongst them. This planter was a near relative of the celebrated Patrick Henry. It may be, that you have planters in Mississippi and Louisiana, who avail themselves to the extent that he did, of the power which slaveholding gives to pollute and destroy. The ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... six drunkards to each house as an average, or five habitual drunkards for one arrested for drunkenness, we should arrive at a total of a million adults who are more or less prisoners of the publican—as a matter of fact, Isaac Hoyle gives 1 in 12 of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed dipsomania; others are but over the verge; but the procession ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... I copied the chapter, Cherubino and I helped Paragot up the stairs and put him to bed. It was the first time I had seen him the worse for liquor. But when one has been accustomed to see one's mother and all her adult acquaintances dead drunk, the spectacle of a god slightly overcome with wine is neither ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... farther confirmation of our tenet may be drawn from the solution of Mr. Molyneux's problem, published by Mr. Locke in his ESSAY: which I shall set down as it there lies, together with Mr. Locke's opinion of it, '"Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly [SIC] of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other, which is the cube and which the sphere. ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley

... no,' I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a girl situated as I was. 'I am so glad you came'; and I smiled, courageous and encouraging. For once in my life—for the first time in my adult life—I determined to be my honest self to another. 'Your voice is exquisitely ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... extends backwards and inwards (Ellis); downwards and backwards (Harrison), in front of the sacro-iliac synchondrosis, as far as the upper extremity of the great sacro-sciatic notch, a distance varying in the adult from one and a half to two inches in length. It forms a curve with its concavity forwards, and at its termination divides into, rather than gives off, its two or three principal branches. Its corresponding vein is in close contact behind, as also the lumbo-sacral nerve, the obdurator ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... or Cranford there might be scandal about a young bachelor's very late visits to a pretty widow. But the adult portion of the population, at any rate, would hardly lay booby-traps to trip him in a river on ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... fine degree of accuracy in all their public devotions. See what opportunity this device offers for the display of ingenuity and tact on the part of a minister! He can, on the blank spaces, have a few pictures drawn. These will be interesting to children who cannot comprehend his sermon, or to an adult who loses the thread of the discourse. Does it not seem like a good thing for the church?" he asked, as he turned his gaze upon ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... possessors such increased facilities of sight that in the course of time the exception became the rule. But the remarkable point is, that the law of heredity not only preserved the variation itself, but the date of its occurrence; and that, although for thousands of years the adult Pleuronecta have had both eyes on the same side, the young still continue during their earlier development to exhibit the contrary arrangement, just as if ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... baby fireless cookers and children fireless cookers. The same dietetic rules apply to them as to the adult." ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters

... the source of authority in the new state. The citizen was to have a voice because he was an adult, capable of rendering judgment in the selection of public servants and in the determination ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... but then incessant ones! The Aristocrat Municipality, pretending to be Constitutional, keeps mostly quiet; not so the Daughter Society, the five thousand adult male Patriots of the place, still less the five thousand female: not so the young, whiskered or whiskerless, four-generation Noblesse in epaulettes; the grim Patriot Swiss of Chateau-Vieux, effervescent infantry of Regiment du Roi, hot troopers of Mestre-de-Camp! Walled Nanci, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... function of these officers is to impose upon the whole adult population the new conditions created by the Act—i.e., they have to ensure the proper payment of contributions in respect of all persons liable to ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... we disobeyed Jarth's will? It is, we know, his will that only the best and the strongest shall rule—but are the best always the strongest? An imbecile adult could destroy the life of a genius-grade child. The strongest wins, but not the best. Such would not be the will of Jarth. If we be the stronger, and the best, then it is right and just that these strange creatures should be destroyed that we may have a stable world of ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell

... also complete sea men, differing in no respect from us, but that they are stupid, and covered with scales; for, though our organisation seems to exclude us essentially from the class of amphibious animals, yet anatomists well know that the foramen ovale may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case, not necessary to life: and how can it be otherwise explained that the Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under the water; and that the famous Swedish ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock

... importance of the new element thrust into the politics of the country. We suppose it to be morally certain that the new constitution of the State of New York, to be framed this year, will confer the elective franchise upon all adult male negroes. We have no faith in the success of any efforts to shut the negro element out of politics. It is the part of wisdom frankly to accept the situation, and get beforehand with the Radicals in gaining an ascendancy over ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard

... roll of 1689 was 1,418. Nothing had since occurred to greatly diminish the number. Callieres left about fifty in Montreal, and perhaps also a few in the neighboring forts. The rest were in Quebec.] Nearly all the adult males of Canada were gathered at Quebec, and there was imminent danger of starvation. Cattle from the neighboring parishes had been hastily driven into the town; but there was little other provision, and before Phips retreated the pinch of famine had ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... there is no difficulty in drawing a distinction; the difficulty comes in when we have to deal with the aberrant races, or species, of chimpanzee, some of which are so gorilla-like that it is by no means easy to determine to which group they really pertain. In height the adult male chimpanzee of the typical form does not exceed 5 ft., and the colour of the hair is a full black, while the skin, especially that of the face, is light-coloured; the ears are remarkably large and prominent, and the hands reach only a short distance below the knees. The head ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... adult male, badly scarred from fighting, and had lost one horn by falling over a cliff when he was killed. He was brownish black, with rusty red lower legs and a whitish mane. His right horn was nine and three-quarters inches in length and ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... necessary nearly to close the mouth, whether the creature be immersed in the fluid it is about to drink, or not: hence, when the child first attempts to suck, it does not slightly compress the nipple between its lips, and suck as an adult person would do, by absorbing the milk; but it takes the whole nipple into its mouth for this purpose, compresses it between its gums, and thus repeatedly chewing (as it were) the nipple, presses out the milk, exactly in the same manner as it is drawn ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... of good soil, for raising all the necessaries of a family. I think I have shown, in another work,[23] that five hundred and fifty pounds of Indian or corn meal, or ten bushels of the corn, properly cooked, will support, or more than support, an adult individual a year. Four times this amount is a very large allowance for a family of five persons; nay, even three times is sufficient. But how small a spot of good soil is required for raising thirty bushels ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... Musonius, in which that philosopher expressly states that the ancient law-givers inflicted punishments on females who caused themselves to abort. After the spread of Christianity among the Romans, however, foeticide became equally criminal with the murder of an adult, and the barbarian hordes which afterwards overran the empire also treated the offence as a crime punishable Fith death. This severe penalty remained in force in all the countries of Europe until the Middle Ages. With the gradual disuse of the old ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... affects a child. In some children it is blended with the earliest, haziest recollection of life at all, as though they had been literally 'cradled in sweet song;' and we may be sure that the hearing of musical sounds and singing in association with others are for the child, as for the adult, powerful influences in awakening sympathetic emotion, and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... proportion to their height, in some instances curving nearly to their high-set ears. Their bodies were smaller and lighter in color, and their fingers and toes bore the rudiments of nails, which were entirely lacking among the males. The adult females ranged in height from ten to ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... whether a child or an adult, should not be disturbed by visitors, even if their calls are short. The excitement of meeting them is followed by a depression of the nervous system. The more dangerous and apparently nearer death the sick person is, the more rigorous should be the observance of this suggestion. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... relation is the chief though not the only factor in the dissemination of the two serious venereal diseases; so prevalent are these in our large cities that at least half the adult male population of all social grades, according to conservative estimates, contract one or both of them. (In Germany gonorrhoea is the most frequent of all diseases, with the single exception of measles; in America it is about as frequent.) Were the evil ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... is experienced by the individual at that period of life when the more social side of human nature is beginning to find expression. In this way the natural growth from the small world of childhood to the larger world of adult humanity is taken advantage of by religion, and the process of inevitable growth is attributed to the influence of religious belief. In itself the phenomenon is in no degree religious, but wholly social. The process is well enough described by Starbuck in the ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... adult Throg, even unarmed, was not to be considered easy meat, Shann thought. Armored with horny skin, armed with claws and those crushing mandibles of the beetle mouth ... a third again as tall as he himself was. No, even ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... pretend that it was calculated, nor that the optimates made express requisition of the naturalists, economists, and historians and sociologists and moralists to provide an imperialistic philosophy for the use of adult and normal dolichocephalous blondes. But there certainly was a coincidence. It may have been due to the influence of what is called a milieu ambiant, that of the commercial and military party. The authors of the doctrine lived in a special atmosphere. Their intellect was there formed—or ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... really was almost seventeen, and in the Middle Fifth, and allowed to smoke asthma cigarettes in bed. He took one out of a cardboard box in his bag, and thought it might do him good to smoke it now. But an adult tobacco-smoker looked so curiously at the little thin cross between cigar and cigarette, that it was transferred to a pocket unlit, and the coward hid himself behind his paper, in which there were several items of immediate interest to him. Would the match hold out at ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung

... as the reproduction of a former human being, especially if the physiological conditions of birth were not understood;[108] the basis of the belief may have been the general similarity between human forms, and, in some cases, the special similarity between the infant or the adult and some deceased person. An extension of the sphere of reincarnation would also naturally arise from the recognized kinship between man and other things, animate ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... can we do anything to obtain for sweated workers, whether in homes or factories, rates of remuneration less palpably inadequate? Now it certainly seems impossible to limit the hours of workers, especially adult workers, in their own homes. More can be done to ensure sanitary conditions of work. Much has been done already, so far as the structural condition of dwellings is concerned. But I am afraid that the measures necessary to introduce what may be called the factory standard of sanitariness into ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner

... portraits. In 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge ceiling piece for the Boston Public Library. The piece was for a room later converted into a children's room, and after the canvas was placed, in 1901, the incongruity of the adult painting and the purposes of the room caused unfavorable comment. But the room has been recently readjusted. It is now lined with high oak shelves, almost to the cornice, filled with musty old books of a beautiful brown—perhaps ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... The term 'adult,' however, used by Mr Macdonald to designate those he measured, is not satisfactory—it does not inform us that the persons measured had reached their full development; for men continue to grow, as has been shewn by M. Quetelet, even after twenty-five. The height given, notwithstanding—five ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various

... the amusements of the children in-doors are mere imitations of the serious affairs of adult life. Boys who have been to the theatre come home to imitate the celebrated actors, and to extemporize mimic theatricals for themselves. Feigned sickness and "playing the doctor," imitating with ludicrous ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton

... He pilfered things to eat. He cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... of teething begin, it is the same. The healthy child left to itself would wince occasionally at the slight pricking pain, and then turn its entire attention elsewhere, and thus become refreshed for the next trial. But under the adult influence the agony of the first little prick is often magnified until the result is a cross, tired baby, already removed several degrees from the beautiful state of peace and freedom in which Nature placed him ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... court of heaven, and his great antagonist, Satan, who stands for the king of evil, is enthroned by it amid the shades of hell. The fiction that courts are a species of earthly paradise is still kept up for the entertainment of children; while the adult, whom the annals of all countries has made familiar with a long record of monarchs, bad as well as good, is disposed to regard them as beneficial or otherwise to a country according to the character and conduct of the occupant of the throne, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... forward to rejoining in a future state those whom we have loved on earth,—as most of us hope and many of us believe we shall,—we are apt to forget that the same individuality is remembered by one relative as a babe, by another as an adult in the strength of maturity, and by a third as a wreck with little left except its infirmities and its affections. The main thought of this poem is a painful one to some persons. They have so closely associated life with its accidents that they expect to see their departed friends in the costume ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... commanded all the adult males of Israel to go up to Jerusalem three times in a year, to celebrate the feasts of the passover, pentecost, and tabernacles. Women were under no obligation to undertake these journeys; [13] but it was not unusual for such as were eminent for piety, to accompany their husbands and ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... type, not of the highest cast either, of the manufacturing operatives of Lancashire. You will find his equal in one at least out of every ten of the adult factory workmen of Lancashire, whose wits are sharpened by everyday conflict and debate in clubs and publics; you will often meet his superior in those self-educated classes. We have not unfrequently read speeches at public ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... the Altar to Love, Honor, and Listen. Still, it was trying to see the once-loved Adult cavorting on the verge of Dementia and know ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade

... is the private and ideal life of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children. Often the parent's influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the more cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what makes the parents' claim at once unjust and pathetic is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... are, whether in the Paumotus or at home. But the Paumotuan Mormon seemed a phenomenon apart. He marries but the one wife, uses the Protestant Bible, observes Protestant forms of worship, forbids the use of liquor and tobacco, practises adult baptism by immersion, and after every public sin, rechristens the backslider. I advised with Mahinui, whom I found well informed in the history of the American Mormons, and he declared against the least connection. 'Pour moi,' said he, with a fine charity, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... tell Of the sweet-flowing words that thence afterwards fell. Just so round our Overton's cradle, no doubt, Tenth ducklings and chicks were seen flitting about; Goose embryos, waiting their doomed decimation, Came, shadowing forth his adult destination, And small, sucking tithe-pigs, in musical droves, Announced the Church poet whom Chester approves. O Horace! when thou, in thy vision of yore, Didst dream that a snowy-white plumage came o'er ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... acquired the dimensions and approximate outline of an adult human body, although all was still vague and blurred. It hovered lightly in the air, a foot or so above the couch. Backhouse looked haggard and ghastly. Mrs. Jameson quietly fainted in her chair, but she was unnoticed, and presently revived. The apparition now settled down ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... appertains to the individual, not to the family alone, or to any form of association, whether social or corporate. Probably not more than five-eighths of the men of legal age, qualified to vote, are heads of families, and not more than that proportion of adult women are united with men in the legal merger of married life. It is, therefore, quite incorrect to speak of the state as an aggregate of families duly represented at the ballot-box by their male head. The relation ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... this military system in order. Henceforth every male able-bodied adult must pay the debt of blood; no more exemptions in the way of military service; all young men who had reached the required age drew lots in the conscription and set out in turn according to the order fixed by ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... never offered anything so sumptuous. It appealed irresistibly to the artistic instinct. It exploded the fatuous policy that causes the appearance in this city of those senseless, antiquated spectacles—food for neither adult nor juvenile—known as "Drury Lane pantomime," a form of entertainment that in its native land has ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... to the nest with tidbits in their bills, and were greeted with loud, impatient cries from three hungry mouths, which were opened wide to receive the food. The total plunge of the stream over the Seven Falls is hundreds of feet, and yet the adult birds would toss themselves over the abyss with reckless abandon, stop themselves without apparent effort in front of their cleft, and thrust the gathered morsels into the little yellow-lined mouths. It was an aerial feat that made our heads dizzy. This pair of birds did not fly up ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... which adult readers will find to the full as satisfying as the boys. Lucky boys! to have such a caterer as Mr. G. A. Henty."—Black ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... youth of some American hero, so that the lad who plays George Washington or Benjamin Franklin will be in touch with the emotions of a patriot of his own years, instead of incongruously portraying an adult. Much of the dialogue contains the actual words of Lincoln, Washington, and Franklin, so that in learning their lines the youthful players may grasp something of the hardihood and sagacity of Washington, ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay

... — N. adolescence, pubescence, majority; adultism; adultness &c. adj.; manhood, virility, maturity full age, ripe age; flower of age; prime of life, meridian of life, spring of life. man &c. 373; woman &c. 374; adult, no chicken. V. come of age, come to man's estate, come to years of discretion; attain majority, assume the toga virilis[Lat]; have cut one's eyeteeth, have sown one's mild oats. Adj. adolescent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... by spontaneous generation. Loeuwenhoek's development of the microscope in the 17th century led immediately to the discovery of the spermatozoon by one of his students. At the time, the "preformation theory" was probably the most widely accepted—i.e., that the adult form exists in miniature in the egg or germ, development being merely an unfolding of these preformed parts. With the discovery of the spermatozoon the preformationists were divided into two schools, one (the ovists) holding that the ovum was the container of the miniature individual, the ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... already mentioned have by no means prevented the boycott and the strike. Indeed they have not, except in rare cases, directly affected the two great causes of industrial disputes—hours and wages for adult male laborers. Many formidable and violent strikes have occurred since 1896, such as those of the shirt-waist makers in New York in 1909, the textile operatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and the Colorado coal miners in 1913. On the whole, however, it seems that the labor unions have developed ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... suitable instrument. Cochrane moved restlessly about. He did not notice Johnny Simms. Johnny had stood sullenly in his place, not moving to look out the windows, ostentatiously ignoring everything and everybody. And nobody paid attention! It was not a matter to offend an adult, but it was very shocking indeed to a rich man's son who had been able to make a career of staying emotionally at a ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... more excursions away from the camp after that unless the excursionists took some adult person with them. He went himself to Candace Farm to see Hunchie Slattery; but he took only Ida Bellethorne with him. They went on their snowshoes. During this trip Mr. Gordon won the abiding confidence of ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson

... the name of a woman was to her a mistake, a crime. Her sense of fitness demanded that names should be given to infants with reference to their adult characters and eventual positions in life. She liked her own name "Caroline"; and she liked "Margaret" and all such womanly, motherly, dignified, stately appellatives. As for "Pansy," it had been the name ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... is three months old, it abandons its pelagic habits and changes into the young animal that lives in the sand. In spite of its smallness (one-eighth of an inch), it has substantially the same structure as the adult. As regards the remaining organs of the Amphioxus, we need only mention that the gonads or sexual glands are developed very late, immediately out of the inner cell-layer of the body-cavity. Although ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel

... however, we have done away with all difficulties of this kind relating to the appointing person, and dispensed with the necessity of waiting for an order from the governor, by enacting that if the property of the pupil or adult does not exceed five hundred solidi, guardians or curators shall be appointed by the officers known as defenders of the city, along with the holy bishop of the place, or in the presence of other public persons, or by the magistrates, or by the ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian

... Pennsylvania were the efforts of Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray. In 1696 he was sent to Maryland by the Bishop of London on an ecclesiastical mission to do what he could toward the conversion of adult Negroes and the education of their children.[1] Bray's most influential supporter was M. D'Alone, the private secretary of King William. D'Alone gave for the maintenance of the cause a fund, the proceeds ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... English prisons as "criminals." The tendency of criminals to belong to the feeble-minded class is indeed every day becoming more clearly recognized. At Pentonville, putting aside prisoners who were too mentally affected to be fit for prison discipline, eighteen per cent of the adult prisoners and forty per cent of the juvenile offenders were found to be feeble-minded. This includes only those whose defect is fairly obvious, and is not the result of methodical investigation. It is certain that such ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... the largest of the deciduous Magnolias. The flowers are creamy white, measuring from six to seven inches in diameter when fully expanded, deliciously fragrant, and produced in large numbers on the adult tree, and even on young plants their appearance is quite a usual occurence. In the autumn the tree is loaded with cones of brilliant scarlet fruit, six to eight inches long. The large obovate leaves are often a foot in length and half, as ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... service and universal service are neither of them strictly accurate. There is no means of making every adult male, without exception, a soldier, because not every boy that grows up has the necessary physical qualification. Nor does the word compulsion give a true picture. It suggests that, as a rule, men would not accept the duty if they ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson

... traces all this to an innate propensity to barter. But barter is only a means, and not even the means to which mankind shew the greatest pro-[end of page 5] pensity; for, wherever they have power to take by force or pillage, they never barter. This is seen both in an infantine and adult state; children cry for toys, and stretch at them before they offer to exchange; and, conquerors or soldiers never buy or barter, when they can take, unless they are guided by some other motive than mere natural propensity. A highwayman will pay for his dinner ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... decollete or detrousse, has no suggestion of sexual allurement. (Westermarck quotes numerous testimonies on this point, op. cit., pp. 192 et seq.) Dr. R.W. Felkin remarks concerning Central Africa, that he has never met more indecency than in Uganda, where the penalty of death is inflicted on an adult found naked in the street. (Edinburgh Medical Journal, April, 1884.) A study of pictures or statuary will alone serve to demonstrate that nakedness is always chaster in its effects than partial clothing. As a well-known artist, Du Maurier, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Parliament this year a Bill to enable a system of probation officers, both paid and voluntary, to be established throughout the country, for dealing not indeed with child offenders alone, but with adult offenders also, who may be properly amenable to that treatment. And next year we propose to introduce a comprehensive Children's Bill, which has been entrusted to my charge, in which we hope to be able to include some ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... grown-up people are subject to prescribed rules," lady Feng expostulated; "but her present birthday is neither one of an adult nor that of an infant, and that's why I would like ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... occurred to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity of a dogged man who waits ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... father, a wholesale merchant, inherited a very comsiderably fortune, which he applied mostly to cultural purposes. With O. Arvesen he founded in 1864 the first Norwegian folk-high-school at Sagatun, near Hamar. Folk-high-schools are schools for adult men and women, where the instruction aims directly at making good citizens. The method of instruction is "historical," but the teacher's personality is all- important in relation to the pupil's individuality. ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... payment of debt, could exchange them or sell them in the market. The price of a slave never rose very high: a woman might be bought for four and a half shekels of silver by weight, and the value of a male adult fluctuated between ten shekels and the third of a mina. The bill of sale was inscribed on clay, and given to the purchaser at the time of payment: the tablets which were the vouchers of the rights of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... of the once coveted delicacies. Alas! the preliminary sniff failed to make her mouth water, the first bite betrayed the inferiority of the potatoes used. Even so the unattainable tart of infancy mocks the moneyed but dyspeptic adult. But she ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... of nearly three hundred pages. As usual, ANDERSEN is not abstruse in his way of putting things. His narrative is adapted alike for the juvenile mind and for the adult. There is no periphrasis in it. One understands his meaning at a glance; therefore the book should be a very popular one when summer time sets in, and people look for some quiet delassement which will not ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various

... and early twenties stand, usually hesitant, on the threshold of life. They are bursting with energy, eager, hopeful, anxious to enter the stream of adult activity. Inexperienced, they under-estimate the difficulties, taking up any line of activity that promises quick results. They are impressionable and generally seeking ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... vitality of this sort. The emotions and instincts that come to one when thoroughly developed, with the vital forces surging within, are decidedly different from those which influence one when lacking in stamina. Many who have grown beyond adult age are still undeveloped, so far as physical condition and vigor is concerned, and this lack of physical development or vitality means immaturity-incompleteness. It means that one is short on manhood or womanhood. This statement, that ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... to be coeval with the foundation of the city. [103] The paternal power was instituted or confirmed by Romulus himself; and, after the practice of three centuries, it was inscribed on the fourth table of the Decemvirs. In the forum, the senate, or the camp, the adult son of a Roman citizen enjoyed the public and private rights of a person: in his father's house he was a mere thing; [1031] confounded by the laws with the movables, the cattle, and the slaves, whom the capricious master might alienate or destroy, without being responsible to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... universal suffrage.' These powerful movements, opposed as they are to each other, agree in spurning the very idea of democracy, which Lord Morley defines as government by public opinion, and which may be defined with more precision as direct government by the votes of the majority among the adult members of a nation. Even a political philosopher like Mr. Lowes Dickinson says, 'For my part, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... enjoyed in Devachan. Say, for instance, that I die and leave on earth some young children. Are these children present to my consciousness in Devachan still as children? Do I imagine that they have died when I died? or do I merely imagine them as adult without knowing their life-history? or do I miss them from Devachan until they do actually die, and then hear from them their life-history as it has proceeded between my ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... country saw no other way out of the difficulty; but what proportion of the Boers can be called "thinking men?" He also said, in the fifteenth paragraph of his despatch to Lord Carnarvon of 6th March 1877, that petitions signed by 2500 people, representing every class of the community, out of a total adult population of 8000, had been presented to the Government of the Republic, setting forth its difficulties and dangers, and praying it "to treat with me for their amelioration or removal." He also stated, and with perfect truth, that many more would have signed had it not ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... between the two cavities, choose to close this opening and substitute microscopic openings in place of it? It would surely seem more reasonable to have the small perforations in the thin, easily permeable membrane of the foetus, and the opening in the adult heart, rather than the reverse. From all this Harvey drew his correct conclusions, declaring earnestly, "By Hercules, there ARE no such porosities, and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... of her sex in the settlement, it would naturally be thought that she lacked in many of the little attentions which only a mother or adult female friend can give, but such was not the case. There was not a man among them all, who had not been taught in the hard school of necessity to become his own tailor and conservator of clothing. Many had natural taste, and had not ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... and myself, this lake had a different attraction, for, improbable as it may seem, it was the haunt of a gang of most abandoned pirates. Behind a wooded island, but quite invisible to the adult eye, the pirate craft lay, conforming in the most orthodox fashion to the descriptions in Ballantyne's books: "a schooner with a long, low black hull, and a suspicious rake to her masts. The copper on her ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... entitled to ask for a more cogent proof of it than the demonstration, however complete, of the germination of an egg, caused by artificial stimulus and not by the ordinary method of syngamy, even though that germination may lead to the production of a perfect adult form. We are entitled to ask him to make clear to us not only what is happening within his system, but—which is far more important—what that system is, and how it came into existence. We are entitled to ask why the artificial stimulus, or the entry ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... thoroughly is this assumed that to say of a gentleman that he does not lie or steal is not praise, but rather an insult, since the imputation to him of what is but the virtue of children is no longer an encomium when applied to the adult, who is supposed to have passed the point where theft and lying are moral temptations, and to have reached a point where, on the basis of these savage, antique, and now childish virtues, he strives for a higher moral ideal. And this ideal of to-day, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... very difficult to judge accurately," Mr. Goodenough said. "But Dahomey is said to be able to put fifty thousand fighting men and women in the field, that is to say her whole adult population, except those too old to bear arms. I should think that there are twenty or twenty-five ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty

... practicing devisive ethnic politics and fomenting violence against the state; PALIPEHUTU's exclusivist charter makes it an unlikely candidate for legalization under the new constitution that will require party membership open to all ethnic groups Suffrage: universal adult at age NA Elections: National Assembly: note - The National Unity Charter outlining the principles for constitutional government was adopted by a national referendum on 5 February 1991; new elections to the National Assembly are to take place 29 June 1993; presidential elections are ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... life which are inculcated in the church are practiced by his father and his mother, his brother and his sister, or he will not take them seriously. If he is conscious of virtue and religious practice as repression, a sort of tyranny practiced on a child by his elders, his notion of the liberty of adult life will quite naturally be freedom to break away from what is now forced upon him into the life of self-determination and indifference to things spiritual that characterises the adult circle with ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... to supply a breeding station, and it would be impracticable to occupy any widely extended part of the river, on account of the difficulties of communication. At the mouth of the river, on the other hand, the supply of adult salmon could be found with certainty, but they must be obtained from the ordinary salmon fisheries in June and held in durance until October or November, and the possibility of confining them without interfering ...
— New England Salmon Hatcheries and Salmon Fisheries in the Late 19th Century • Various

... persons for their immediate utility to their preparation for more effective work as men and women.... The danger is not that there may, in the present, be too few adolescent laborers, but that there may be too many, and that as a result there may in the future be too few healthy and well trained adult ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... energy. Young people's clubs, societies for the study of Socialism should be formed all over the country as regular adjuncts to our party organization, and very serious consideration should be given to them by the adult Socialists. But they should remain primarily study clubs, and should not be encouraged to engage in practical political activity, which can do but little good to our movement, and may tend to arrest the intelligent ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... and grotesque appearing birds attain a length of about 48 inches. The plumage varies from white to a deep rosy red. It requires several years for them to attain the perfect adult plumage, and unlike most birds, they are in the best of plumage during the winter, the colors becoming faded as the nesting season approaches. The birds are especially noticeable because of the crooked, hollow, scoop-shaped bill, and the extremely long legs and neck. The feet ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed



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