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Locomotion   Listen
noun
Locomotion  n.  
1.
The act of moving from place to place. " Animal locomotion."
2.
The power of moving from place to place, characteristic of the higher animals and some of the lower forms of plant life.
3.
The name of a song and a dance, briefly popular in the 1960's; as, do the locomotion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Locomotion" Quotes from Famous Books



... position in the comity of nations. The representative of the Isle of Man, if he travelled in the best style, would stand before the representative of His Majesty the King if his means of transit were that of a coolie. It is doubtless very stupid, but it is true. Your means of locomotion fixes your place in the estimation of the East, because it is visible to them, while your credentials ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... resting stations, and go on in companies. They always go at a fast swing— though they generally limp too—and there is invariably one of the company who has much ado to keep up with the rest. They generally talk about horses, and any other means of locomotion than walking: or, one of the company relates some recent experiences of the road- -which are always disputes and difficulties. As for example. 'So as I'm a standing at the pump in the market, blest if there don't come up a Beadle, and he ses, "Mustn't stand ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... of the most complex nature, and the engineers who have studied it have not been able to come to an agreement except as regards a small number of points. It may even be said that unanimity exists upon but a single point, and that is that the means of locomotion in Paris do not answer the requirements of the public, and that there is an urgent necessity for new ones. The capital question, that of knowing whether the railway to be built shall be beneath or above ground, is not yet settled; for, up to the present, no project has been prescribed in one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... it is necessary first to state in what particulars he has evolved, what are the conditions which distinguish him from the lower animals. Four marked distinctions may be named: his erect attitude, with the freeing of the fore limbs from use as agents in locomotion; his employment of natural objects, instead of his bodily organs, as tools and weapons; his development of vocal language; and his great mental superiority, with the general use of the mind in his dealings ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... steps, for he was not given to rapid locomotion, his gold-headed cane heavily striking the ground as he went. He had not spoken since we left the house, and I felt that I was passing from the position of a guest to that of a junior clerk. Still, not being overwhelmed ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... a lower to a higher condition, we cannot now realise the quick change which would pass over the material framework of the patriarch, but that it would be etherialised so as to be "a heavenly body" marvellously endowed with new powers of sense, of insight and locomotion, fit to be the instrument of a soul fully redeemed from the consequences of sin, we cannot doubt; and for thousands of generations has that soul sunned itself in the brightest fellowships and employments of the ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... wonderful city; to see the beautiful equipages, fine saddle-horses and riders and the skill with which the bicycles were so rapidly engineered through the crowded streets. The general use of bicycles and tricycles all over England, even for long journeys, is fast becoming the favorite mode of locomotion both ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... island disappeared from view, and he had barely crossed the center of the stream, he begun to think that this species of locomotion was rather tardy, and he partially came to the sitting position and ventured to take his paddle in hand. A discharge from the shore warned him of the danger he ran, and he was reluctantly forced to drop his head again and resort to his ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis

... said long ago, "The mind is the workshop in which all visible life is formed." Our mental operations are silently, invisibly, carried on, and yet we see the effect of these silent plans and ideas in our noisy methods of locomotion; our architecture; our commerce—in all the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... was a four-wheeled dogcart with a pair of the famous Torywood blue roans. It was an agreeable variation in modern locomotion to be met at a station with high-class horseflesh instead of the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that one wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust. After a quick spin of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedge-girt ...
— When William Came • Saki

... the realm of sound at all corresponding to the actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly due to the sense of locomotion, the rhythm; so that sound, to become music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay, it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned Stumpf, that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound incline ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... day of his death. In person he was very large and fat—not unlike a cockle in shape: so round were his proportions, and so unwieldy, that it appeared much easier to roll him along from one place to another, than that he should walk. Indeed, locomotion was not to his taste: he seldom went much farther than round the small patch of garden which was in front of his house, and in which he had some pinks and carnations and chrysanthemums, of which he was not a little proud. His head was quite bald, smooth, and shining white; his face partook of ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... of facts that have been scouted in this way, corresponds pretty exactly to the list of human discoveries, down to the recent improvements in street lighting and steam locomotion. The knowledge of the best of us is but a little light which shines in a great deal of darkness. We are all of us more ignorant than wise. The proportion of knowledge yet lying beyond the confines of our explorations, is as a continent against a cabbage garden. Yet many thousands are contented ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... I dismissed the man who had driven the wagon down, and jogged on by ourselves. I sat on a board in the back of the covered cart, only too glad for any sort of locomotion which was not ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich

... a very singular personage altogether. However, he has done me more than one service before now, and though I do not comprehend his method of arriving at conclusions, still less his mode of locomotion, I am always glad of ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... class, was in some manner a necessary preparation for its higher development; but in fact the embryo, during its growth, may become less, as well as more, complicated{465}. Thus certain female Epizoic Crustaceans in their mature state have neither eyes nor any organs of locomotion; they consist of a mere sack, with a simple apparatus for digestion and procreation; and when once attached to the body of the fish, on which they prey, they never move again during their whole lives: in their embryonic condition, on the other hand, they are furnished with eyes, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... portal of a club in Piccadilly. It was after ten by the clocks, and nearly, but not quite, dark. A warm, rather heavy, evening shower had ceased. This was the beginning of the great macintosh epoch, by-product of the war, when the paucity of the means of vehicular locomotion had rendered macintoshes permissible, even for women with pretensions to smartness; and at intervals stylish girls on their way home from unaccustomed overtime, passed the doors in transparent macintoshes ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... inside, using his crutch once more to assist his locomotion. In his other hand he gripped a tremendous horse pistol, the very size of which must have sent a shiver ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... Malacostraca [Crabs, Lobsters, Shrimps, etc.] may perhaps present a point of union. Like many Zoeae, the Insecta possess three pairs of limbs serving for the reception of nourishment, and three pairs serving for locomotion; like the Zoeae they have an abdomen without appendages; as in all Zoeae the mandibles in Insecta are destitute of palpi. Certainly but little in common, compared with the much which distinguishes these two animal forms. Nevertheless, the supposition ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... on the other side, just a few feet beyond the iron roads, a horse-car track and a turnpike offer additional facilities for locomotion. Birds perch on the numerous telegraph wires amid wrecks of kites and dingy pennons—once kite-tails—nothing hurts them; and below the children of Twinrip appear just as free and safe, and seem to have as much delight in mere ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.

