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Wedge-shaped   Listen
adjective
Wedge-shaped  adj.  
1.
Having the shape of a wedge; cuneiform.
2.
(Bot.) Broad and truncate at the summit, and tapering down to the base; as, a wedge-shaped leaf.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wedge-shaped" Quotes from Famous Books



... commencement of the season, and others which originate as an elongated cell; this becomes septate, and ultimately separates at the joints. During the greater part of the year, both kinds of spores are to be found in the same pustule. In Melampsora, the winter spores are elongated and wedge-shaped, compacted together closely, and are only matured during winter on dead leaves; the summer spores are pulverulent and globose, being, in fact, what were until recently regarded as species of Lecythea. In Cystopus, the spores are sub-globose, or ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... strip of Delta vivid green, the palms, the roofs of Bedrashein, the blue laughter of the Nile with its flocks of curved felucca sails. Further still, rising above the yellow Libyan horizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen Pyramids, cutting their wedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of gold. Seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape. They towered darkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient Powers that now watched him taking these little steps across ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... while the apse arch, where centering would have had structural value, is formed with true radiating voussoirs. The failure of the voussoirs to radiate to the centre therefore seems to be simply the result of using untapered voussoirs in which the arch form must be obtained by wedge-shaped joints. For if these joints are carelessly formed, the crown may very well be reached before the requisite amount of radiation has been obtained. On the other hand, if full centering had been used, we should expect to find marks of ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... is splendid in plumage, and in shape is far more graceful than his domesticated brother. In early winter the wild ducks fly overhead in a wedge-shaped phalanx, and by and by they pair, and if disturbed start up with a sudden quack, quack from the copse-wood pond. Broods of downy wild ducks have been brought in by boys, but it has almost always proved impossible ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... WEDGE-SHAPED GULF. One which is wide at its entrance, and gradually narrows towards its termination, as ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... you find a lad who does not treasure among his secrets the nesting-place of some pair of birds? Where can you find a child who does not watch for the first robin of spring-time? Where can you find one who does not know when the wild ducks in the wedge-shaped flocks ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets

... singularly-formed web. Strong lines radiated in a vertical plane from a common centre, where the insect had its station; but only two of the rays were connected by a symmetrical mesh-work; so that the net, instead of being, as is generally the case, circular, consisted of a wedge-shaped segment. All the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... the tree is taken from the ground with its roots undisturbed. Should the end of the tap root project below the end of the cylinder, the thready end should be pinched off with the thumb nail. By placing the lower end of the cylinder on the bottom of a box and inserting a wedge-shaped piece of wood in the slot, the cylinder is sprung open and can be withdrawn, leaving the young tree, with a cylinder of earth around its roots, standing on the bottom of the box. This operation can be repeated until the box is full of the young trees, when it is carried to ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs

... taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out. He took the same path he had followed home. On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. In a camp or two ashore the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were burning. Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... SACRUM, so called because the ancients offered it in sacrifices, is a wedge-shaped bone, that is placed between the innominata, and to which it is bound by ligaments. Upon its upper surface it connects with the lower vertebra. At its inferior, or lower angle, it is united to the coccyx. It is concave upon its anterior, and convex ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... x 7/8 x 3/4 inches; oblong, compressed, constricted in the middle, with well marked sutures; color grayish-brown, bright, marked with a few purplish markings in the grooves at the apex; base tapering to a blunt point; apex tapering, pointed, wedge-shaped, sometimes curved; shell medium thick, 1.5 mm.; partitions thin; cracking quality medium; kernel plump, full, brownish-yellow, bright, sutures rather small, straight, secondary ones marked by a line, surface rather wrinkled; flavor sweet, ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume

... opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese against a flaming sky—a far honk—then stillness. Then the flackering quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and ripple of the dead waters among ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... 158) we have a wedge-shaped figure standing on a triangle placed on the ground, as in the previous figure, its three corners being the same height. In the vertical geometrical square we have a ground-plan of the figure, from which we draw lines to diagonal and to base, and notify by numerals 1, 3, ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey

... butter, brush over the bottom of a frying pan and pour a little of the batter into it, let it cover the bottom of the pan without being thicker than paper, let it brown, turning it to brown the other side, spread with any jelly preferred, fold in half and fold again, making a wedge-shaped cake. Use all the batter in this way, and serve hot. It would be well to have ...
— The Golden Age Cook Book • Henrietta Latham Dwight

... passages have been pierced below from the outside, which probably lead to them. The base of the building is constructed of sun-dried bricks about 2 ft. square and 4 or 5 in. thick. The Takht-i-Rustam is wedge-shaped in plan, with uneven sides. It is apparently built of pise mud (i.e. mud mixed with straw and puddled). It is possible that in these ruins we may recognize the Nan Vihara of the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang. There are the remains of many other topes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... the strange wedge-shaped letters that covered every vacant space on the stone slabs could be read, what a message from the past ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff

... spring. Then, raking the surface smooth, I set a line along its length on one side. A man took a spade, sunk its length in the soil, and pushed it forward strongly. This action made an almost perpendicular wedge-shaped aperture just back of the spade. The asparagus plant, with its roots spread out fan-shape, was sunk in this opening to a depth that left the crown of the plant between three and four inches below the surface. Then the spade was drawn out, and the soil left to fall over the crown ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe

... simple experiment. Here is a beam from the electric light; beautifully white and bright, is it not? It looks so pure and simple, but yet that beam is composed of all sorts of colors mingled together, in such proportions as to form white light. I take a wedge-shaped piece of glass called a prism, and when I introduce it into the course of the beam, you see the transformation that has taken place (Fig. 4). Instead of the white light you have now all the colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... him up, and all his splendid posterity from the banks of the Euphrates at the Bir-el-Nimroud. The Royal Asiatic Society no doubt will soon find his mark, or cross, His Turfy Highness not being expected to be a letterato, in Cuneiform, wedge-shaped or arrow-headed characters upon the unbaked or sun-dried bricks thrown out of the famous Nineveh mound, so that at last Nimroud will have full justice done him by a ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... most of them stood raising themselves in their stirrups, gazing after the stag that now, with little more than his antlers visible like a bleached bough moving on the flood, swam strongly out into the golden mist still cloaking the Island. Moment by moment he out-distanced the wedge-shaped ripple where the heads of the tired pack bobbed in pursuit; for here, as always in water, the deer held the advantage, being able to float and rest at will while the hound must always ply his forelegs or sink. The huntsman, however, judged it impossible ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... story which is well worth repeating runs as follows: A farmer had called in the local "joyner" to do sundry repairs at the homestead. One day, whilst enjoying a humble meal, he sat watching some doves as they hopped about the yard. Struck by the movement of their wedge-shaped tails, it occurred to him to joint his timber by the interlocking ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham

... by means of hammering tight together two wedge-shaped iron pieces, several sets of them between type and iron frame which were supposed to hold the type in the form like a vise; raised it carefully, and there remained on the tin-covered make-up table about a quarter of a column of the set type. She slammed ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... wedge-shaped, elastic clot which now fills the wound from bottom to top like jelly in a mould, the leucocytes or white blood-cells promptly migrate and convert it into a mesh of living cells. They are merely the cavalry and skirmishers of the repair brigade and are quickly ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... day their writing—as revealed to us now through the recent excavations—had ceased to have that pictorial aspect which distinguishes the Egyptian script. What had originally been pictures of objects—fish, houses, and the like—had come to be represented by mere aggregations of wedge-shaped marks. As the writing of the Babvlonians was chiefly inscribed on soft clay, the adaptation of this wedge-shaped mark in lieu of an ordinary line was probably a mere matter of convenience, since the sharp-cornered implement used in making the inscription ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... in a small clearing, consisted of two tents, both of the wedge-shaped kind. The sleeping-tent was nearly filled by the bed it contained; and this, lifted a few inches above the ground on pole supports, was of browse or brush and straw, covered with blankets. A square canopy of mosquito-netting protected it. The cooking-tent had a foundation of logs and a canvas ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... not pull for the narrow strand where he had landed with Decoud, and afterwards alone on his first visit to the treasure. He made for the beach at the other end, and walked up the regular and gentle slope of the wedge-shaped island. Giorgio Viola, whom he saw from afar, sitting on a bench under the front wall of the cottage, lifted his arm slightly to his loud hail. He walked up. Neither ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... however, death that came, and he is a too attentive lover. The battle had been going on some seconds without apparent result, possibly because the voles had to bite upwards, shark-fashion, owing to the fact that their fighting-teeth are wedge-shaped incisors, instead of stabbing fangs, when there was a hrrr! That is all, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... louder as the rising tide lapped up the sands at the back of the Bar. The faint yellow-pink after-thought of sunrise and pencillings of tarnished cloud alike had vanished into the all-obtaining misty blue of the upper sky. Heading for the French coast, a skein of wild geese passed in wedge-shaped formation with honking cries and the beat of strong-winged flight. The barrow creaked again, wheeled some few yards further along the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... for sale, but many people like to have an eraser in the end, and this requires still more work. These erasers are round or flat or six-sided or wedge-shaped. They are let into the pencil itself, or into a nickel tip, or drawn over the end like a cap, so that any one's special whim may be gratified. Indeed, however hard to please any one may be, he ought to be able to find a pencil to suit his taste, for a single factory in the United States makes more ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan

... finger keys representing the various characters and spaces, and the machine is so organized that on manipulating the keys it selects the matrices in the order in which their characters are to appear in print, and assembles them in a line, with wedge-shaped spaces or justifiers between the words. The series of matrices thus assembled in line forms a line matrix, or, in other words, a line of female dies adapted to mold or form a line of raised type on a slug cast against the matrices. After the matrix line is ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... the rough edge is worked smooth on a slip stone, the cross section of which is wedge-shaped and the edges of which are rounded. The toe and heel of the beveled side of the gouge are brought into contact with the flat side of the stone. As the sharpening proceeds the wire edge is worked to the inside of the gouge. The rounded edge of the stone is then placed inside the gouge ...
— A Course In Wood Turning • Archie S. Milton and Otto K. Wohlers

... (TREE HIBISCUS.) The only woody and sometimes tree-like species; has ovate, wedge-shaped, 3-lobed, toothed leaves, and large (3 in.) white, purple, red, or variegated flowers. Usually a shrub, 6 to 15 ft. high, often cultivated ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar

... material was clay. Papyrus, it is true, was occasionally used, but it was expensive, while clay literally lay under the feet of everyone. While the clay was still soft, the cuneiform or "wedge-shaped" characters were engraved upon it by means of a stylus. They had originally been pictorial, but when the use of clay was adopted the pictures necessarily degenerated into groups of wedge-like lines, every curve becoming an angle formed by the junction of two lines. ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... w[oe]re ylfa gescot; that is, if it were an asa-shot or an elf-shot. On this subject Grimm says: It is a very old belief that dangerous arrows were shot by the elves from the air. The thunder-bolt is also called elf-shot, and in Scotland a hard, sharp, wedge-shaped stone is known by the name of elf-arrow, elf-flint, elf-bolt, which, it is supposed, has been sent by the ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre

... is a crudely wedge-shaped body but incomparable in its ruggedness to that or any other model, and the colour of mud and sand and of coral, dead and sea-stained. It reposes, with its back flush with the surface, beside a block of coral or stone defiantly indistinguishable ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... humerus the patient is to be bound in the supine position, a wedge-shaped stone wrapped with yarn placed in the axilla, and the surgeon, pressing against the padded stone with his foot and raising the humerus with his hands, reduces the head of the bone to its natural position. If this method fails, a long crutch-like stick is prepared to receive ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... brought on prematurely before the passages are sufficiently dilated, from narrowing of the pelvic bones or other mechanical obstruction in the passages, from monstrous distortions or duplications in the fetus, or from the turning back of one of the members so that the elongated conical or wedge-shaped outline is done away with. Prompt as is the normal parturition in the mare, however, difficult and delayed parturitions are surrounded by special dangers and require unusual precautions and skill. From the proclivity of the mare to unhealthy inflammations of the peritoneum and other abdominal ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... warm by this time and, after Perez had put on his coat and hat, they went out once more into the gale. The point of which Perez had spoken was a wedge-shaped sand ridge that, thrown up by the waves and tide, thrust itself out from the beach some few hundred yards below the station. They reached its tip, and stood there in the very midst of the storm, waiting for ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... Plato to the Caucasus, terminating somewhat abruptly, a little west of the central meridian, in about N. lat. 42 deg. One of the most interesting features associated with this range is the so-called great Alpine valley, which cuts through it west of Plato. The Caucasus consist of a massive wedge-shaped mountain land, projecting southwards, and partially dividing the Mare Imbrium from the Mare Serenitatis, both of which they flank. Though without peaks so lofty as those pertaining to the Alps, there is one, immediately east of the ring-plain Calippus, which, towering ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... This is the wrist box. You will find this box in two parts or halves. In a new engine you will find that these two halves do not meet on the wrist pin by at least one-eighth of an inch. They are brought up to the pin by means of a wedge-shaped key. (I am speaking now of the most common form of wrist boxes. If your engine should not have this key, it will have something which serves the same purpose.) As the brasses wear you can take up this wear by forcing the key down, which brings the two halves nearer together. You can continue ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard

... "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped piece of greenstone," says a writer in the Cornhill Magazine, 50-517. It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. Of course this writer says it's all ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... of Bonn, quoted in Karl Vogt's "Vorlesungen ueber den Mensohen," distinguishes four chief forms of the pelvis in mankind—the oval in Aryans, the round among the Red Indians, the square in the Mongols, and the wedge-shaped in the Negro. Examining this question mechanically it would seem that the longer a race had remained in an upright position the lower is the sacrum, and the greater is the tendency to approximate to the larger lateral diameter of the European female. The front to back diameter of the ape's ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... From the French coin, in turn from Latin cuneus, wedge, suggestive either of an earlier wedge-shaped piece, or of a wedge-shaped mark on the piece. The German word Muenze is from the Latin moneta (as is the English mint, the place where coins are made), which meant money, that name being taken from the ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... To a query as to whether the country house known as Zamanilovka was anywhere in the neighbourhood the peasants replied by doffing their caps; after which one of them who seemed to boast of a little more intelligence than his companion, and who wore a wedge-shaped beard, made answer: ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... feet across at the bottom," he said; "the wall by the passage goes straight up, on the other side it is the bare rock, so it is almost wedge-shaped. It is twenty feet long, and five feet high up to its roof, that makes it nearly seven to the upper part of the mouth." The vault was absolutely empty. He moved about for a minute and then said: "Gold has been stored here. There ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty

... the affected portion of bone, there results a sequestrum often of considerable size and characteristic shape, which, because of the sclerosis and surrounding endarteritis, is exceedingly slow in separating. When the sequestrum involves an articular surface it is often wedge-shaped; in other situations it is rounded or truncated and lies in the long axis of the medullary canal (Fig. 125). Finally, the sequestrum lies loose in a cavity lined by tuberculous granulation tissue, and is readily identified in a radiogram. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... marmalade between,) and either grate loaf-sugar over the top one, or ice it smoothly; marking the icing with cross lines of coloured sugar-sand, all the lines meeting at the centre so as to divide the cake, when cut, into triangular or wedge-shaped slices. If you ice it, add a few drops of essence of lemon ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie

... fossil-search, offered to apply their more efficient skill and strength to a new attempt in the same direction; and, with high hopes for the result, Mysie, still accompanied by Clarissa, proceeded to another portion of the cliffs, where a low, wedge-shaped promontory, shadowed by beetling crags, was, as Mr. F. confidently stated, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... Greta, which winds round and catches the evening lights in the front of the house. In front we have a giant's camp—an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrodale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tentlike ridge ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... and then as gradually ceases In dust on the other side; life's emblem deep, 10 A confused noise between two silences, Finding at last in dust precarious peace. On the wide marsh the purple-blossomed grasses Soak up the sunshine; sleeps the brimming tide, Save when the wedge-shaped wake in silence passes Of some slow water-rat, whose sinuous glide Wavers the sedge's emerald ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... wild duck crossed our bows at some little distance, a wedge-shaped phalanx of craning necks and flapping wings. I happened to be steering while Davies verified our course below; but I called him up at once, and a discussion began about our chances of sport. Davies ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... bower it illuminated with strange radiancy the dainty disorder of deserted lunch, made prisms out of the wine-glasses, painted the white cloth with wedge-shaped rainbows, and flooded the cavernous interiors of the half-eaten fowl with a pathetic ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... degrees. They are exposed to view in nearly vertical precipices, varying from 200 to 600 feet in height, which bound the valley through which the river Magnan flows. Although, in a general view, the strata appear to be parallel and uniform, they are nevertheless found, when examined closely, to be wedge-shaped, and to thin out when followed for a few hundred feet or yards, so that we may suppose them to have been thrown down originally upon the side of a steep bank where a river or Alpine torrent discharged itself into a deep and tranquil sea, and formed a delta, which advanced gradually from the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... Roughly speaking the whole of this dark frame of tones from the accented point of the trees at the top to the mass of the rock on the left, may be said to gradate away into the distance; cut into by the wedge-shaped middle tone of the hills ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... was toneless. Her face in the darkness gleamed wedge-shaped and unfamiliar between the falling waves of ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... though, for the point being wedge-shaped the swaying about and jerking to and fro of the boat had driven it further and further in, so that it was not until he had been ready over and over again to give up in despair that the boy got the ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn

... one corner of her territory remains to her, a wedge-shaped piece, ten miles or so in width at the coast, narrowing to nothing at a point less than thirty miles inland. And in that tragic fragment there remains hardly an undestroyed town. Her revenues are gone, being collected ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... turn, with its corner A at the line below the rung, and DE flush with the upper corner. When all the notches have been marked cut down the AC line of each with a tenon saw, and chisel along BC till the wedge-shaped chip is removed. Finish off every notch as neatly as possible, so that the rungs may make close ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams

... Atreus, and it had a curious recess in the roof, in which were found numerous interesting examples of Etruscan pottery. It is, however, clear from the city gates, sewers, aqueducts, &c., that the Etruscans were acquainted with and extensively used the true radiating arch composed of wedge-shaped stones (voussoirs), and that they constructed it with great care and scientific skill. The gate at Perugia, and the Cloacae or Sewers at Rome, constructed during the reign of the Tarquins,[19] at the beginning of the sixth century B.C., are examples of the true arch, ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... two days climbing the roughest and most difficult trail he had ever seen. From the looks of the descent he imagined the worst part of his travel was yet to come. Not improbably it was two thousand feet down to the river. The wedge-shaped valley, green with alfalfa and cottonwood, and nestling down amid the bare walls of yellow rock, was a delight and a relief to his tired eyes. Eager to get down to a level and to find a place to rest, Duane ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... decree which his nobles presented to him in writing. In common with the Babylonians they used the same alphabetic system, though their languages were unlike,—namely, the cuneiform or arrow-head or wedge-shaped characters, as seen in the celebrated inscriptions of Darius on the side of a high rock thirty feet from the ground. We cannot determine whether the Medes and Persians brought their alphabet from their original settlements ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... manufacture of weapons; and the first period of the bronze age may be dated from 1800 to 1500 B.C. The bronze celts at first differed little from those made of copper, but gradually the type developed from the plain wedge-shaped celt to the beautiful socketed celt, which appears on the scene in the last, or fifth, division of the bronze age (900-350 B.C.). It was during the age of bronze that spears came into general use, as did the sword and rapier. The early spear-heads were simply knife-shaped bronze ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... the box, hub, or shell, B, reverse wedge-shaped blocks, C C', and bolts, D D', with their nuts, E E', or the equivalents of these devices, arranged for operation together, substantially as and for the purposes herein ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... species, the PRAIRIE WHITE-FRINGED ORCHIS (H. lepicophea), found in bloom in June and July, on moist, open ground from western New York to Minnesota and Arkansas, differs from the preceding chiefly in having larger and greenish-white flowers, the lip cleft into wedge-shaped segments deeply fringed. The hawk-moth removes on its tongue one, but not often both, of the pollinia attached to disks on either side of the entrance to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... in the course of an operation, for example in osteotomy for knock-knee, or wedge-shaped resection for bow-leg, are repaired by the same ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... run on continuously without spacing; and as to punctuation, little or nothing was known. In the Greek works on papyrus before Christ, there are to be found certain marks indicating pauses, such as the wedge-shaped sign (>). In Biblical MSS., however, the division of the text into lines enabled the reader the more easily to understand the meaning, and was an assistance to him in public reading. As many blunders were made by the monks in transcribing and re-transcribing ...
— The Importance of the Proof-reader - A Paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, by John Wilson • John Wilson

... more sorrowful, thoroughly indifferent—what is called an "overwhelmed"—expression. The features of that face were of the ordinary rustic type: a wrinkled forehead, small grey eyes, a large nose, a wedge-shaped beard, a swarthy, sunburned skin.... But the expression! ... the expression!... In that dim gaze life barely burned, and sadly at that; and his voice also was, ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... the cedar board, with its pad, against the inside of the leg. Sam bound the thin end of the wedge-shaped blanket to the knee. Thus the thick end of the pad pressed against the calf just above the ankle, leaving the foot and the injured bone free of the board. Sam passed a broad buckskin thong about the ankle ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... breakfasted in bed, the ingenuity of Ottillie having somewhat mitigated the tray difficulty by a clever adjustment of the wedge-shaped piece of mattress with which Europe elevates its head at night. Molly was just "winding up" a liberal supply of honey, and Rosina was salting her egg, when there came a tap at the ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner

... very well, although on a wedge-shaped pillow, I bid you good-morning, my heart. The whole panorama before me is bathed in such a bright, burning sun that I cannot look out at all without being blinded. Until I begin my calls I am sitting here breakfasting and smoking all alone in a very spacious apartment—four rooms, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... and without reinforcing, to convey all its load into the column, leaving only the bending to be considered in the truncated portion intersected? Not even the bending should be considered, except in the case of relatively shallow members, but simply the tendency on the part of the wedge-shaped section to slip out on the 45 deg. planes, thereby requiring sufficient reinforcement at the crossing of these planes of principal weakness to take the component of the load on this portion, tending to shove it out. This reinforcement, of course, should be anchored securely ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... fishing-vessel that left Gloucester and Marblehead, the chief centres of the fishing industries, went a boy of ten or twelve to learn to be a skilled fisherman. He was called a "cut-tail," for he cut a wedge-shaped bit from the tail of every fish he caught, and when the fish were sorted out the cut-tails showed the ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... "the wedge-like attack of his own division"; see Grote, "H. G." x. 469 foll. I do not, however, think that the attacking column was actually wedge-shaped like the "acies cuneata" of the Romans. It was the unusual depth of the column which gave it the force of an ironclad's ram. Cf. "Cyrop." II. iv. for ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... feet[44], the fissure being continued in zigzag form for thirty miles, so that the stream had to change its course from right to left and left to right, and went through the hills boiling and roaring, sending up columns of steam, formed by the compression of the water falling into its narrow wedge-shaped receptacle. ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... Assyrians. The slabs against the walls were carved with representations of battles, hunts, sacrifices, triumphs, and all the scenes in the kings' histories, nay, in the building of the city; and there were explanations in the wedge-shaped letters of the old Assyrian alphabet. The Ninevites had numerous idols, but their honour for the Lord had not quite faded away; and about the year 830, about the time of Amaziah in Judah, and Jeroboam ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... a clump of brown seaweed, which had fallen apart like the neatly dressed hair of a woman, was a black streak, signifying the gape of a wedge-shaped mollusc known as a pinna. The gape was about as long as the parting of a woman's hair and about thrice as wide. As I crouched to note the functions of the animal, my shadow intervened and the caution of the creature was roused, the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... materially in shape, colour, and taste, so as to be easily discriminated: furthermore the leaves of the Aconite—supposing them to be attached to the root—are not to be mistaken for those of any other plant, being completely divided to their base into five wedge-shaped lobes, which are again sub-divided into three. Squire says it seems incredible that the Aconite Root should be mistaken for Horse Radish unless we remember that country folk are in the habit of putting back again into the ground Horse Radish ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... with the sharp chin, the woman of the wedge-shaped face. She invariably wears her hair over her ears and so elongates the V lines of her chin. By arranging the hair close to the sides of her head and putting it in a soft low coil on the top a much more pleasing ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans

... high, and invisible to ordinary sight, but he could see them so distinctly, their shape and colours, that all the birds he knew were easily recognized. There were swans, shining white, with black heads and necks, flying in wedge-shaped flocks, and rose-coloured spoonbills, and flamingoes with scarlet wings tipped with black, and ibises, and ducks of different colours, and many other birds, both water and land, appeared, flock after flock, all flying as fast as their wings could ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.

... passages are kept clean by cells especially adapted to this purpose, known as the ciliated epithelial cells. These are slender, wedge-shaped cells which have projecting from a free end many small, hair-like bodies, called cilia (Fig. 35). They line the mucous membrane in most of the air passages, and are so placed that the cilia project into the tubes. Here they keep up an inward and outward wave-like ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... to pursue their work according to certain definite lines and shapes, which are to them instinctive and in no way, we may presume, logical. The same is seen in the groups and formations of flocks of gregarious animals and in the flights of gregarious birds, among which the wedge-shaped phalanx of wild ducks and the huge globe of soaring storks are as remarkable ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... been grape or canister, it might have done a good deal of damage. But the cannon had been loaded with Geoffrey's tankette in mind, and the tribesmen only jeered. One of them dashed forward, under the cannon's smoking muzzle, and jammed a wedge-shaped stone between the left side track and the massive forward track roller. The track jammed, broke, and whipped back in whistling fragments. The tankette slewed around while the unharmed tribesman danced ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry

... downtown; our new uniforms with their unlined greatcoats (minus the cozy fur collars such as civilians wore) did not keep out more than a quarter of the cold, the rest went through us. Our caps were wedge-shaped affairs of imitation black fur, and on mild days we felt very smart in them, but when it was forty below and Jack Frost was on a still hunt for every exposed portion of our body, a cap that would not be coaxed down to meet our collars was a fit object ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien

... deep or very pale; about 1 inch broad, on slender footstalks, in terminal clusters. Calyx tubular, 5-toothed, much enlarged in fruit, sticky; 5 petals with claws enclosed in calyx, wedge-shaped above, slightly notched. Stamens 10; pistil with 3 styles. Stem: 4 to 10 in. high, hairy, sticky above, growing in tufts. Leaves: Basal ones spatulate; 2 or 3 pairs of lance-shaped, smaller leaves seated ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... Leaves simple, alternate, 6-9 inches long, 3-4 inches broad, smooth and dark green above, lighter and downy beneath; outline obovate to oblong, varying from irregularly and deeply sinuate-lobed, especially near the center, to nearly entire, base wedge-shaped; stalk short; ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars of flame which led the children of Israel through the desert away from the land of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to look upon is this gaunt, wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this Italian city, unshattered amid the ruins and wrecks of time, looking older than the Eternal City itself, like terrible impassiveness turned to stone. And so in the Middle Ages men supposed this to be the sepulchre of Remus, who was slain by his own brother at ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... made, quick-working wood vise that has proved very satisfactory. The usual screw is replaced by an open bar held on one end by a wedge-shaped block, ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... thus wedge-shaped and located between the parietal and the postorbital. The posterior edge of the supratemporal protrudes as a convex border slightly behind the end of the parietal, and measures 3.0 mm. around the curve to ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton

... over yet. The little sister opens the oven and discovers some chestnuts just roasted; the grandmother puts her hand on the bottles of cider arranged on the dresser; and I draw forth from the basket that I have hidden, a cold tongue, a wedge-shaped piece of butter, 5 ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... In many places skeleton wigwams marked the site of old Nascaupee camps. The hills on the east in places rose abruptly from the water, but on the west they stood a little back with sand-hills on terraces between and an occasional high, wedge-shaped point of sand and loose rock reached almost halfway across the lake. Often as I looked ahead, the lake seemed to end; but, the distant point passed, it stretched on again into the north till with repetition of this experience, it began to seem as if the end would never ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... of rock, the mountains here yielding to its sweep in a broadening valley only to press on it beyond and thrust it back on its way northward. It was all splendid and simple; if you please, nothing but a stream filling the intersecting slopes of a wedge-shaped valley and turning off because it had to. But the serenity of the whole composition: gray rocks, shining waters, green slopes; white mists, enveloping the crests, smiling in the afternoon sun! Jaded as were ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... described as a heterogeneous mass of clay, with sand and gravel in varying proportions, inclosing the transported fragments of rock, of all dimensions, partially rounded or worn into wedge-shaped forms, and generally with surfaces furrowed or scratched, the whole material looking as if it had ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... Babylonia, were of an unknown stock. They were the founders of Babylonian culture. Even by them the soil was skillfully cultivated with the help of dikes and canals. They were the inventors of the cuneiform writing. The cuneiform characters were originally pictures; but these were resolved into wedge-shaped characters of uniform appearance, the significance of which was determined by their position and local relation to one another. It is not known how long the Sumerian period lasted, nor even when it closed; the chronology of the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... tumbled down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the desire to convey a religious truth, not ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... back to me, digging among his cabbages. I went up to him. 'Are you so and so?' I said. He turned round and, I tell you the truth, I have never seen such piercing eyes in my life. Yet the whole face was shrunk up like a little fist with a little wedge-shaped beard and sunken lips. He was an old man. 'I am so and so,' he said. 'What are you needing?' 'Why, this is what I am needing,' I said, and put the writing in his hand. He looked at me intently and said: 'Come indoors, ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... apart into separate V's, and the two sides of each of these had been drawn narrowly together, so that what had been two parallel lines of fence, with the lane between, was now a long double row of wedge-shaped piles of rails, all pointing into ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... dike several large, apparently now quite isolated, fragments of mica-slate were embedded: but as their foliation was exactly parallel to that of the surrounding solid rock, no doubt these new separate fragments originally formed wedge-shaped depending portions of a continuous vault or crust, once extending over the dike, but since worn down ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... under the pillow, a mechanical arrangement, a memory of his Indian life in the midst of untrusted subordinates, the officer seized in his left hand the Sikh tulwar, which was his own "property saber" of Thibetan royalty. Its naked, wedge-shaped blade was as keen ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... and the cornices and the capitals of the pillars were richly sculptured with sacrificial processions, and long trains of soldiers and captives, with great inscriptions of wedge-shaped letters, and with animals of all sorts. The work was executed by Egyptian captives; and so carefully was the hard black marble carved and polished, that a man could see his face in the even surfaces, and they sent back ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... momentum that took away half their weight, and made a stumble or false step, or indeed anything but an actual collision, almost impossible. Closing together they avoided the latter, and holding each other well up, became one irresistible wedge-shaped mass. At times they yelled, not from consciousness nor bravado, but from the purely animal instinct of warning and to combat the breathlessness of their descent, until, reaching the level, they charged across the gravelly ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte

... their duties without the assistance of beasts of burden. Papyri were not used as in Egypt. Nor was ink required. Babylonian letters were shapely little bricks resembling cushions. The angular alphabetical characters, bristling with thorn-like projections, were impressed with a wedge-shaped stylus on tablets of soft clay which were afterwards carefully baked in an oven. Then the letters were placed in baked clay envelopes, sealed and addressed, or wrapped in pieces of sacking transfixed by seals. ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... Sods of earth or turf, cut in wedge-shaped form, to line the parapet and face the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... behind that light, a little drab cottage of a half dozen rooms. It stood, unpainted and unkempt, in a wedge-shaped acre of neglected garden which, between high weeds and uncut shrubbery, had long before gone to straggling ruin. And that wedge-shaped acre which cut a deep fissure in the edge of the immaculate pastures of Boltonwood's ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... built of several pieces, sewed together in so neat a manner that on the outside no join could be seen. They were of two kinds, double and single. The single were from twenty to thirty feet long, and twenty-two inches broad in the middle, with wedge-shaped heads and sterns, and decked over at both ends, leaving only a third part open. They had outriggers, and some few carried sails, but were generally impelled by short paddles, the blades of which were broadest in the middle. The double canoes were composed of two ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston

... Cutting boards, wedge-shaped boards somewhat like backing boards, but with the top edge square; used in cutting the edge of a book ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell

... thundered steadily down on them; then it swayed violently, as two or three of the brutes immediately in front fell beneath the bullets, while their neighbors made violent efforts to press off sideways. Then a narrow wedge-shaped rift appeared in the line, and widened as it came closer, and the buffaloes, shrinking from their foes in front, strove desperately to edge away from the dangerous neighborhood; the shouts and shots were redoubled; the hunters were almost choked by the cloud of dust, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... The wedge-shaped edge of one of the forms of bit shown in the sketch is filed to shape and the bit heated in a fire or on a gas heater. A bit of rough sandstone, or even a clean soft brick, or a bit of tin plate having some sand sprinkled over ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... being grouped into large and coherent masses than is common in the State. This is particularly true of those living on the plains, who display in their encampments a military precision and regularity which are remarkable. Every village consists of a single row of wigwams, conical or wedge-shaped, generally made of tule, and just enough hollowed out within so that the inmates may sleep with the head higher than the feet, all in perfect alignment, and with a continuous awning of brushwood stretching along in front. In one end-wigwam lives the village captain; on the ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... whole of the barb turned on a stout pivot of steel, but was kept in line with the shaft by a tiny wooden peg which passed through barb and shaft, being then cut off smoothly on both sides. The point of the harpoon had at one side a wedge-shaped edge, ground to razor keenness, the other side was flat. The shaft, about thirty inches long, was of the best malleable iron, so soft that it would tie into a knot and straighten out again without fracture. Three harpoons, or "irons" as they were always called, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... a scene of great activity. The ground was covered with blankets, robes, and bedding. A lantern from the centre pole sent wedge-shaped shadows darting back and forth; the camp stove was set up, and a fire from wood which McCrae had brought along was soon crackling in it. Pots and pans were produced; women eager to be of service swarmed about the stove, and children, free at last of their muffling wraps, romped in high-laughtered ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... Aronia).—Aronia Thorn. South Europe, 1810. This tree attains to a height of 20 feet, has deeply lobed leaves that are wedge-shaped at the base, and slightly pubescent on the under sides. The flowers, which usually are at their best in June, are white and showy, and succeeded by large yellow fruit. Generally the Aronia Thorn forms a rather upright and branchy specimen of neat proportions, and when studded with its milk-white ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... stealthily round and round the boar, who changed front with every movement of his lithe and sinewy adversary, keeping his determined head and sharp, deadly tusks ever facing his stealthy and treacherous foe. The bristles of the boar's back were up at a right angle from the strong spine. The wedge-shaped head poised on the strong neck and thick rampart of muscular shoulder was bent low, and the whole attitude of the body betokened full alertness and angry resoluteness. In their circlings the two brutes were now nearer to each other and nearer ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... the old text were reprinted in every land and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the cuneiform language (so called because the letters were wedge-shaped and "cuneus" is the Latin name for wedge) had given up its secrets. Another ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon

... as if it had been the heaviest and hottest of crowbars. She laughed again when she looked at his face. He had an odd trick of lifting one of his eyebrows very high and at an acute angle when perplexed or ill at ease. This eccentric left eyebrow—now quite wedge-shaped—had gone up almost to the edge of his tousled gray hair. Ruth patted his great clumsy hands ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... overhanging, empty space. Bert followed his leader down to the gallery slowly and cautiously. From it he was able to watch the wonderful spectacle of the first air-fleet flying through the night. They flew in a wedge-shaped formation, the Vaterland highest and leading, the tail receding into the corners of the sky. They flew in long, regular undulations, great dark fish-like shapes, showing hardly any light at all, the engines making a throb-throb-throbbing sound that was very ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... in the centre of the base, is very large in proportion to the size of the animal. It is formed of five shelly, wedge-shaped pieces, each ending in a hard, triangular tooth. The whole mouth is a conical box, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... (about 1000 men-at-arms, 6000 archers, and a few thousands of other foot). It is probable that the usual three "battles'' were drawn up in line, each with its archers on the flanks and the dismounted men-at-arms in the centre; the archers being thrown forward in wedge-shaped salients, almost exactly as at Crecy (q.v..) The French, on the other hand, were drawn up in three lines, each line formed in deep masses. They were at least four times more numerous than the English, but restricted by the nature of the ground to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... many others to England. The native women search for and find them not only near the beds of streams, but also about the alluvial diggings. Nearly all are shaped like the iron axe or adze of Urua, in Central Africa, a long narrow blade with rounded top and wedge-shaped edge. This tool is either used in the hand like a chisel, or inserted into a conical hole burnt through a tree-branch, and the shape of the aperture makes every blow tighten the hold. The people mount it in two ways, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... his shoulder, and indistinctly, that he first thought he saw a face, a little, evil, wedge-shaped face, looking out at him from a hole. When he turned and confronted it, the thing ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame

... woodpecker, aided by its wedge-shaped beak, could, in case of need, rip up the bark under which its prey was to be found; that his tongue, covered with spines bending backward, is well adapted to seize the larvae; and, lastly, that the stiff and elastic feathers of its tail afford it ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... course be cut off at any length. This is best done with a piece of hard wood planed down to a cutting edge, i.e., wedge-shaped. Mr Trench has devised a kind of brass frame, into which the gelatine issuing from the nozzle of the cartridge machine is forced, finding its way along a series of grooves. When the frame is full, a wooden ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford

... infinitely minute cylinders scattered over the field. The larger Foraminifera are attacked, and instead of being vividly white and delicately sculptured, they become brown and worn, and finally they break up, each according to its fashion; the chamber-walls of Globigerina fall into wedge-shaped pieces, which quickly disappear, and a thick rough crust breaks away from the surface of Orbulina, leaving a thin inner sphere, at first beautifully transparent, but soon ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... he was on the outside of the sloping heap, but only to set the surface in motion again and roll and glide down and down and over and over once more, till he was brought up short in the narrowest part of a wedge-shaped mountain cleft, to begin struggling again, trampling as if rapidly ascending stairs, to avoid being buried by the gliding rubbish still in motion and filling up the bottom of ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn

... country, substituted tablets of clay for the papyrus or other similar material which they had formerly used. The characters were impressed upon the soft tablet by means of a triangular writing-instrument, which gave them their peculiar wedge-shaped form. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... gave them room; but it was a long time before they relaxed any, but continued going round and round like a water wheel or an endless chain. The foreman ordered three men on the heaviest horses to split them. The men rode out a short distance to get the required momentum, wheeled their horses, and, wedge-shaped, struck this sea of cattle and entered, but it instantly closed in their wake as though it had been water. For an hour they rode through the herd, back and forth, now from this quarter, now from that, and finally the mill was broken. After midnight, as luck would have it, heavy dark clouds ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams

... with 1800 camels across the desert towards Metammeh. Lord Wolseley remained behind to guard the new base of operations. At Abu Klea wells, when nearing the Nile, the column was assailed by a great mass of Arabs. They advanced in five columns, each having a wedge-shaped head designed to pierce the British square. With a low murmuring cry or chant they rushed on in admirable order, disregarding the heavy losses caused by the steady fire of three faces of the square. Their leaders soon saw the weak place in the defence, namely, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... of six- months-old ice lay close together. Some of these floes presented a square mile of unbroken surface, and among them were patches of thin ice and several floes of heavy old ice. Many bergs were in sight, and the course became devious. The ship was blocked at one point by a wedge-shaped piece of floe, but we put the ice-anchor through it, towed it astern, and proceeded through the gap. Steering under these conditions required muscle as well as nerve. There was a clatter aft during the afternoon, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... an astonishment. All those feet are small, symmetrical—light as the feet of figures painted on Greek vases—and the step is always taken toes first; indeed, with geta it could be taken no other way, for the heel touches neither the geta nor the ground, and the foot is tilted forward by the wedge-shaped wooden sole. Merely to stand upon a pair of geta is difficult for one unaccustomed to their use, yet you see Japanese children running at full speed in geta with soles at least three inches high, held to the foot only by ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... had managed the rectification of the matter; did he take the upper table off? "Oh no, without that. I simply opened or loosened the left side of the table about and above the upper corner, then, having cut and glued a slight thin wedge-shaped piece of wood, through the narrow opening caused by the loosening of the table, I passed it on a thin knife long enough to reach to the upper block, between which and the part of the upper table which was not holding I carefully thrust it and tucked it in, finally glueing and cramping again ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... flower. The plant usually grows in a nearly upright or more or less ascending position, or when it grows from the side of a trunk it is somewhat shelving. It is somewhat spathulate in form, i. e., broad at the free end and tapering downward into the short stem in a wedge-shaped manner, and varies from 2—10 cm. long and 1—5 cm. in breadth. It grows on fallen branches or trunks, on stumps, and often apparently from the ground, but in reality from underground roots or buried portions ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... procedure, until he misses, when the knife is surrendered to the next in turn. When he receives the knife each player tries the feat at which he failed before. The last player to accomplish all the feats has the pleasure of "pulling the peg," The peg consists of a wedge-shaped piece of wood the length of the knife blade which is driven into the ground by the back of the knife and must be pulled by the teeth of the unfortunate one who was last to complete the necessary feats. The winner has the honour of driving ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... "beat their way." When I was at work in Sonoma County, California, a little fellow came and worked for ten days, who once travelled 200 miles inside the cowcatcher of an engine. Most English people know the wedge-shaped pilot in front of the American engine well enough by repute to recognise it. When the engine was in the yard over the hollow track he crawled in, taking a board to sit on inside. When the locomotive once ran out on the ordinary track it was impossible to remove him, although the fireman ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... different kinds of glass, the colours can be extinguished, still leaving a residue of refraction, and he employed this residue in the construction of achromatic lenses—lenses yielding no colour—which Newton thought an impossibility. By setting a water-prism—water contained in a wedge-shaped vessel with glass sides (B, fig. 8)—in opposition to a wedge of glass (to the right of B), this point can be illustrated before you. We have first of all the position (dotted) of the unrefracted beam marked upon the screen; then we produce the narrow water-spectrum (W); finally, by introducing ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... of the mescal. With baskets on their backs the women go out to gather the plants. Their implements consist of a stick about two inches in diameter and three feet long, wedge-shaped and sharpened at one end, and a broad hatchet-like knife. On reaching a plant, the woman places the sharp end of the stick at its base and by a blow with a stone severs the root and pries it up. Nothing could be more primitive. The women of the Stone ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... reptile showed simply wonderful cleverness in climbing, running up fifty feet of iron-bark trunk as quickly as it could cover the level ground, and keeping always on the far side of the tree from the dogs, its long, ugly, wedge-shaped head constantly turning from side to side, in keen, listening observation. From Jess's contemptuous, half-hearted bark, Finn gathered that this singularly ugly creature was not one of the deadly people, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... not much more than large enough to admit a knife-blade; but as they watched it slowly opened, till it was an inch—a foot—across, and then all sound ceased, and they could look down for a short distance before the sides came together, the whole forming a long wedge-shaped hollow. ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... is a curious wedge-shaped boxwood fiddle, decorated with allegorical scenes, and dated 1578. Dr. Burney states that it has no more tone than a violin with a sordine. It is said to have been presented by Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Leicester, and bears both of their coats-of-arms ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... PLANTAR CUSHION on FIBRO-FATTY FROG.—Composed of a fibrous meshwork, in the interstices of which are lodged fine elastic and connective fibres and fat cells, this wedge-shaped body occupies the space between the two lateral cartilages, the extremity of the perforans tendon, and the horny frog. It offers for consideration an antero-superior and an infero-posterior face, a base, an apex, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... deep. The larger the head in circumference, caused by the prominent cheeks, the greater the quantity of muscle to hold the jaws together. The head should be of great depth from the occiput to the base of the lower jaw, and should not in any way be wedge-shaped, dome-shaped, or peaked. In circumference the skull should measure in front of the ears at least the height of the dog at the shoulders. The cheeks should be well rounded, extend sideways beyond the eyes, and be well furnished with muscle. ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... of one of the shallow water molds and Fig. 87 shows in detail the method of fastening the end to the side. It will be seen that the 1-in. turnbuckle rods pass through the ends of beams that bear against the outside of the mold. These tie rods have eyes at each end in which rods with wedge-shaped ends are inserted. The molds were erected on the trestle by a locomotive crane and were then lifted by the mold traveler, carried and lowered into place. The largest one of these molds with its iron ballast, weighed 40 tons. To remove a mold, after ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... itself. I was one day standing in the woods upon a flat stone, in what at certain seasons was the bed of a stream, when one of these weasels came undulating along and ran under the stone upon which I was standing. As I remained motionless, he thrust his wedge-shaped head, and turned it back above the stone as if half in mind to seize my foot; then he drew back, and presently went his way. These weasels often hunt in packs like the British stoat. When I was a boy, my father one day armed me with an old musket and ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... sharp-pointed, knife-like, jointed organs (maxillae) which seem to be exclusively used on all ordinary occasions in making perforations. The inner edges of these maxillae are nearly straight, and when brought together they form a sharp-pointed, wedge-shaped, plow-like instrument which makes a clean, narrow, longitudinal slit when it is inserted in the flower and shoved forward. The slits made by it are often not readily seen, because the elasticity of the tissues ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various



Words linked to "Wedge-shaped" :   unsubdivided, wedge, cuneiform, cuneal, simple



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