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Inversion   /ɪnvˈərʒən/   Listen
Inversion

noun
1.
The layer of air near the earth is cooler than an overlying layer.
2.
Abnormal condition in which an organ is turned inward or inside out (as when the upper part of the uterus is pulled into the cervical canal after childbirth).
3.
A chemical process in which the direction of optical rotation of a substance is reversed from dextrorotatory to levorotary or vice versa.
4.
(genetics) a kind of mutation in which the order of the genes in a section of a chromosome is reversed.
5.
The reversal of the normal order of words.  Synonym: anastrophe.
6.
(counterpoint) a variation of a melody or part in which ascending intervals are replaced by descending intervals and vice versa.
7.
A term formerly used to mean taking on the gender role of the opposite sex.  Synonym: sexual inversion.
8.
Turning upside down; setting on end.  Synonym: upending.
9.
The act of turning inside out.  Synonyms: eversion, everting.



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"Inversion" Quotes from Famous Books



... eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... acquaintance with the mythology of other nations, were made to furnish him with the materials for hastily applying one solution to all the early Jewish histories, which he failed to invalidate by the application of the historic method just described. By an inversion of the argument of the early Christian apologists, he pretended that the early history preserved among the Hebrews was borrowed from the heathens, instead of claiming that the heathen mythology was a trace ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... is the case with Hungary, Russia, the Danubian Principalities, North America, etc. Artificial fertilizers, guano in particular, indeed substitute the offal of men and beasts; but many farmers can not obtain the same in sufficient quantity; it is too dear; at any rate, it is an inversion of nature to import manure from great distances, while it is allowed to go ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... inversion of parts as a proof of modern pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions them, and the "prettier verses," with a note of exclamation (!). {73a} But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd's old copy, and nobody ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang

... remedies proposed for the fatal effects of parcellaire division may be reduced to two, which really are but one, the second being the inversion of the first: to raise the mental and moral condition of the workingman by increasing his comfort and dignity; or else, to prepare the way for his future emancipation ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... he employed in his "Task," there would be no reason to complain; but in translating Homer he seems to have thought it necessary to use a different style from that of his original work. Almost every sentence is stiffened by some clumsy inversion; stately phrases are used when simpler ones were at hand, and would have rendered the meaning of the original better. The entire version has the appearance of being hammered out with great labor, and as a whole it is cold and constrained; scarce any thing seems ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with the sound of processionals and of recessionals—a certain popular version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries of derision raised by the makers of this likeness ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we chose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... a notable inversion of old ideas; before the change the ecclesiastical authority had been civil, but because of the change the civil authority became ecclesiastical. If theocracy means the rule of the church or the sovereignty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... bitternut, Carya cordiformis. This injury consisted mostly of the killing back of the lower limbs and twigs with some varieties being killed outright. Killing of the lower limbs as compared with the tops of the trees is probably related to lower temperatures near the ground due to temperature inversion and possibly to the fact that the lower branches were somewhat weaker in their growth. This sort of injury is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... peace between the warring powers, and strong likelihood of peace in the world for all time to come. It also meant other things. It meant the complete inversion of the American policy and the welcoming of science as the servant of mankind's larger needs and not merely a flunky to the ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings

... very rudimentary. Every stage of evolution is here represented, distributed regularly from bottom to top, from the verge of maturity to the vague outlines of the embryo. The sheath clasps its string of ovules so closely that any inversion of the order is impossible. Besides, an inversion would result in a gross absurdity: the replacing of a riper egg by another in an ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... uncertain origin; perhaps an inversion of bel cece, "beautiful chick (pea)," or from Fr. chiche beau, with same meaning), the term in Italy from the 17th century onwards for a dangler about women. The cicisbeo was the professed gallant of a married woman, who attended her at all public entertainments, it being considered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was, had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the influence of Saint Francis of Assisi. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... to have lived without meat, on the smell of a rose. 48. "Essentiae rationalis immortalis." 49. St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. x., cc. 9, 19, 32. 50. That which includes everything is opposed to nullity. 51. An inversion of the parts of an antithesis. 52. St. Augustine—"Homily on Genesis." 53. Sir T. Browne wrote a dialogue between two twins in the womb respecting the world into which they were going! 54. Refinement. 55. Constitution another form of temperament. 56. The Jewish computation ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... Sugar; Cane Sugar; Manufacture of Sugar; Sulphur Dioxid and Indigo, Uses of, in Sugar Manufacture; Commercial Grades of Sugar; Sugar in the Dietary; Maple Sugar; Adulteration of Sugar; Dextrose Sugars; Inversion of Sugars; Molasses; Syrups; Adulteration of Molasses; Sorghum Syrup; Maple Syrup; Analysis of Sugar; Adulteration of Syrups; Honey; Confections; Coloring Matter in ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder

... creative power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... great revolution can be accomplished by a temporary army, that this army will be subsisted by State supplies and that taxation alone is adequate to our wants is in my opinion absurd, and as unreasonable as to expect an inversion of the order of nature to accommodate itself to our views. If it were necessary it could be easily proved to any person of a moderate understanding that an annual army or any army raised on the spur of the occasion besides being unqualified for the end designed is, ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... they might make interesting discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... is the perception of a globe rolling round in the abdomen, and ascending to the stomach and throat, and there inducing strangulation. It consists of an ineffectual inversion of the motions of the oesophagus, and other parts of the alimentary canal; nothing being rejected from ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... the columns (or the lines) of the determinant, and then taking for the factors the n elements in the dexter diagonal. And we thence derive the rule for the signs, viz. considering the primitive arrangement of the columns as positive, then an arrangement obtained therefrom by a single interchange (inversion, or derangement) of two columns is regarded as negative; and so in general an arrangement is positive or negative according as it is derived from the primitive arrangement by an even or an odd number of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... which effectually bars a great number of people from further inquiry into Socialist teaching, that Socialism is contrary to Christianity. I would urge that this is the absolute inversion of the truth. Christianity involves, I am convinced, a practical Socialism if it is honestly carried out. This is not only my conviction, but the reader, if he is a Nonconformist, can find it set out at length by Dr. Clifford in a Fabian tract, Socialism ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... gladiatorial arena of musical London, where all were waiting to turn their thumbs down on the figure of the native Potts, he had received a letter from his mother's birthplace. It was inscribed: "Egregio Signor Pozzi." He was saved. By the simple inversion of the first two words, the substitution of z's for t's, without so fortunately making any difference in the sound, and the retention of that i, all London knew him now to be the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... inward, and the Christ stands for the tendency to give, and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the deathward—deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet—curious inversion of earlier experience—the deathward tendency results in death to itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... bound, and with chaplets of flowers on their heads and necklaces of black figs around their necks. It is recorded, among the South Sea Islands, that a traveller once witnessed such a sacrifice as this memorized in the classic Greek festival. Then, by a queer but common inversion of idea, this baleful but sacred individual is fetched back into the community, as the outcast, hidden in Lady Wood, was brought back into Combe Martin, being beaten and reviled, and yet keeping his sacred character as a being set apart from the rest of men. His ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... way that the shortcomings now to be noticed bear not upon Mr. Longfellow's own style of work so much as upon the method itself with which they are necessarily implicated. These defects are, first, the too frequent use of syntactic inversion, and secondly, the too manifest preference extended to words of Romanic over words ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... of a vertebrate and that of a mollusc such as the common Pecten. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements. The eye of the Pecten presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which is not met with, in general, in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs and vertebrates separated from their common parent-stem long before the appearance of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... call up as definite a picture of shopping activity as Bond Street or Piccadilly. The chief trouble is the facility of confusing such an address as No. 44 East 45th Street with No. 45 East 44th Street; and so natural is an inversion of the kind that one is sometimes heedless enough to make it in writing ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... "correct" colors of the Chinese, while green is one of the "intermediate" colors that are less esteemed. Here we have the yellow used merely as a lining to the green, or employed in the lower, or less honorable, part of the dress;—an inversion of propriety, and intimating how a favorite had usurped the place of the rightful wife and thrust ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... ranges. Security makes the latter the choicer places of residence. Hence they are held by the overbearing and marauding Kurds, late-comers into the land, while the older and numerically weaker Armenians cower down on the lower levels.[1258] Here is an inversion of the usual order. The militantly stronger intruders, with no taste for agriculture, have seized the safer and commanding position on the hills, descending in winter with their cattle and horses to pasture and prey ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... more appropriately. It is my rule of life to do whatever I find to do with all my might. I believe, indeed, that the bearings became red hot. Finally one of the wheels jammed together. A side wheel it was, so that its stoppage necessitated an inversion of the entire apparatus,—an inversion ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... placental has been greatly modified by secondary adaptation in the various groups of this most advanced and youngest sub-class of the mammals. Thus, for instance, we find in many of the rodents (guinea-pigs, mice, etc.) APPARENTLY a temporary inversion of the two germinal layers. This is due to a folding of the blastodermic wall by what is called the "girder," a plug-shaped growth of Rauber's "roof-layer." It is a thin layer of flat epithelial cells, that is freed from the surface of the blastoderm in some of the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... points of difference. The crystalline lens in the higher cuttle-fish consists of two parts, placed one behind the other like two lenses, both having a very different structure and disposition to what occurs in the vertebrata. The retina is wholly different, with an actual inversion of the elemental parts, and with a large nervous ganglion included within the membranes of the eye. The relations of the muscles are as different as it is possible to conceive, and so in other points. Hence it is not a little difficult to decide how far even the same terms ought to be employed in ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... orthography of words. 