... to my notions, the best of all sorts of locomotion. Steam at sea makes you sick, and the voyage is generally over before you have gained your sea legs and your land appetite. In mail or stage you have no sickness and see the country, but you are squeezed sideways by helpless corpulence, and in front cooped into uneasiness by two pairs of ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... way daintily and gave a cry of delight when after pushing a short distance into the thicket, she found an old rail fence apparently leading off in the direction she wished to go. She climbed it promptly and worked slowly along its zig zag course—a means of locomotion that was comfortingly safe, if somewhat slow. The pups complained over this desertion for they had to worm through the tangle ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie

... population in Florence. I was foolish enough to go. All were obliged to be dressed in character or in full ball-costume: no dominoes allowed. The Casino, I was told, is the largest club-house in the world; and salon after salon of that immense building was so crowded that locomotion was nearly impossible. The floral decorations were magnificent, the music was excellent, and some of the ten thousand people present tried to dance, but the sets formed were soon squeezed into a ball. Then they gave up in despair, while the men swore under their breath, and the women repaired to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... desperate eagerness with which they were embraced, the Fogie Club will form a remarkable contrast. But it has recommendations of its own, which may compensate for others of which it cannot boast. It does not seek to promote rapid locomotion; but it presents a terminus of quiet and creditable rest. It does not promise dividends; but it does not contemplate calls. The stock is not expected to rise; but neither is it likely to fall. A solvent and sagacious public will judge on which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various

... travelling either way. It then becomes a work of charity for the more opulent of the faithful to speed them on the journey. But that they depend on such means of travelling is reason sufficient to account for long in their line of locomotion, and for their congregating here in considerable numbers. Of all places likely to maintain the constant infection of plague, this must be one of the first: for notoriously among no people is the disease so rife ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... recapture the lost trenches. I telephoned to my good friend, Colonel Brutenell, the C.O. of the Motor Machine-Gun Brigade, and asked him to send me a side-car to take me forward. He had always in the past shown me much kindness in supplying me with means of locomotion. Colonel Brutenell was an old country Frenchman with the most courteous manners. When I first discovered that he was the possessor of side-cars, I used to obtain them by going over to him and saying, "Colonel, if you will give me a side-car ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... and appearance. A second and more attentive observation, however, convinced Edward that this man's life had not been spent upon fresh water; and, had any stronger evidence than the nameless marks which the ocean impresses upon its sons been necessary, it would have been found in his mode of locomotion. While Edward was observing him, he beat slowly up to one of Mr. Langton's servants who was standing near the door of the inn. He seemed to question the man with affected carelessness; but his countenance was dark and perplexed when he turned ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... going to the meetings varied according to the distance to be traversed. In an immense majority of cases the means of locomotion are not even mentioned, presumably therefore the witches went on foot, as would naturally be the case in going to the local meeting or Esbat, which was attended only by those who lived near. There are, however, a few instances where it was thought worth while ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law's landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like one ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... thing of commonest course, that, in this age of inveterate locomotion, your present humble friend, now talking in this candid fashion with your readership, has been every where, seen every thing, and done his touristic devoirs like every body else about him: also, as a like circumstance of etymological triviality, that he has severally, and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... book are depicted an old State Coach, the Mail Coach, the primitive Railway Train, and a Railway Engine of the latest pattern, all indicative of progress in locomotion. To complete the series, and for the purpose of historical record, subjoined is a picture of the first Motor vehicle used (1904-1905) in Bristol for the rapid transport of His Majesty's Mails by road. No doubt, in process of time, this handy ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs

... had reached that period of drunkenness, and it took a vast quantity of stout liquor to bring him up to it, where his voice began to grow hoarse, his ready tongue to trip, his brain to be most completely muddled, and his legs to be most unreliable instruments of locomotion. The men about the table nodded and winked to each other, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... of muscular motion,—the languid body obeyed not the service of the imbecile will. Some could walk and use their limbs and hands in simple motions; others could make only make slight use of their muscles; and two were without any power of locomotion. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... has become more conspicuous since Wordsworth's day. The Lake country is now both engirdled and intersected with railways. The point to which even the poorest of genuine lovers of the mountains could desire that his facilities of cheap locomotion should be carried has been not only reached but far overpassed. If he is not content to dismount from his railway carriage at Coniston, or Seascale, or Bowness,—at Penrith, or Troutbeek, or Keswick,—and to move at eight miles ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... Hesperoherpeton lived and sought food in the weedy shallows at the margin of a pond or lagoon, and that for much of the time its head was partly out of water (Fig. 12). The animal could either steady itself or crawl around by means of the paddlelike limbs, but these probably could not be used in effective locomotion on land. Like the Ichthyostegids, it probably swam by means ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton

... rode to Newmarket yesterday, which contains five words, may be made to express five different statements by putting the stress upon each of the words in turn. By putting the stress on you the person addressed is marked out as distinct from certain others, by putting it upon rode other means of locomotion to Newmarket are excluded, and so on. With the same order of words five interrogative sentences may also be expressed, and a third series of exclamatory sentences expressing anger, incredulity, &c., may be obtained from the same words. It is to be noticed that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... He had just come from a feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... mournfully on its back waving its legs in the air like a reversed Battle, had now been jolted right side upper-most, and was using those legs, not as proofs of the emptiness of the world, but as a means of locomotion. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... interesting to be inserted here; and they clearly shew that, notwithstanding Aubrey's credulity and love of theory, he was fully sensible of the beneficial results to be expected from increased facilities of conveyance and locomotion. On this point indeed he and his friends, Mr. Mathew and Mr. Collins, were more than a century in advance of their contemporaries, for it was not till after the year 1783 that Wiltshire began to profit by ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... meals they send in a trifle of 1,500 dishes. [458] Diamonds and amethysts are plentiful as blackberries. If you are a poet, and you make good verses, it is likely enough that some queen will stuff your mouth with balass rubies. How poorly our modern means of locomotion compare with those of the Nights. If you take a jinni or a swan-maiden you can go from Cairo to Bokhara in less time than our best expresses could cover a mile. The recent battles between the Russians and the Japanese are mere skirmishes compared with the fight described in "The City ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... before I had travelled to —— in a stupendous machine, of which now I recollect only that it seemed to take years out of my little life in arriving at its destination, and that, on its broad, substantial rear, it bore the effigy of "an ancient Briton." Locomotion then, like me, was in a state of infancy. On the occasion of my second visit to the city, I had hardly time to wonder at the velocity with which I was borne along. Distance was annihilated. The two hundred miles over which the ancient Briton had wearisomely laboured, were reduced to twenty, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... tales convey in a realistic way the wonderful advances in land and sea locomotion. Stories like these are impressed upon the memory and their reading ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton

