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noun
Mechanics  n.  That science, or branch of applied mathematics, which treats of the action of forces on bodies. Note: That part of mechanics which considers the action of forces in producing rest or equilibrium is called statics; that which relates to such action in producing motion is called dynamics. The term mechanics includes the action of forces on all bodies, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous. It is sometimes, however, and formerly was often, used distinctively of solid bodies only: The mechanics of liquid bodies is called also hydrostatics, or hydrodynamics, according as the laws of rest or of motion are considered. The mechanics of gaseous bodies is called also pneumatics. The mechanics of fluids in motion, with special reference to the methods of obtaining from them useful results, constitutes hydraulics.
Animal mechanics (Physiol.), that portion of physiology which has for its object the investigation of the laws of equilibrium and motion in the animal body. The most important mechanical principle is that of the lever, the bones forming the arms of the levers, the contractile muscles the power, the joints the fulcra or points of support, while the weight of the body or of the individual limbs constitutes the weight or resistance.
Applied mechanics, the principles of abstract mechanics applied to human art; also, the practical application of the laws of matter and motion to the construction of machines and structures of all kinds.
orbital mechanics, the principles governing the motion of bodies in orbit around other bodies under gravitational influence, such as artificial Earth satellites.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mechanics" Quotes from Famous Books



... thousand, but even a modest ten thousand, or five hundred rubles for assisting them; but when he will live among the toiling people, under the same conditions, and exactly as they do, then he will be able to apply his knowledge to the questions of mechanics, technics, hygiene, and the healing of the laboring people. But now science, supporting itself at the expense of the working-people, has entirely forgotten the conditions of life among these people, ignores (as it puts it) these conditions, and ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... destroy. The work was the saving of the valuable arms—costing the government thirty thousand dollars per gun—and the machinery of the sunken Milwaukee.[A] By a curious circumstance this party of divers was composed partly, if not principally or entirely, of mechanics and engineers who were exempt from military service under the economic laws of the Confederacy, yet who in heart and soul sympathized with the rebellion. They had worked to save for the South: now they were to work and save for the North. It was a service of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various

... one of the suffetes in place of Hasdrubal, and as commander-in-chief of the army in Spain, was carried, and was ratified by that of the popular assembly, the traders and manufacturers of Hanno's party not venturing to oppose the will of the mass of mechanics and ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... principles are not now known to the industrial scientist, which would enhance many fold the value of the means employed in such business, to the equal advantage of the owner of the capital and his assistants. The merchants, the bankers, the manufacturers, and the master mechanics are making a wasteful and inferior use of their material, while at the same time they are inadvertently keeping the lower classes in poverty by the want of a knowledge of these modern discoveries. It is from this lack of information only that the poor ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... if the house was to be ready for Leonidas on his return, selected the wall paper and the suits of furniture for all the rooms from the patterns before her, and having carefully marked them and written her directions, she requested Mr. Copp to set the mechanics to work at once, and to hurry on the repairs as fast as justice to the ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... instruction of slaves and practically none to the enlightenment of freedmen. Negroes in considerable numbers were becoming well grounded in the rudiments of education. They had reached the point of constituting the majority of the mechanics in slaveholding communities; they were qualified to be tradesmen, trustworthy helpers, and attendants of distinguished men, and a few were serving as clerks, overseers, and managers.[1] Many who were favorably circumstanced learned more than mere reading and writing. ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... opposite houses, and gratifying the anxious public at the same time with a view of themselves, it is difficult to imagine. They always look so diffident and respectful, that involuntarily our interest in them becomes almost too lively for words. We think with disdain on miserable soldiers and hungry mechanics, and half-starved paupers and whole-starved labourers; and turn, with feelings of a very different kind, to the contemplation of virtue rewarded, and modesty well fed, in the persons of the two meditative gentlemen whose appearance at the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... Curriculum reform was gained. There was, indeed, one great miss. The year before Marischal College was founded, Galileo had published his work on Mechanics, which, taken with what had been accomplished by Archimedes and others, laid the foundations of our modern Physics. Copernicus had already published his work on the Heavens. It was now time that the Aristotelian Physics ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... philosopher, throws a doubt on the existence of our secret, with the view of filching it; others again make him a business proposition—capitalists who wish to entangle him in their meshes. As things go at present we do not know how they will turn out. No one certainly can deny the forces of mechanics and geometry, but the finest theorems have very little bodily nourishment in them, and the smallest of ragouts is better for the stomach; but, really, science is not to blame for that. During the past winter my master and myself warmed ourselves over our ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac

... a summons to another meeting of the council of scientists," he said to Carnes. "They'll have to get along without me. All they'll do anyway will be to read a lot of dispatches and wrangle about data and the relative accuracy of their observations. Herriott will lecture for hours on celestial mechanics and propound some fool theory about a hidden body, which doesn't exist, and its possible influence, which would be nil, on the inclination of the earth's axis. After wasting four hours without a single constructive idea being ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek

... said lately, as if it were something inconsistent with the liberties, the happiness, and the moral and intellectual improvement of mankind. Gigantic fortunes are acquired by a few years of prosperous commerce—mechanics and manufacturers rival and surpass the princes of the earth in opulence and splendor. The face of Europe is changed by this active industry, working with such mighty instruments, on ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere mechanics of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather

... Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava. He was a poet of the poor, but in a quite peculiar sense. Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, were poets of the poor, but mainly of the peasant poor. Elliott is the poet of the English artisans,—men who read newspapers and books, who are members of mechanics' institutes, who attend debating societies, who discuss political measures and political men, who are tormented by ideas,—a very different kind of persons altogether. It is easier to find poetry beneath the blowing hawthorn than beneath the plumes of factory or furnace smoke. In such uninviting ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... to have been that printing was first carried on in England in an ancient chapel converted into a printing-house, and the title has been preserved by tradition. The bien venu among the printers answers to the terms entrance and footing among mechanics; thus a journeyman, on entering a printing-house, was accustomed to pay one or more gallons of beer for the good of the chapel; this custom was falling into disuse thirty years ago; it is very properly rejected entirely in ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... that he had obtained his position at the factory by the aid of forged credentials. It was believed that he was rather a famous German inventor who had been living in the United States for some years. He had an almost uncanny knowledge of mechanics, as ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson

... anywhere he could get whiskey and dope. He would come back, rave around, threaten everybody with a gun, but paid out money like he had the mint back of him, and finally got it done. You notice that the logs are "treated," stained or shellacked, to retain their first color. The mechanics did that, and the count was mightily pleased until he found out that it made the shack stand out so that it could be seen for a long distance, and then he threw a fit. He went wild, ran 'em off the job, then I came ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... attractions for a pupil which—in any preliminary visit he pays to a school before joining it—he should look for keenly. And he should make certain, too, that the school has a staff of skilled and experienced mechanics. ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White

... into estates of villages; that nine-tenths of the vast population of the land consist of cultivators of the soil; that it is these cultivators who inhabit the villages; that there are certain "established" village servants—mechanics and others who are apparently paid a wage by the village at large, and whose callings remain in certain families and are handed down from father to son, like an estate. He gives a list of these established servants: Priest, blacksmith, carpenter, accountant, washerman, basketmaker, potter, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... conversant with the principles of mechanics, it may seem difficult to realise the degree of accuracy of which such a method is capable. Yet there can be no doubt that his moons inform us of the mass of Jupiter, and do not leave a margin of inaccuracy so great as one hundredth part of the total amount. If other confirmation ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... had been of pale, sad beings, whose most appropriate place was by the side of death-beds. These sisters of Notre Dame were brisk, energetic women, of lively temperaments. Finding the building which was preparing for them not yet provided with doors and windows, from the scarcity of mechanics, they themselves set about planing, glazing, and painting, to make every thing neat and comfortable. Wilkes, in his account of his exploring expedition, speaks regretfully of the poor appearance the Protestant missions presented, when compared with those of the Catholics; there being ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... raw product in this country was a necessity. For England this had begun in 1786; but she guarded so jealously all inventions bearing upon it that none found their way to us. Our machinery was therefore of the most imperfect order, the work chiefly of two young Scotch mechanics. In 1788 a company was formed at Providence, R.I., for making "homespun cloth," their machinery being made in part from drawings from English models. Carding and roving were all done by hand labor; and the spinning-frame, with thirty-two ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... of crowding people, masked ladies, courtiers with pages carrying torches for the return after dark, merchants with linkmen, work folk with lanterns, noblemen elbowing tradesmen from the wall, tradesmen elbowing mechanics; all pushing and jostling and cracking their jokes with a freedom of speech that would have cost dear in Boston Town. The beaux, I mind, had ready-writ love-verses sticking out of pockets thick as bailiffs' yellow papers; so that a gallant could have stocked his own munitions ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... an experienced officer, was to command the Congo expedition; his party consisted of fifty seamen, marines, and mechanics, with several individuals skilled in the various branches of natural history. They sailed from Deptford in the middle of February 1816, and arrived at Malemba about the end of June. The mafouk, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... answer that question, what dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish,—the science of seers on the Chaldee's Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the law of the secretest sages, hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret. "WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sensible men, to whom I was recommended, they laughed in my face. I soon found that a house would, though the stone and timber were to be had for nothing, cost three times as much as in England. This was on account of the very high wages required by mechanics; but this was not all. None of the materials of a house, except stone and timber, are produced in the colony. Every pane of glass, every nail, every grain of paint, and every piece of furniture, from the kitchen copper to the drawing-room curtains, must have come from England. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various

... Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Godain, Tonsard, his daughters, wife, and Pere Fourchon, also Vaudoyer and several mechanics were supping at the tavern. The moon was at half-full, the first snow had melted, and frost had just stiffened the ground so that a man's step left no traces. They were eating a stew of hare caught in a trap; all were drinking and laughing. It was the day after the wedding of Catherine and Godain, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... the quite important office of inspector of manufactures. His time was mainly occupied in traveling and study. Being deeply interested in all subjects relating to political economy, he had devoted much attention to that noble science, and had written several treatises upon commerce, mechanics, and agriculture, which had given him, in the literary and scientific world, no little celebrity. He frequently visited the father of Sophia. She often spoke to him of her friend Jane, showed him her portrait, and read to him extracts from her glowing letters. The calm philosopher ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... correct adjustment means approximation of the breath bands, inflation of the cavities—in fact, all true conditions of tone. Nature has placed within the organ of sound the principle of a double valve,—one of the strongest forces known in mechanics,—for the control of the breath during the act of singing. This is what we mean by automatic breath-control—using the forces which Nature has given us for that purpose, using them in the ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... tenement of shabby brick, which was evidently well filled up by a miscellaneous crowd of tenants; shop girls, mechanics, laborers and widows, living by ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger

... almost all built in an uniform manner; the inhabitants themselves it was who built them, each for himself, there being but few or no mechanics in the country. The hatchet was their capital and universal instrument. They had saw-mills for their timber, and with a plane and a knife, an Acadian would build his house and his barn, and even make all his wooden domestic furniture. Happy nation! that could thus be sufficient to itself, ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard

... from the hemp and sugar godowns, squat Germans in white suits with pencils stuck in their sun helmets and wearing amber-coloured spectacles. British clerks with cargo lists, customs brokers, barking mates with blasphemous vocabularies, Scotch mechanics with parched throats, and all the underlings who have to do with ships and ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore

... to the pursuit of material advantages. The old philosophers had gone on bothering about theology, ethics, and the true and beautiful, and such other nonsense. Bacon taught us to work at chemistry and mechanics, to invent diving-bells and steam-engines and spinning-jennies. We could never, it seems, have found out the advantages of this direction of our energies without a philosopher, and so far philosophy is negatively good. It has written up upon all the supposed avenues to inquiry, 'No admission ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... theoretic truth to sensation and ordinary use, bring it more within the appreciation of people in general. Eudoxus and Archytas had been the first originators of this far-famed and highly prized art of mechanics, which they employed as an elegant illustration of geometrical truths, and as a means of sustaining experimentally, to the satisfaction of the senses, conclusions too intricate for proof by words and diagrams. As, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... opened it and examined it carefully. He had a great talent for mechanics: he could work in iron, copper and all kinds of metals. He had got himself several kinds of tools, and he could easily repair or make anew a screw, a key, and so on. David turned the watch about in his hands, and muttered between his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... Mechanics' Institute.—The proposal to form a local institution of a popular nature, for the encouragement of learning among our workers, like unto others which had been established in several large places elsewhere, was published in June, 1825, and several meetings were held before December 27, when ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... intimately acquainted with individual characters, and also a smaller audience to face. The first congregation that I was called to take charge of, in Burlington, N.J. contained about forty families. Three or four of these were wealthy and cultivated, the rest were plain mechanics, with a few gardeners and coachmen. I made my sermons to suit the comprehension of the gardeners and coachmen at the end of the house, leaving the cultivated portion to gain what they could from the sermon on its way. One of the wealthy attendants was ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... McGee, a member of the Canadian cabinet and a man of great eloquence and ability, visited St. John and delivered a lecture in the Mechanics' Institute Hall on the subject of the union of the colonies. His lecture was fully reported in the Morning News, a paper then published in that city, and attracted wide attention because it opened up a subject of the highest interest ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay

... exhaustively described the way in, has returned from the gulf like Dante, and has given away the whole mystery. Possessed of his key to the labyrinth the wayfaring man shall not err therein, and it will, no doubt, be a new curiosity for the more daring among Cook's tourists. The workshops are supplied with mechanics by a simple expedient; hopeless specimens of English malefactors, condemned to penal servitude for the term of their natural life, are relegated to this region, a kind of grim humour characterising the selection. The most hideous ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... the mills and factories in the neighborhood, and Sir Robert had long confabs with the managers, of whom he asked permission to "jot down" the interesting facts developed in the course of their conversations, surprising them by his knowledge of mechanics and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, developed with especial reference to the rational foundation of Thermodynamics. By J. WILLARD GIBBS, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Mathematical Physics, ...
— Mr. Edward Arnold's New and Popular Books, December, 1901 • Edward Arnold

... a marine's drab shirt and overalls, stood among a silent group of mechanics on a pier near the Goat Island lighthouse. A few hundred feet out lay a small practice torpedo boat, with the rays of a searchlight from the bridge of the parent ship of the First Flotilla resting full ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there on the river, above and below, as the beauty and convenience of the spot invited each to settle: some mechanics however, who ply their trade, are ranged under the fort; all the others were exposed to the incursions of the natives, who in the year 1643, while I was there, actually killed some two score Hollanders, and burnt many houses and ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various

... welfare of the Indians had been slighted. But it was Holy Week. All the priests were, or professed to be, busy with exercises and confessions, and not one could be found to undertake the mission of Acadia. They were more successful in engaging mechanics and laborers for the voyage. These were paid a portion of their wages in advance, and were sent in a body to Rochelle, consigned to two merchants of that port, members of the company. De Monts and Poutrincourt went thither by post. Lescarbot soon followed, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... of a mile and see the Mansion, Ballard Hall, Ladies' Hall, and Strieby Hall, the latter a brick house three stories high above the basement, dedicated Thanksgiving Day of 1881 in the presence of the venerable secretary for whom it was named. The work on this building was done by colored mechanics, students of the school making the brick and the stone, a sort of concrete ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 1, January 1888 • Various

... in harmony with the law of mechanics according to which what is gained in force is lost in velocity and what is gained in intensity is lost in expansion. After all, no doubt morality in politics should be a negligible quantity. Honest, upright men who hearken only to the voice of conscience, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... account that I know of when the use of fire was not known. We read Gen. iv. 22, that Tubal-cain was an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron, and if reason has any thing to do in this case, we may suppose that the use of fire was known to these mechanics. The date to which this reading belongs, is 3875 years before Christ; but there can be no reasonable doubt but that the use of fire was known long before, and that it was used in the offerings which were made by Cain ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou

... compose these spirits, proceeding towards the brain, it is not necessary to suppose any other cause, than simply, that the arteries which carry them thither proceed from the heart in the most direct lines, and that, according to the rules of mechanics which are the same with those of nature, when many objects tend at once to the same point where there is not sufficient room for all (as is the case with the parts of the blood which flow forth from the left cavity of the heart and tend ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes

... able to make out," I began, "why women are so shy about being caught reading poetry. We men—lawyers, mechanics, or what not—may well feel ashamed. If we must read poetry, it should be at dead of night, within closed doors. But you women are so akin to poesy. The Creator Himself is a lyric poet, and Jayadeva [15] must have practised the divine art seated ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... wooden pavements. Blessed be God for the sky, too, though the smoke of the city may somewhat change its aspect,—but still it is better than if each street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people walking the mall,—mechanics apparently, and shopkeepers' clerks, with their wives; and boys were rolling on the grass, and I would have liked to lie ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... of all classes of the people, by persons of each class, is altogether visionary. Unless it were expressly provided in the Constitution, that each different occupation should send one or more members, the thing would never take place in practice. Mechanics and manufacturers will always be inclined, with few exceptions, to give their votes to merchants, in preference to persons of their own professions or trades. Those discerning citizens are well aware that ...
— The Federalist Papers

... dreadful oaths and opprobrious invectives, ordered them to desist, swearing he would suffer no bulkheads nor hurricane-houses to stand where he was master: but finding his remonstrances disregarded by these mechanics, who believed him to be some madman belonging to the family, who had broken from his confinement, he assaulted them both with great fury and indignation, and was handled so roughly, in the encounter, that in a very short time he measured his length on the floor, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... the Emperor of Austria, and adored the Emperor of Russia, till he became old, ugly, and unfortunate, when their adoration instantly terminated; for what is more ungenteel than age, ugliness, and misfortune! The beau-ideal with those of the lower classes, with peasants and mechanics, is some flourishing railroad contractor: look, for example, how they worship Mr. Flamson. This person makes his grand debut in the year 'thirty-nine, at a public meeting in the principal room of a country inn. He has come into the neighbourhood with the character of a man worth ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... from this, their speech, habits, customs, religions, food, and pastimes were polyglot; on this account the lines of racial demarkation were apt, at times, to be drawn all too sharply. Yet this very fact of differentiation provided hundreds of others—farmers, shopkeepers, jobbers, machinists, mechanics, blacksmiths, small restaurant-keepers, pool and billiard room owners—with ample sources ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... ourselves the liberty of voting against Government, though, we are generally friendly. We are, however, friends of the people avant tout. We give lectures at the Clavering Institute, and shake hands with the intelligent mechanics. We think the franchise ought to be very considerably enlarged; at the same time we are free to accept office some day, when the House has listened to a few crack speeches from us, and the Administration ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... investigated the mechanics of the contrivance, estimated that after a drop of 16 feet, the upward pressure, amounting to over 2 lb. per square foot, would act on a surface of not less than 254 square feet. There was, at the ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... shopkeepers, arrayed in decent dresses becoming their station, but most of them bearing, like, the Regent York, "signs of war around their aged necks"—gorgets, namely, and baldricks, which sustained their weapons. The lower places around the table were occupied by mechanics and artisans, the presidents, or deacons, as they were termed, of the working classes, in their ordinary clothes, somewhat better arranged than usual. These, too, wore pieces of armour of various descriptions. Some had the blackjack, or doublets covered with small plates of iron of a lozenge ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... the strength of these he laboured half the morning. It would puzzle me to explain on what scientific principle the wonderful apparatus was laid down, what mixture between the wing of a bird, the tail of a fish, and the screw of a steamer it embodied. I never was good at mechanics, and certainly Percy Rimbolt's mechanics were such as it is given but to few to follow. Suffice it to say that by eleven o'clock the structure had reached a critical stage, and stood still for want of the cork which Appleby had been charged ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed

... singular nature before the author, as Sheriff of Selkirkshire. The singular dexterity with which the show-man had exhibited the machinery of his little stage, had, upon a Selkirk fair-day, excited the eager curiosity of some mechanics of Galashiels. These men, from no worse motive that could be discovered than a thirst after knowledge beyond their sphere, committed a burglary upon the barn in which the puppets had been consigned to repose, and carried them ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... engineer, on plans of his own. Of light draught and frame, and peculiar construction, some officers distrusted her strength and sea-going qualities. The Chickasaw, too, was not yet completed, the mechanics being still at work on her machinery and fittings, and her crew, with exception of a half-dozen men-of-war's-men, were river-men and landsmen, knowing nothing of salt-water sailing or of naval discipline. ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various

... and Last committed infanticide at the starting of Punch. He sent his first paper from his temporary rooms at Chertsey; it was the burlesque, "Transactions and Yearly Report of the Hookham-cum-Snivey Literary, Scientific, and Mechanics' Institute" (12th September, 1841). This was succeeded in the following month, with the opening of his "Physiology of a London Medical Student," which was rather laughable in itself, while displaying a wonderful intimacy with the rough and noisy world with which it dealt. The idea, however, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... was decidedly cold. The Faubourg Saint-Germain has its pretensions; but do not imagine that the Marais has none! Those wives and daughters of mechanics, of wealthy manufacturers, knew little Chebe's story; indeed, they would have guessed it simply by her manner of making her appearance and by her ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... at, was first derided. Each great inventor, after solving problems in mechanics or chemistry, had to face the jeers ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... Sphere—Algebra, the Use of the Globes, Natural and Moral Philosophy, Pneumatics, Optics, Dioptics, Catroptics, Hydraulics, Erostatics, Geology, Glorification, Divinity, Mythology, Medicinality, Physic, by theory only, Metaphysics practically, Chemistry, Electricity, Galvanism, Mechanics, Antiquities, Agriculture, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... three or four mechanics at work, and the job was secured. The day following there were only two, and the next day none. Edith sent word by the grocer, asking what was the matter. The following day one man appeared, and on being questioned, said "the boss was very busy, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... before that a change of the tariff in 1842 made the importation of opium legal in the empire. The country has in recent years employed foreign officers in its army and navy, and foreign mechanics in its workshops. China is represented at five of the principal nations of the world by ambassadors. It has built up a very respectable navy, mostly at the shipyards of Great Britain; and foreign officers have greatly improved the condition of ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... ah! when I look up the silent street of the town nowadays and see the old houses empty but for weavers, and merchants, and mechanics, people of useful purposes but little manly interest, and know that all we have of martial glory is a dust under a score of tombstones in the yard, I find it ill to believe that ever wars were bringing trade for ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... Two skilled mechanics had been brought from Quebec, and no one was permitted to see their work nor to learn what they were doing. Their work was to be in the basement, which had been excavated ten feet deep, the massive walls reaching ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor

... the poor, the outcast, the ignorant, and the brutal, what that same will was like. With His own life-blood He seals this Covenant between God and man. He offers up His own body as the first-fruits of this great kingdom of self-sacrifice. He takes poor fishermen and mechanics, and sends them forth to acquaint all men with the good news that God is their King, and to baptize them as subjects of that kingdom, bound to rise in baptism to a new life, a life of love, and brotherhood, and self- sacrifice, like His own. He commands them to call ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... the school could do that he couldn't, so long as it was imitative work. You have got to be constructive. You have got to work out some way to get ahead of them; and if you will take the history of the white races and go over their great achievements in mechanics, science, art, literature—anything you choose—when a white man is constructive, when he does create, he can simply cut circles around the colored races. The thing is to get the boys and girls of today to understand what is going on in the world, what they must do as their share ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... our memory of the terrors of Nihilism that SARDOU'S play seems almost further away from us than the tragedy of Agamemnon. In our callous incapacity to be thrilled by the ancient horrors of forty years ago we fall back on the satisfaction to be got out of the author's dexterity in the mechanics of his craft. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various

... holiday most religiously observed by journeymen shoemakers, and other inferior mechanics. a profanation of that day, by working, is punishable by a line, particularly among the gentle craft. An Irishman observed, that this saint's anniversary ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.

... Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... with her gloves and veil, and as the automobile moved off she had that joyous sensation of something about to happen. They drove out of town on the one straight road that led to the Gunsight mine and Rimrock was so busy with the mechanics of his driving that she had a chance to view the landscape by herself. The white, silty desert, stretching off to blue mountains, was set as regularly as a vineyard with the waxy, dark-green creosote bushes; and at uncertain intervals the ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... of the hand light-ray cylinders; fifty officers, and about fifty older men in charge of the projectors and rockets, who, for want of a better term, I might call our artillery corps. There was also the organization of girls, and a miscellaneous corps of men to handle the boats, mechanics to set up the projectors, and ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings

... have been freed from slavery; we have become possessed of the respect, if not the friendship, of all civilized nations. Our progress has been great in all the arts—in science, agriculture, commerce, navigation, mining, mechanics, law, medicine, etc.; and in general education the progress is likewise encouraging. Our thirteen States have become thirty-eight, including Colorado (which has taken the initiatory steps to become a State), and eight Territories, including the Indian Territory and Alaska, and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant

... persons well acquainted with our peculiar system of laws (as different from those of England as from those of France), and who knew exactly how to adapt the desired alteration to the principle of our legislative enactments, so that the whole machine might, as mechanics say, work well and easily. For a long time this wholesome check upon innovation, which requires the assimilation of a proposed improvement with the general constitution of the country to which it has been recommended, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... have already mentioned the heterogeneous composition of the Senate. The tribunate and legislative corps are worthy to figure by its side; their members are also ci-devant mechanics of all descriptions, debased attorneys or apostate priests, national spoilers or rebellious regicides, degraded nobles or dishonoured officers. The nearly unanimous vote of these corps for a consulate for ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... extensive, having good shops filled with modern tools. Several ships have already been built here, and two men-of-war are now upon the stocks—another evidence of so-called civilization. Japan, you see, is ambitious. All the officials, foremen, and mechanics, are natives, and these have proved their ability in every department. The wages paid surprise us. All branches are about upon an equality. Painters, moulders, blacksmiths, carpenters, machinists, all get the same compensation—from 25 to 40 cents per day, according to their respective value ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... the mangonels constructed by Nestorian mechanics under the directions of Nicolo and Maffeo see Marco Polo, op. ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... poop, and the whole ship, as far as we could see, presented a scene of the greatest activity. Smiths were at work on the well deck, with deafening din hammering and cutting steel plates with which to repair the Hitachi; mechanics were working at the seaplane, called the Woelfchen, which was kept on the well deck between her flights; prisoners were exercising on the poop, and the armed guards were patrolling constantly among them and near us on the well deck. ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes

... he must do himself. Nine-tenths of the technically educated men to-day are working for men who were liberally educated, or who educated themselves. Germany is producing a race of first-rate clerks and skilled mechanics, who are working hard ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... of the liberal arts, of mechanics, of all sciences with their magistrates and doctors, and of the discipline of the schools. As many doctors as there are, are under his control. There is one doctor who is called Astrologus; a second, Cosmographus; a third, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells

... and the bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactures may fail, and commodities be debased; but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will continue without ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... likely to make way for it? It is allowed, on all hands, that among the methods concerted at Rome, for bringing over England into the bosom of the Catholic Church; one of the chief was, to send Jesuits and other emissaries, in lay habits, who personating tradesmen and mechanics, should mix with the people, and under the pretence of a further and purer reformation, endeavour to divide us into as many sects as possible, which would either put us under the necessity of returning to our old errors, to preserve peace at home; ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... features, of him who relates it. I have been of this opinion ever since I criticized upon the chin of Dick Dewlap. I very often had the weakness to repine at the prosperity of his conceits, which made him pass for a wit with the widow at the coffee-house and the ordinary mechanics that frequent it; nor could I myself forbear laughing at them most heartily, tho upon examination I thought most of them very flat and insipid. I found, after some time, that the merit of his wit was founded upon the shaking of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... economic condition of these Negroes. What of their wealth, their means and methods of living well and wisely? With gradual emancipation and the cessation of the sale of slaves the Negroes became economically unimportant to the whites.[3] They were employed as servants, laborers, sailors and mechanics.[4] It was reported to the American Convention of Abolition Societies in 1797, however, "that a degree of decorum and industry prevailed among them much to their honor and advantage." This report further ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... 1695, but owes its prosperity to the great coal and iron beds in its vicinity. Other industries include iron and brass foundries, engineering, manufactures of woollens and calicoes, silk-weaving, paper-making, oil and fireclay. The public buildings comprise the town hall, county buildings, mechanics' institute, academy, two fever hospitals and free library, the burgh having been the first town in Scotland to adopt the Free Library Act. Airdrie unites with Falkirk. Hamilton, Lanark and Linlithgow in sending one member to parliament. The parish of New Monkland, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... to adopt in an old country like the Netherlands. Splendid churches and cathedrals, the legal possession of which would be contended for by rival sects, could scarcely be replaced by temporary structures of lath and plaster, or by humble back parlours of mechanics' shops. There were questions of property of complicated nature. Not only the states and the communities claimed in rivalry the ownership of church property, but many private families could show ancient advowsons and other claims to present or to patronize, derived ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... were alive with men. Merchants left their customers, clerks their books, mechanics their tools. Draymen stripped their horses of harness, abandoned their wagons, and rode away to join their cavalry. Within an incredibly brief space of time everybody was off for the armory, the military companies marching ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White

... necessary in any colony, and gives the colonists, whose toil is compulsory, a continual and regular occupation of an almost unvarying character. (This applies equally to the case of a penal colony.) Workmen, foremen, engineers, builders, mechanics, gardeners,—all are patients, with the exception of the Director, the doctor, and about a hundred mounted warders, who pass rapidly from one part to another and are able to intervene in suicidal or ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... difficult still was the incredible shortage of skilled labour. Owing to our deplorable predilection in the army for putting square pegs into round holes, there were trained engineers sweeping out mess-huts or carrying stretchers; capable mechanics digging holes or grooming horses; and skilled draughtsmen addressing envelopes and writing: "Passed to you, please, for information and necessary action," on documents referring to the momentous question as to whether No. 54321 Dr. Jones, R.H.A., should have a pair of new breeches ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... humble duties to occupy his time. His paroxysms of gout came only at intervals, and in the periods between he kept himself engaged. He had a taste for mechanics, and among his attendants was an Italian named Torriano, a man of much ingenuity, who afterwards constructed the celebrated hydraulic works at Toledo. He was a skilful clock-maker, and, as Charles took a special interest ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... in the time of James I. were as devoted to sports and amusement as they are now; and when the king was making a progress through Lancashire, "he received a petition from some servants, labourers, mechanics, and other vulgar persons, complaining that they were debarred from dancing, playing, church-ales—in a word, from all recreations on Sundays after Divine service." King James hated Puritanism and loved recreation; so he readily granted the petition of the Lancashire folk, and issued a proclamation ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... of Camille Flammarion's the answer is easy. It will be when the progress of mechanics has enabled us to solve the problem of aviation. And in a few years—as we can foresee—a more practical utilization of electricity will ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... gullible disciples. These illusions were merely mechanical devices such as the mysterious opening and shutting of doors on the sound of a certain word like "Abracadabra." These devices can be duplicated by our skilful mechanics, but would not be worth very much these enlightened ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson

... are hiring mechanics to do all that sort of thing for them. They're beginning to have them just the way they have coachmen; and he says it's ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... men heard this law of the heavenly righteousness how wondrous simple it must have seemed in contrast with the elaborate scribe-made law which their Rabbis laid upon them. Pharisaism had reduced religion to a branch of mechanics, a vast network of rules which closed in the life of man on every side, a burden grievous and heavy to be borne, which crushed the soul under its weary load. This was the yoke of which Peter said that neither they nor their fathers were able to bear it. Was it any marvel ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson

... one is filled with the spirit of song the less he concerns himself with the construction of the vocal instrument. People with little or no musicianship have been known to wrangle ceaselessly on whether or not the thyroid cartilage should tip forward on high tones. It is such crude mechanics masquerading under the name of science that has brought voice training into general disrepute. The voice teacher is primarily concerned with learning to play upon the vocal instrument rather than upon its mechanical construction, two things which ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger

... ain't gonna pay for no more autographed photos, we won't fire the press agent, you gotta finish this picture with Miss Hart and both them camera men that's shootin' this movie is high-class mechanics and stays! Outside of that, I'm ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer

... of Kant, the great German metaphysician. On my return I would commence a school for either young men at L105 each, proposing to perfect them in the following studies in this order:—1. Man as an Animal;—including the complete knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, mechanics, and optics:—2. Man as an intellectual Being;—including the ancient metaphysics, the system of Locke and Hartley—of the Scotch philosophers—and the new Kantean system:—3. Man as a Religious Being;—including an historic summary of all religions, and of the arguments ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... much more subtle and difficult to trace and formulate than chemical and mechanical laws. Hence the student of organic evolution can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certainties in this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and mechanics. It is very doubtful if life can ever be explained in terms of these things. Life works through chemical combinations and affinities, and yet is it not more than chemistry? It works with and through mechanical principles ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... standing in a garden of narcotics, and lassitude were stealing through his limbs. When she had gone, a single memory clung to him—the memory of the wonderful texture of her skin. He had read in a child's book of physiology that our skin breathes. The affirmation had meant nothing to him beyond mechanics; now, suddenly, it meant much. He had seen, felt, this woman's skin breathe, and its breath had been like the fragrance of ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... earth, as if a recent and unusually copious shower of "meteoric cosmical matter" had fallen into the solar furnace, and prompted it by increased incandescence to hotly deny the truth of Helmholtz's assertion: "The inexorable laws of mechanics show that the store of heat in the sun must be finally exhausted." Certainly to those who had fanned themselves through the tedious torture long remembered as the "hot Sunday," the science-predicted period of returning glaciers and polar snows where palms and ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... lien, as the claim of a factor upon goods intrusted to him for sale, has been noticed. (Sec.3.) The right of lien extends to others than factors. It is intended also for the benefit of manufacturers, mechanics, and other persons carrying on business for the accommodation of the public. A tailor has a lien upon the garment made from another's cloth until he is paid for the making; a shoemaker upon the shoes made from another's leather; a blacksmith upon the horse he has shod; an innkeeper ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young

... not that spirit of chivalry possessed by Edward. He was a younger son, and had to earn, in a way, his own fortune, and he felt that his inclinations were more for peace than strife. Moreover, Humphrey had talents which Edward had not—a natural talent for mechanics, and an inquisitive research into science, as far as his limited education would permit him. He was more fitted for an engineer or an agriculturist than for a soldier, although there is no doubt ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... for tradespeople, and especially for manufacturers. Any one of those numerous disputes between masters and mechanics, which distinguish British industry, might have been safely referred to him, for he abhorred and despised ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... Funchal was somewhat longer than was intended at first, as the engineers found it necessary to take up the propeller and examine the brasses. This work would occupy two days, and while the three mechanics were toiling in the heat, the rest of the ship's company took the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the town and its surroundings; the crew had a day's leave, half at a time. An excursion was arranged to one of the numerous ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... to introduce the character in New York. Outside of himself, his daughter, and the basso Angrisani, the company was a poor affair, the orchestra not much better than that employed at the ordinary theater then (and now, for that matter), and the chorus composed of mechanics drilled to sing words they did not understand. It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that at one of the performances of Mozart's opera, of which there were ten, singers and players got at sixes and sevens in the superb finale of the first act, whereupon Garcia, losing his temper, rushed ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... science, mechanics, and practical life, throw overboard men and things of the past, so should we in theology, Church life, and experience, when we can do better. Reverence for persons, and respect for ideas, should not enslave us. Let us move on, doing better and better. We do not care to believe all the theology ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... and his brother bade the queer old man good-night and entered their shed. It was filled with the appetizing odor of frying steak. On the top of the blue flame stove in a screened-off corner, Le Blanc, one of their mechanics, was cooking the simple meal with the loving care of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... assemblage it was! At first I could not catch a glimpse of the hounds themselves, or even the servants, for the crowd, mostly of foot-people, that surrounded them. Where did these queer-looking pedestrians come from? They were not agricultural labourers; they were not townspeople, nor operatives, nor mechanics; they were the sort of people that one never sees except on such an occasion as this. I believe if I was in the habit of attending low pigeon matches, dog fights, or steeplechases, in the "Harrow ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... him for a day or two each. The wages were meagre enough, but Duncan accepted them gladly, the more so because the farmers in every case gave him board besides. Now and then he secured odd jobs as an assistant to mechanics. In one case he stoked the furnaces of a coal mine ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... Behmen, or Anthroposophia Theomagica {102b}. He is also quite mistaken about the sphaera pyroplastica, a neglect not to be atoned for, and (if the reader will admit so severe a censure) vix crederem autorem hunc unquam audivisse ignis vocem. His failings are not less prominent in several parts of the mechanics. For having read his writings with the utmost application usual among modern wits, I could never yet discover the least direction about the structure of that useful instrument a save-all; for want of which, if the moderns had not lent their assistance, we might yet ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift

... were the typical examples of Mr. Smiles's virtue of self-help; they owed nothing to government or to the universities which passed for the organs of national culture. The leading engineers began as ordinary mechanics. John Metcalf (1717-1810), otherwise 'blind Jack of Knaresborough,' was a son of poor parents. He had lost his sight by smallpox at the age of six, and, in spite of his misfortune, became a daring rider, wrestler, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... for, in terror, each endeavoured to appear generous. No means of obtaining a rich harvest were neglected; for instance, Ali distributed secretly large sums among poor and obscure people, such as servants, mechanics, and soldiers, in order that by returning them in public they might appear to be making great sacrifices, so that richer and more distinguished persons could not, without appearing ill-disposed towards the pacha, offer only the same amount as did the poor, but were obliged ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... through a long subordination of wretches combined against the public happiness, from the prime minister surrounded by peers and officers of state to the exciseman dictating politics amidst a company of mechanics whom he debauches at the public expense, and lists in the service of his master with the taxes which he gathers.' Parl. Hist., xii. 570. See ante, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... the mind with forms which will assist us in conceiving or expressing the complex or contrary aspects of life and nature. The danger is that they may be too much for us, and obscure our appreciation of facts. As the complexity of mechanics cannot be understood without mathematics, so neither can the many-sidedness of the mental and moral world be truly apprehended without the assistance of new forms of thought. One of these forms is the unity of opposites. Abstractions have a great power over ...
— Sophist • Plato

