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Gradation   /greɪdˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Gradation

noun
1.
Relative position in a graded series.  Synonym: step.  "Subtle gradations in color" , "Keep in step with the fashions"
2.
A degree of ablaut.  Synonym: grade.
3.
The act of arranging in grades.  Synonym: graduation.



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"Gradation" Quotes from Famous Books



... tribunes, and had a seat in the military councils, and his office was very lucrative. To his charge was intrusted the eagle of the legion. [Footnote: Liv. xxv. 5; Caes. B.C., vi. 6.] As the centurion could rise from the ranks, and rose by regular gradation through the different maniples of the Hastati, Principes, and Triarii, there was great inducement held out to the soldiers. In the Roman legion it would seem that there was a regular gradation of rank although there were but ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... distinct rays proceeding from the sun, but they were shorter than on the evening of the 3d. These are caused by the tops of the great cumuli of the storm, when sunk below the horizon, intercepting the sun's rays, which still shine on the upper atmosphere. The gradation was very marked, and accorded with the different distances of the central vortex on the 3d and 4th—although, on the 4th, the nearest distance must have been over four hundred miles to the southern boundary ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett

... throughout the whole visible world, an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that Reason alone countervails fill the ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... best describe it, though very inadequately, as a sudden realisation of the appalling greatness of the issues of living. I avoid saying "life and death" deliberately, for Death was nowhere in the picture. I was confronted in an instant, and without any preparation, or gradation of emotion, not only with the immanence but with the ineffable greatness of that whole of which I was a part. Though it may be a little difficult to make the distinction clear, this feeling had nothing to do with the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... governments and individuals has a corresponding ethical gradation: the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not extinguishing but harmonizing the passions, and training them in virtue; in the timocracy and the timocratic man the constitution, whether of the State or of the ...
— The Republic • Plato

... process of digestion would necessitate such absolute torpor of the brain and spinal cord as certainly would be quite incompatible with the exigencies of civilized life. There is a certain alternation between the periods of activity of the two systems, but this varies in infinite gradation; from the digestive torpor of the savage, analogous to that of ruminating animals, up to the unconscious digestion of healthy men of temperate habits and marked intellectual and physical activity, to whom all hours of the day are nearly equally suitable ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... grew thoroughly disgusted with himself, then heartily ashamed. Were it possible for me to give every finest shade and gradation of the change he underwent, there would be still an unrepresented mystery which I had not compassed. But were my analysis correct as fact itself, and my showing of it as exact as words could make it, never a man on whom some such change had not at least begun to pass, would find in it any revelation. ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... Diadumenia'nus, whom he took as partner in the empire. 25. Macri'nus was fifty-three years old when he entered upon the government. He was of obscure parentage; some say by birth a Moor, who, by the mere gradation of office, being made first prefect of the praetorian bands, was now, by treason and accident, called ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... external cause leading to the appearance of one of these melodies is found in the poem chosen for text. Whatever Schubert read, if it interested him, immediately called up within him a melodic form. These melodies not only differ from one another by degrees of indescribably delicate gradation, but each as it comes proves itself adapted to the text which gave it birth. These lovely melodies, moreover, are supported by pianoforte accompaniments which at times rise to a co-ordinate rank ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... considerations urged in favor of the measure referred to are that in almost all the land districts, and particularly in those in which the lands have been long surveyed and exposed to sale, there are still remaining numerous and large tracts of every gradation of value, from the Government price downward; that these lands will not be purchased at the Government price so long as better can be conveniently obtained for the same amount; that there are large tracts which even the improvements of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Martin van Buren • Martin van Buren

... morning call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an apple with a worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace a regular gradation between these two extremes. In cities where the evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors, where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the interchange of civilities. A good deal, which in colder regions is ascribed to mean ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... constitute this "some such state" that may be denominated unsoundness; yet I feel highly satisfied with the force and precision by which it is expressed in the words "whatever degree," which if a scale were constructed on which imbecility might be estimated, would imply the ultimate gradation; and whenever any subject can be regulated by definite quantity, expressed in numbers, it conveys the most certain information. Your Lordship may however judge of the surprize and disappointment I felt when I arrived at the following sentence in the same ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam

... phaenomena of hybridisation which are exhibited by many species when crossed with other species. On the other hand, not only is it not proved that all species give rise to hybrids infertile inter se, but there is much reason to believe that, in crossing, species exhibit every gradation from ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... was kindly and delicately offered as a means of employment and support to himself and of pecuniary relief to his parents, as a stepping-stone to fortune; while the romance with which his disposition was tinged, served to picture to his prophetic vision, scenes of official gradation and pre-eminence. How often do young men of similar temperament indulge in the same enticing speculations, and allow themselves to be carried away by the blissful creations of a fertile fancy; alas! only to awake from the intoxication of their delightful dream, to realize the pangs of ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro

... in the darkness, ignorant of what was going to happen. He felt her hand clasping his. Without perceiving any gradation, he lost all consciousness of his body; he was no longer able to feel his limbs or internal organs. His mind remained active and alert. Nothing particular appeared to be ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... With a bit of charcoal some Raphael draws a face with five lines, and some photographer snaps a camera at the same face. Which would any sane man choose as the best work of art? The five-line face, of course. Why? Is the work of the camera unreal? Is it not more accurate in drawing, more subtle in gradation than the less mechanical picture? To be sure. What, then, makes the superiority of the few lines of our Raphael? That which makes the superiority of all noble art—its truth,, not on a low, but on a high, plane: its power of interpreting. See!" he said, fairly aglow with excitement. ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... on the whole, our system of gradation is juster than the English system, but I think we are going to an extreme at both ends. And it must be borne in mind that our actual taxation of high incomes is not even measured by the rates fixed in the House Bill, because ...
— Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation • Otto H. Kahn