... which somehow and at some time he should be able to dress up and magnify to the admiration of a select circle at the Rainbow. When a young gentleman like Dunsey is reduced to so exceptional a mode of locomotion as walking, a whip in his hand is a desirable corrective to a too bewildering dreamy sense of unwontedness in his position; and Dunstan, as he went along through the gathering mist, was always rapping his whip somewhere. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... more active ship than the Wright. In ordinary seas, walking was a matter of difficulty, and when the wind freshened to a gale locomotion ceased to be a pastime. Frequently I wedged myself into my berth with books and cigar boxes. On the first day out, my dog (for I traveled with a dog) was utterly bewildered, and evidently thought himself where he did not belong. After falling a dozen times upon his ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... respects. Each of them performs a special task which the others do not, and each differentiated organ does its part to make the whole creature an efficient mechanism. The leg of the frog is an organ of locomotion, the heart is a device for pumping blood, the stomach accomplishes digestion, while the brain and nerves keep the parts working in harmony and also provide for the proper relation of the whole creature to its environment. So rigidly are these organs specialized in structure ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... proof of this statement he will find ample evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on Industrial Biography, where facts and dates are adduced to show that steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised roads, coal gas, photography, anaesthesia, and even telegraphy are inventions which, so far as concerns the germ idea on which their success has been based, are of very much older origin ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... bright eyes peering at us from among the boughs. The slightest movement or noise made by us would send them scampering off along the branches, or rather swinging themselves by hands and tails from bough to bough, or from creeper to creeper, that being their favourite mode of locomotion. They were clean, nice, respectable-looking little fellows, quite unlike monkeys cooped up in menageries, or even in the Zoological Gardens, and seemed to lead very happy and joyous lives. Gerard declared that if he was not ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... my arrival, however, he informed me by letter of his resolve to stay in Paris. He had failed to find an ass of the true vagabond character. The ideal ass he sought should be a companion as well as a means of locomotion. He would not take an urban donkey into the country against its will. To force any creature, man, woman, or ass, out of the groove of its temperament were a crime of which he could not be guilty. Then, again, Narcisse did not enter into the spirit of the pilgrimage. He laid his head ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... are used as saddle animals, and it is said that they perform good service in this way. This will probably be regarded by our people as a very undignified and singular method of locomotion, but, in the absence of any other means of transportation upon a long journey, a saddle-ox might ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... our Indian tribes descended, some have gone into their religion, their morals, their manners, customs, habits, and physical forms. By such helps it may be learnedly proved, that our trees and plants of every kind are descended from those of Europe; because, like them, they have no locomotion, they draw nourishment from the earth, they clothe themselves with leaves in spring, of which they divest themselves in autumn for the sleep of winter, he. Our animals too must be descended from those of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... that "mother has been spending half-crowns and five shillings almost every day this last week in cab fares." But the remark was not made grudgingly. Winnie respected her mother's infirmities. She was only a little surprised at this sudden mania for locomotion. Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently magnificent in his way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside as interfering with his meditations. These were frequent, deep, and prolonged; they bore upon a matter more important than five shillings. Distinctly ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... too, at the amount of locomotion which I contrived to combine with all this scribbling. I must have gone about, I think, like a tax-gatherer, with an inkstand slung to my button-hole! And in truth I was industrious; for I find myself in full swing ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... seed of my story, a pale boy of thirteen is the germ of the cart. First, though he will be of little use to us afterwards, comes a great strong boy of sixteen, who considerably despises this mode of locomotion, believing himself quite capable of driving his mother in the gig, whereas he is only destined to occupy her place in the evening, and return with his father. Then comes the said germ, a boy whom repeated attacks of illness have blanched, and ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... by railroads; which again, considering how much they have already exceeded the maximum of possibility, as laid down by all engineers during the progress of the Manchester and Liverpool line, may soon give way to new modes of locomotion still more astonishing to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... consequence I get myself reported. Sister Allworthy has reported me three times, bless her! Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, and now she threatens to have me up before the matron. That dear soul has difficulties of locomotion, being buried under the Pelion on Ossa of a mountain of fat. She inhabits a cave of Adullam on the edge of the Inferno—i. e., the 'theatre'—below stairs, and has a small dog with a bad heart and broken wind always ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... please me exceedingly) they have not muscle to "hit from the shoulder" with force sufficient to make them formidable antagonists; and I am aware that they lack something in the length of limb requisite for the rapid locomotion of the ball-ground; but they have never had a chance. See what the washerwomen have done for themselves. They seem to be a separate race of beings, for they all have large arms, and shoulders that would do honor to ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... Scandinavia is familiar with the kariol, the means of locomotion so dear to the hearts of her people. Two long shafts, between which trots a horse wearing a square wooden collar, painted yellow and striped with black, and guided with a simple rope passed, not through his mouth, but around his nose, two large, slender wheels, whose springless ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne

... afterwards surmounted the difficulty at a cost of L40,000, though the work was commenced when engineering science was less understood than now. Let us also listen to the Quarterly, "Steam as applied to locomotion by sea and land is the great wonder-worker of the age. For many years we have been so startled by such a succession of apparent miracles, we have so often seen results which surpassed and falsified all the deductions of sober calculations, ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth

... of the atmospheric railroad, and it is, perhaps, worthy of note as a curious fact that such a means of locomotion should have occurred to Coleridge so ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... had been only a machine of locomotion, to carry him from place to place, to beat and spur and goad mercilessly in flight; now this giant black, with his splendid head, was a companion, a friend, a brother, a loved thing, guarded jealously, fed and trained ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... manner of creatures are these which form these hard skeletons? I dare say that in these days of keeping aquaria, of locomotion to the sea-side, most of those whom I am addressing may have seen one of those creatures which used to be known as the "sea anemone," receiving that name on account of its general resemblance, in a rough sort of way, to the flower ...
— Coral and Coral Reefs • Thomas H. Huxley

