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Fragmentary   /frˈægməntˌɛri/   Listen
Fragmentary

adjective
1.
Consisting of small disconnected parts.  Synonym: fragmental.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Fragmentary" Quotes from Famous Books



... Mr. Beglar's contribution to Vol. IV of the Archaeological Survey Reports is a little, but very little, better than Mr. Carlleyle's disquisition on Agra in that volume. Sir A. Cunningham's observations in the first and twentieth volumes of the same series are of greater value, but are fragmentary and imperfect, and scarcely notice at all the city of Shahjahan. Fergusson's criticisms, so far as they go, are of permanent importance, though the scheme of his work did not allow him to treat in detail of any particular section. Guide-books by ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... from Nicholas— that many of the Jews ruin themselves owing to the need of giving such a feast, because he who omits it is not esteemed pious. As his source fails him for the period following on the banishment of Archelaus, the treatment becomes fragmentary, but at the same time more original and independent. An account of the various Jewish sects interrupts the chronicle of the court intrigues and popular risings. Josephus distinguishes here four sects, the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Zealots, but his account is mainly ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... E. Ellis, The Puritan Age (1888), a dry book but less given to special pleading, and Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (1880-1882), a series of essays with elaborate notes and bibliographies, presenting in a fragmentary way the conventional view of the period. Less frankly favorable to New England is J. A. Doyle, English Colonies in America: The Puritan Colonies, 2 vols. (1887), a work of value, but diffuse in style and often confused in treatment, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews

... to the proceedings. The Trust may have been destroyed, or the Trust may be hidden in some place of concealment inaccessible to discovery. Either way, it is, in my opinion, impossible to found any valid legal declaration on a knowledge of the document so fragmentary and so incomplete as the knowledge which you possess. If other lawyers differ from me on this point, by all means consult them. I have devoted money enough and time enough to the unfortunate attempt to assert your interests; and my connection with the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... new and marvelous births; the life-giving spirit of primal love broods here anew on the face of the waters. The former is more simple, clear, and like to nature in the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter, notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches nearer to the secret of the universe. For Conception can only comprise each object separately, but nothing in truth can ever exist separately and by itself; Feeling perceives all in all at one and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... I answered, "that I am so well familiar with Mr. Dannevig's adventures as to be quite competent to supplement his fragmentary statements. I shall be very happy ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... am free to say that since the distinguished Tournefort the French have remained to some extent inactive in this direction; they have produced almost nothing, unless we except some fragmentary mediocre or unimportant works. On the other hand, Linne in Sweden, Dilwillen in England, Haller in Switzerland, Jacquin in Austria, etc., have immortalized themselves by their own works, vastly extending the limit of our ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... discovered the polarization and interference of heat, the triple constitution of the solar ray, the identity of magnetism and electricity, the polar nature of chemical affinity, the optical polarities of crystals, and the interaction of magnetism and light. Since then the once meagre and fragmentary science of physics has become one of the grandest and richest departments of human thought; and the illustrious names of Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer, of Grove, Faraday, and Tyndall, may be fitly named beside those of the leading thinkers ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... therefore give this up as in vain, and try by some fragmentary sketches, scenes, and anecdotes, to let you know in some measure what manner of man my father was. Anecdotes, if true and alive, are always valuable; the man in the concrete, the totus quis comes out in them; and I know you too ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... very fine meetings; and then part of the time I am talking in between times, and how tired I am some of the time. Still I am standing with my race on the threshold of a new era, and though some be far past me in the learning of the schools, yet to-day, with my limited and fragmentary knowledge, I may help the race forward a little. Some of our people remind me of sheep without ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... hotel suite when they returned, sitting on the middle of his spinal column in a reclining chair, smoking a pipe, dressing the edge of his knife with a pocket-hone, and gazing lecherously at a young woman in the visiplate. She was an extremely well-designed young woman, in a rather fragmentary costume, and she was heaving her bosom at the invisible audience in anger, sorrow, scorn, ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... that when the American people received this land from the bountiful hand of Nature, it was endowed with a magnificent and all-pervading supply of valuable wild creatures. The pioneers and the early settlers were too busy even to take due note of that fact, or to comment upon it, save in very fragmentary ways. ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... Tremayne purposed to pay his debt to the Averys by the adoption of Frances Avery's child. But Barbara was rather dismayed when she heard that Lysken would not at first be able to talk to her cousin, since her English was of the most fragmentary description. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt

... pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the Esmeralda telegraphist—a fragmentary and interrupted message—had been properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have rendered an enormous service to Charles Gould. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... full of beginnings. Fragmentary landscapes were all about her. Like most southrons, she did not like to finish. There is an impatience of toil—of its duration at least—in the southern mind, which leaves it too frequently unperforming. This is a natural ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... number of fragmentary impressions of Alice strangely transfigured in bridal raiment. It seemed to make her sister downcast beyond any precedent. The bridesmaids and pages got rather jumbled in the aisle, and she had an ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... made New York's Fire Department great equally animates its commercial brother has been shown more than once, but never better than at the memorable fire in the Hotel Royal, which cost so many lives. No account of heroic life-saving at fires, even as fragmentary as this, could pass by the marvellous feat, or feats, of Sergeant (now Captain) John R. Vaughan on that February morning six years ago. The alarm rang in patrol station No. 3 at 3.20 o'clock on Sunday morning. Sergeant Vaughan, hastening to the fire with his men, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... aspects of African culture, we can speak at present only in a fragmentary way. Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided into two language zones: north of the fifth degree of north latitude is the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred groups of widely divergent languages; south of the line there is one minor language (Bushman-Hottentot), spoken by less than fifty ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... short irregular sections along the sides of the canyons, their fragmentary condition being due to interruptions caused by portions of the sides of the canyon walls being too steep for moraine matter to lie on, and to down-sweeping torrents and avalanches. The left lateral of the trunk may be traced ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... repeat, is certainly neither a classical nor a finished writer. He has no doubt gone out of fashion, because his style is pompous and diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary; because his reasoning lacks firmness and his erudition solidity. Still, no other German writer of note exercised the important indirect influence which was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude to Schelling and his philosophy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... inquire where to go; what to do she could settle when there. She tried to collect her thoughts. Alas! it was not so easy as collecting her luggage. For a long time she crouched on the fender and looked into the fire, seeing in it only fragmentary pictures of the last seven years—bits of scenery, great Cathedral interiors arousing mysterious yearnings, petty incidents of travel, moments with Sidney, drawing-room episodes, strange passionate scenes with herself as single performer, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... is not piecemeal [partial] and beggarly [fragmentary], like that which does penance for actual sins, nor is it uncertain like that. For it does not debate what is or is not sin, but hurls everything on a heap, and says: All in us is nothing but sin [affirms that, with respect to us, all is simply sin (and there is nothing ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther

... violence from intended victims. He was rarely combative. Fighting was not his special gift; he met misfortune with patient passivity Resistance he found a mistake. But for all this a certain sense of superiority was, never wanting in Nickie the Kid; the shabbiest clothes, a deplorable hat, fragmentary boots, shirtlessness, the most distressing situations all failed to wholly eliminate a touch of impudent dignity, a trace of rakish self-satisfaction which as a rule escaped the attention of his clients; but, here and there, a student of human nature found it ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... Lord. If we are not fully conscious of that which sustains our life, how can we live wisely and perform our duties? Whatever we see, movable or immovable, good or bad, it is all "That." We must not divide our conception of the universe; for in dividing it, we have only fragmentary knowledge and ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda

... Yet the guide is fragmentary, incomplete, and in no sense a bibliography. Its emphases vary according to my own indifferences and ignorance as well as according to my own sympathies and knowledge. It is strong on the character and ways of life of the ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... had to build up on rather fragmentary data, but it appears that Eugene fled as far as Pudberry Parva, and endeavoured to cool his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various

... of which he grew up was not of the kind we should choose to be the home of an artist. He ran the constant risk of becoming infected by that dangerously dissipated attitude of mind in which a person will taste of everything, as also by that condition of slackness resulting from the fragmentary knowledge of all things, which is so characteristic of University towns. His feelings were easily roused and but indifferently satisfied; wherever the boy turned he found himself surrounded by a wonderful ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... could tell where or how the "Righteous Army" might be found. The information doled out by the Japanese authorities was fragmentary, and was obviously and naturally framed in such a manner as to minimize and discredit the disturbances. It was admitted that the Korean volunteers had a day or two earlier destroyed a small railway station on the line to Fusan. We knew that a small ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... outer world. It bears witness to the unity of knowledge, and strives by the constructive criticism of the categories of science to render that unity explicit. Its function is, no doubt, valid and important, for it is evident that man cannot rest content with fragmentary knowledge. But still, it might be objected that it is premature at present to endeavour to formulate that unity. Physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences, while they necessarily presuppose the unity of knowledge, and attempt in their own way and in their own sphere to discover it, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... series of transverse curvilinear fractures, which affect the forms even of every minor ridge, and produce its principal ravines and boldest rocks, even where no distinctly excavated valleys exist. Thus, the Mont Vergi and the Aiguilles of Salouvre are only fragmentary remains of a range of horizontal beds, once continuous, but broken by this transverse system of curvilinear cleavage, and worn or weathered ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... closed hand there issued an entirely new sound. At first it was so faint and fragmentary that only two of us heard it. Then it became stronger and more continuous, and presently we were all gazing ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... is unseasonable, and almost culpable. On such a subject as the Philosophy of Protestantism—'satius erat silere, quam parcius, dicere.' Better were absolute silence, more respectful as regards the theme, less tantalizing as regards the reader, than a style of discussion so fragmentary ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... near Port Louis rise to a height of between two and three thousand feet; they consist of strata of basalt, obscurely separated from each other by firmly aggregated beds of fragmentary matter; and they are intersected by a few vertical dikes. The basalt in some parts abounds with large crystals of augite and olivine, and is generally compact. The interior of the island forms a plain, raised probably about a thousand feet above the level of the sea, and composed ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin

... his prowess at Waterloo, the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be perceived that he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken, beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety cart, in the rear ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... not been cleared as far as Erech, and so the boats could not enter that city. Here Sin-iddinam was ordered to do the work with the men at his disposal and complete it in three days. After that he was to go on with the work he had already been ordered to do. In another fragmentary letter the king orders the clearing away of the water-plants which had obstructed the course of the Euphrates between Ur and Larsa. One is reminded of the sudd ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... talked, though in a rather fragmentary and brief fashion, of Kingcombe and of the changes he found. He never by any chance mentioned any other place than Kingcombe, until Nathanael happened to ask him where Duke ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... 1851.—I have been reading, for six or seven hours without stopping the Pensees of Joubert. I felt at first a very strong attraction toward the book, and a deep interest in it, but I have already a good deal cooled down. These scattered and fragmentary thoughts, falling upon one without a pause, like drops of light, tire, not my head, but reasoning power. The merits of Joubert consist in the grace of the style, the vivacity or finesse of the criticisms, the charm of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... next few centuries, knowledge of Krishna remains in this fragmentary state. Nothing further is recorded and not until the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, crystallizes out between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. does a more detailed Krishna make his appearance.[4] By the end of this period, ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... imitation of the living alleviate the loss, while we demonstrate its magnitude. My funeral eulogy of Sir Alexander Ball must therefore he a narrative of his life; and this friend of mankind will be defrauded of honour in proportion as that narrative is deficient and fragmentary. It shall, however, be as complete as my information enables, and as prudence and a proper respect for the feelings of the living permit me to render it. His fame (I adopt the words of our elder writers) is so great throughout the world that he stands in no need of an encomium; and yet ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... the utmost, and put down that tankard for a moment. If this be yonder sun and this lesser crumb be the outermost one of our revolving system, and this the next within, and this the next, and so on; now if this be so tell me which of these fragmentary orbs is ours—which of all these crumbs from the hand of the primordial would be that we stand upon?" And I waited with an anxiety a light manner thinly hid, to ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... the overwhelming force of the Indians, extreme caution became necessary, and instead of advancing boldly, the soldiers sought advantageous ground. Seeing this, the Indians became convinced that there had been a division of General Carr's command, and that the company before them was a fragmentary part of the expedition; they therefore assumed the aggressive, charging us until we were compelled to retire to a ravine and act on the defensive. The attack was made with such caution that the soldiers ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... Zeke. He was the glass of fashion and the mould of form, but there was no indication in his smooth-shaven, wooden countenance of the comrade to whom Jewel had referred in her fragmentary letters. ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham

... fever, and captivity, and a great success in my profession was about to be accorded to me, but there was much work yet to be done. The rough material I had for a grand account of the closing of the campaign; but these fragmentary figures and notes must be wrought into narrative, and to avail myself of their full significance, I must lose no moment of application. I found that I was one of four correspondents on board, and ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... Russian village life, or which may be regarded as specially illustrative of Russian sentiment and humor those which the present chapter contains have been selected. Any information they may convey will necessarily be of a most fragmentary nature, but for all that it may be capable of producing a correct impression. A painter's rough notes and jottings are often more true to nature than the most finished picture into ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... start, their courtship lacked most of the hallmarks of that tender process. There were few endearments, fewer still of the half-told, half-guessed confidences which, by their very fragmentary nature only serve to add emphasis to a comprehension that can construct a living, vital intimacy out of such slight materials. Indeed, there was no especial effort at spiritual comprehension between them. Instead, their unsentimental wooing was a sort of amatory bargain ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... western system of physics. Your physics are without form and void; patchwork, constantly changing. There is no substantial foundation for any system of metaphysics. What you say or do in physics is fragmentary ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson

... He was no longer alone, for God was with him. The petition was full of devotion, tenderness and faith, and as he poured it forth his countenance beamed like that of an angel. When it was finished he began the sermon. The first few words were scarcely audible. The thoughts were disconnected and fragmentary. He suffered an unfamiliar and painful embarrassment, but struggled on, and his thoughts cleared themselves like a brook by flowing. Each effort resulted in a greater facility of utterance, and soon the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... intelligent criticism of his history, which produced on me a marked impression. The reviewer wrote: Bancroft falls into "that error so common with the graphic school of historians—the exaggerated estimate of manuscripts or fragmentary material at the expense of what is printed and permanent.... But a fault far more serious than this is one which Mr. Bancroft shared with his historical contemporaries, but in which he far exceeded any of them—an utter ignoring of the very meaning and significance of a quotation mark."[213] ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... "Do the best thou knowest today. Shrink not from frequent error in this gradual, fragmentary state. Follow thy light for as much as it will show thee; be faithful as far as thou canst, in hope that faith presently will lead to sight. Help others, without blaming their need of thy help. Love ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... hope to hear the bulk of the music for the theatre, as has been remarked, because of the worthlessness of the plays to which it is attached. Even King Arthur, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen and Dioclesian pieces are too fragmentary, disconnected, to be performed with any effect without scenery, costume, and some explanation in the way of dialogue. In King Arthur there are instrumental numbers to accompany action on the stage: without that action these numbers are meaningless. King Arthur was given at Birmingham ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman

... Nobilior in 189, it fell into insignificance. The foundation by Augustus of Nicopolis (q.v.), into which the remaining inhabitants were drafted, left the site desolate. In Byzantine times a new settlement took its place under the name of Arta (q.v.). Some fragmentary walls of large, well-dressed blocks near this latter town indicate the early ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... of ideas, which culminated in the stupendous revolution of 1789, and everywhere in Europe, and more specially in Germany, shattered and swept away the obsolete remnants of medievalism. The German Empire as such disappeared; only fragmentary States survived, among which Prussia alone showed any real power. France once again under Napoleon was fired with the conception of the universal imperium, and bore her victorious eagles to Italy, Egypt, Syria, Germany, and Spain, and even to the inhospitable plains of Russia, which ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... secular ambitions which promise support in return for their co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which approaches the undoing of the sin of a divided Christendom with the preliminary announcement that no separated body must be required to admit that it has been in the wrong. Human disregard of the divine method ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... and after the Resurrection. Of the remainder-by far the larger portion consists of several conversations which are hung upon miracles that seem to be related principally for the sake of these. The whole of the phenomena show us at once the fragmentary character of this Gospel as stamped upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... we had halted—the furze-cutter pointed to them with his bill-hook, and told us that what we now looked on was once one great rock, which he had seen riven in an instant by the lightning into the fragmentary form that it now presented. If we mounted the highest of these three masses, he declared that we might find out our own way to St. Cleer's Well by merely looking around us. We followed his directions. Towards the east, far away over the magnificent sweep of moorland, and on the slope of ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... the epochs of greatest overflow great marine formations were deposited over large areas of what is now dry land. These were followed as the land rose to sea level by extensive marsh and delta formations, and these in turn by scattered and fragmentary dry land deposits spread by rivers over their flood plains. In the marine formations are found the fossil remains of the sea-animals of the period; in the coast and delta formations are the remains of those which inhabited the marshes and forests of the coast regions; while ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... as this it is good to be brief. The poems printed in this book need no preliminary commendations from me or anyone else. The author has left us his own fragmentary but impressive Foreword; this, and his Poems, can speak for him, backed by the authority of his experience as an infantry soldier, and sustained by nobility and originality of style. All that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his poems; any superficial impressions of his personality, any ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen

... the entire system of Heraclitus is of course so fragmentary that we can only speak of this, as of many other points, with great caution. The same is true, although in a lesser degree, of the system of Anaxagoras. His nous, if we translate it by mind, is more comprehensive than Logos. We must not, however, suppose, that this ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... saw interwove with fragmentary things our garrulous friend had said, and with the trend of my ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... Hawthorne's romances that the interest centres in one strongly defined protagonist, to whom the other characters are accessory and subordinate,—perhaps we should rather say a ruling Idea, of which all the characters are fragmentary embodiments. They remind us of a symphony of Beethoven's, in which, though there be variety of parts, yet all are infused with the dominant motive, and heighten its impression by hints and far-away suggestions at the most unexpected moment. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... Queen," and he motioned for the obese beauty to hold the pencil. She did so, and then he stood up, and, while the cock-fight still went on, he read, with a fine Chicago fluency, what proved to be a proclamation. As will be seen, it was full of ellipses and was fragmentary in its character, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... which we possess about Athenian law, though comparatively fuller, is still fragmentary. The sources from which our knowledge is derived are chiefly ...
— Laws • Plato

... From the fragmentary description that had come her way, she at once recognised Mrs. Lee—the tall, straight figure in a gown of pale green linen, the dainty, regular features, and the crown of wonderful hair, radiating sunlit splendour, as she wore ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... unfortunately fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. We learn from Dr Howitt, for example, that a pirrauru is always a brother's wife or a wife's sister (they are usually the same), and the relation arises through the exchange by brothers of their ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... the aborigines of that continent, than any other portion of the polar regions. In fact, as long ago as 1804 a complete dictionary of the Greenland tongue was published by Otho Fabricius, the translation being in the Danish language. With the exception of a few fragmentary vocabularies, this is the only work upon which the traveller or the student of the languages of the Polar regions ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... of morning quenched the rushlight, and Janet's thoughts became more and more fragmentary and confused. She was every moment slipping off the level on which she lay thinking, down, down into some depth from which she tried to rise again with a start. Slumber was stealing over her weary brain: that uneasy slumber which is only better than ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... if it is a legitimate and reasonable one to apply, we shall be able to understand why classical Greek literature was the basis of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery, however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of spiritual 'Re-birth', and how its further and further exploration may be still a task worth men's spending their lives upon and capable ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... on the right is a sacristy occupying a small structure, and to the westward is a fragmentary edifice known as the Basse OEuvre,—one of the oldest existing buildings in France; a Romano-Byzantine work, variously stated as of the sixth to eighth century and forming a portion of the original church which occupied the ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... properly. Therefore, it is with justice that the most thoughtful of those who are concerned in these inquiries insist continually upon the imperfection of the geological record; for, I repeat, it is absolutely necessary, from the nature of things, that that record should be of the most fragmentary and imperfect character. Unfortunately this circumstance has been constantly forgotten. Men of science, like young colts in a fresh pasture, are apt to be exhilarated on being turned into a new field of inquiry, to go ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... referred to are set in CAPITALS. Other references are printed in "lower case," or "small," type. Because of the large number of fragmentary quotations made from speeches and books, no titles are indexed, but all such material will be found indexed under the name ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... it satirizes, the comedy often becomes unintelligible save to scholars. Hence the utter valuelessness to us of to-day of the comedies of Aristophanes as works of wit. Their only value to-day is as fragmentary records of Greek manners. The comedy is thus writ not for all times, but only for a time; while "Taras Bulba," though generations come and generations go, will ever appeal unto men as a thing of imperishable beauty. But while "The Revisor" ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... other time; and the Greek language, much as it afterwards gained in depth and capacity of expressing abstract thought, has never again the same freshness, as though steeped in dew and morning sunlight. Sappho alone, that unique instance of literature where from a few hundred fragmentary lines we know certainly that we are in face of one of the great poets of the world, expressed the passion of love in a way which makes the language of all other poets grow pallid: /ad quod cum iungerent purpuras suas, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... a Prussian soldier and statesman, who died in 1853, after doing enough to convince men since that the revolution of 1848 produced no finer mind. He left among other things two or three volumes of short fragmentary pieces on politics, religion, literature, and art. They are intelligent and elevated, but contain hardly anything to our point to-night, unless it be this,—that what is called Stupidity springs not at all from mere want of understanding, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... the human mind, when it perceives things after the common order of nature, has not an adequate but only a confused and fragmentary knowledge of itself, of its own body, and of external bodies. For the mind does not know itself, except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of body (II. xxiii.). It only perceives its own body (II. xix.) through the ideas of the modifications ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... the one great opportunity of her life. He gave but slight and vague consideration to the methods by which he would achieve the renown which would overshadow Laura's life; but, having resolutely adopted the purpose with a few tragic gestures and some obscure fragmentary utterances, he felt consoled and was able to obtain a ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... to European scholars, until quite recently, in a fragmentary condition, frequently disfigured by errors of transcription. Since the French occupation of Algiers, however, two or three perfect copies have been discovered, one of which, now in the Imperial Library at Paris, bears the autograph of Ibn Djozay. The publications of the Societe ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society. There would be no time for a revolution—there would be an eruption, and fragmentary Judges, Courts and their minions would fly upward athwart the sky, like stones and balls of flame driven from the vomiting crater of a furious volcano! No. This is a right like the right of breathing. This is a liberty that broods upon us like the atmosphere. The grand ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher

... O man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil! Primal pioneer of pliocene formation, Hid in lowest drifts below the ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... beauty inevitably awaken love, either as respect or tenderness; the lovable, loveliness? And at the same time the love itself such loveliness awakens. Love far beyond particular cases or persons, fitting all noble things, real and imaginary, complex or fragmentary. Love ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... the Third Act, and ran over those fragmentary passages which were clearly enough written and expressed to be intelligible to the ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins

... earliest ages of the world has been carried along the course of time, and spread by the diverging streams of population over the whole surface of the globe. The facts are, as was to be expected, always more or less changed, and often, indeed, fragmentary. Still, like old coins, which retain traces of their original effigies and inscriptions, these traditions possess a high historic value. Their remarkable correspondence with the statements of the Bible confirms our faith in its divinity; and their being common to nations ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie

... primitive in spirit as in substance; apart from it a connected picture of the Apostolic Age would be impossible. With it, the Pauline Epistles are of priceless historical value; without it, they would remain bafflingly fragmentary and incomplete, often even ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... supposed vessel here. To add to her perplexity, she could not be positive, now that it came to a real nautical query, whether the craft of Neigh's friends had one mast or two, for she had caught but a fragmentary view of the topsail ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... Carrying net.—One fragmentary net (139535a), the original size of which cannot be determined, is similar to the hairnets in construction, but probably was used for carrying. The bag is tied with the same element square knot; the mesh size is approximately 2.4 cm. Both ends of this net, however, ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey

... of sales, net income, or financial results are available, the fragmentary records make it obvious that the business continued to flourish beyond World War I, and long after the passage of the first Food and Drug Act—in 1906. The almanacs were still printed as recently as 1938; while ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw

... description, for I cannot understand how any one who compares together the description of the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad and that of the Shield of Hercules in the fragmentary form in which we have it, can doubt for a moment that both descriptions came from the same hand. (The theory that Hesiod composed the latter poem can scarcely be entertained by any scholar.) As I long since ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... at the threshold by Mart, whose face was gaunt and white and worn, and who no sooner caught sight of the once revered features of the would-be labor leader than he fell upon them with his fists and fragmentary malediction. Mart battered and thumped, while Elmendorf backed and protested. It was a policeman, one of that body whom ever since '86 Elmendorf had loved to designate as "blood-hounds of the rich man's laws," who lifted Mart off his prostrate ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King

... referred to in the descent of the Unicau, consisted of antique, coarse pottery, scoria and ashes, together with a metallic alloy of a whitish hue, but capable of being cut partially with a knife. There were also deposites of bones, but so decayed and fragmentary as to make it impossible to determine their specific character. All these were, geologically, beneath the various strata of sand, loam and vegetable mould, supporting the heavy primitive forest of that valley. At Little Rock, in the valley of the Arkansas, vestiges of art have recently been found ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft

... nothing is simpler than to create for oneself the idea of a human being, a figure and a character, from a series of glimpses and anecdotes. Creation of this kind we practise every day; we are continually piecing together our fragmentary evidence about the people around us and moulding their images in thought. It is the way in which we make our world; partially, imperfectly, very much at haphazard, but still perpetually, everybody deals with his experience ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... fragmentary nature of most latent prints it is not possible to derive a classification which makes a file search practicable. A latent impression may be identified, however, by comparison with the prints of a ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation

... still. She knew that he was trying to piece together his fragmentary thoughts and impressions, seeking to bridge over from last night to to-day. So she talked softly with him, soothing him alike with the tenderness of her voice and the pressure and gentle stroke of her hand upon his hand and arm. He had ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... protocols were secured with great difficulty in fragmentary form, and were translated into Russian in December, 1901. It is almost impossible to get at the secret depositories again where they are hidden, and therefore they cannot be reinforced by definite information as to the place, day, month, year, where ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein

... his short 'Chroniques' and 'Nouvelles,' and the posthumous 'Lamiel' which he probably intended to destroy, Stendhal has left four stories which deserve detailed consideration: 'Armance,' 'Le Rouge et Le Noir,' 'La Chartreuse de Parme,' and the fragmentary ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... language but the order of a quotation must have its due weight, and we have no right to dismember a passage and, discovering fragmentary parallels in various parts of the Gospels, to assert that it is compiled from them and not derived, as it stands, from another source. As an illustration, let us for a moment suppose the 'Gospel according to Luke' to have been lost, like the 'Gospel according to the Hebrews' and so many others. ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels

... The fragmentary and distorted form in which the letter ascribed to Verrazzano, appeared in the collection of Ramusio, and was thence universally admitted into history, rendered it necessary that the letter should be here given complete, ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy

... little-read Vindication of the Rights of Women, careless and fragmentary as it is, and by no means so startling to us as to her contemporaries, shows Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of genuine insight, who saw the questions of woman's social condition in their essential bearings. Her intuitions need little modification, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... will never know what these two great men thought of one another. Hawthorne has left some fragmentary sentences concerning Emerson, such as, "that everlasting rejecter of all that is, and seeker for he knows not what," and "Emerson the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloud-land in vain search for something real;" but he likes ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... Glenarvan, "there is nothing in the fragmentary words in the document that could apply ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... and loose knots which the ingenious Reader may easily untie." These remarks, however, as also Flecknoe's "Of the Author's Idea of a Character" (Enigmaticall Characters, 1658) and Ralph Johnson's "rules" for character-writing in A Scholar's Guide from the Accidence to the University (1665), are fragmentary and oblique. Nor do either of the two English translations of Theophrastus before Gally—the one a rendering of La Bruyere's French version,[1] and the other, Eustace Budgell's The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1714)—touch ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally

... The rude and fragmentary annals of the frontier are filled with the deeds of men, of whom Mansker can be taken as a type. He was a wonderful marksman and woodsman, and was afterwards made a colonel of the frontier militia, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... long February nights with the ewes in labour, looking out from the shelter into the flashing stars, he knew he did not belong to himself. He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the dark heaven travelling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... and the Corpus Hermeticum wants relief, he will find it, perhaps, best in the writings of a gentle old Epicurean who lived at Oenoanda in Cappadocia about A. D. 200. His name was Diogenes.[169:1] His works are preserved, in a fragmentary state, not on papyrus or parchment, but on the wall of a large portico where he engraved them for passers-by to read. He lived in a world of superstition and foolish terror, and he wrote up the great doctrines of Epicurus for the ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... embraces. Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see them dimly, although they could not see her. She could not help remarking that these strolling couples were strangely lacking in sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but fragmentary, disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer, tremulous note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest, kindliest shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a quick movement, and a little ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber

... fireworks; indescribable the mingled tumult that roars heavenwards. Girls linked by the half-dozen arm-in-arm leap along with shrieks like grotesque maenads; a rougher horseplay finds favour among the youths, occasionally leading to fisticuffs. Thick voices bellow in fragmentary chorus; from every side comes the yell, the cat-call, the ear-rending whistle; and as the bass, the never-ceasing accompaniment, sounds the myriad-footed tramp, tramp along the wooden flooring. A ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... than the pipe were several flat stones standing at various angles. When these were removed there were found fragmentary remains of at least three adults, lying in confusion, as if only the folded dismembered skeletons had been placed here. They lay on a floor of slabs which, in turn, ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... in a very modified fashion, and present him as an example in a very limited degree. His dependence upon divine power was rude, and divorced from elevation of character and morality, but howsoever imperfect, fragmentary, and I might almost say to our more trained eyes, grotesque, it looks, yet there was a reality in it; and when the man was faithless to his vow, and allowed the crafty harlot's scissors to shear from his head the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... not much to say. Whatever interest they felt in each other was guarded, taciturn. When they talked it was in disjointed sentences on fragmentary subjects. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... text, for his own deciphering. The MS. is in keeping with the whole story, and may be looked upon as its appropriate emblem. The story has been brought to light by chance, and has been rendered intelligible by close study and interpretation of fragmentary and widely separated facts, capable of being read only by one conversant with the text of human affairs, and who has the patience to grope through the trackless intervals of time, and the skill to supply the lost words and syllables of history by careful ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... lay." Just why Henderson and his associates did not act sooner upon the reports brought back by the hunters—Boone and Scaggs and Callaway, who accompanied Boone in 1764 in the interest of the land company "is not known; but in all probability the fragmentary nature of these reports, however glowing and enthusiastic, was sufficient cause for the delay of five years before the land company, through the agency of Boone and Findlay, succeeded in having a thorough exploration inside of the Kentucky ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... policy towards the Huguenots, read, above all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write Telemaque. It meets us in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise, bears about it the air of a martyr's cell. We find it again explicitly in the Oceana of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... their turn above the waters, to afford materials for the study of whatever race of intelligent beings may then have succeeded us. These considerations must lead us to the conclusion, that our knowledge of the whole series of the former inhabitants of the earth is necessarily most imperfect and fragmentary,—as much so as our knowledge of the present organic world would be, were we forced to make our collections and observations only in spots equally limited in area and in number with those actually laid open for the collection of fossils. Now, the hypothesis of Professor Forbes is essentially ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... together, and making part illustrate part under the light of the comment and illumination which it had received before,—and so, when we read it with him for the fourth and last time, it was no longer a string of beads,—a set of separate verses,—Jewish, antiquated, and fragmentary,—but one vivid illustration of the "peace which passeth all understanding" into which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... the war she had seen the Browns, as part of a preconceived plan, in cohesive rear-guard resistance, with every detail of personal bravery a utilized factor of organized purpose. Now she saw defence, inchoate and fragmentary, each part acting for itself, all deeds of personal bravery lost in a swirl of disorganization. That was the pity of it, the helplessness of engineers and of levers when the machine was broken; the warning of it to those who ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... unable to sew because of fading eyesight. She married in 1879 and led a long and contented married life until the recent death of her husband. She lives with her husband's nephew and ekes out a living by fragmentary jobs. She has a good memory and a clear ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration

... are, however, so very fragmentary, and the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now have nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the remains of the newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively abundant keramic ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... "Summer Idyl," is delicious, particularly in the chances it gives the flautist. There is a fragmentary cantilena which would make the fortune of a comic opera. The third number, "In October," is particularly welcome in our music, which is strangely and sadly lacking in humor. There is fascinating wit throughout this harvest revel. "The Shepherdess' Song" ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... tall Frenchman, bearing in the hollow of each arm a child who clasped a bundle to its breast. His eyes grew brighter at sight of Necia, and he broke into a flood of patois; they fairly bombarded each other with quick questions and fragmentary answers till she remembered her companion, who had fallen back a pace and was studying the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... events. But the Venetian archives possess also a long series of continuous Reports, which place us, as it were, in the very midst of the courts, the capitals, and the daily course of public business. For the sixteenth century they are only preserved in a very fragmentary state as regards England; for the seventeenth they lie before us, with gaps no doubt here and there, yet in much greater completeness. Even in the first volume they have been useful to me for Mary Tudor's reign and the end of Elizabeth's; in the later ones, not only for ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... Fragmentary illustrations of either would but dimly shadow forth, instead of clearly elucidating, what is here meant in the recollection of those who can still recall this Reading of "Doctor Marigold" to their remembrance. Those who never heard it as it actually ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... them—before a blazing log fire, squatting on their heels in the comfortable fashion of the outdoors man the world over. Their talk was fragmentary. None gave any sign of alertness toward ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... regret the introduction of such passages from the psychopathology of hysteria, which, because of their fragmentary representation and of being torn from all connection with the subject, cannot have a very enlightening influence. If these passages are capable of throwing light upon the intimate relations between the dream and the psychoneuroses, they have served the purpose for which ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... of the place is a couple of very ancient towers, brownish-yellow in hue, and mantled in scarlet Virginia-creeper. One of these towers, reputed to be of Saracenic origin, is isolated, and is only the more effective; the other is incorporated in the house, which is delightfully fragmentary and irregular. It had got to be late by this time, and the lonely castel looked crepuscular and mysterious. An old housekeeper was sent for, who showed me the rambling interior; and then the young man took me into a dim old drawing-room, which had no less than four ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... are cut short—as I hold, spoiled—by circular and triangular forms of rose and trefoil resting on them as such forms never rest in Nature; and the whole, though beautiful, is only half beautiful. It is fragmentary, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... the bell rang she heard a conversation on the pier, which removed the last shade of doubt from her mind, if any had existed, that she was Charles Stow's widow. The sentences were but fragmentary, but she could easily ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... are few and rapidly made; but they faithfully portray the great features of the case, and present a true and living picture to the mind of every thoughtful man. The jealousies, the rivalries, the antipathies of the sections; the foreign intrigues and eventual foreign domination among our fragmentary governments; the large standing armies, and the competing naval forces; and finally, 'the endless war and numberless miseries' which will inevitably result—all these mighty evils will not only afflict our own unhappy country, but 'peace will be exiled from the world.' The interests ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... the imagination at once so quick and profound, coming without study, given at a glance. Therefore by far the greatest and most influential feature of this view from Bright Angel or any other of the canon views is the opposite wall. Of the one beneath our feet we see only fragmentary sections in cirques and amphitheaters and on the sides of the outjutting promontories between them, while the other, though far distant, is beheld in all its glory of color and noble proportions—the one supreme beauty and wonder to which the eye is ever turning. For ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir

... little book in which I shall give everything and everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my heart."[23] He then set to work at last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these documents are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he passes in review every phase of history, leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... fitful, and fragmentary; intimate lover's talk, interspersed with luminous pauses, that were but hidden channels of speech; till Quita felt the walls within walls giving way under her 'magic,' and knew that she had reached the shy, inmost heart of the man ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... meeting talented actresses—there were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would "mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced. She took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner party; and it was seldom ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... occasionally with Phoenician ones, and on Jewish writers having noted the occasions in Jewish histories. Scripture and Josephus alone furnish our materials for the period now under consideration, and the materials are scanty, fragmentary, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... Literature offers us a picture of life to which there is a key, and by some analogy it suggests explanations of real life. It is of far more value to be true to the principles of life than to the outer facts. The outer facts are fragmentary and uncertain, mere passing suggestions, signs in the darkness. The principles of life are a clew of thread which may guide the human judgment through many dark and difficult places. It is to these that the artistic ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... Recluse, thus planned, only the second (the Excursion, published in 1814) has been completed. Of the other two there exists only the first book of the first, and the plan of the third. The Recluse will remain in fragmentary greatness, a poetical Cathedral ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... he still kept his eyes turned involuntarily towards the cabinet, and at last he approached it, and looked within the mimic portal, still endeavoring to recollect what it was that he had heard or dreamed about it,—what half obliterated remembrance from childhood, what fragmentary last night's dream it was, that thus haunted him. It must have been some association of one or the other nature that led him to press his finger on one particular square of the mosaic pavement; and as he did so, the thin plate of polished marble slipt aside. ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Richard's child, Richard's friend, in the deft interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole plausible fabric. She knew that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings, fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the stranger from ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... either of them speak again till the music ceased. A vaudeville turn followed. A disgustingly clad, bewigged soubrette murdered a rag time ditty in a rasping soprano, displaying enough gold in her teeth to "salt" a barren claim. No one gave her heed. The lilt of the orchestra elicited a fragmentary chorus from the audience. For the rest the people pursued the prescribed purpose of these intervals in ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... attacking is also an element of obscurity. Many things in a controversy might seem relevant, if we knew to what they were intended to refer. But no conjecture will enable us to supply what Plato has not told us; or to explain, from our fragmentary knowledge of them, the relation in which his doctrine stood to the Eleatic Being or the Megarian good, or to the theories of Aristippus or Antisthenes respecting pleasure. Nor are we able to say how far Plato in the Philebus conceives the finite and infinite ...
— Philebus • Plato

... into service of his philosophy. His earliest philosophical work (rediscovered (1862) in translated Dutch manuscript) was a Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being. It is a fragmentary, uneven work, chiefly valuable for the insight it gives into the workings and development of Spinoza's mind. The Ethics, in the completed form in which we have it (no manuscript of it is extant) has ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... twig, bush, spray, sprig; runner; leaf, leaflet; stump; component part &c. 56; sarmentum[obs3]. compartment; department &c. (class) 75; county &c. (region) 181. V. part, divide, break &c. (disjoin) 44; partition &c. (apportion) 786. Adj. fractional, fragmentary; sectional, aliquot; divided &c. v.; in compartments, multifid[obs3]; disconnected; partial. Adv. partly, in part, partially; piecemeal, part by part; by installments, by snatches, by inches, by driblets; bit by bit, inch by inch, foot ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... had caught that fragmentary warning from one of the coyotes. What they sought was very close, it was right down there. Both animals were in ambush, awaiting orders. And what they found was familiar, another confirmation that the fugitive was Terran, not native ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton

... more certain ground in our next and last chapter of Viking exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century, and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland settlements of the western ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... closed with a bang, and Agatha was left alone endeavouring to analyse her sensations during her interview with Wyllard, which was difficult, for they had been confused and fragmentary. She had certainly been angry with him, but the cause for this was much less apparent, though there were one or two half-sufficient explanations. For one thing, it was almost intolerable to feel that he had evidently taken it for granted that the greater security she would enjoy ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... is the author, not merely of the "Maximes," but of a second book which is much less often read. This is his "Memoires," a very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... press, and being incapacitated for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes, memoranda, &c., and requested me to fashion them into some shape more fitting for the general eye. This, owing to the fragmentary and disjointed state of his manuscripts, I have felt wholly unable to do; yet being unwilling that the reader should be deprived of such parts of his lucubrations as seemed more finished, and not well discerning how to segregate these ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... Floracita was so continually whirling round in fragmentary dances, that he often told her she rested on her feet less than a humming-bird. But after he was gone, she remained very still from morning till night. When Madame spoke to her of the necessity of giving dancing-lessons, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... literature is proceeding as fast as able and devoted workers can overtake it. Those who know the subject best declare that no complete history of Babylonian religion can yet be written. The texts now in our possession embody many documents of much more remote age, yet the information is as yet too fragmentary and often of too doubtful interpretation, while the proportion it bears to the whole of Babylonian life is too little known to supply a solid foundation for history. With this caution we proceed to state the results which are considered likely to prove well founded. As we saw, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... the necessity of the divine nature; so that whatsoever he deems to be hurtful and evil, and whatsoever, accordingly, seems to him impious, horrible, unjust, and base, assumes that appearance owing to his own disordered, fragmentary, and confused view of the universe. Wherefore he strives before all things to conceive things as they really are, and to remove the hindrances to true knowledge, such as are hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride, and similar emotions, which I have mentioned above. Thus he endeavours, as ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... rather," he says, "consider Shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged AS UTTERLY PERFECT ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... grassy mounds to the door, which stood open that the Saturday sun might drive out the damp vapors of the week. She went in and saw whitewashed walls; thick round pillars between the nave and aisles; deep-sunken windows dim with fragmentary pieces of colored glass, and all more or less out of the perpendicular; a worm-eaten oak-screen separating the chancel and a solemn enclosure, erst a chapel, now the Fairfax pew; a loft where the choir sat in front for divine service, with fiddle and bassoon, and the school-children sat behind, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr



Words linked to "Fragmentary" :   fragmental, fractional, fragment



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