... of treatment, and on it, therefore, I propose to draw for the materials of the present course. It will be best to begin with the few simple facts regarding light which were known to the ancients, and to pass from them, in historic gradation, to the more abstruse ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... fundamental unity. Moreover, the investigations of the last three-quarters of a century have proved, they tell us, that similar inquiries, carried out through all the different kinds of animals which are met with in nature, will lead us, not in one straight series, but by many roads, step by step, gradation by gradation, from man, at the summit, to specks of animated jelly at the bottom of the series. So that the idea of Leibnitz, and of Bonnet, that animals form a great scale of being, in which there are a series of gradations from the most complicated form to the lowest and simplest; that ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... of hardness in the hardest metal, and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs Clennam's demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little Dorrit, there was a fine gradation. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... of his first volume he states "that we can descend by almost imperceptible degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—from the most highly organized animal to the most entirely inorganic substance. We will recognize this gradation as the great work of nature; and we will observe it not only as regards size and form, but also in respect of movements and in the successive ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... by following a student through the several departments. After the preliminary examination a student who is to take the regular course of study enters the initiatory room. Here he begins with the rudiments of bookkeeping, the study which marks his gradation. The time not given to the practice of writing, and to recitations in other subjects, is devoted to the study of accounts. He is required, first, to write up in "skeleton" form—that is, to place the dates and amounts of the several transactions under the proper ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... consistent. Mandeville puts the case of a man who gets drunk in an alehouse; and says it is a publick benefit, because so much money is got by it to the publick. But it must be considered, that all the good gained by this, through the gradation of alehouse-keeper, brewer, maltster, and farmer, is overbalanced by the evil caused to the man and his family by his getting drunk[854]. This is the way to try what is vicious, by ascertaining whether more evil than ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... each other, though at the same time resembling. Now if this be true of different colours, it must be no less so of the different shades of the same colour, that each of them produces a distinct idea, independent of the rest. For if this should be denied, it is possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it; and if you will not allow any of the means to be different, you cannot without absurdity deny the extremes to be the same. Suppose therefore a person to ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... pictures, heretofore noticed at large in this Magazine, called 'The Voyage of Life,' representing Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age; 'Angels ministering to Christ in the Wilderness,' a picture that has an horizon, and an aerial gradation toward the zenith, which alone, to say nothing of the figures, and the composition itself as a study, would richly repay a visit; 'The Past and the Present,' two most effective scenes, especially the second, which is overflowing with the mingled graces of poetry and art; a glorious ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... window of like colours, enclosed within a pointed arch. The exterior view of this portal is very fine, and Messrs. Brayley and Britton place it next to the east end, (which is hardly of later date than 1135,) in gradation of style, and refer to it as "an elegant specimen of the time of King John, or the early part of the reign of Henry the Third."[6] Dr. Milner describes this portal as "one of the first specimens of a canopy over a pointed arch, which afterwards became ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various

... is the highest praise that could be given to a poet, and the rarest. Browning's women are not perhaps as various as his men; but from Ottima to Pompilia (from the "great white queen, magnificent in sin," to the "lily of a maiden, white with intact leaf") what a range and gradation of character! These are the two extremes; between them, as earth lies between heaven and hell, are stationed all the others, from the faint and delicate dawn in Pauline, Michal and Palma, through Pippa and Mildred and Colombe and Constance and the Queen, to ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... servants, who do washing at the river two or three times a month as part of their family-service—are apt to get so far down. The experienced professionals and early risers secure the best places and choice of rocks; and among the hundreds at work you can discern something like a physical gradation. At the next bridge the women look better, stronger; more young faces appear; and the further you follow the river-course towards the Jardin des Plantes, the more the appearance of the blanchisseuses improves,—so that within the space of a mile you can see well ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... says:[202] "In the distant future I see open fields for {189} far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." It may not be amiss then to glance slightly at the question, so much disputed, concerning the origin of ethical conceptions and its bearing on the theory of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... although individual electors may have very different views as to the relative merits of a number of candidates for any office, still the expression of the degree of favour in which the candidates are held by the whole body of electors will be the same if each elector be assumed to have a uniform gradation of preference. Suppose that there are ten candidates, and it is required to place them in order of general favour. Each elector should be required to place the whole ten in the order of his preference, ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth

... the greatest in an other. Thus, the heaviest wood is less heavy than the lightest of the metals; and the least valuable of the metals is perhaps of more value than the choicest wood. (2.) The comparative degree may increase upon itself, and be repeated to show the gradation. Thus, a man may ascend into the air with a balloon, and rise higher, and higher, and higher, and higher, till he is out of sight. This is no uncommon form of expression, and the intension is from ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... course, its gleam. It was not by any means dull, however, either in colour or substance, and was of infinite hardness and fineness of texture. The surface was almost that of a jewel. The colour grew lighter as it rose, with gradation so fine as to be imperceptible, changing to a fine yellow almost of the colour of "mandarin" china. It was quite unlike anything I had ever seen, and did not resemble any stone or gem that I knew. I took it to be some unique mother-stone, or matrix ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... relation is that of Master and Man! How it pervades the world; ascending from the lowest gradation of planter and slave through the states of master and servant, landlord and labourer, manufacturer and artisan, till it comes to the higher degrees of rule which one cultivated man has to exercise over another in the performance of the greatest ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps

... long and superb chain of the Pyrenees which forms the embattled isthmus of the peninsula, in the centre of those blue pyramids, covered in gradation with snow, forests, and downs, there opens a narrow defile, a path cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... sergeants, [Footnote: I have thought it best to give the English titles, which of course have only a general correspondence with the Greek Polemarch, Lochagus, etc.] who in their turn had to see that the required movement was executed by the men under their command: for such was the regular gradation of authority and responsibility in the Spartan army. Thanks to this perfect organization, in a very few minutes every man was in his place and ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... In musical terminology every gradation of volume in sound, from the faintest to the loudest, enters into the category of Intensity. One of the accepted rules of the arte del bel canto was, that every sustained tone should be coloured by some graduation of intensity. Thus the ability to augment and diminish the volume ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... "levitation" of the axe at one end of a period of near three thousand years to the "levitation" of Sludge & Co. at the other end, there is a complete continuity of the miraculous, with every gradation, from the childish to the stupendous, from the gratification of a caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. There is no drawing a line in the series that might be set out of plausibly attested cases of spiritual intervention. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... wise and good men who have lived before us. It was their wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported. In one of the most fortunate periods of our history this country was governed by a connection; I mean the great connection of Whigs in the reign of Queen Anne. They were complimented upon the principle of this connection by a poet who was in high ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside it such a poem as the following, we are reminded of the saying of Emerson that "the soul's advances are not made by gradation ... but ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... were invited, sitting at a lower table, while the masters had the higher one on the dais, and a third was reserved for the apprentices after they should have waited on their masters—in fact it was an imitation of the orders of chivalry, knights, squires, and pages, and the gradation of rank was as strictly observed as by the nobility. Giles, considering the feast to be entirely in his honour, though the transfer of his indentures had been made at Salisbury, endeavoured to come out in some of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... proprietors of three thousand pounds were allowed two votes; those of six thousand were entitled to three; ten thousand pounds was made the qualification for four. The votes were thus regulated in the scale and gradation of property. On this scale, and on some provisions to prevent occasional qualifications and splitting of votes, the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... vessels of the right side as well as the left. On the other hand, I observe that the peculiarities to the normal separate condition of A and B, the carotid and subclavian arteries of Plate 10, display, in the relationary aggregate, a phasial gradation of A and B joining into a common trunk union, in which state we then find the aorta giving origin to a right and left innominate artery. Between these two forms of development—viz., that where the four vessels spring separately ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... furniture of ceremony upon a side-table, and was called a gantiere. The first woman presented to her in this manner all that she asked for, unless the tirewoman, the lady of honour, or a princess were present, and then the gradation pointed out in the instance of the glass of ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... alarming to consciences which have not lost all sensitiveness; it numbers among its participants multitudes of those who ought to blush and to tremble for thus hazarding their own virtue, and for thus corrupting the virtues of others; it draws within its charmed circle men and women who fill up every gradation of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... away. But who will be bold enough to say that there was to be found at that time one who was in every way perfect, and who brought his work, whether in invention, or design, or colouring, to the standard of to-day, and contrived the sweet gradation of his figures with the deep shades of colour, in a manner that the lights remained only on the parts in relief, and likewise contrived those perforations and certain extraordinary refinements in marble statuary that are seen in the statues ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari

... before the more opulent, who could afford to post to town in aristocratic style, became reconciled to railway travelling. In the opinion of many, it was only another illustration of the levelling tendencies of the age. It put an end to that gradation of rank in travelling which was one of the few things left by which the nobleman could be distinguished from the Manchester manufacturer and bagman. But to younger sons of noble families the convenience and cheapness of the railway did not fail to recommend itself. ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... deepest expression and musical texture its liveliest action. Nor is there any such line to separate polyphonic from non-polyphonic methods of accompanying melody; and Bach's Orgelbuechlein and Brahms's posthumous organ-chorales show every conceivable gradation between plain harmony or arpeggio and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... of each kind, he told Chia Jung to have them taken to the Jung mansion. After this, he himself kept what was required for his own use at home; and then allotting the rest, with due compliance to gradation, he had share after share piled up at the foot of the moon-shaped platform, and sending servants to summon the young men of the clan, he distributed ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... beautiful at Mary's feet. The third in order, underneath her, lo! Rachel with Beatrice. Sarah next, Judith, Rebecca, and the gleaner maid, Meek ancestress of him, who sang the songs Of sore repentance in his sorrowful mood. All, as I name them, down from deaf to leaf, Are in gradation throned on the rose. And from the seventh step, successively, Adown the breathing tresses of the flow'r Still doth the file of Hebrew dames proceed. For these are a partition wall, whereby The sacred stairs ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... see, there is among the Russian Nonconformist sects what may be called a gradation of fanaticism, in which is reflected the history of the Great Schism. In the Wanderers we have the representatives of those who adopted and preserved the Antichrist doctrine in its extreme form—the successors of those who fled to the forests to escape from the rage of the Beast ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... lighter than black, or than other things about it, assume a given shade, as dark as, with due reference to other things, you can have it, but no darker. Mark that for your extreme dark on the object, and between those limits get as much drawing as you can, by subtlety of gradation. That will tax your powers of drawing indeed; and you will find this, which seems a childish and simple way of going to work, requires verily a thousandfold more power to carry out than all the pseudo-scientific abstractions that ever ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... his life he painted—leaving it not quite completed,—a 'Pieta;' showing that his hand owned the weight of years,[16] but the conception of the subject is still animated and striking, the colours still glowing; while, Titian-like, the light still flows around the mighty group in every gradation of tone. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... mandarins of lesser rank in charge, besides a host of revenue collectors, the bureau of government works and other departments, with several hundred thousand officials, who all rank as gods beyond the grave. These deities are civilians; the military having a similar gradation for the armies of Hades, whose captains are gods, and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... all. I have been a bad boy, Mr. Cassilis; I do not seek to deny that; but it was after my wife's death, and you know, with a widower, it's a different thing: sinful—I won't say no; but there is a gradation, we shall hope. And talking of that—— Hark!" he broke out suddenly, his hand raised, his fingers spread, his face racked with interest and terror. "Only the rain, bless God!" he added, after a pause, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Camp, 20th June, while Friedrich, from the first gray of morning, and diligently all day long, was withdrawing from the trenches of Prag,—Friedrich's people, self and goods getting folded out in the finest gradation, and with perfect success; no Daun to hinder him,—Daun leisurely doing TE-DEUM, forty miles off, helping on the WRONG side by that exertion! [Cogniazzo, ii. 367.]—"Poor Browne, he is dead of his wounds, in Prag yonder," writes Westphalen, in his ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... it be duly allied and tempered with its opposite. For these opposites I hold to be correlative and polaric, each required by the other. But chasm is worse than indistinction; and he that breaks the circle of human fellowship is more mischievous than he who blurs the hues of gradation. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... 'Ideal,' and compose some very pretty music to the enclosed words, with which Rag's ideal flame has inspired Rag—surtout, let it be as good as possible, with accompaniment a l'avenant. An alteration in the music of each stanza would render the gradation of energy expressed in the words, 'Je compte sur toi.'" (How du Maurier came by the name of "Rag" I must tell later on.) ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... in this place, had made him in habits and good offices almost a citizen; and his frankness, conciliatory disposition, and elevated demeanour, an estimable one. The expressions of regret as general as he was known, and not uttered by friends and acquaintance only, but by every gradation of class, not only by grown persons, but young children, are the test of his worth. Such too is the only eulogium worthy of the good and brave, and the citizens of Quebec have, with solemn emotions, pronounced it on his memory. But at this anxious ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... times during the seance—the fluctuations in weight, if any, to be recorded on a revolving drum. Means ought also to be provided for studying the temperature, pulse, muscular exertion, breathing, etc., etc. The lighting of the room should be carefully attended to and capable of the slightest gradation. Means should be provided for obtaining moving pictures of the seance from without the room, unknown to the medium. Were the sittings held in complete darkness, these photographs could be obtained by means of ultra-violet light, with ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... world, mobile and immobile, are the very first to be dissolved away. After this (are dissolved) those qualities which compose all entities. After the qualities (are dissolved) the five elements. Such is the gradation of entities. Gods, men, Gandharvas, Pisachas, Asuras, and Rakshasas, have all sprung from Nature, and not from actions, not from a cause. The Brahmanas, who are creators of the universe, are born here again and again. All that springs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... left unpenetrated, the division is always distinct between the injected part and that which is not penetrated by the fluid flint. In this case, the flinty matter has proceeded a certain length, which is marked, and no farther; and, beyond this boundary, there is no partial impregnation, nor a gradation of the flintifying operation, as must have been the case if siliceous matter had been deposited from a solution. 2dly, The termination of the flinty impregnation has assumed such a form, precisely, as would naturally happen from a fluid flint ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... may be so injured that his power is gone and the next best dog in the pack takes his place. The hottest contests are always between dogs that are well matched; neither will give place to the other and so they fight it out; but from the foremost in power down to the weakest there is a gradation of authority; each one knows just how far he can go, which companion he can bully when he is in a bad temper or wishes to assert himself, and to which he must humbly yield in his turn. In such a state the weakest one must yield to all ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... of surface almost all the nations of note in the world, past or present. Now if we examine this belt, and compare the different parts of it with one another, we shall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... 1. The state or condition through which, by a regular upward gradation, all animated beings pass from the lowest point of existence in which they originate, towards humanity and the highest state of happiness and perfection. All the states of animation below that of humanity are necessarily evil; in the state of humanity, good and evil ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... memories of endearment, a keen sense of loss, a weeping over crushed hopes, and a pain of wounded affliction. But the mother feels that one has been taken away who was still closer to her heart. Hers has been the office of constant ministration. Every gradation of feature has developed before her eyes. She has detected every new gleam of intelligence. She heard the first utterance of every new word. She has been the refuge of his fears; the supply of his wants. And ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... Miss Dudley and 'Manda Grier behaved, just what they thought. He had many minds about the matter himself, and had gone from an extreme of self-abhorrence to one of self-vindication, and between these he had halted at every gradation of blame and exculpation. But perhaps what chiefly kept him away was the uncertainty of his future; till he could give some shape to that he had no courage to face the past. Sometimes he wished never to see either of those girls again; but at other times he had a longing to go and explain, to justify ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, were the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. He seems to have been led to his opinion that the change of species had been gradual by the difficulty experienced in distinguishing species from varieties by the almost perfect gradation of forms in certain groups, and by the analogy of domestic productions. With respect to the means of modification, he attributed something to the direct action of the physical conditions of life, something to the crossing of already existing forms, and much to use and disuse, or, in other ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... in the southwest and is characterized by the culmination of trends in the region studied to paler upper parts, longer tail, longer ear, and longer, relatively narrower rostrum—characters that appear at least partly independent of each other as concerns gradation toward the smaller, darker-colored populations to the northward. The latter, while exhibiting some differences in color (slightly paler westwardly) and length of tail (shorter northwardly), stand more or less ...
— Geographic Variation in the Harvest Mouse, Reithrodontomys megalotis, On the Central Great Plains And in Adjacent Regions • J. Knox Jones

... and Lohar, that is in what I have designated the grade of village menials above the impure and below the cultivating castes. In Bengal the Kumhars have a much higher status and Brahmans will take water from their hands. But the gradation of caste in Bengal differs very greatly from that of other ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... States, at least for my own State; and what a contrast do the very streets of your capital daily present to the Christianity and morality of the nation? A race of slaves, or at least colored persons, of every hue from the jet black African, in regular gradation, up to the almost pure Anglo-Saxon color. During the short time official duty has called me here, I have seen the really red haired, the freckled, and the almost white negro; and I have been astonished at the numbers of the mixed race, when compared with those of full color, and I have ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... if each system in gradation roll Alike essential to th' amazing whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. Let earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly, Planets and suns run lawless through the sky; Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurl'd, Being on ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... Quaternary period. The existence of a period before the Glacial epoch or between different glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant, there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more northern ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... as we possess the power to struggle, hope is the last feeling to desert the human mind. Men are endowed with every gradation of courage, from the calm energy of reflection, which is rendered still more effective by physical firmness, to the headlong precipitation of reckless spirit: from the resolution that grows more imposing and more respectable ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... this more marked than in the matter of pitch, or key. With the study of landscape, the range of gradation from light to dark has broadened. A picture may now be painted in a "high key;" the picture may be, from the highest to the lowest note in it, far lighter than would have been thought possible ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... in its connections and results to be hastily relinquished. The correspondence which usually exists between the genius of civil governments, and the arrangement of literary institutions, has been very happily exemplified in our system of schools, rising in regular gradation from the primary to the professional, and wisely accommodated to the public convenience and necessity. This system, whatever defects may have existed in some of its practical operations, has been found, on the whole, admirably suited to the condition of society. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, are not natural to strong emotion. They are the result of spirits that are calm, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... chain of being is complete in me: In me is matter's last gradation lost, And the next step is spirit—Deity! I can command the lightning, and am dust! A monarch, and a slave; a worm, a god! Whence came I here, and how? so marvelously Constructed and conceived? Unknown! This clod Lives merely ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... and Mr.; then General and Mrs. Pendleton, Miss Pendleton, Mr. and Mrs. John, Mr. and Mrs. Henry, and Mr. and Mrs. James Pendleton;" and so Mrs. Smith kept on in continuous nomenclature for a considerable time. It was only as she came down into the lower ranks of fashion, after a regular gradation, that she hesitated for a moment—and then her pauses grew ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... rule of the game to lay satin-stitch very evenly. Worked in floss, the mere surface of satin-stitch is beautiful. A further charm lies in the way it lends itself to gradation of colour. Beautiful results may be obtained by the use of perfectly flat tints of colour, as in Illustration 40; but the subtlest as well as the most deliberate gradation of tint may be most perfectly ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day