... that resistance would be in vain, signified his readiness to follow them, whereupon he was led by two of their number to the cavern above alluded to, whilst the remaining pirates bestowed their attention upon poor Patrick O'Leary, whom, (as he had not yet recovered his powers of locomotion,) they lifted upon their shoulders and bore him away after his master, much in the same manner as they would have carried a ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker

... and even then he stands but a poor chance, unless assistance is at hand. I have never seen anyone who could run at full speed in rough ground without falling, if pursued. Large stones, tufts of rank grass, holes, fallen boughs, gullies, are all impediments to rapid locomotion when the pursued is forced to be constantly looking back to watch the progress of his foe, and to be the judge of ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... led the way in conducting the first train of passengers from Liverpool to Manchester. There were present on that occasion thousands of spectators, many of whom had come from distant parts of the kingdom to witness this greatest of all events in the history of railway locomotion. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... generally easy in dorsal dislocations, but may be difficult when the bones are displaced laterally. This may be due to fragments of bone or soft parts getting between the bones, and may necessitate operative interference. In old-standing dislocations, operation is to be advised only when locomotion is seriously ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... Mr. Escot, "that a wild man can travel an immense distance without fatigue; but what is the advantage of locomotion? The wild man is happy in one spot, and there he remains; the civilised man is wretched in every place he happens to be in, and then congratulates himself on being accommodated with a machine that will whirl him to another, where he will be just ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... England. The Colonel was a handsome man about forty, a gentleman Of wealth and high social position, a resident of New Orleans. He served with distinction in the confederate army, and received a wound in the leg from which he has never entirely recovered, being obliged to use a cane in locomotion. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... of brain-cell energy, and a final adaptive activation of the appropriate part. Walking, running, and their modifications constitute an adaptation of wonderful perfection, for, as Sherrington has shown, the adaptation of locomotion consists of a series of reflexes— ceptors in the joints, in the limb, and in the foot being ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... for the King to proceed immediately to Dublin; for the southern counties had been so completely laid waste by the banditti whom the priests had called to arms, that the means of locomotion were not easily to be procured. Horses had become rarities: in a large district there were only two carts; and those Avaux pronounced good for nothing. Some days elapsed before the money which had been brought from France, though no very formidable ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... acquired animals with professional composure, without condescending to look back, as he felt certain of security, having left his hospitable friend of the preceding night with nothing better than his own legs for locomotion. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... Street station of the Sixth Avenue Elevated Road, and ascended the steps. In spite of her anxieties the young lady felt interested in the novel means of locomotion, and asked a variety of questions of the train boy. At Thirty-Third Street they descended, and walking a short distance up Broadway turned down a side street, and were soon at the ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger

... Spartan training had a queer effect upon her. Always meagrely fed, always knowing the very minimum of comfort, she became oblivious to food or comfort for herself; she became unconscious, independent of her body save as a means of locomotion, but she cared immensely for other people's. She shivered to think of Wullie's brother Tammas and his son Jock out fishing in the night with icy salt water pouring over chafed hands, soaking through their oilskins; she cried after a savagely silent meal of ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... bench in front of it for the accommodation of the topers who frequented the bar-room. By mutual consent, and without argument, the unfortunate couple aimed for this seat as soon as they saw it, for it promised a grateful respite from the perils of locomotion. The "finkel" was now doing its utmost upon them. Their heads were dizzy, and everything was wofully uncertain; still they knew what they were about, and had sense enough left to dread the consequences of their indiscretion. After they had seated themselves, they glanced at each ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic

... known that one drink made Higgins drunk, and all further libations merely served to maintain him in status quo. Exhaustive experiments had proved that he was able to retain consciousness and the power of locomotion until the first streak of dawn appeared, after which he usually became a burden. For the present he was amply able to take care of himself, and now, although his speech was slightly thick, his demeanor was ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... Her attempt at silent locomotion had brought her to the door of the library, directly opposite the dining room. As she turned to retrace her steps that door suddenly opened and a hand grasped ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... time Spurlock did not move. This incredible scene robbed him of the sense of locomotion. But his glance roved, to the door through which Ruth had gone, to Enschede's drooping back. Unexpectedly he found ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... animal, locomotion and other activity predominate over nutritive processes, which fact we may express, in the terms just given, by saying that kataboly prevails over anaboly. An animal, as we have just explained, is an apparatus for the decomposition and partial oxydation ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... hundred dollars, in addition to his half-pay as a colonel in the revolutionary army. For two or three years before his death he suffered under the effects of a paralysis. Much of the time he was in a measure helpless, so far as locomotion was concerned. His general health, however, was tolerably good, by using great precaution in his diet. He had long abstained from the use of either tea or coffee as affecting his nervous system. His mind retained much of its vigour, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... that he had come again into proximity of the path, he resumed his previous methods of locomotion; that is, he began to crawl on hands and feet. The timber was of greater density here, for it was nearer the foot ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... revealed to me on the first night of my solitude. I am about to start; address me no longer at Paris. Railways were invented for the benefit of love affairs. A lover laid the first rail, and a speculator laid the last. Happily Rouen is a faubourg of Paris! This advantage of rapid locomotion will permit me to pass two hours at Richeport with you, and have the delight of pressing Raymond's hand. Two hours of my life gained by losing them with my oldest and best friend. I will be overjoyed to once more see the noble Raymond, ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... renders it impossible. The feet are turned in so that the inner sides look upwards. When placed upon its feet, therefore, the soles will not rest upon the ground. In a short time the position of the feet changes, and they become fitted for the purposes of support and locomotion. When he begins to walk, the child should have shoes with tolerably broad soles, which ought to be at least half an inch ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... circumstances we loitered but little on the Northern roads. At the end of May we reached Yrun. Here we sold our ponies - now quite worn out - for twenty-three dollars - about five guineas. So that a thousand miles of locomotion had cost us a little over five guineas apiece. Not counting hotels at Madrid and such smart places, our daily cost for selves and ponies rarely exceeded six pesetas, or three shillings each all told. The best of it was, the trip restored the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... "Which is the king?" Fifteen mutton cutlets, "sautees au jus," for breakfast; fifteen mutton cutlets served with a "sauce a la champagne," for dinner; to say nothing of strawberries, and sweet apple-puffs between meals, made digestion and locomotion difficult. It was no wonder that he was a martyr to the gout. But he cared for nature and for books as well as for eating. His Lettres d'Artwell (Paris, 1830), which profess to be selections from his correspondence with a friend, give a pleasant picture of the roi ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... when the word besoins is introduced it refers as much to the physiological needs as to the emotions of the animal resulting from some new environment which forces it to adopt new habits such as means of locomotion or of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... way, would it not strike you as monstrous, if in speaking of the minute and lessening jaws, palpi, etc., of an insect or crustacean, any one were to say they were produced by the affaiblissement of the less important but larger organs of locomotion. I see from your letter (though I do not suppose it is worth referring to the subject) that I could not have expressed what I meant when I allowed you to infer that Owen's rule of single organs being of a higher order than multiple organs applied ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... that the advance of flying machines will be so rapid that within the next decade they will be used with as much ease and safety as any other means of present locomotion. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... perhaps, be allowed to insert some verses upon the new locomotion, since they bear upon this question of walking in remote places, and were composed to some extent in Sussex byways in the spring ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... omnibus service, all the horses having been requisitioned, and in the latter part of October there were not more than a couple of dozen cabs (drawn by decrepit animals) still plying for hire in all Paris. Thus Shanks's pony was the only means of locomotion. ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... spectral no longer, but nearing with every plunge forward of our sturdy young Percheron. Locomotion through any new or untried medium is certain to bring with the experiment a dash of elation. Now, driving through water appears to be no longer the fashion in our fastidious century; someone might get a wetting, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... to have so far gained the ascendancy over them, as to prevail upon them to adopt a fashion, which required a voluntary relinquishment of one of the greatest pleasures and blessings of life, the faculty of locomotion; and to contrive to render this fashion so universal that any deviation from it should be considered as disgraceful. The desire of being thought superior to the rest of his fellows sometimes, indeed, leads a man into strange extravagancies. Upon this principle the men of learning, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... physical agencies are related to the things on which they act, still, the sensation implies, over and above the organic change, a subjective activity of which the external activity is altogether devoid. Likewise, we say that a man is at the right of a pillar because, with his power of locomotion, he can take his stand at the right or the left, before or behind, above or below. But obviously these relations, vary them as we will, imply nothing in the stationary pillar, though they are real in the man who holds or changes his position. Once more, a coin ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... becomes necessary to admit a prosaic fact hitherto concealed from the Reader. Narcissus rode a bicycle. It was, I must confess, a rather 'modern' thing to do. But surely the flashing airy wheel is the most poetical mode of locomotion yet invented, and one looks more like a fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious, county—road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans to his ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... seven minutes this precisely was what the nearest street lamp did reveal unto itself as its downward-slanting beams fell upon a furtive, fugitive shape, suggestive in that deficient subradiance of a vastly overgrown forked parsnip, miraculously endowed with powers of locomotion and bound for somewhere in a hurry; excepting of course no forked parsnip, however remarkable in other respects, would be wearing a floppy straw hat in a snowstorm; nor is it likely it would be adorned lengthwise in its rear with a highly ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... express myself so, put out of gear mentally. But as soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I recovered my powers of locomotion. ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad

... to make the explanations she had asked, he found it a harder task than he had imagined. Her knowledge of human inventions, of worldly means of locomotion, was not extensive, and he had to begin with the A B C of it and go through a course in elementary mechanics. After the forty-second paragraph of instructions the damsel clapped her ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump

... not as high as the apes and monkeys, bears, wolves, foxes and dogs, the domestic horses and the elephants. They are handicapped by feet that are good for locomotion and defense, but otherwise are almost as helpless as so many jointed sticks. This condition closes to the ruminants the possibility of a long program of activities which the ruminant brain might otherwise develop. The ruminant ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... that from the time when the ancestral man first walked erect, with hands freed from any active part in locomotion, and when his brain-power became sufficient to cause him to use his hands in making weapons and tools, houses and clothing, to use fire for cooking, and to plant seeds or roots to supply himself with stores of food, the power of natural selection ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... separated as soon as possible; but, as soon as the excitement of the fight was over, Ensign Macshane was found to have no further powers of speech, sense, or locomotion, and was carried by his late antagonist to bed. His sword and pistols, which had been placed at his side at the commencement of the evening, were carefully put by, and his pocket visited. Twenty guineas in ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... one think, then, that our problem of individual and national economy is solely that of the maximum of pounds raisable against gravity, the maximum of locomotion, or of agitation of any sort, that human beings can accomplish. That might signify little more than hurrying and jumping about in inco-ordinated ways; whereas inner work, though it so often reinforces outer work, quite as often means its arrest. To relax, to say to ourselves (with ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... rotation of the earth conveyed the locality which happened to be his destination directly beneath him, whereupon he was to let out the gas and drop down! Ptolemy knew quite enough natural philosophy to be aware that such a proposal for locomotion would be an utter absurdity; he knew that there was no such relative shift between the air and the earth as this motion would imply. It appeared to him to be necessary that the air should lag behind, if the earth had been animated by a movement of rotation. In this ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... drive" through endless cornfields along natural roads or tracks, parched, cracked, and dusty one day, and presenting the next a surface of black mud, offers but few attractions to the ladies, and vehicular locomotion is therefore resorted to only as a matter of necessity, on journeys to estates or towns often fifty to one hundred miles distant. Country life, indeed, has no great attractions in any part of Russia Proper, and ever since the Emancipation of the Serfs and the accompanying extinction of the power ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... that the dictum of a mathematical athlete upon a difficult problem which mathematics offers to philosophy, has no more special weight, than the verdict of that great pedestrian Captain Barclay would have had, in settling a disputed point in the physiology of locomotion. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of describing our introduction to our partners of the evening; for we were no sooner presented, than the ladies swooped upon us like their prey, placing their shawls upon our left arms, while they seized and clung to what was left available of us for locomotion. There was considerable giggling and tittering throughout the company when Signora Fenzo, the young and comely wife of a gondolier, thus took possession of Eustace, and Signora dell' Acqua, the widow of another ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... fabric. Social theorems, if fiercely agitated, are therefore the more likely to be at last determined, so that they never can be matters of question more. Human life has been in some sense prolonged by the increased powers of locomotion, and an almost limitless power of converse. Finally, there is hardly any serious mind in Europe but is occupied, more or less, in the investigation of the questions which have so long paralyzed the strength of religious feeling, and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... number; for each candidate for Varsity honors tackled the dummy in a totally different style. The lift tackle is performed by seizing the opponent around the legs below the hips, bringing his knees together so that further locomotion is an impossibility to him, and lifting him upward off the ground and depositing him as far backward toward his own goal as circumstances and ability will permit. The lift tackle is the easiest to make. The dive ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... almost gone. I can walk without Major Weir, which is the name Anne gives my cane, because it is so often out of the way that it is suspected, like the staff of that famous wizard,[454] to be capable of locomotion. Went to Court, and tarried till three o'clock, after which transacted business with Mr. Gibson and Dr. Inglis as one of Miss Hume's trustees. Then was introduced to young Mr. Rennie,[455] or he to me, by [Sir] James Hall, a genteel-looking ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... all, thanking them very heartily for their assistance; then, calling for a clear space, he followed Rodier to his seat. Almost before the onlookers could realize what was happening, the aeroplane was in action, and while they were still discussing the extraordinary nature of this means of locomotion, it had soared into the air, flown humming away from them, and become a mere speck in ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... ludicrousness of it. It was the baggage difficulty, a thing that took us quite by surprise; for, till then, we had never appreciated the word "transport" at its full meaning. Like most home-living Britons, hitherto surrounded by every facility for locomotion of persons and goods, we had utterly failed to understand that in a new country things are wholly different in this respect. One can get about one's self easily enough; travel can always be accomplished somehow, even if one has to walk; but it ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... injuries I sustained, I found my health somewhat impaired. I obtained a furlough, and came to visit my cousin. The doctor recommended open air exercise, and so I brought with me my motor-cycle, as I am fond of that means of locomotion." ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton

... types of organisms as must have existed in the past if the succession of life on the globe has been an unbroken lineal succession. Here are reptiles with bat-like wings, and others with bird-like pelves and legs adapted for bipedal locomotion. Here are birds with teeth, and other reptilian characters. In short, what with reptilian birds and birdlike reptiles, the gap between modern reptiles and birds is quite bridged over. In a similar way, various diverse mammalian forms, as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... their feet. They often carry before them, placed upon the saddle-bow, a small, half-nude, child which they steady with one hand while with the other they hold the bridle. It is usually women of importance who indulge in this luxury, for the poor fellahin women have no other means of locomotion than their little feet. These beauties, as we may suppose them to be, since they are masked more closely than society ladies at the Opera ball, wear over their garments a habbarah, a sort of black taffeta sack, which fills with air and swells in the most ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... we know to our cost. Now, the picaninny knows what is good for him. Place him in promixity to a dust-hole or an ash-heap, and observe what takes place. He approaches it with that droll, yet pathetic, method of locomotion peculiar to his period of life—travelling on both hands and one knee, whilst with the big toe of the other hind-foot he propels himself along. In the very centre of the dirt, he deftly whirls into a sitting position, and proceeds to redeem the time, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... do; and the people who have seen him "turning cart wheels" along the side of the road, have supposed that he was amusing himself and idling his time; he was only trying to invent a new mode of locomotion, so that he could economize his legs, and do his errands ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... I never studied horseflesh much, even in my university days, I can admire a spirited nag on occasion. But I have to content myself with humbler means of locomotion in my own calling. A poor parson cannot entertain his friends as a magnate like you can. Have you any one at the hall now, besides ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... me a cruise in the Stella to-morrow, Murray," he said; "she will be far the best style of locomotion for me, for these mountains of yours don't suit me—and yet I should like to see something of the magnificent scenery surrounding you." The proposal was at once agreed to, and Stella said that she should ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... transmitted to existing species in nearly the same state, although now of very slight use; but any actually injurious deviations in their structure would of course have been checked by natural selection. Seeing how important an organ of locomotion the tail is in most aquatic animals, its general presence and use for many purposes in so many land animals, which in their lungs or modified swim-bladders betray their aquatic origin, may perhaps be thus accounted for. A well-developed ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... cripple, smitten with some disease that affected his powers of locomotion. He was excessively thin. Don Luis also saw his pallid face, his cavernous cheeks, his hollow temples, his skin the colour of parchment: the face of a sufferer from ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... Various ingenious machines for locomotion and amusement attracted general attention. Another source of interest were the graceful and picturesque groups of children moving in the air. At intervals, one of the most fascinating of their number would descend with offerings of fruits and flowers for our guests. The ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... it all as fast as possible! Forget that horses ever existed except as means of locomotion,' and Bertha got up and walked towards the window as if restless with pain, ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... seize a man and keep him as long as it likes; it is only Anglo-Saxons that have an absolute right not to have that happen to them, and not only are they entitled not to be imprisoned, but their liberty of free locomotion may not be impeded. An American citizen has a constitutional right to travel freely through the whole republic and also not to be excluded therefrom. Punishment by banishment beyond the four seas was forbidden in very early times in ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... in 559 in a great combined attack of all the invaders on Constantinople under a certain Zabergan, which was brilliantly defeated by the veteran Byzantine general Belisarius. The Avars were a nomad tribe, and the horse was their natural means of locomotion. The Slavs, on the other hand, moved about on foot, and seem to have been used as infantry by the more masterful Asiatics in their warlike expeditions. Generally speaking, the Avars, who must have been infinitely less numerous than the Slavs, were settled in Hungary, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... people towards liberty. And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart beat, and which can agitate the world, but the union of all liberties, the liberty of conscience, of instruction, of association, of the press, of locomotion, of labour, and of exchange; in other words, the free exercise, for all, of all the inoffensive faculties; and again, in other words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism, and the reduction of ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... illustrates this distinction than the difference between the fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins as a fin or paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for locomotion. Some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for holding well as tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life seems to have almost created the simian hand and to have wrought a revolution in the form and use of the forearm ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... new motor-cars, each more swift and powerful than its predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignation of his chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his driving them himself. He used them more and more. He developed a passion for locomotion ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... whole city lay bathed in a refreshing silence. It was very heavenly to stand there and feel the cool, soft air—unaccompanied, for the first time during the day, by the rattling rumbling sounds of locomotion and the jarring discordant murmurs of unmusical voices—fanning ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... walking with the hands, on a ladder, or upon the floor, head down, is a good exercise; but I think the common prejudice in favor of the feet as a means of locomotion is well founded. Man's anatomy contemplates the use of the legs in supporting the weight of the body. His physical powers are most naturally and advantageously brought into play while using the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... Chelonia alone include oceanic, fresh-water, and terrestrial forms. Birds again have adapted themselves to oceanic conditions, to forests, plains, deserts, fresh waters. Mammals have repeated the process. The organs of locomotion in such cases show profound modifications, adapting them to their special functions. One thing to be explained ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... them had overpowered an enemy or a victim the two sank down into the vegetation, and the victor began to eat the vanquished. Their means of locomotion consisted of huge fins, or rather half-fins, half-wings, of which they had three laterally arranged behind each head, and four much longer and narrower, above and below, which seemed to be used mainly ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... as if I were riding in one of the old royal state carriages," said Patty, "although there isn't the slightest resemblance in the vehicle, or the means of locomotion." ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells

... Cells. Each cell has a life of its own. It manifests its vital properties in that it is born, grows, multiplies, decays, and at last dies.[3] During its life it assimilates food, works, rests, and is capable of spontaneous motion and frequently of locomotion. The cell can secrete and excrete substance, and, in brief, presents nearly all the phenomena ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... in your gait, Because Dame Nature made you great; I tell you, sir, your mighty size Is of no value in my eyes;— Your magnitude, I have a notion, Is quite unfit for locomotion; When journeying far, you often prove How sluggishly your feet can move. Now, look at me: I'm made to fly; Behold, with what rapidity I skip about from place to place, And still unwearied with the race; But you—how lazily you ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various

... cause her to smile as she hurried through the crowd, across the sand-spit, and over the flat towards the log-building she had pointed out to Mr. Thurston. Time had rolled back, and locomotion and transportation were once again in the most primitive stages. Men who had never carried more than parcels in all their lives had now become bearers of burdens. They no longer walked upright under the sun, but stooped ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... the villages of the better class through the islands. There are two towns, St. George and Hamilton, and one main high-road, which connects them; but even this high-road is broken by a ferry, over which every vehicle going from St. George to Hamilton must be conveyed. Most of the locomotion in these parts is done by boats, and the residents look to the sea, with its narrow creeks, as their best highway from their farms to their best market. In those days—and those days were not very ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope

... of notice how locomotion in all ages seems to have classified itself into what we now know as passenger and goods train, saloon and steerage. Away back in the 18th century when men were only dreaming of the wonders of the good ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... Lancashire and Yorkshire have proved not unworthy of these boons may be easily maintained; but their progress and elevation have been during this interval wonderfully aided and assisted by three causes, which are not so distinctively attributable to their own energies. The first is the revolution in locomotion, which has opened the world to the working man, which has enlarged the horizon of his experience, increased his knowledge of nature and of art, and added immensely to the salutary recreation, amusement, and pleasure of his existence. The second cause is the cheap postage, the moral benefits of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... with respect to those things which tend to domestic convenience and comfort, the means of illumination, the production and application of heat, and the performance of various household operations; with respect to methods of rapid locomotion from place to place, and the transmission of intelligence from point to point, stood about where it did in the days of the patriarchs. Suddenly waters of that long stream over whose drowsy surface scarcely a ripple of improvement had passed for three thousand years, ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith

... every one knows, generally convey only a single person, and are drawn by two men, who run in a tandem, while the third pushes the ricksha from the back, and is always ready at any emergency to prevent the vehicle from turning turtle. This mode of locomotion, however, was not likely to become popular among the Coreans, who, if carried at all, prefer to be carried either in a sedan-chair, an easy and comfortable way of going about, or else, should they be in a hurry and not wish to travel in grand style, on pony or donkey's back. ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... very evil intended to be provided against is before us, and around us, and pressing us on all sides. How can we, how dare we, make a perfect dead letter of this part of the Constitution, which we have sworn to support? The insolvent persons have not the power of locomotion. They cannot travel from State to State. They are prisoners. To my certain knowledge, there are many who cannot even come here to the seat of government, to present their petitions to Congress, so great is their fear that some creditor will dog their heels, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... discovery of modern times, and the greatest material force known to men, has been committed to the present generation. The progress of Steam, from the days of its first application to lifting purposes, through all of its gradations of application to railway locomotion and steamboat and steamship propulsion down to the present time, has been a series of splendid and highly useful triumphs, alike creditable to the genius of its promoters, and profitable to the nations which have adopted it. However great ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey

... House, or the Scottish Thule, to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)—I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts settle (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here I am and remain. London is not a bad place ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... his sabbaths.[1] One of the charges in the indictment against the notorious Dr. Fian ran thus: "Fylit for suffering himself to be careit to North Berwik kirk, as if he had bene souchand athoirt [whizzing above] the eird."[2] Most effectual ointments were prepared for effecting this method of locomotion, which have been recorded, and are given below[3] as an illustration of the wild kind of recipes which Shakspere rendered more grim in his caldron scene. The efficacy of these ointments is well illustrated by a story narrated by Reginald Scot, which unfortunately, on account of ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... is not entirely idle to consider the effect of scientific progress on the march of human affairs, as so often exemplified in history. Whether that half-century of continuous war would have been possible with the artillery, means of locomotion, and other machinery of destruction and communication now so terribly familiar to the world, can hardly be a question. The preterhuman prolixity of negotiation which appals us in the days when steam and electricity ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... want of her; but I shall not drive her up to that unless the Delhi is likely to run away from us; and not then till after I have added the sail to our power of locomotion. We are coming up with her now, and probably Captain Rayburn's fears that his steamer may run away from us are beginning to abate," said the captain, rubbing his hands in his delight at ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... evolutionist, there was a time when animals had no legs, and so the leg came by accident. How? Well, the guess is that a little animal without legs was wiggling along on its belly one day when it discovered a wart—it just happened so—and it was in the right place to be used to aid it in locomotion; so, it came to depend upon the wart, and use finally developed it into a leg. And then another wart and another leg, at the proper time—by accident—and accidentally in the proper place. Is it not astonishing that any person intelligent enough to teach ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... wording: the ears; food and how obtained; the tongue; paws, including cushions; whiskers; teeth; action of tail; sounds; sharp hearing; sense of smell; cleanliness; eyes; looseness of the skin; quick waking; size of mouth; manner of catching prey; claws; care of young; locomotion; kinds of prey; enemies; protection by society for the prevention of cruelty to animals,—twenty-two topics in all. When I inquired if they would teach the length of the tail, or the shape of the head and ears, or the length and shape of the legs, ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... fathers, and the fountain-head of their Christianity, students are flocking from East, West, and South, from America and Australia and India, from Egypt and Asia Minor, with the ease and rapidity of a locomotion not yet discovered, and last, though not least, from England,—all speaking one tongue, all owning one faith, all eager for one large true wisdom; and thence, when their stay is over, going back again to carry over all the earth "peace to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... irrelevant. But the vision of the figures in the automobile dominated all. I am sure that he was mentally unsound and that his actions were instinctive. He walked furiously, because walk he must, because violent physical exercise had always been his panacea, and because the very act of locomotion was an achievement of some sort. After awhile he found himself running swiftly along the paths that led to the Sweetwater, and then following the stream through the gorge in the hills, leaping over the rocks until he reached the wall and the ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... so far that he cannot even understand the difficulties! It seemed to him that it was a matter quite simple, natural, and easy to take one's place in a projectile and start for the moon! That journey must be undertaken sooner or later; and, as for the mode of locomotion adopted, it follows simply the law of progress. Man began by walking on all-fours; then, one fine day, on two feet; then in a carriage; then in a stage-coach; and lastly by railway. Well, the projectile is the vehicle of the future, and the planets themselves ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... to disarm the resentment of Bud. At all events, he had no choice. What designs the Squire had in this arrangement he could not tell; but the clay-bank mare carried him to meeting on that December morning, with Martha Hawkins behind. And as Miss Hawkins was not used to this mode of locomotion, she was in a state of delightful fright every time the horse sank to the knees in the ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston

... actually got to Paris." Monotony, he says, "is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous; but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house is monotonous; but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, as usual, is right. 'Those who travel by land or sea' are to be objects of our pity and our prayers; and I do pity them. I delight in that same monotony. It saves curiosity, anxiety, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... more than a decade no such weather had been experienced. The snow was so deep that the ordinary means of locomotion were ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... ignorance goes far enough to ignore difficulties. It has, therefore, appeared a simple, natural, and easy thing to him to take his passage in a projectile and to start for the moon. That journey would be made sooner or later, and as to the mode of locomotion adopted, it simply follows the law of progress. Man began by travelling on all fours, then one fine day he went on two feet, then in a cart, then in a coach, then on a railway. Well, the projectile is the carriage of the future, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne

... a fever settled in his leg, causing it to wither from the knee to the foot, and doomed him through life to lameness. Like Byron, he was sensitive upon the subject of this physical defect. It was a serious obstacle to his locomotion, and in speaking compelled a sameness of position injurious to the effect of his oratory. Scarcely had two years elapsed from the time of his admission to the Bar before his fame as a lawyer and advocate was filling the State. His business had increased to such an ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... dog-train. They would be expected to take on their own sleds their beds, clothing, and part of the supplies. Snowshoes were made for them, and every day they diligently practiced this new method of locomotion. They had many amusing tumbles. Sometimes, where the snowdrifts were deep, when they attempted to pass over, they somehow or other would get the snowshoes so tangled up that over they would go on their heads. The more they struggled, the deeper they sank ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... not mock anybody, nor shall I knit my brows at any one, but shall be ever cheerful and devoted to the good of all creatures. I shall not harm any of the four orders of life gifted with power of locomotion or otherwise, viz., oviparous and viviparous creatures and worms and vegetables. But on the contrary, preserve an equality of behaviour towards all, as if they were, my own children. Once a day shall I beg of five or ten families at ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... thrown down from the glaciers; rocks have likewise been thrown from the sides of mountains by the same cause, and large portions of earth have been removed many hundred yards from their situations at the foot of mountains. On inspecting the locomotion of about thirty acres of earth with a small house near Bilder's Bridge in Shropshire, about twenty years ago, from the foot of a mountain towards the river, I well remember it bore all the marks of having been thus lifted up, pushed away, and as it were crumpled into ridges, by a column ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... have none." The uproar rose higher. The accusers all declared that they saw the "black man," Satan himself, standing by her side. They pretended to try to approach her, but were suddenly deprived of the power of locomotion. John Indian attempted to rush upon her, but fell sprawling upon the floor. The magistrate again appealed to her: "What is the reason these cannot come near you?"—"I cannot tell. It may be the Devil bears me more malice than another."—"Do ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... Pennsylvania, I, in company with many other lads, used to tie a bundle of horse hairs into a hard knot and then immerse them in the brook, when the water began to get warm, and in due time we would have just as many animals, with the power of locomotion and appearance of snakes, as there were hairs in the bundle. I have raised them one-eighth of an inch in diameter, with perceptible eyes and mouth on the butt end or root part of the hair. Take such a snake and dip ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... of steam as a motive agent an immense saving has been effected in the outlay required to be made in producing a given result in locomotion. This is the combined product of two causes. Such perfection has been attained in the construction of machinery, that by the aid of steam there can thence be obtained a continuity, combined with a rapidity of motion, which far ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various

... analysis of other movements than those I have mentioned, and has yet to be applied to many more, such as the crawling of insects and millipedes, and the beautiful rippling movement of the legs and body by which many marine worms swim. It has been extensively used in the study of human locomotion, and of the successive poses of the arms and legs in various athletic exercises, and in such games as ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester



Words linked to "Locomotion" :   locomotive, crawl, lope, circle, trot, circuit, run, step, gait, stroke, running, travel, walk, jog, mobility, motion, creep, lap, movement, creeping, walking, brachiation, motive power, dance step



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