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Basic   Listen
adjective
Basic  adj.  
1.
(Chem.)
(a)
Relating to a base; performing the office of a base in a salt.
(b)
Having the base in excess, or the amount of the base atomically greater than that of the acid, or exceeding in proportion that of the related neutral salt.
(c)
Apparently alkaline, as certain normal salts which exhibit alkaline reactions with test paper.
2.
(Min.) Said of crystalline rocks which contain a relatively low percentage of silica, as basalt.
Basic salt (Chem.), a salt formed from a base or hydroxide by the partial replacement of its hydrogen by a negative or acid element or radical.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Basic" Quotes from Famous Books



... the field, far enough to admit of his safely running the round of the bases before the ball could be returned, so as to enable him to score a run, the side scoring the most runs winning the game. This basic principle of "Rounders," Chadwick contended, is identical with the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... base, groundwork; founding establishment; endowment; grillage. Antonym: superstructure. Associated words: fundamental, basic, caisson. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... come to her, saw her have different notions, and more or less put them to the test, on different nights. She was always alive—she liked it herself. She gave him ideas, long as he had been on the stage. Naturally she had a great deal to learn, no end even of quite basic things; a cosmopolite like Sherringham would understand that a girl of that age, who had never had a friend but her mother—her mother was greater fun than ever now—naturally would have. Sherringham winced at being dubbed a "cosmopolite" by his young entertainer, just as he had winced a moment ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... we'll just have to be patient until RCR goes through. Try to remember how difficult it is for the human mind to comprehend our love, even with the aid of mathematics. As rationaloids we fully understand the basic attraction which they call magnetic theory. All humans know is that if the robot sexes are mixed a loss of efficiency results. It's only normal—and temporary like human love—but how can we explain it to them? ...
— The Love of Frank Nineteen • David Carpenter Knight

... of one not amenable to Law, by any sort of political accident! That would indeed be to laugh at Justice in this Kingdom! That would indeed be cynical and unsound! We must never admit that there is no basic Justice controlling the edifice of our Civic Rights. We do, we must, conclude that a just and well-considered principle underlies this despotic Institution; for surely, else, it would not be suffered to survive for a single moment! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... beans, and dried meat were all pounded up in a well made granite mortar, on the top of which, oftentimes, a basket hopper was fixed by means of pine gum. Some of these mortars were hewn from steatite, or soapstone, others from a rough basic rock, and many of them were exceedingly well made and finely shaped; results requiring much patience and no small artistic skill. Oftentimes these mortars were made in the solid granite rocks or boulders, found near the harvesting and winnowing places, and I have photographed ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... powder, basic cupric acetate used as a paint pigment and fungicide. A green patina of copper sulfate or copper chloride on copper, brass, and bronze exposed to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... the head of this complex Department that I must limit myself as much as possible to formulating simple, basic policies and putting these policies into the hands of men who will carry them out. In general, my most important work is to administer the public domain. That is, I must discover how best the natural resources that the Federal Government still controls ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... to know the facts so that we could take proper action toward saving the timber still left to the public. But of far more importance was the light that this history (and the history of our other resources) throws on the basic attitude, tradition and governmental beliefs of the American people. The whole standpoint of the people toward the proper aim of government, toward the relation of property to the citizen, and the relation ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... denial, therein is my service. But for a second of this sensuality in haste—thou shalt pay in money, revulsion, disease and ignominy.' And that is all. There is not a single phase of human life where the basic main truth should shine with such a monstrous, hideous, stark clearness, without any shade of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... understand now why the young man was so sanguine, why it wasn't necessary to be born again, even under the auspices of the Great Spirit. It is very gratifying indeed to be in the midst of a great county of this kind that has made one of the great basic industries so successful. It takes three things to make a really great nation; it takes great natural resources, it takes great policies and it takes great people. We have nations in this world where the resources, the possibilities of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... was a fixed quantity, rising out of the bedrock of the Constitution, while Federalism, Whiggism and Republicanism were but the chimeras of some prevailing fancy drawing their sustenance rather from temporizing expediency and current sentiment than from basic principles and profound conviction. To make haste slowly, to look before leaping, to take counsel of experience—were Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democracy, while fully conceiving the imperfections of government and meeting as events required the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... The basic principle of road drainage is to minimize the effect of water to such an extent that there will always be a layer of comparatively dry soil of appreciable thickness under the traveled part of the road. This layer should probably never be less than two feet thick and for soils of ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg

... animal during the 20th century, confirmed his views. Still mankind persists in preferring simple solutions and ideas to complex ones. This is the way our brains and our nature as gregarious animals make us think and feel. This our basic human nature make ambitious men able to appeal to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... produces the highest achievement of the individual personality. The Social Democratic organization, opposed though it is to the military organization, is also composed of Germans and is, therefore, directed by the same basic principles as the military organization, although for entirely different purposes. For this one reason it was almost a matter of course that the Social Democrats offered their services for the war at the moment when they recognized that it had become of imperious necessity ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... Processes, which Processes, preponderating at different epochs, have not been clearly apprehended as necessary complements of each other, and have, hence, been regarded as different Methods. In one phase of the Anticipative or Hypothetical stage,—the assumption of basic Principles as points to reason from,—the Observation and Collection of Facts, and the Induction therefrom, were processes so imperfectly performed, that they appeared to have no existence; in another phase, that employed by Aristotle, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... in chemistry, a basic substance which has been obtained as a decomposition product of nuclein, and also from the pancreatic glands of oxen. It has been synthesized by E. Fischer (Berichte, 1897, 30, p. 2238) by heating ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Marx and Engels an opportunity for issuing their epoch-making Manifesto, that even to-day is read and reread by the workers in all lands of the world. Translated into every language, it is the one pamphlet that can be found in every country as a part of the basic ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... expect that it is a basic trait of character, for spacemen must be gregarious, and although I am not truly a spaceman I have been in space and, in consequence, my character is no different from my ex-crewmates—at least in that respect. I think as time passes I shall miss the comfort of companionship, the sense ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone

... the title, he wrestled with a theory of American aesthetics. "Christmas, 1915", the third book in the series, appeared, applying the "Gospel of Beauty to the Photoplay". The ideas of Art and Democracy that develop in the first two books are used as the basic principles in "The Art of the Moving Picture". Those who desire a close view of the Lindsay idea will do well to read the three works in the order named. Further ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay

... of alcoholic solution of basic fuchsin (sufficient to give a definite pink colour), or a few drops of waterproof Chinese ink added to the medium at this stage facilitates the subsequent "fishing" ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... lips. He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... regarded the number of clearly stressed ones. The derived English system adopted from the French (1) rime and (2) identical line-length, and retained from the Anglo-Saxon (3) regularity of stress. (4) It largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon regard for quantity and (5) it retained alliteration not as a basic principle but as an (extremely useful) subordinate device. This metrical system, thus shaped, has provided the indispensable formal basis for making English poetry admittedly the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... church fair should be to strengthen the church, to propagate the Gospel, and to bring the world nearer to its God." That is Dr. Conwell's idea of the purpose of a church fair and the basic principle on which The Temple fairs are built. They always open on Thanksgiving Day, the anniversary of Dr. Conwell's coming to the church and continue for ten days or two weeks thereafter. These fairs are most carefully planned. The membership, of course, ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... on the day of his graduation; and, too, in each case where the efforts have reached any high standard of excellence they have been followed by the same phenomenon of enthusiasm. I think the explanation of the latter lies in what is a basic, though often dormant, principle of the Anglo-Saxon heart, love of fair play. "Shiny," it is true, was what is so common in his race, a natural orator; but I doubt that any white boy of equal talent could have wrought the same effect. The sight of that boy gallantly waging with puny, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... provide basic information about two subjects that can be richly rewarding whether you follow them for profit, as Shell does, or for pleasure, as millions of ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company

... 1806, the validity of Whitney's patent was finally determined by decision of the United States Circuit Court in Georgia. Whitney asked for a perpetual injunction against the Holmes machine, and the court, finding that his invention was basic, granted him all ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... father's grave, Arthur Ranger! I'll put you both out of the house! Go to the Whitneys, where you belong!" And then she saw Arthur as he now was, and herself the wife of Dory Hargrave. And she for the first time realized, as we realize things only when they have become an accepted and unshakable basic part of our lives, what her father had done, what her father was. Hiram had won ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing, and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... This is the basic difference between great men and little ones—the little ones are concerned solely with to-day; the great ones think only of the future. They have gained that largeness of vision and of understanding which ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... Ethical Lessons Nos. 1 to 27, constitute an excellent elementary instruction in the science of Vitosophy, embracing the basic principles of Genetics, Phrenology and Ethics, and enable the member to acquire a very comprehensive knowledge of the greatest of all ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor

... diamonds, iron ore, phosphates, feldspar, bauxite, uranium, and gold; cement; basic metal products; fish processing; food processing; ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... adjacent States and the residue compelled to wait twenty-five years before statehood was given to it. The rights of man and citizenship in the State had again been temporarily lost sight of by the party of which these were basic principles. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... are sufficient to indicate the basic theory that governed the bringing up of children for countless generations. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... was something worth investigating in those fields we developed on our magnetic shield work. They had to do, you know, with light, and radiant energy. There must be some reason why a metal reflects. Further, though we can't get down to the basic root of matter, the atom, yet, we can play around just about as we please with molecules and molecular forces. But it is molecular force that determines whether light and radiant energy of that caliber shall be reflected ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell

... discriminate between conscience proper and the term as used in the looser, larger sense, we will have nothing but confusion. Conscience proper is simply the impulse of the soul that urges us to do right as we see the right. We do not deny that it also embodies the basic element in the soul that enables us to discover what is right; but our conviction as to what is right is dependent upon knowledge acquired through other faculties. When we speak of conscience in the loose and general ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... succeeding volume on "Lyric Declamation: Recitative, Song and Ballad Singing," will be discussed the practical application of these basic principles of Style to the vocal music of the German, French, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... clear evidences of the persistence of the forces, even though under strange guise. Read the platforms of the Greenback-Labor, the Granger, and the Populist parties, and you will find in those platforms, discredited and reprobated by the major parties of the time, the basic proposals of the Democratic party after its revolution under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, and of the Republican party after its revolution by Mr. Roosevelt. The Insurgent movement is so clearly related to the areas and elements that gave strength to this progressive assertion of old ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... was plain before her. Ten years ago she had made up her mind, as a woman seldom makes up her mind. She had seen facts, basic facts, naked in a glare of light. Those facts had not changed. But she had changed. She was ten years older. The horror of passing into the fifties had died out in the cold resignation of passing into the sixties. Any folly now would be ten times more foolish than a folly of ten years ago. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... reasoning goes to the ground. His basic facts are no facts, and his reasoning is absurd. All the essays on music and on drama and on the music-drama are as much an expression of himself as his music-dramas. I have in earlier chapters gone so far as even to labour the point ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... Rennick got a sounding at 2015 fathoms from bottom similar to yesterday, with small pieces of basic lava; these two soundings appear to show a great distribution of this volcanic rock by ice. The line was weighed by hand after the soundings. I read ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... wag suggested that he was trying to cultivate "the field of his face," but nothing could disturb the imperturbable gravity of his composition. Gravity, solid gravity, was one of the basic elements of his nature. When, however, he lighted his enthusiastic lamp, and his warm heart gushed forth in song or story—I think I hear him singing now, "A man's a man for a' that!"—he carried his ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... I earnestly hope that the Chinese Communist regime will not again, as in the case of Korea, defy the basic principle upon which world order depends, namely, that armed force should not be used to achieve territorial ambitions. Any such naked use of force would pose an issue far transcending the offshore ...
— The Communist Threat in the Taiwan Area • John Foster Dulles and Dwight D. Eisenhower

... "The basic framework and controlling inference of Northern sentiment is Puritanic, the old Roundhead rebel refuse of England, which has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees, the worst bigots on earth and the meanest tyrants when they have the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... To him occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if powerful blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal. This is the basic principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an economy in ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... Of course the telegraph was still far from an accomplished fact. Without the improved electro-magnets and the relay of Professor Henry, Morse had not yet even the basic ideas upon which a telegraph to operate over considerable distances could be constructed. But Morse was possessed of Yankee imagination and practical ability. He was possessed of a fair technical education for that day, and he eagerly ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers

... should never affirm anything offhand. One must try to reach the basic reason for every condition. And this basic reason might just be—as I have said—our superstitious faith in a power which we do not possess. We have grown so terribly modest in our demands; why is it? Might this not lie at the very root of our predicament? Our power ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun

... began to say in a lovely serious tone of voice, looking him square in the eyes and determined that as we were now on the subject of basic things, like infantile colic, I would have it out with him along all lines, "there is an awful shock coming to you when you ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... "As basic standards with reference to each cantonment, such commission shall use the main scales of wages, hours, and conditions in force on June 1, 1917, in the locality where such cantonment is situated. Consideration shall be given to special circumstances, if any arising after ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various

... and social security was impossible in a land so corrupted by the desperation of famines, so little able to spare the necessary taxes. The nation was too huge to be fed from outside, and so had been left by the FN to stew in its own misery until its people solved their basic problem. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye

... else they weren't applicable even on a basic level. Or something. I don't know. I don't ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse

... distinguish a band of mustangs from cattle, and range-riders from outlaws or Indians; in a word, when he had learned to know what it was that he saw, to trust his judgment, he would have acquired the basic feature of a rider's training. But he showed no gift for the lasso, that other essential requirement of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... The basic principle of life, in the Galenic physiology, is a spirit, anima or pneuma, drawn from the general world-soul in the act of respiration. It enters the body through the rough artery (τραχεια αρτηρια {tracheia artêria}, arteria aspera ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... legends be true, an instructor of that venerable sage, Hermes was, and is, the Great Central Sun of Occultism, whose rays have served to illumine the countless teachings which have been promulgated since his time. All the fundamental and basic teachings embedded in the esoteric teachings of every race may be traced back to Hermes. Even the most ancient teachings of India undoubtedly have their roots in ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... twenty-four rows of five, or 120 medallions, and adding those on the arch, you get a total of 154. Even this is not all; for on each medallion or panel its separate bas-relief is contained within a quatrefoil. None of their arcs are semi-circles, and none of their basic figures are squares, for each panel is slightly varied in size from its neighbours. The result is that intervals of various shapes are left at each of the four angles of every quatrefoil, and into ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... of Political Philosophy the word "Constitution," stands for the fundamental principles of government. It is the sum (1) of the general and basic principles of all political organization by which the form, competence, and limitations of governmental authorities are fixed and determined, and (2) of the general and basic principles of liberty, in accordance ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh

... cosmic current of that mood—you become in touch, so to speak, with all the other people who are under its dominion, and so it gains strength because unity is strength. If you can understand that as a basic principle, you can see that it is only a question of controlling yourself and directing your moods with those currents whose augmentation can bring you good. You must never be negative and drift. You can be drawn in any adverse way if ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... spirit of awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts, and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the traditions of freedom ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... Basic Principles Underlying All Socially Useful Changes.—A fundamental principle in democracy is the right and duty of every human being to develop a strong, noble and distinctive individuality. For such development it is necessary that a person be ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... with Egbert. He couldn't link up with the world's work, because the basic desire was absent from him. Nay, at the bottom of him he had an even stronger desire: to hold aloof. To hold aloof. To do nobody any damage. But to hold aloof. It was ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... been horse meat and the garnishments such green things as she had plucked at the roadside; but the flavour of the delectable broth cured us of any inclinations to make investigation as to the former stations in life of its basic constituents. I am satisfied that, chosen at random, almost any peasant housewife of France can take an old Palm Beach suit and a handful of potherbs and, mingling these together according to her own peculiar system, turn out a ragout fit for a king. Indeed, it would be ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb

... Success can be built only on a properly and carefully laid foundation. Those who desire to be Christians desire to be successful in the Christian life. Those who are called to work for God desire to be successful workers. Jesus said to Martha, "One thing is needful." There is generally one basic principle on which all else must be built. If this is overlooked or neglected, partial or complete failure is certain. Many attempts are failures because of being begun at the wrong place. In mathematics we must master the rudiments before we can compute the orbits of the ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor

... Mrs. Bagley changed James Holden's way of life far more than he'd expected. His basic idea had been to free himself from the hours of dishwashing, bedmaking, dusting, cleaning and straightening and from the irking chore of planning his meals far enough ahead to obtain sustenance either through mail or carried note. He ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... mill is pertinent to the development of linkages "in great," being the first of a new class of machine tools that over the next 50 or 60 years came to include nearly all of the basic types of heavy chip-removing tools that are in use today. The development of tools was accelerated by the inherent accuracy required of the linkages that were originated by Watt. Once it had been demonstrated that a large and complex machine, ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... be useful on future voyages. From the early days, when he taught himself navigation amidst the swamps of his native Lincolnshire, until his last illness laid him low, he was ever an eager student. Intelligent curiosity and a desire to know the best that the best minds could teach were a basic part of his character. We find him counselling Ann Chappell, at about the time when he became engaged to her:* (* Flinders' Papers.) "Learn music, learn the French language, enlarge the subjects of thy pencil, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... obviously very useful for every adult to be able to read, write and reckon. Who, then, can criticize a Government because it insists that all children be taught these basic skills? But for the same reason and on the same principle, provision could be made for swimming-schools in every village and town on the sea-coast, or on the streams and rivers; every boy should ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... With a basic knowledge to start from, any reasonably clever man can digest an enormous amount of information about any given industry in a very brief time. Jack MacRae spent three weeks in Vancouver as a one-man commission, self-appointed, to ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... stated the case. There is no basic mutuality between the farm and the labour union. The farmer is as much a capitalist as he is ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... proofs. In the analysis of the blood plasma, we find chlorides of sodium, potassium and ammonium, carbonates of potassa, soda, lime and magnesia, phosphates of lime, magnesia, potassa, and probably iron; also basic phosphates and neutral phosphates of soda, and sulphates of potassa and soda. Now in the analysis of those tissues composed principally of inorganic substances or compounds, it will be seen that these same salts are found in ...
— Report on Surgery to the Santa Clara County Medical Society • Joseph Bradford Cox