... state the truth—some of the truth, at least,—and see hereafter if any darker truths will blot these pages. We have now been full two years united; the 'romance' of our attachment must be worn away. Surely I have now got down to the lowest gradation in Arthur's affection, and discovered all the evils of his nature: if there be any further change, it must be for the better, as we become still more accustomed to each other; surely we shall find no lower depth ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... with the help of the Omdeh, be became familiar with the remarkable peculiarity in the Arab system of music—its division of tones into thirds. Egyptian musicians consider that the European system of music is deficient in sounds. This small and delicate gradation of sound gives a peculiar softness to the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... reception-room, and very grand and very solemn they were. Mr Slope was down-stairs giving the last orders about the wine. He well understood that curates and country vicars with their belongings did not require so generous an article as the dignitaries of the close. There is a useful gradation in such things, and Marsala at 20s a dozen did very well for the exterior ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... beasts: "Tell them off," said he, "from the bald man to the bald man." Yet these were prisoners committed, not for punishment, but trial. Nor, had it been otherwise, were the charges against them equal, but running through every gradation of guilt. But the elogia or records of their commitment, he would not so much as look at. With such inordinate capacities for cruelty, we cannot wonder that he should in his common conversation have deplored the tameness and insipidity of his own times and reign, as likely ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... wood carbonized to a certain degree, but retaining distinctly its woody texture. Dr. MacCulloch, On Rocks, p. 636., observes: "In its chemical properties, lignite holds a station intermediate between peat and coal; while among the varieties a gradation in this respect may be traced; the brown and more organised kinds approaching very near to peat, while the more compact kinds, such ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various

... old age, begin? When did each stage of our mental growth begin? When or where did the English language begin, or the French, or the German? Was there a first English word spoken? From the first animal sound, if we can conceive of such, up to the human speech of to-day, there is an infinite gradation ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... And from one gradation to another, they entered Cologne with Severne seated between the two girls, each with a hand in his, and a great disposition to pet him and spoil him; more than once, indeed, a delicate head just grazed each of his square ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... read what they could not yet afford to buy. This fraud could only be counteracted by an edition equally cheap and more commodious; and Lintot was compelled to contract his folio at once into a duodecimo, and lose the advantage of an intermediate gradation. The notes which in the Dutch copies were placed at the end of each book as they had been in the large volumes, were now subjoined to the text in the same page, and are therefore more easily consulted. Of this edition two thousand five hundred were first printed, and five thousand ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson

... Angelo Now wil I write Letters to Angelo, (The Prouost he shal beare them) whose contents Shal witnesse to him I am neere at home: And that by great Iniunctions I am bound To enter publikely: him Ile desire To meet me at the consecrated Fount, A League below the Citie: and from thence, By cold gradation, and weale-ballanc'd forme. We ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... all the rest. In the first place you must follow the grain of the wood. If the back twists and undulates, your cut must do the same. The feather of the grain must never be reversed, but descend by perfect gradation from handle to tip. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... perfumed the air with the fragrance of their oils.* These retained in general the appearance of those in New South Wales, while they were in reality very different. The rich and vivid colouring of the more northern flowers, and that soft and exquisite gradation of their tints, for which they are so singularly distinguished hold with those here, but in a less eminent degree. The two countries present a perfect similarity in this, that the more barren spots are the most gaily adorned. The curious florist, and scientific botanist, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... of his movements was sometimes arrested by a more formidable barrier, either naturally existing in the pursuit he had undertaken, or created by his own impetuosity, he seldom failed to succeed either in knocking it down or cutting his way through it. He had little idea of gradation: he saw no interval between the first step and the last, but pounced upon his object with the impetus of a mountain cataract. This rapidity of movement, indeed, subjected him to some disasters which ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... so that an insensible gradation shall take place from a coarse cluster like the Pleiades down to a milky nebulosity like that in Orion, every intermediate step being represented. This tends to confirm the hypothesis that all are composed of stars more or ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden

... Africans, such as the Hereros of western Damaraland and the Dinkas of the upper White Nile, have an amazing choice of words for all colors describing their animals—brown, dun, red, white, dapple, and so on in every gradation of shade and hue. The Samoyedes of northern Russia have eleven or twelve terms to designate the various grays and browns of their reindeer, despite their otherwise low cultural development.[70] The speech of nomads has an abundance of expressions for cattle in every relation of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make each other happy-by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear about them-down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a very beautiful Gradation of Thoughts to shew how amiable Virtue is. We love a virtuous Man, says he, who lives in the remotest Parts of the Earth, though we are altogether out of the Reach of his Virtue, and can receive from it no Manner ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... of the present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... acquired an office of scribe, which was commonly exercised by persons of his condition. [2] Favorable oracles, or rather the consciousness of superior merit, prompted his aspiring son to pursue the profession of arms and the hopes of fortune; and it would be extremely curious to observe the gradation of arts and accidents which enabled him in the end to fulfil those oracles, and to display that merit to the world. Diocletian was successively promoted to the government of Maesia, the honors of the consulship, and the important command of the guards of the palace. He distinguished ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... CHURCH.—The Christian Church very early in its history became an organized body, with a regular gradation of officers, such as presbyters, bishops, metropolitans or archbishops, and patriarchs. There were at first four regular patriarchates, that is, districts superintended by patriarchs. These centred in the great cities of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... all along used the same word, and called the places we have spoken of—glens. A fine observer—the Editor of Gilpin's Forest Scenery—has said: "The gradation from extreme width downwards should be thus arranged,—strath, vale, dale, valley, glen, dell, ravine, chasm. In the strath, vale, and dale, we may expect to find the large, majestic, gently flowing river, or even the deeper or smaller lake. In the glen, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... science and the visible order of being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature, to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and common vocation with supernal beings, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... Street and adjacent parts seemed to hail the morn with more than their wonted energy. Never, save on a hunting morning, did Mr. Jorrocks tumble about in bed with such restless anxiety as cock after cock took up the crow in every gradation of noise from the shrill note of the free street-scouring chanticleer before the door, to the faint response of the cooped and prisoned victims of the neighbouring poulterer's, their efforts being aided by the flutterings and impertinent chirruping ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... it, and the third to divide water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain, and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the plowshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... attained. If the fixed balance shows 7 lbs. on what is meant to be a 5 to 1 ratio, the setting of R relatively to P and Q is correct. If, however, there is a serious discrepancy, it would be worth while making tests with a very strong balance, and establishing a corrected gradation on a paper dial pasted to the ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams

... of needs in practical manipulation very satisfactorily. Changes in adjustment are easily and quickly made, in regard to intensity, interval and absolute rate. If desired, the gradation of intensities here employed may be refined to the threshold of perceptibility, ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... natural selection of successive, slight, but profitable modifications. We can thus understand why nature moves by graduated steps in endowing certain animals of the same class with their several instincts. I have attempted to show how much light the principle of gradation throws on the admirable architectural powers of the hive-bee. Habit no doubt often comes into play in modifying instincts; but it certainly is not indispensable, as we see in the case of neuter insects, which leave no progeny ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various

... tempering for this culminating hour. Yet, if I would have confessed it, there was something either in the sound of the voice, although it seemed sweetness itself, or else in this yielding which awaited no gradation of gentle approaches, that did not vibrate harmoniously with the beat of my inward music. And likewise, when, taking her hand in mine, I drew closer to her, looking for the beauty of her face, which, indeed, I found too plenteously, a cold shiver ran through me; but "it is the marble," ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... admitted by all{65}. Gladiolus, Crinum, Calceolaria{66} must be species if there be such a thing. Races of dogs and oxen: but certainly very general; indeed a gradation of sterility most perfect{67} very general. Some nearest species will not cross (crocus, some heath ), some genera cross readily (fowls{68} and grouse, peacock &c.). Hybrids no ways monstrous quite perfect except ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... of opinion that any alteration for the better can be made, either in the rate of salaries now allowed or in the rank and gradation of our diplomatic agents, or both, the present would be a fit occasion for a ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson

... right gradation, the text has been prepared to suit the different ages of readers. Care has been given to the illustration, print, and binding of the series, for it is believed that this is the best way to secure from the children that careful handling of the volumes ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne

... gradation, from symptoms which cannot be described in language, to severe grand mal. Gowers says: "The elements of an epileptic attack may be extended, and thereby be made less intense, though not less distressing. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... telling "curtains," if the character-drawing be keen, the conversations fresh, sparkling, and humorous. John Bull likes vividness and solidity of impasto; Jonathan's eye is often more pleasantly affected by a delicate gradation of half-tones. The one desires the downright, the concrete, the real; the other is titillated by the subtle, the allusive, the half-spoken. The antithesis is between force and finesse, between ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... factories and workshops and crowded by-ways. At Aston Church the young man alighted, and walked rapidly for five minutes, till he reached a row of small modern houses. Socially they represented a step or two upwards in the gradation which, at Birmingham, begins with the numbered court and culminates in the ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... received from their subjects the respect due to deities. In these exorbitant pretensions they were greatly strengthened by the institution of taboo, which lent the sanction of religion to every exertion of arbitrary power.[648] Corresponding with the growth of monarchy was the well-marked gradation of social ranks which prevailed in the various tribes from the king downwards through chiefs, warriors, and landholders, to slaves. The resulting political constitution has been compared to the old feudal ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... (1) grade, gradual, graduate, degrade, digress, Congress, aggressive, progressive, degree; (2) gradation, Centigrade, ingress, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... playing is not only inartistic, but devoid of all interest. Weight playing permits nothing to interfere with discriminative phrasing, complicated rhythmical problems, the infinitely subtle variation of time for expressive purposes now classed under the head of agogics, all shades of dynamic gradation; in fact everything that falls in the domain of the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke

... senses, it seems to explain. As far as I understand your remarks and illustrations, you doubt the possibility of gradations of intellectual powers. Now, it seems to me, looking to existing animals alone, that we have a very fine gradation in the intellectual powers of the Vertebrata, with one rather wide gap (not half so wide as in many cases of corporeal structure), between say a Hottentot and a Ourang, even if civilised as much mentally as the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... more recent formations, while other species continually die out and disappear, so that the present condition of the organic world is clearly derived by a natural process of gradual extinction and creation of species from that of the latest geological periods. We may therefore safely infer a like gradation and natural sequence from one geological epoch ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... to coal. You may find about the world— you may see even in England alone—every gradation between coal and growing forest. You may see the forest growing in its bed of vegetable mould; you may see the forest dead and converted into peat, with stems and roots in it; that, again, into sunken forests, like those to be seen below high-water mark on many ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... my plighted word, William." Yet there was something bordering on coldness even in the sweet accents with which she spoke; the nice instinct of love detects each gradation of feeling with an unerring certainty. I was not satisfied, and when I left her, I was more unhappy than ever. I longed to speak to my brother on the subject, yet some indescribable feeling prevented me; and I allowed the days ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... gradation is natural to compounds of letters and written language, and, though speech is one of the greatest gifts to man, it is writing which distinguishes him from the uncivilized savage. The practice of writing is of such remote antiquity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... not obey the same instinct in submitting to the hand of power? Apart from the requirements of a gradation of ranks, or the consequences of a conquest, the multitude delight to surround their chiefs with privileges—whether it be that their vanity makes them thus to aggrandize one of their own creations, or whether they try to conceal the humiliation of subjection by exaggerating ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre

... that particular girl alone. I think I saw then the obscure beginning, the seed germinating in the soil of an unconscious need, the first shoot of that tree bearing now for a mature mankind the flower and the fruit, the infinite gradation in shades and in flavour of our discriminating love. He was a child. He was as frank as a child too. He was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... brief phrase whose solemnity prefaced millions of common place epitaphs before Tennyson taught grief to speak, lamenting his dead friend in every phase and variety of regret. With such gradation and difference of sorrow will the recent death of a very remarkable woman, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, be mourned for by all who knew her, and with such a sense of blank loss will they long continue to lament one whose public success as an ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... of our Germanism by another force which seems Celtic, is visible in our religion. Here, too, we may trace a gradation between Celt, Englishman, and German, the difference which distinguishes Englishman from German appearing attributable to a Celtic element in us. Germany is the land of exegesis, England is the land of ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... their own substance, and in that of the rocks surrounding them; and we can form no conception of the result of irresistible pressure, applied so as to rend and raise, with imperceptible slowness of gradation, masses thousands of feet in thickness. We want some experiments tried on masses of iron and stone; and we can't get them tried, because Christian creatures never will seriously and sufficiently spend money, except to find out the shortest ways of killing each ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... and no anarchy in the Universe," says Emerson, "all is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone with them alone, they pronouncing on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant and incessantly fall snow ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan

... is prettier than the other; but this hatter (the one that takes the private lessons) is really une file prodigieuse. Ah, par exemple, elle brule ses vais-seux cella-la! She threw herself into my arms the very first day, and I almost owed her a grudge for having deprived me of that pleasure of gradation, of carrying the defences, one by one, which is almost as great as that of ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James

... their best work without effort: but analyze the touches afterwards, and you will find the structure and depth of the colour laid mathematically demonstrable to be of literally infinite fineness, the last touches passing away at their edges by untraceable gradation. The very essence of a master's work may thus be removed by a picture- ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... who, for disobedience, had forfeited their high abode in Heaven. The gnostics of early christian times, in imitation of a classification of the different orders of spirits by Plato, had attempted a similar arrangement with respect to an hierarchy of angels, the gradation of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... climates, the workers, again, are of two classes, whose structure and functions are widely different. In some species they are wonderfully unlike each other, and constitute two well-defined forms of workers. In others, there is a gradation of individuals between the two extremes. The curious differences in structure and habits between these two classes form an interesting, but very difficult, study. It is one of the great peculiarities ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... limited to their own affairs. By the beginning of the tenth century the Barbarian invasions ended, and as the populations settled down a new system appeared, based partly on the Barbarians' love of independence, partly on their plans of military gradation—the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... will trouble God with no more requests. Doth not some of your own consciences speak, that ye would seek no more from Christ than to be saved from an ill hour, and to be found in him; whereas Paul was not content with this, but made an holy gradation, as we read, Philip iii. 8, &c. He desired to know the power of Christ's resurrection, and to be made conformable to him by any means; and now, when he is found in Christ, and justified, he counts not himself well, or perfect and complete, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... expression, though still with heavy features, is met with; but in general both countenance and figure are flat, out of proportion, and stiff in drawing, whilst the highest effort of colouring consists of one uniform layer, without tints or gradation. Perhaps amidst the many thousand subjects found in tombs and temples between Philoe and Cairo, one or two may be treated with nearly as much skill as was exhibited by the Italian painters before the time of Cimabue—except that scarcely an attempt even ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various

... from his supper; that is to say, from everlasting joy and felicity: for it is a great matter to despise God's word, or the minister of the same; for the office of preaching is the office of salvation; it hath warrants in scripture, it is grounded upon God's word. St. Paul to the Romans maketh a gradation of such-wise: Omnis quicunque invocaverit nomen Domini salvabitur: quomodo ergo invocabunt in quem non crediderunt, aut quomodo credent ei quem non audisrunt? that is to say, "Whosoever shall call on the name ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer

... of Pepys is illustrated every gradation of legal rank from Reader of an Inn of Court to Lord High ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... commences; and it is one that impresses itself on the imagination and the memory in a measure not likely to be forgotten. The change is like a pantomime transformation scene! The traveller passes without the slightest intermediate gradation from the dreary scene which has been described, into the shade and the beauty of a region of magnificent and well-managed forest! The bodily delight of passing from the severe glare of the sun into ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... penal part of the obligation in this degree. Here it is proper to remark that in the opening of any Lodge of Masons, they commence giving the signs of an Entered Apprentice, and go through all the signs of the different degrees, in regular gradation, until they arrive to the one which they are opening, and commence at the sign of the degree in which they are at work, and descend to the last when closing. After going through all the signs, as before described, the Right Worshipful Master declares the Lodge opened in the ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan

... nearer to Him, and attain, if not a full understanding, a deeper feeling of the elements of His surpassing excellence and glory. Indeed, as the highest poetry (in Milton, for instance) blossoms into prayer, so the truest prayer, often by insensible gradation, becomes poetry. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... same side of being supported in its demands by right, by reason, and by the Constitution; and the consciousness, on the opposite side, of contending against the force of all these solemn considerations. It is farther to be considered, that in the gradation between the smallest and largest States, there are several, which, though most likely in general to arrange themselves among the former are too little removed in extent and population from the latter, to second an opposition to their just and legitimate pretensions. Hence it is by ...
— The Federalist Papers