... and a half marks when the days are long, at six skillings (five cents) a tree—a plowman two marks. In the winter the usual wages of labourers are two marks a week, with board. Shoemakers, tailors, and other mechanics average about the same daily. When one considers the scarcity of good food, and the high price of all luxuries, especially tobacco and brandy, it does not seem strange that the emigration fever should be so prevalent. The Norwegians have two traits in common with a large class of Americans—rampant ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... August 23, 1809, near Mechanics Valley, in Cecil county, and received his education in the log schoolhouse in that neighborhood known as Maffit's schoolhouse. He learned the trade of a cooper with his father John McCauley. After coming of age he taught school for a few years, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... riding-master of the troop. In 1761 he was made a sergeant of dragoons, but peace having been proclaimed the following year, the company to which he belonged was disbanded. He afterwards commenced the business of a scaw-banker, which means that he went about the country enticing mechanics and rustics to ship to America, on promise of having their fortunes made in that country; and then by artful practices, produced their indentures as servants, in consequence of which on their arrival in America ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... hole through her, and when she's loaded light that hole is above water line. The wrecking vessel that goes down to salve her will have steel plates, tools and mechanics aboard, and new plates can be put in temporarily. And if that cannot be done those holes can be patched with planking and ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... or a bridge till he's got over this bridge and the rest of the geometry? I don't know whether I can ever learn it all myself, but I'm going to the School of Engineering up at the University, next spring, to learn chemistry, and qualitative analysis, and calculus, and analytical mechanics, and graphical statics, and metallurgy, and thermodynamics, and hydraulics, and a lot of other things. But these people here will still be at work on this same triangle years after I am dead, if they have anybody to ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost

... remarkable physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become the fashion in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in the salons; ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play, Les Femmes savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first indications. In 1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, in which a savant explains the new astronomy to a lady in the park of a country house. [Footnote: ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... scarcely be expected that these guilds, composed in many cases of mechanics, should give rise to works of the highest order of merit. Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful, their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere personal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... "we must make the best of it, and support them. You say you are ignorant of the country. I must explain to you then how money is to be made here, and by whom. The class of labourers make money readily, if they are industrious, because they have high wages and constant employment; artificers and mechanics, carpenters, shipwrights, wheelwrights, smiths, brick-layers, masons, get rich here, without difficulty, from the same causes; but all these things are out of the question for you. You have head, not hands, I perceive. Now ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... deduced from and applied to German history, exhibits the (indirect) influence of the Comtist school. It is based upon psychology, which, in his view, holds among the sciences of mind (Geisteswissenschaften) the same place (that of a Grundwissenschaft) which mechanics holds among the sciences of nature. History, by the same comparison, corresponds to biology, and, according to him, it can only become scientific if it is reduced to general concepts (Begriffe). Historical movements and events are of a psychical character, and Lamprecht ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... prevented slipping. The machine successfully hoisted grain from the lower box to one fastened higher up, but not shown in the picture. The model was very crude in its workmanship, but it showed the ability of fourth-grade boys to successfully apply an important principle in mechanics, and it gave opportunity for their ingenuity to express itself. The work was done with such tools and materials as the boys could provide for themselves, and without assistance other than encouraging suggestions from the teacher. This bit of construction accompanied a broad study of the subject ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs

... machines. We wish to determine whether the laws and forces which regulate their activities are the same as the laws and forces with which we experiment in the chemical and physical laboratory, and whether the principles of mechanics and the doctrine of the conservation of energy apply equally well in the living machine and ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... young men. He reached Tonga in safety, and remained for upwards of a year, gaining the language of the people, and protected by the chiefs, but without making any converts. On his return to Sydney he left the two young mechanics, and they were afterwards joined by the Reverend John Thomas, a young ardent missionary from England. They had indeed need of faith and patience. The chiefs who at first protected them proved themselves fickle and treacherous, robbing them of all they ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... locomotive and the road it was to run upon. He could soon draw and calculate better than his father, but he never excelled him in the solution of practical problems which depended upon a knowledge of materials and the simple laws of physics and mechanics. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... were styled, varying at times from four to six in number; the former intrusted with the legislative, the latter with the executive functions of administration. A large proportion of these bodies were selected from the merchants, tradesmen, and mechanics of the city. They were invested, not merely with municipal authority, but with many of the rights of sovereignty. They entered into commercial treaties with foreign powers; superintended the defence of the city in time of war; provided for the security of trade; granted letters of reprisal ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott



Words linked to "Mechanics" :   kinetics, carrying into action, statistical mechanics, Newtonian mechanics, performance, reaction, execution, statics, celestial mechanics, jerk, natural philosophy, quantum mechanics, carrying out, mechanism, auto mechanics, dynamics, mechanical, kinematics, fluid mechanics, airplane mechanics, pneumatics, aeromechanics, hydraulics, wave mechanics



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