... that they matured young? There, all about them, from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple. Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through finger-tips, all through those early years when eyes ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... nature of the forces they were using, and of the best methods of employing the same. And such knowledge could not be imparted without the fundamental truths of nature being understood by them, which understanding was possible only to those who had grasped the great Basic Truths of ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... were; but you haven't any head for business; aren't you just that much nearer the time when not a soul here will trust you? That's just like you, to plunge ahead and use up your credit on gimcracks!" Mahaffy prided himself on his acquaintance with the basic principles ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... slightly bitter. He saw that the girl's mind was merely skipping over the surface of the commercial sea upon which her father sailed a pirate craft; she had not plunged into the depths where she might have found the basic principles of all business—fairness; she had taken no account of the human impulse that, in just men, impels them to grant to their fellows ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... There are three basic weaknesses in the American system of government as we know it to-day. There are three insidious evils that are creeping like a blood-poison through the body politic, threatening the very life of the Republic. They ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And each act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the question. And each scene or other minor division must do the same according to its scale. Everything basic that applies to the technique of the novel applies equally to the technique of ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... exist in combination as complex fusible silicates. There are many minerals which with but little soda form a glass, but with more yield a lumpy scoriacious mass. There are many minerals, too, which are already basic (for example, calcite), and which, when present, demand either a less basic or an acid flux according to the proportions in which they exist. For purposes of this kind borax, or glass, or clay with more ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... excepting the amendments which ended slavery as the result of the Civil War, only the last three, passed in recent years partly through the relaxing influence of the world war, mark a serious departure from the basic principles ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... said, "you have displayed a complete lack of understanding of Corps discipline, the respect due a senior agent, even the basic courtesies. Your aggravated displays of temper, ill-timed outbursts of violence and almost incredible arrogance in the assumption of authority make your further retention as an officer-agent of ...
— The Yillian Way • John Keith Laumer

... tendency, always more or less marked in highly refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary basic qualities, and to parade and make much of verbal and technical acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter scorn of the "sensual caterwauling of the literary classes," for this is not the only country in which books are produced that are a mere skin of elegant words blown up ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... metal plate surmounted by a hoop of thin wire over which was stretched a web of threads glistening in the sun. Holding that hoop on a level with his mouth, the alien clicked his mandibles, and those sounds became barely distinguishable basic galactic words. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... forever breaking down and building up, but never destroying themselves. A match may be burned, but the atoms are still unchanged, having resolved themselves into smoke, carbon dioxide, ashes, and certain basic elements. It was clear to the professor that he could never accomplish his purpose if he were to employ one system of atomic structure, such as embalming fluid or other concoction, to preserve another system of atomic ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones

... more about Marsh, and the girl had given him some basic facts which would enable him to enlarge his fund of information. The owner, or the real estate agent who managed the building, seemed to be the logical starting point for securing this information. To find out the names of these people must be his ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne

... - on 6 November 1996, Sultan QABOOS issued a royal decree promulgating a basic law considered by the government to be a constitution which, among other things, clarifies the royal succession, provides for a prime minister, bars ministers from holding interests in companies doing business with the government, establishes a bicameral legislature, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... occurred to me than the basic conception underlying all these rows of twigs and bugs suddenly flashed into clear meaning before me. The simplicity of it ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... estimates, the long-term development of the economy after decades of war remains a daunting challenge. The population lacks education and productive skills, particularly in the poverty-ridden countryside, which suffers from an almost total lack of basic infrastructure. Fear of renewed political instability and corruption within the government discourage foreign investment and delay foreign aid. The government is addressing these issues with assistance from bilateral ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... moral challenge raised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are bewildered, others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are even seeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning their actual relations to the basic organization of society. ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... turned schoolmaster, explaining that the Huron and Iroquois nations came of the same stock, but that most of the western tribes were Algonquin in blood, and that, though they had tribal differences in speech, Algonquin was the basic language, as Latin is the root of all our tongues at home. I took the damp bark, and wrote some phrases of Algonquin, showing her the syntax as well as I had been able to reduce it to rule myself. She had a quick ear and the power ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... has modified the De la Rue cell by substituting a solution of caustic potash for the ammonium chloride, and his battery has been used for "star" lights, that is to say, the tiny electric lamps of the ballet. The Schanschieff battery, consisting of zinc and carbon plates in a solution of basic sulphate of mercury, is suitable for reading, mining, ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... productivity. The government was forced to introduce two austerity packages later in the spring which cut government spending by 2.5% of GDP. Growth dropped to 0.3% in 1997, -2.3% in 1998, and -0.5% in 1999. The basic transition problem continues to be too much direct and indirect government influence on the privatized economy. The government established a restructuring agency in 1999 and launched a revitalization program - to spur the sale of firms to foreign companies. Key priorities ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... necessarily follows that no return is due, or can be justly paid, for the use of borrowed money. Work is the one title of all acquisition, and all acquisition should be in exact proportion to the amount of work done. This is the basic principle, and it is the principle of the Divine Law: In sudore frontis tuae comedes panem tuum. Once more, therefore, and once more in an unpromising and intractable material, we find the Church ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... chain, driving savagely to the end of it. Another would grind his teeth against the cold steel till his jaws dripped blood, while a third would amputate the mangled foot. But whatever the method, the basic fact was the same,—no coyote waited submissively for his fate but waged a ceaseless, desperate fight ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... of nearly five million men in France and England to-day, has so little typhoid that it is practically a negligible quantity, and this holds with other communicable diseases. There must be some basic reason for this freedom from contagious diseases, for we know that such freedom does not come ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... him last night, "This is our secret." It could not be secret when his father spoke like that. . . . And then, with a flare of illumination he perceived how intensely his father disliked him. Nothing but sheer basic antipathy could have been responsible for that miserable retort, "Am I to bind up your broken heart?" Anger, no doubt, was the immediate cause, but so utterly ungenerous a rejoinder to Michael's announcement could not ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... done enough to demonstrate the correctness of my details. The defects," he added, with a look at the ruined brick-work, "are merely basic ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... rocks observed, by far the greater number are foliated basic eruptives,—schists and gneisses. There are, however, some that are of undoubted ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... machinery and equipment, fuels and minerals, chemicals, textile and products, basic ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... of hand that launched this cult upon the world as the last days came. Beyond all the physical manifestations, the religious idea in Spiritualism has leavened the religious thought of millions. No one can deny that the basic idea is the one that the serpent promulgated in Eden, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer

... baleful artificial standards so long tolerated must be abolished, that the fetish of the nineteenth century civilization must be overthrown, and that it is all-important that people be thoroughly acquainted with the far-reaching and basic significance of this problem, through courageous and persistent agitation and education, in order that manhood and womanhood be brought up to the ethical plane which marks enduring civilization. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... was agreed that the question of appointing an International Committee, consisting of two members from each of the five Great Powers, to whom would be referred President Wilson's draft, with certain basic principles to guide them, should be considered at the ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt

... too, your English Nelson and Lady Hamilton! Not one of these was a man's ideal of what a wife and mother ought to be. So no doubt the Greeks were right in that principle, as they were right in all basic principles of art and balance. And now we mix the whole thing up, my Paul—domesticity and learning—nerves and art, and feverish cravings for the impossible new—so we get a conglomeration of false proportions, and ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn

... pioneer of vast territories for commerce, molder of history through his long feud with the powerful Eurasian scientist, Ku Sui—the adventurer would doubtless have passed into oblivion like other long-forgotten spacemen. We have Sewell's industry to thank for our basic knowledge of Carse. His "Space-Frontiers of the Last Century" is a thorough work and the accepted standard, but even it had of necessity to be compressed, and many meaty episodes of the Hawk's life go almost unmentioned. For instance, Sewell gives a rough synopsis of ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore

... is called upon to study the geologic features of mineral deposits, their occurrence, structure, and origin. The basic information thus acquired is useful in estimating reserves and life of mineral deposits. This leads naturally to considerations of valuation. Because valuation plays such a large part in any tax program, the geologist is being used by tax boards ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... common experiment in basic science. Borazon fiber works the same way. Because it is so fine and has such tremendous tensile strength, it is possible to apply a pressure of hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch over a very small area. Under pressures like that, ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Dr. Watson's umbrella—my wants are simple. And Ames, the faithful Ames, no doubt he will stretch a point for me. All my lines of thought lead me back invariably to the one basic question—why should an athletic man develop his frame upon so unnatural an instrument ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... The basic theory of the present count is to equalize, as nearly as possible, the value of the five declarations, in order to produce the maximum amount of competition in bidding. This has proved most popular with the mass of players, and has been universally ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work