... art by just gradation moves, Toil builds on toil, and age on age improves: The Muse alone unequal dealt her rage, And graced with noblest pomp her earliest stage. 20 Preserved through time, the speaking scenes impart Each changeful wish of Phaedra's tortured heart; Or paint the curse that ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... apprentices—the better sort at least—obtained full recognition as practitioners; and at the close of the fourteenth century their reputation had become so considerable that the great apprentices had formed themselves into a distinct order, in which they stood next to serjeants-at-law, the gradation being as follows: ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... classify the textile fabrics of the mound region it is found that, although there is an unbroken gradation from the rudest and heaviest textile constructions to the most delicate and refined textures, a number of well-marked divisions may be made. The broadest of these is based on the use of spun as opposed to unspun strands or parts, a classification corresponding somewhat closely ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes

... January, to 82deg, the ordinary, or 86deg, the highest known extreme of July, near the level of the sea. Between these two points (both taken in the shade) there is from month to month a pretty regular gradation of increase or decrease, amounting to somewhat less than four degrees. In winter the prevailing winds are from the north-west, west and south; in summer the most frequent are the north, north-east and east. The weather is often extremely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... philosopher should be, I should be doubtful. As to the conversation at breakfast, I can recall some of it easily, some with an effort, some only with a large element of doubt, and some not at all. Thus there is a continual gradation in the degree of self-evidence of what I remember, and a corresponding gradation in the trustworthiness of ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... great in one respect seldom fails in some other, and there is in the church another and a larger brass, from which it appears that Selwyn not only had a wife, but also eleven children, who are depicted in successive grandeur or gradation. There are monuments by Roubiliac and Chantrey in the church, and on the left side of the altar lies buried William Lilly, the great astrologer, the Sidrophel of Butler's "Hudibras." And look into the chancel. There is a tablet to ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... although at some distance, Giorgione da Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his pictures, and gave a sublime movement to his works by means of a certain darkness of shadow, very well conceived; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief, sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari

... trace of tan-colour, excepting the spots over the eyes, and sometimes a little on the feet. These latter cases, and many others, show plainly that the colour of the feet and the eye-spots are in some way correlated. I have noticed, in various breeds, every gradation, from the whole face being tan-coloured, to a complete ring round the eyes, to a minute spot over the inner and upper corners. The spots occur in various sub-breeds of terriers and spaniels; in setters; in hounds of various kinds, including the turnspit-like German ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... that clothed them in fertility and beauty. Terraces were raised upon the steep sides of the Cordillera; and, as the different elevations had the effect of difference of latitude, they exhibited in regular gradation every variety of vegetable form, from the stimulated growth of the tropics, to the temperate products of a northern clime; while flocks of llamas—the Peruvian sheep—wandered with their shepherds over the broad, snow-covered ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... an object so worthy of the monarch of a great commercial people, one voyage followed another in close succession; and, we may add, in regular gradation. What Byron had begun, Wallis and Carteret soon improved. Their success gave birth to a far more extensive plan of discovery, carried into execution in two subsequent voyages, conducted by Cook. And that nothing might be left unattempted, though ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... of occupations may appear very strange, but among the unsettled and ambitious population of the United States, men at the age of fifty have been, or at least have tried to be, everything, not in gradation, from the lowest up to the highest, but just as it may happen—doctor yesterday and waiter to-day—the Yankee philosopher will to-morrow run for a seat in legislature; if he fails, he may turn a Methodist ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... tank to the other, mentally established the gradation of the fauna from the primitive protoplast to ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. He saw the difficulty of distinguishing between species and varieties, the almost perfect gradation of form in some groups, and the great similarity of domestic breeds of animals to such species. He believed that some degree of change was produced by the physical conditions of life, the intercrossing of species, and by habits causing increased use or disuse of parts. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... by the measures required for the departure of the Spanish troops. The period fixed by the king had already expired, and these obnoxious foreigners were still in the country, living in part on pillage, and each day committing some new excess. Complaints were carried in successive gradation from the government to the council, and from the council to the king. The Spaniards were removed to Zealand; but instead of being embarked at any of its ports, they were detained there on various pretexts. Money, ships, or, on necessity, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... valley so that we see it from two levels, and under two aspects. As we return, winding upwards on higher ground, we get glimpses of sunny dimpled sward through the dark stems of the majestic fir-trees towering over our head. There is every gradation of form and colour in the picture, from the ripe warm gold barring the branches of the firs, to the pale silveriness of their upper foliage; from the gigantic trees rising from the gorge below, each seeming to fill a chasm, to the airy, graceful birch, a mere toy beside it. Rare butterflies ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... said, "Mandeville puts the case of a man who gets drunk at an alehouse, and says it is a public benefit, because so much money is got by it to the public. But it must be considered that all the good gained by this through the gradation of alehouse-keeper, brewer, maltster, and farmer, is overbalanced by the evil caused to the man and his family ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... was strongly felt in Milan, where he spent so many of the best years of his life and founded a School of painting. He was a close observer of the gradation and reflex of light, and was capable of giving to his discoveries a practical and aesthetic form. His strong personal character and the fascination of his genius enthralled his followers, who were satisfied to repeat his types, to perpetuate the "grey-hound eye," and to make ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell

... which he carries about him, thus "turning his vices into commodity." He accounts for the friendship between the Prince and Poins, from "their legs being both of a bigness;" and compares Justice Shallow to "a man made after supper of a cheese-paring." There cannot be a more striking gradation of character than that between Falstaff and Shallow, and Shallow and Silence. It seems difficult at first to fall lower than the squire; but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer and humble foil in his cousin Silence. Vain of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... may be known by not effervescing when a drop of nitric, sulphuric or other acid is applied to them, or by the grains not being readily scratched or broken by ordinary pressure. In nature there is every intermediate gradation, from perfectly loose sand to the hardest sandstone. In MICACEOUS SANDSTONES mica is very abundant; and the thin silvery plates into which that mineral divides are often arranged in layers parallel to ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... is now the case. Consequently the composer felt that he had done his duty if, even in situations of the most tragic import, he provided his executant with a broad, even melody. Into this the consummate art of the singer could infuse every gradation of feeling. The composer presented a blank canvas, upon which the artist painted the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild



Words linked to "Gradation" :   blending, gradational, rank, shading, cut, step, ablaut, gradate, graduation, quantification



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