2. By omitting many inflections, especially of the noun, and consequently making more use of articles and auxiliaries. 3. By the introduction of French derivatives. 4. By using less inversion and ellipsis, especially in poetry. Of these, the second alone, I think, can be considered as sufficient to describe a new form of language; and this was brought about so gradually, that we are not relieved from much of our difficulty, as to whether some compositions ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... power depends upon such subtle matters of the harmonic expression of melody that its artistic use is one of the surest signs of the difference between classical and merely academic music. There are many melodies of which the inversion is as natural as the original form, and does not strikingly alter its character. Such are, for instance, the theme of Bach's Kunst der Fuge, most of Purcell's contrapuntal themes, the theme in the fugue of Beethoven's sonata, op. 110, and the eighth of Brahms's variations on a theme by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... So do not I. You die "soft," Phdrus; give me the cudgels, and I'll die "game," at least. The flaw in your argument, X., is this: you summoned Phdrus to invert his proposition, and then you extorted an absurdity from this inversion. But that absurdity follows only from the particular form of expression into which you threw the original proposition. I will express the same proposition in other terms, unexceptionable terms, which shall evade the absurdity. Observe. A and B are at this time equal in value; that is, they ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... them—for instance, the word Patrie. Some few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the greater part remained. They have excluded from French—as some think to the impoverishment of that language—most elements of the Gothic—the inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative, the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the Englishman than is the new—all these were destroyed by the group ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... the Wasp in her a adult form, is to the larvae of the latter an object of insurmountable repugnance and probably a toxic dish. Even the transformation of the nymphosis surprises me less than this inversion of the appetite. What happens in the insect's stomach to make the adult seek passionately what the youngster refused lest it should die? This is not a question of organic debility unable to endure a too substantial, too hard, too highly spiced dish. The grub that gnaws the Cetonia-larva, that ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... in great degree unconsciously, bears witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation before God: though the inversion of the very idea of Him fundamentally involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which Himself has written on our hearts; and would substitute our subjection to an arbitrary ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... custom to decry Sevcik as a teacher, to dwell on his absolutely mechanical character of instruction—and not without justice. First of all Sevcik laid all the stress on the left hand and not on the bow—an absolute inversion of a fundamental principle. Eldering had taken great pains with my bow technic, for he himself was a pupil of Hubay, who had studied with Vieuxtemps and had his tradition. But Sevcik's teaching as regards the use of the bow was very poor; his pupils—take Kubelik with all his marvelous ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... knife and the cooking pot; the whitewashing, as I believe it is termed with us, also shows, only it is not the debtor who is whitewashed, but the creditors doing themselves over with white clay to celebrate the removal of their enemy from his sphere of meretricious activity. This inversion may arise from the fact that whitewashing a creditor who was about to be cooked would be unwise, as the stuff would boil off the bits and spoil the gravy. There is always some fragment of sound sense underlying African institutions. Kiva was, when I got ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the prose far surpassing the poetry. Dryden, almost immediately after the Restoration, shows noteworthy advance in modern prose style. He avoids a Latinized inversion, such as the following, with which Milton begins the second sentence ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... line, though he may not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing the required effects. And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm of the words which express the calming ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... solemnity. Indeed, with all the title and pace, this seems very like the virtual "slow" movement. A mood of rapt, almost melancholy absorption prevails, with rare flashes of joyous utterance, where the Allegro enters as if to break the thrall of meditation. A very striking inversion of the theme now appears. The gradual growth of phrases in melodious instalments is a trait of Franck (as it is of Richard Strauss). The rough motto at each turn has ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... Parliament gave the crown, and gave it under conditions. Parliament became supreme in administration as well as in legislation. The king became its servant on good behaviour, liable to dismissal for himself or his ministers. All this was not restitution, but inversion. Passive obedience had been the law of England. Conditional obedience and the right of resistance became the law. Authority was limited and regulated and controlled. The Whig theory of government was substituted for the Tory theory on the fundamental points of political science. The ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... would supersede the awful majesty of the Imperial city? He may have been heated by a long series of petty annoyances to such a degree that at last they may have ended in rage and a sudden flinging loose of himself from the society. It is the impulsive man who frequently suffers what appears to be inversion, and Judas was impulsive exceedingly. Matthew, and Matthew only, says that Judas asked for money from the chief priests. "What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him unto you?" According to Mark, whose account of the transaction is the same as Luke's, "Judas . . . went ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford

... "Principle of Beauty" and the "Memory of Great Men." Parallel with these things is Dante's passion of reverence for the old historic places—provinces, cities, rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to modern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... the power of certain particles upon the nerves, that the stomach will be thrown into convulsions that almost threaten an inversion, by taking only four ounces of a wine in which so small a portion of glass of antimony as one scruple is infused in eight pounds of the former. And what is still more remarkable is, that the glass of antimony remains not only undissolved, but, comparatively speaking, undiminished ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith

... in Nicias' way of speaking, the term 'courageous' must be denied to animals or children, because they do not know the danger. Against this inversion of the ordinary use of language Laches reclaims, but is in some degree mollified by a compliment to his own courage. Still, he does not like to see an Athenian statesman and general descending to sophistries of this sort. Socrates ...
— Laches • Plato

... inversion of the old problem, If the ton of coal cost ten dollars, what will the cord of wood come to? Now, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... elaborate one. After the subject has been carried through the first time, the subject is introduced in a new form, in inversion (measure 43, alto), all ascending passages in the original being now imitated in downward directions and by the same interval. This taken as a new subject affords ground for much additional development, and later on the fugue becomes very complicated and interesting. When ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doctrine. The Protesting Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the locus, or centre, where Phil. places them, to the very locus ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... mannerism appears in his earliest writings; it is most marked at the time of the Rambler; whilst in the Lives of the Poets, although I think that the trick of inversion has become commoner, the other peculiarities have been so far softened as (in my judgment, at least), to be inoffensive. It is perhaps needless to give examples of a tendency which marks almost every page of his writing. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... redness; 32 per cent. of the radiation from the same spiral at a red heat; 26 per cent. of the radiation from a white-hot spiral, and only 21 per cent. when the spiral is brought near its point of fusion. Remarkable cases of inversion as to transparency also occur. For barely visible redness formic aether is more opaque than sulphuric; for a bright red heat both are equally transparent; while, for a white heat, and still more for a higher temperature, sulphuric ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... full flavour to the beer, to which, no doubt, the popularity of this class of beverage is largely due. Invert sugar is prepared by the action either of acid or of yeast on cane sugar. The chemical equation representing the conversion (or inversion) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... January 3, 1879, to a judgeship which had become vacant by the resignation of Sir Anthony Cleasby. A notorious journalist asserted that the promise had been made on consideration of his writing in the papers on behalf of the Indian Government. The statement is only worth notice as an ingenious inversion of the truth. So far from requiring any external impulse to write on Lytton's behalf, Fitzjames could hardly refrain from writing when its expediency was doubtful. When the occasion for a word in season offered ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... a dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of 'United' States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... astonishing thing about it is its inversion of a yet more consecrated form: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee". Emily Bronte does not follow St. Augustine. She has an absolutely ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... the fields and sky were so much of one colour by the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. Over the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... be to many, particularly acceptable. (562/2. In a paper "On the Geological Structure of the Alps, etc." ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume V., page 157, 1849) Murchison expressed his belief that the apparent inversion of certain Tertiary strata along the flanks of the Alps afforded "a clear demonstration of a sudden operation or catastrophe." It is this view of paroxysmal energy that Lyell criticises in the address.) Capital, that metaphor of the clock. (562/3. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... poetic inspiration, the effect upon the senses, which its higher appeals are sure to involve, becomes with those delighting in, and capable of appreciating, that sensuous effect merely, its sufficient and only end, and even a doctrine of criticism based on this inversion will not be wanting. But the difficulty of unlocking the great Elizabethan poems with any such theory of Art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of Art, which the great Elizabethan Poets adopted, and whether we approve of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it was, for our ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... spoken right. Those who now rule form an aristocracy in an inverse sense, contrary to the law, and yet more contrary to nature.[3321] For, by a violent inversion, the lower grades in the graduated scale of civilization and culture now are found uppermost, while the superior grades are found at the uniform. The Constitution having suppressed inequality, this has again arisen in an inverse sense. The populace, both ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... investigation, and these are found uniformly to reveal the same Law or Principle, it is assumed that all similar Phenomena are invariably governed by this Principle or Law, which, in reality deduced or derived, is, by this inversion of terms, said to be induced from the observed Facts. The Law so established has thenceforth two distinct functions: I, all the Facts of subsequent Observation, by the primitive Method of observation, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... recommendations as are commonly of more value than physic. She was to keep her bed, to be allowed no modern literature of any kind, unless Milton and Swift may be admitted as moderns, and even these authors and their predecessors were to be admitted in very sparing quantities. If any signs of inversion, archaism, or neologistic tendencies appeared he was to be summoned at once; but of these (he added) he had little fear. He did not doubt that in a few weeks we should have her up and about again, but he warned me against letting her ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... his circuitous journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes. Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme which looked ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... and all other tackling necessary for it. In another, two or three burning glasses, wherewith he made both men and women sometimes mad, and in the church put them quite out of countenance; for he said that there was but an antistrophe, or little more difference than of a literal inversion, between a woman folle a la messe and molle a la fesse, that is, foolish at the mass and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... given,—bass at five shillings a bottle, champagne (nee gooseberry) at five pounds, Cape smoke at two shillings per two fingers,—and, at a given signal, there was an inarticulate roar from dusty throats, an inversion of tumblers over thirsty mouths, and a second inversion over the ground to show that ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various

... the widow contracted an alliance with an Indian whose Christian name was Barnet, which name, in process of time, came to be corrupted into Brant. The little boy, who had been called Joseph, thus became known as "Brant's Joseph," from which the inversion to Joseph Brant is sufficiently obvious. No account of his childhood have come down to us, and, little or nothing is known of him until his thirteenth year, when he was taken under the patronage of that ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... cent. of all operatives are of the female sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. The employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... of dress we take to be the following—utility in all cases, ornament when practicable. The first should ever precede, and serve as the basis to the second; and it is the inversion of their due positions that causes so many applications of the utile and the dulce to end in sheer absurdity. The usefulness of any article or system of dress depends entirely upon climate, modified of course by the occupation or pursuits of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class—"isn't much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man." There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or before dawn, and then ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... not very easily definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly different state of things, the inversion of our own, and much could be forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be forgiven to an American if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a purely republican experience. I knew ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... particular attention to the law that any sequence followed out in an inverted order must produce an inverted result, for this goes a long way to explain many of the problems of life. The physical world affords endless examples of the working of "inversion." In the dynamo the sequence commences with mechanical force which is ultimately transformed into the subtler power of electricity; but invert this order, commence by generating electricity, and it becomes converted into mechanical ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... copper having a slow motion from top to bottom. This renewal of the liquid is so much the more necessary in that the saturated solution of sulphate of copper has a density of 1.166, and the sulphate of zinc one of 1.445, There would occur, then, a mixture through inversion of densities if the solution were allowed to reach a too great amount of saturation, did not the siphon prevent such a phenomenon by sucking up the liquid into the part where the mixture tends to take place. The chemical action that produces the current is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... a mere accident of the situation; for Dwight's division being formed in echelon of battalions on the right, just as it had in the first instance been necessary to bring the 114th into action obliquely to the left, so now Beal was forced to form the line of battle of his brigade by inversion, and this, moreover, in the woods, with the steep bank of the Red Bud hampering his right. Slow though it must have seemed to Per Lee, standing out there alone, this difficult movement was in reality executed by Beal with great promptness and rapidity and in admirable order. As regiment after ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin

... ogee recta—that is, right side up; or it may be inverted, as in Fig. 193, with the concaved surface below, and is then called ogee reversa. Contrast these two views and you will note what a difference the mere inversion of the strip makes in the appearance. Second, because the ogee has in it, in a combined form, the outlines of nearly all the other types. The only advantage there is in using the other types is because you may thereby build up and space your ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... expected at the moment. The revolution itself must, of course, have taken place in an easy and gradual manner, and it is by no means clear that, had I even been awake at the time of the occurrence, I should have been made aware of it by any internal evidence of an inversion—that is to say, by any inconvenience or disarrangement, either about my person or ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... welding the two codes into one. Thorpe follows the manuscripts in this arrangement, though not in the numbering of the sections, and the student who consults his edition is apt to be confused with this chronological inversion, unless he has taken note of the cause. Ine reigned over a mixed population of Saxons and Britons, and his code is of a more comprehensive character than that of the Kentish kings. His enactments became, through subsequent re-enactments, the basis of the laws not only ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... reciprocal, and full of import. And Mr. Buckle begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life. And if you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly maintained,—and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary audacity which makes his propositions so startling and his pages to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... liberty, and France is—what is France!"—We know what France suddenly became in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple Pope with the New Testament in his hand. An outbreak, or at least a radical change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be achieved without an outbreak, everybody felt was inevitable in France: but it had been universally expected that France would as usual take the initiative in that matter; and had there been no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary Sicily, France had certainly ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... Group. Background of yellow-red, lighter vase in yellow-green, and darker vase of green, with slight addition of black. Vary by inversion of the colors in ground and ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell

... of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... is impracticable; as, "The people sought him, and came unto him, and stayed him, that he should not depart from them."—Luke, iv, 42. Here, to prove that to be a pronoun, the disciples of Tooke and Webster must resort to more than one imaginary ellipsis, and to such inversion as will scarcely ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... view was presented to me, I stood for some time to contemplate it; I cannot better illustrate the reaction which, took place in my mind, than by saying that it resembles that awkward inversion which a man's proper body experiences when, on going to pull something from which he expects a marvellous assistance, it comes with him at a touch, and the natural consequence is, that he finds his head down and his heels up. That which dashed the whole scene from the dark elevation in which ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton

... [322] The inversion of the organs shown by Vertebrates as compared with Invertebrates is due to the reversed position of the embryo relatively ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... punish the sinner, for justice requires it; then they say he does not punish the sinner, but punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, attributes his righteousness to the sinner, and so continues just. Was there ever such a confusion, such an inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as an unrighteous; neither, if justice required the punishment of sin, could justice let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain upon the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... This is, however, a matter of very small moment in dealing with celestial objects; for, as they are usually round, it is really not of much consequence which part we regard as top and which as bottom. Such an inversion would, of course, be most inconvenient when viewing terrestrial objects. In order to observe the latter we therefore employ what is called a terrestrial telescope, which is merely a refractor with some extra lenses added in the eye portion for the purpose of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... is left to itself, the order of succession is constant, and its occasional inversion is always explicable by some human interference. It is curious that the trees which require most light are content with the poorest soils, and vice versa. The trees which first appear are also those which propagate ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... Get by heart, as her father advises, half-a-dozen serious texts of Scripture, and drop one in now and then, such as, 'All flesh is grass.' 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' 'He that marrieth not doth well, but he that marrieth doth better.' To be sure, there is a slight inversion of text here, but then it is made ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... the author of the one passage could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... but elsewhere a very ordinary understanding can recognise the clauses and the epithets which are out of place, and in excess, retarding or confusing the direct appreciation of the thought. If we have written a clumsy or confused sentence, we shall often find that the removal of an awkward inversion liberates the ides, or that the modification of a cadence increases the effect. This is sometimes strikingly seen at the rehearsal of a play: a passage which has fallen flat upon the ear is suddenly brightened into effectiveness by the removal of a superfluous phrase, which, by ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... not quite follow all this, but it seemed part of the general inversion of the new age. He bowed condescendingly to his first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of the guests, to an inner group, did Lincoln consider it appropriate to introduce him. This first introduction ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... also sucrose or crystallizable sugar, when in dilute solution is changed very readily into grape sugar or glucose, a substance which is much more difficult than cane sugar to crystallize. This change, called inversion, takes place in over-ripe canes. It sets in very soon after cutting in any cane during warm weather; it occurs in cane which has been injured by blowing down, or by insects, or by frost, and it probably occurs in cane which takes a second growth after ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... and elder states, What strange inversion all his works awaits! From age to age, on every peopled shore, Stalks the fell Demon of despotic power, Sweeps in his march the mounds of art away. Blots with his breath the trembling disk of day, Treads down whole nations every stride he takes, And ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... a condition will occur where at some level, instead of the temperature and/or relative humidity decreasing with altitude, it will begin to increase. This layer of warm, moist air is known as an inversion layer, and it can do all kinds of crazy things to a radar wave. It can cause part of the radar wave to travel in a big arc and actually pick up the ground many miles away. Or it can cause the wave to bend down just enough to pick up trucks, cars, houses, or anything that has a surface ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... to the final inversion—"this landscape is beautiful" instead of "I like this landscape"—there is yet another, and far more curious merging of the subject's activities in the qualities of the object. This further putting of the cart before the horse (and, you will see, attributing to the cart ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... cursing under his breath. He pulled down the outer screen that was fighting directly against the radio frequency, energy for energy, and allowed the beam to strike squarely on the second screen, the inversion field that shunted the major portion of the energy impacting against it through 90 ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak

... was held in high reputation, assuming, in these respects, the attitude of a royal court in the northern parts of the kingdom; and the family were regarded with such veneration and esteem that the following harmless inversion was familiar "as household words:"—"God save the Earl of Derby and the King;" the general feeling and opinion thereby apparent being love to their lord ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... standard. Judged by this, surely the fairest, the only fair, rule, Japan has every reason to be considered a moral country. Those shocking crimes which appear to be the outcome of either the aberration or the inversion of the sexual instincts are almost unknown there. Nor do I consider that the public estimate of prostitution on the whole makes for immorality. If an evil exist, and prostitution is undoubtedly an evil, it is surely better to regulate it ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... difference, are flattering to the esteem of ourselves as a literature-loving people. It is true that we no longer garble our acting versions of Shakespeare. We are content with abbreviations of the text, some of which are essential, but many of which injure the dramatic perspective, and with inversion of scenes which may or may not be justifiable. But, to my mind, it is in our large dependence on scenery that we are following too closely that tradition of the Restoration which won the wholehearted approval of Pepys. The musico-scenic method of producing ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... we here grasp the race-differences in the making, and catch the only glimpse it is allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum? What strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate resultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever its bulk, is elementary, I hold that the study of its conditions (be these never so ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... American conservative, indeed, descended the stairs of compromise until his descent into utter abnegation of all that civilized humanity holds dear was arrested by the Rebellion. And the reason of this strange inversion of conservative principles was, that the movement of Slavery is towards barbarism, while the movement of all countries in which labor is not positively chattellized is towards freedom and civilization. True conservatism, it must never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... After words used in apostrophe, as Monsieur, Madame; 3. After conjunctions and interjections when there is silence; 4. After all transpositions; for example: To live, one must work. Here the preposition to takes the value of its natural antecedent, work; that is to say, six degrees, since by inversion it precedes it, and the gesture of the sentence bears wholly on the preposition; 5. Before and after incidental phrases; 6. Wherever we wish to indicate ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... here observed parallels that of many other cases in which the left-right direction is reversed. These commoner cases take on an added interest when considered in connection with a case of double space inversion. Such a case is on record.[1] The double inversion consists in writing all verbal symbols and digits up side down and backward. In this case the boy had perfect pseudoscopic vision at the beginning of his school ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... and stature by the art and power with which the superstition of the enemy invested them. These oppressed yet dreaded fugitives obtained, naturally enough, the character of the German spirits called Kobold, from which the English goblin and the Scottish bogle, by some inversion and alteration of ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... bustles and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity even of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness. But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence. The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... readiness, and it is put into them and pressed down. The next day these baskets are suspended in the sun, and at night are brought into the houses to congeal. The process is now finished. The cakes are removed by inversion of the baskets and "bushrope" tied around them, by which the pieces are carried. As thus prepared, odika is highly esteemed by the natives as an article of food, being made into a kind of thick gravy and eaten with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... women in all races, and for those which distinguish them in each race, or each society. An interesting subordinate inquiry may be, how far such mental differences are inverted in cases where there is inversion of social and domestic relations; as among those Khasi Hill-tribes, whose women have so far the upper hand that they turn off their husbands in a summary way if ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... exact, we have six and a half pairs of eyes, and one undeniable fact; and on the other we have—what is it?—prejudice, common-sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there seven more honest-seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner's anatomical structure, and—never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell! The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy Gottfried's contribution (for I count him as one of the seven). ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... actually in"). The dream exhibits my friend as behaving like a general paralytic, and thus riots in absurdity. But the dream thoughts run ironically. "Of course he is a madman, a fool, and you are the genius who understands all about it. But shouldn't it be the other way round?" This inversion obviously took place in the dream when Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whilst any one, however young, can to-day easily ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... but these will not fail to strike the learner after a very brief acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle cxu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... hydrodynamical experiments of Professor Bjerknes all the phenomena of magnetic induction can be reproduced directly and perfectly, but the phenomena of magnetic action are not so exactly reproduced, that is to say, they are subject to a sort of inversion. Thus when two bodies are pulsating together and in the same phase (i. e., both expanding and both contracting at the same time), they mutually attract each other: but if they are pulsating in opposite phases, repulsion is the result. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects, glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... the most prolific sources of Corrupt Readings, is Transposition, or the arbitrary inversion of the order of the sacred words,—generally in the subordinate clauses of a sentence. The extent to which this prevails in Codexes of the type of B[Symbol: Aleph]CD passes belief. It is not merely the occasional writing of [Greek: tauta panta] for [Greek: panta tauta],—or ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... fewest and simplest words that can be found in the compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way; allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without obscurity; thus, 'his present, and your pains, we thank you for' is better than 'we thank you for his present and your pains,' because the Dauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; but 'when to these balls our rackets ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... black tea kettle. As a reporter, one of the few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead line. So I assured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished writing. But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of the American rule that business should always come before people, he assured me that he could sit down at the fire with me ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell

... am also an elder ... feed the flock of God.' He remembered that last command, which sounded ever in his spirit, 'Follow thou Me,' and discerning now, through all the years that lay between, the presumptuous folly and blind inversion of his own work and his Master's which had lain in his earlier question, 'Why cannot I follow Thee now? I will lay down my life for Thy sake'—he writes to all, 'Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... fragile clinging beauty, but the girl of the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carry water, who would be the much considered and much sought after female in such a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversion in values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of his untamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a prey to destruction and extermination when he comes into contact with the new condition ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... that the court of Vienna was the paradise of old women, and that there is no other place in the world where a woman past fifty excites the least interest. Had her travels extended to the interior of North America, she would have seen another instance of this inversion of the common mode of thinking. Here a woman never was of consequence, till she had a son old enough to fight the battles of his country. From that date she held a superior rank in society; was allowed to live at ease, and even called ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... kinds of plants found to be displaced in the great earthquake of Riobamba, in the province of Quito, on the 4th of February, 1797, and in that of Calabria, between the 5th of February and the 28th of March, 1782. The phenomenon of the inversion or displacement of fields and pieces of land, by which one is made to occupy the place of another, is connected with a translatory motion or penetration of separate terrestrial strata. When I made the plan of the ruined town of Riobamba, one particular spot ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... the revenue, following the natural course and order of things, arises out of their commerce. Here, by a mischievous inversion of that order, the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues; and these are carried out of the country without producing anything to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason, powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... evidence, not only does not diminish in any thing like the same proportion, but is not necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing more results than a disturbance in the order of precedency of the two processes, sometimes amounting to its actual inversion: insomuch that instead of deducing our conclusions by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some cases begin by obtaining them provisionally from specific experience, and afterward connect them with the principles of human nature by a ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century Martineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to the human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, For ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... let me assure the suspicious reader, is his own and not an Erewhonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fascination for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler. College professors, he avers, have ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life [214] satisfies, no poetry even, if it be ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... motions by sympathy. 8. Vomiting performed by intervals. 9. Inversion of the cutaneous absorbents. 10. Increased secretion of bile and pancreatic juice. 11. Inversion of the lacteals. 12. And of the bile-ducts. 13. Case of a cholera. 14. Further account of the inversion of lacteals. 15. Iliac passions. Valve of the colon. 16. Cure of the iliac passion. 17. Pain of gall-stone distinguished from pain of the stomach. Gout of the stomach from torpor, from inflammation. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... decline with the decay of literature. Music, rising into excellence and importance at a time when poetry was on the decline, acquired such superiority that verse, instead of being its mistress, became its handmaid. The first occasion of this inversion was in the year 1594, when Rinuccini, a Florentine poet, associated himself with three musicians to compose a mythological drama. This and several other pieces by the same author met with a brilliant reception. Poetry, written only in order to be sung, thus assumed a different character; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... at a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... see the reason for this inversion of arrangements, and she was silent a little while; studying it, ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner

... and the lawyer, being (by some strange inversion of professional excellence) honest at the bottom, was deeply pained at having such words used, as to, for, about, or ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... from their throne of parental authority, and take the law from their children's mouths; for they had no other means of finding out what was good American form. The result was that laxity of domestic organization, that inversion of normal relations which makes for friction, and which sometimes ends in breaking up a family that was ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... the burden of European customs from his shoulders, his almost moribund interest in his art revived. Gauguin there experienced visions, was haunted by exotic spirits. One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour inversion of Manet's Olympe. With the cosmology of the islanders ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... there are the mysteries of suspension and inversion, by means of which even the second is received into favor in the bosom of harmony. A musician once explained all these things to me, but that was later. And then there are still other marvels which I do not understand, as the fugue, counterpoint, the canon for two ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... out another kind of rearrangement. He takes the creation of Eve from Adam as an inversion. He refers to the ever recurring world-parent myths of savage peoples, in which the son begets upon the mother a new generation. He cites after Frobenius a story from Joruba, Africa, where the son and daughter of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... to 1-1/2 or 2 inches, and is evident immediately after the accident; it is due to the distal fragment being drawn up by the muscles inserted into the great trochanter and upper end of the shaft. In a limited number of cases the distal fragment lies in front of the proximal, and there is inversion of ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... seems to be an inversion of la Trenise, except that in nineteen cases out of twenty, the waistcoat, tip, camellia and wristbands, seem to undergo intense mental torture; for if there be such a thing as "poetry of motion," pastorale must be the "Inferno ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various

... to have come in this way even within a Horace's apprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame. With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth genius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and fame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. When the Virgin in ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... thirty degrees from the south pole, is seen in its whole revolution, and, accordingly, when off the Cape, I have observed it in every stage, from its triumphant erect position, between sixty and seventy degrees above the horizon, to that of complete inversion, with the top beneath, and almost touching the water. This position, by the way, always reminded me of the death of St. Peter, who is said to have deemed it too great an honour to be crucified with his head ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... incandescent globes in space. How explain that they were here represented in reverse, their brilliance scattered and diffused over the surrounding sky, leaving points of blackness instead? Afterward he learned that the peculiar chemical constituency of the atmosphere was solely responsible for the inversion of the usual ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... pairs he was able to show similarities in mechanisms that had no apparent relation. He was first to recognize that the fixed link of a mechanism was kinematically the same as the movable links. This led him to the important notion of inversion of linkages, fixing successively the various links and thus changing the function of the mechanism. He devoted 40 pages to showing, with obvious delight, the kinematic identity of one design after another of rotary steam engines, demolishing ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... gave a grand entertainment to certain distinguished persons of both sexes at Wittenberg. To render the scene more splendid, he contrived to exhibit a memorable inversion of the seasons. As the company approached the doctor's house, they were surprised to find, though there was a heavy snow through the neighbouring fields, that Faustus's court and garden bore not the least marks of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... times, it can be sufficiently extended to allows the lenticular substance to protrude; he would have discovered the real use of the scaly plates; he would have explained that of the canal k, of the plaited pallet q, and the movements of all these parts, more admirable perhaps than the inversion which he was ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber

... are very good; but Dr. Herz has endeavored to simplify it still further, and with this object in view has experimented on several arrangements. For example, to obtain inversion a contact was simply placed on each side of the vibrating plate. Although the movements of this latter are not, as we know, of the nature of ordinary sonorous vibrations, it was thought that they might prove to be in opposite directions on the two sides of the plate, and that one of the contacts ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may hear from him again, as a ship passing in the night, a rotund meditative figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of passion had become a passion; for him individuality was cloaked by the commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... of 1660 was such a revolution. Complete and instantaneous inversion of the position of the two parties in the nation, it occasioned much individual hardship. But this was only the fortune of war, the necessary consequence of party ascendancy. The Restoration was much more than a triumph ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... incidentally that he used every day with great profit certain devotional books, and that about twice a week he took for definite meditation and prayer a passage from the Gospels. It struck me that here was a strange and sad inversion of the right order of proportion; devotional books daily, and the New Testament (in any sense of earnest meditative study) about twice a week! Very different, I thought, is the view and teaching of the Church of England in this matter of the spiritual reading of her Ministers. What does the Church ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule

... homme manque, of a man who would be a genius were it not for the excess of his qualities. Would he continue to appear a genius, then he must continue to display that excess which—so he wished them to believe—alone prevented his brilliant achievements. It was all a curious, vicious inversion. "You could do great things if you didn't drink," crooned the fools. "See how I drink," Gourlay seemed to answer; "that is why I don't do great things. But, mind you, I could do them were it not for this." Thus every glass he tossed off seemed to hint in a roundabout ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... exhausts. You can also use acids to corrode boiler tubes; acid fumes will ruin cylinders and piston rods. A small quantity of some corrosive substance, a handful of emery will be the end of oil cups. When it comes to dynamos or transformers, short circuits and inversion of poles can be easily managed. Underground cables can be destroyed by fire, water or ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... yesterday, ever dearest—and since, I have been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader. It seems to me too that the language is freer—there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm. It just strikes me so for the first impression. At any rate the interest grows and grows. You have a secret about Domizia, I guess—which will not be told till the last perhaps. And that poor, noble Luria, who will ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... that there is no divine sanction for goodness and no eternal stamp on vice, that morality is a matter of convention which every society and every nation has a right to invert if it judges such inversion in the line of its interests. The spirit of anarchy in art proclaims that all the works of nature are equally beautiful or equally ugly, that nothing which exists is unfit to be represented in our galleries and public places, that so long as a picture or a statue arouses a sentiment it does not ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... Life from the Universal Spirit into the individual there must be no inversion in the individual's presentation of himself to the Originating Power: for through the very same Law by which we seek Life—the Life namely, of reciprocal action and re-action—every inversion we bring with us in presenting ourselves to the Spirit is bound to be faithfully reproduced in a corresponding re-action, thus adulterating the stream of Pure Life, and rendering it less life-giving in proportion to the extent to which we invert the action of the Life-principle; so that in extreme ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward

... higher Radiates is permanent for these; and when the little sphere moving about by means of its vibratile cilia has elongated a little, attached itself by the lower end to some surface, while the inversion of the upper end has formed the mouth and digestive cavity, and the expansion of its margin has made the tentacles, the very simple story of the fresh-water Hydra is told. But the last page in the development ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak on this occasion. To my surprise he passed on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined on my side to keep him cautiously in view, and to ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... indignation, "some sort of blasphemy laws reasonably enforced may be an advantage even to those who differ from the popular religion of a country, and who desire to oppose and to deny it." But this is an inversion of the natural order of things. What reason is there in imprisoning an innocent man because some one meditates an assault upon him? Would it not be wiser and juster to restrain the intending criminal, as is ordinarily done? I object to being punished because others cannot keep their tempers; ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote

... country's pride, &c. Construe: When the priest, the slave, and the liberticide, trampled his country's pride, and mocked [it] with many a loathed rite of lust and blood. This of course refers to the condition of public affairs and of court-life in the reign of Charles II. The inversion in this passage is not a very serious one, although, for the sense, slightly embarrassing. Occasionally Shelley conceded to himself great latitude in inversion: as for instance in the Revolt of ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... purified by washing with saline solution or eusol, and the surrounding skin painted with iodine, after which the edges are approximated by sutures. The raw surfaces must be brought into accurate apposition, care being taken that no inversion of the cutaneous surface takes place. In extensive and deep wounds, to ensure more complete closure and to prevent subsequent stretching of the scar, it is advisable to unite the different structures—muscles, fasciae, and subcutaneous tissue—by ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... interest in the game that a kind of Guide to Billiard Types cannot but be of value. Hence the following classification of players who are to be met with in clubs, country-houses or saloons by any ordinary wielders of the cue. Any reader who has ever endeavoured to master what may be called (by way of inversion) the Three Balls Art has power ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various

... the most interesting and most honorable pursuits in which a man can engage. Ambition to serve is always noble. Desire for the honors and emoluments of public office, however, may crowd out the desire to render public service. Such a substitution of selfish for patriotic considerations, such an inversion of the proper order of interests in a man's mind, is the vice of political ambition. The ambitious politician seeks office, not because he seeks to promote measures which he believes to be for the public good; ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... one permanent and fatal mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that "Failure is to form habits." When he said it the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not failure merely, but ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... this sense, I grant you, that the best managed homes are those where the wife has most power. But when she despises the voice of her head, when she desires to usurp his rights and take the command upon herself, this inversion of the proper order of things leads only to misery, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... whose parents, in the first settlement of the country, had to work very hard for their general maintenance, may be the cause of this inversion of moral duties, and the parents not being considered properly on an equality with their better dressed and better educated offspring; but from whatever cause it springs, the effect it produces on the mind of a stranger is very painful. It is difficult to ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... has the grand simplicity or the large humanity of the early singers, and, as a hero, AEneas is no less a failure than Arthur. Sir Charles Bowen's version hardly gives us this peculiar literary quality of Virgil's verse, and, now and then, it reminds us, by some awkward inversion, of the fact that it is a translation; still, on the whole, it is extremely pleasant to read, and, if it does not absolutely mirror Virgil, it at least brings us many ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... read backward, these propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order, and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth. She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve; no matter in Mind, and no mind in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various



Words linked to "Inversion" :   motility, abnormality, overturn, abnormalcy, chemical action, gayness, move, genetic mutation, rhetorical device, invert, counterpoint, genetics, movement, anastrophe, motion, chromosomal mutation, sexual inversion, upset, chemical change, variation, turnover, homosexualism, homoeroticism, queerness, chemical process, genetic science, homosexuality, mutation, atmospheric phenomenon



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