... primarily a medical mission, and nothing that may have been stated in this book with reference to other branches of the work is meant in any way to detract from what to us as doctors is the basic reason for our being here, though we mean ours to be prophylactic as well as ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... valuable, besides showing up every little variety in the values used for your modelling; and thus enabling you to model with the least expenditure of tones. Whatever richness of variation you may ultimately desire to add to your values, see to it that in planning your picture you get a good basic structure of simply designed, and as far ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... instincts of man have asserted themselves more or less under all conditions of society, but under certain conditions, when there was an accumulation of wealth, and especially with the institution of slavery, they had greater opportunity to assert themselves than elsewhere. Thus the basic cause of polygyny is not economic, but psychological; and given certain moral and economic conditions of society, these polygynous tendencies assert themselves. Monogamy, on the other hand, has in no sense been determined by economic conditions but is fundamentally ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... combinations, through the effect of a spontaneity whose nature we have attempted to describe. It always tends to realize itself in degrees that vary from mere momentary belief to complete objectivity. Throughout its multiple manifestations, it remains identical with itself in its basic nature, in its constitutive elements. The diversity of its deeds depends on the end desired, the conditions required for its attainment, materials employed which, as we have seen, under the collective name "representations" are very unlike one another, not only as regards ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... the diagrams fool you. The basic idea is very simple. We absorb all sonar impulses that hit the ship and transmit them out the opposite side of the hull, instead of letting a ping bounce back and show up on the sonarscope of any hostile sub on the lookout ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton

... social ideals are personal. We seek a better world for the sake of a higher race. The emphasis on child-welfare has a social rather than a sentimental basis. The family is our great chance to determine childhood and so to make the future. The child of today is basic to the social welfare of tomorrow. He is our chance to pay to tomorrow all that we owe to yesterday. The family as the child's life-school is thus central to every social ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... being set aside as a basic principle, the reason invoked by the dramatist is positive reason, the reason of science, of justice, of rational logic. In verbose monologues, he combats the superstitions and fanaticism of the orthodox. The whole force of the Maskil's hatred ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... examples of such a landscape; from its low swelling summits rise at intervals the powerful master cones of Shasta, Rainier, Adams, Hood, Baker, and others. Fujiyama, the celebrated mountain of Japan, may be cited as a familiar example of the basic mountain form, the single-cone volcanic peak. Vesuvius is a familiar example of simple complication, the double-cone volcano, while Mauna Loa in Hawaii, including Kilauea of the pit of fire, a neighbor volcano ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... back to the serene altitude of clean conscience, and I will undertake to enlighten you upon the secret of every great historical event, tragic or otherwise. If you will search history carefully, you will note that the basic cause of all great events, such as revolutions, civil strifes, political assassinations, foreign wars, and race oppressions, lay not in men's honor so much as in some one man's dishonor. A man, having committed a dishonorable act, may reestablish himself in the eyes of his fellow-beings, ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath

... following spring when the present member was going to retire, and he was vehement in his views and clear as to the course he meant to take. He was so eloquent in his discourse and so full of that divine spark of enthusiasm, that he was always listened to, no matter how unpalatably Tory the basic principles of his utterances were. He never posed as anything but an aristocrat, and while he whimsically admitted that in the present day to be one was an enormous disadvantage for a man who wished to get on, he endeavored to palliate the misfortune by lucid explanation of what the duties ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... respect for the tangible fact of money—a contempt for the mere value of the dollar and a respect for the ability to take stands of which that mystic figure was the symbol. Sarah's hard common sense, overlaid as it was by an embroidery of sentiments and emotions, still constituted the basic quality in his character, and Sarah would have been the last woman in the world to think lightly of renouncing—or of inviting another to renounce—an income of ten thousand dollars a year. He might dream ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... and to gossip of neighborhood affairs. In Virginia it was otherwise. In Virginia families lived on separate farms and each farm was of necessity a community within itself. Life was geared to the basic fact that tobacco was the money crop, and also was the real source of the financial strength and stability of the colony. Each family required a farm of sufficient acreage to raise tobacco as well as food-stuff and cattle; and throughout ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon

... in terms of muscular movement," and this expresses the most important single fact in the mature mentality. That the mind is largely constituted of memories of muscular movements is basic ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... liberated, as appears in the above equation, together with the formation of an acid salt, a very minute quantity of free fatty acid remaining in solution. Rotondi (Journ. Soc. Chem. Ind., 1885, 601), on the other hand, considered that a neutral soap, on being dissolved in water, was resolved into a basic and an acid salt, the former readily soluble in both hot and cold water, the latter insoluble in cold water, and only slightly soluble in hot water. He appears, however, to have been misled by the ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... a single example that works. If you make your claims broader than that one example, the Examiner will reject you for lack of disclosure. This is basic in patent law. Ex parte Cameron, Rule 71, and 35 U.S.C. 112 will ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness

... a xixxix tree was selected, no doubt whatever can remain as to the breeze's basic motivation. Articles of a valuable nature just aren't left beneath xixxix trees. Everybody knows that squixes live in xixxix trees and everybody knows that squixes are collectors. They collect all sorts of things, buttons and pins and twigs and pebbles—anything at all, in fact, that isn't too big ...
— Collector's Item • Robert F. Young

... was a constitutional question only so long as it did not cross that other more universal "right," the paramount "charter of liberty," by which, in his view, all other rights were conditioned. He would impose on all mankind, as their basic moral obligation, the duty to sacrifice all personal likes, personal ambitions, when these in their permanent tendencies ran contrary to the tendency which he rated as paramount. Such had always been, and was always to continue, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... and they and all of us are impaled on those horns as certainly as the sausages I ate for breakfast this morning had been impaled on the cook's toasting-fork—it is for this reason, I say, that Mr. Shaw and his friends seem to me to miss the basic principle that lies at the root of all things human and divine. By the way, not all things that are divine are human. But all things that are human are divine. But ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... probably both concrete and abstract meanings; word-conventions; and grammatical particles. It is at least probable that there are also silent determinatives and not unlikely that there is also a pure phonetic or alphabetic element. That the latter element is not the basic one may I think be now regarded ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... likewise to the teaching method or purpose which focalizes the teachers' attention and energy chiefly on the subject. Certain basic assumptions, now pretty much discredited, have led to the avowed teaching of the subject for its own sake, and often without much regard to any definite social utility served by it. This charge seems to find an instance in the handling of the subject of ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien

... is leading us all back to the basic commonplaces of thinking. Is life under any and all conditions worth the having? Our reason says not. It tells us that the diseased and the weak-minded should not be permitted to breed, that an anaemic ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... to see it, and deeply impressed. To us, at first, these women, unavoidably ignorant of what to us was the basic commonplace of knowledge, had seemed on the plane of children, or of savages. What we had been forced to admit, with growing acquaintance, was that they were ignorant as Plato and Aristotle were, but with ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

... anybody's fool, whatever the division thought, and he was right down to the basic root of things from the start. Coupled with the stunted growth that nature in a miserly mood had doled out to him, none knew better than himself that the name of "Toddles," keeping that nature stuff patently before everybody's eyes, damned him ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... "Friends?" Shann used the basic galactic speech devised by Survey and the Free Traders, semantics which depended upon the proper inflection of voice and tone to project meaning when the words ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... English Law. By W.M. GELDART, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. A simple statement of the basic principles of the English legal system on which that of the United States ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake and Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to point out, parallelism is the basic structural technique. Macpherson incorporated two principal forms of parallelism in his poems: repetition, a pattern in which the second line nearly restates the sense of the first, and completion ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson

... involved then, two basic points of opposition between the two governments. First America contested the British theory of "once a citizen always a citizen[5]"; second, America denied any right whatever to a foreign naval vessel in time of peace to stop ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... saw," replied the major, "are as much of a prison as we have. Each hut holds one prisoner. He has all the necessary furniture, in addition to audioceivers and story spools which he can change once a week. He also has basic garden equipment. All prisoners grow everything they eat. Each man is dependent on himself and is restricted to the hut and the area around it. If he comes within two miles of the tower, the guards will pick him up on radar and order ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell

... gradually fulfilling itself, completing itself. At adolescence, the first circuit of family love should be completed, dynamically finished. And then, it falls into quiescence. After puberty, family love should fall quiescent in a child. The love never breaks. It continues static and basic, the basis of the emotional psyche, the foundation of the self. It is like the moon when the moon at last subsides into her eternal orbit, round the earth. She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she forgets, and becomes unaware. She only knits her brows over the earth's ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence



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