Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Substratum   Listen
Substratum

noun
(pl. substrata)
1.
A surface on which an organism grows or is attached.  Synonym: substrate.
2.
Any stratum or layer lying underneath another.  Synonym: substrate.
3.
An indigenous language that contributes features to the language of an invading people who impose their language on the indigenous population.  Synonym: substrate.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Substratum" Quotes from Famous Books



... upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands, Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imagined them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least those of Mrs. Archer's generation) were ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... It is a purely metaphysical hypothesis unwarrantable in his opinion as a dogma. He distinguishes between correspondence—which he of course admits—and parallelism, to which he is opposed. We never think without a certain substratum of cerebral activity, but what the relation is precisely, between brain and consciousness, is one for long and patient research: it cannot be determined a priori and asserted dogmatically. Until such investigation ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... ignorance unquestionably is concerning the physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified in regarding this substratum as the same both in ganglionic or organic, and in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies between them are so numerous ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... senses in some measure left with us a show of truth, or probability at least, about the adventure, which, for my own part, I find it difficult to throw off. Exaggerated and full of improbabilities, I admit, yet the story hath some substratum of truth, no doubt by which it is supported. What it is, would be difficult to ascertain, but the mystery or misapprehension, whatever it be, shall be cleared ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... that he might have taken Hilland into his confidence, he had, in terms substantially the same as those given, imagined his explanation, and he smiled as he portrayed to himself his friend's jocular response, which would have nevertheless its substratum of true sympathy. "Hilland would say," he thought, "'That is just like you, Graham. You can't smoke a cigar or make love to a girl without analyzing and philosophizing and arranging all the wisdom of ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... himself can revel among the clouds in his own writings, and can leave us sometimes in doubt whether he ever means to come back to earth, but when his foot is on terra firma he loves to feel the earthy substratum which supports his weight. With women he likes a hand that can remain an unnecessary moment within his own, an eye that can glisten with the sparkle of champagne, a heart weak enough to make its owner's arm tremble within his own beneath the moonlight ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various

... have understood. If they had, they wouldn't have believed. He found that he savagely resisted the conviction himself. But there was no other way for such garbled tales with such a substratum of fact to be spread among the stars. And whoever spread them knew of events up to the last news sent back by Bors, but nothing after that. Undoubtedly, Talents, Incorporated's Department for Disseminating Truthful ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... fond of local colour that they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet but few of the secrets of the world and none of the ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... connect the actual manufacture of the things a chicken makes inside an egg with the desire and memory of the chickens, so as to show that one and the same set of vibrations at once change the universal substratum into the particular phase of it required and awaken a consciousness of, and a memory of and a desire towards, this particular phase on the part of the molecules which are being vibrated into it. So, for example, that a set of vibrations shall at once turn plain white and yolk of egg into ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... strictly chained down to the real: it is only when want is satisfied that it develops without hinderance. But it is also the proof of an internal liberty, because it reveals to us a force which, independent of an external substratum, sets itself in motion, and has sufficient energy to remove from itself the solicitations of nature. The reality of things is effected by things, the appearance of things is the work of man, and a soul that takes pleasure in appearance does not take pleasure in what it receives ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... undermining his health. He looked during his student days overworked, and if nature had endowed him with a less magnificent physique he would, no doubt, have succumbed to the strain of this perpetual over-exertion. But after his marriage a happy change came over him. The joyous substratum of his nature (what he himself called his pagan self) broke through its sombre integuments and asserted itself. No sooner had he taken his place among the teachers of the University than his clear and weighty personality commanded admiration and respect. In social intercourse his ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... Gulliver, or Baron Munchausen, ever transcended the stories about those Kablunets which had reached this broad, short, sturdy Eskimo—stories which no doubt began in the south of Greenland with a substratum of truth, but which, in travelling several hundreds of miles northward, had grown, as a snowball might have grown if rolled the same distance over the Arctic wastes; with this difference—that whereas the snowball ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... Roberto's marriage, his desertion of his wife, his attachment to another woman who deserts him when he falls into poverty, all coincide with the facts in his own career. From this we may infer that what follows has also a substratum of truth regarding a temporary connection of Greene with Alleyn's company as playwright, though it is evident that he describes Alleyn's theatrical conditions as they were between 1589 and 1592 and after Alleyn had acquired ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... she disappointed in Bridge. She had looked upon him as a gentleman whom misfortune and wanderlust had reduced to the lowest stratum of society. Now she feared that he belonged to that substratum which lies below the lowest which society recognizes as a part of itself, and which is composed ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... of New South Wales. A little rain renders it however so soft and slimy as to make it difficult to travel over; and I should conjecture, from the milky whiteness of the water in the holes we have seen, that it rests on a substratum of white clay three or four feet below the surface; the water holes at least had that bottom, although their margins were of the red, ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley

... power than the common mouse, and is therefore at a disadvantage in moving about on sloping surfaces. One evidence of this fact is the character of the tracks made by the animal. Instead of raising its feet from the substratum and placing them neatly, as does the common mouse (Figure 5), it tends to shuffle along, dragging its toes and thus producing on smoked paper such tracks as are seen in Figure 6. From my own observations I am confident that these figures exaggerate ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... marsh land that lies at the roots of the sandstone heights that culminate in Hind Head, Leith Hill, and the Devil's Jumps. As already said, the great mass of Bagshot sand lies upon a substratum of clay. The sand drinks in every drop of rain that falls on the surface. This percolates through it till it reaches the clay, which refuses to absorb it, or let it sink through to other beds. Thereupon the accumulated ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... climates where burials are hurried, and in rude ages when medical skill is comparatively undeveloped, are all within the bounds of possibility. There does not appear in them any trace of mythology,—hardly even of the supernatural; and he would be a bold man who would deny that a substratum of fact may not underlie some of them. To establish their relationship with the group we are now considering, links of a much more evident character are wanting. The fact that they are traditional is not of itself sufficient. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... the claims of substance as unequivocally as those of spirit, declaring it to be "only an uncertain supposition of we know not what, i. e., of something whereof we have no particular, distinct, positive idea, which we take to be the substratum or support of those ideas we know." Yet he inclines on the whole toward materialism. "We have," he says, "the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... long, thirty feet broad in front of the edifice, and nineteen feet high. The upper one is formed upon the back half of the middle platform, of which last Mr. Stephens observes that "this great terrace was not entirely artificial. The substratum was a natural rock, and showed that advantage had been taken of a natural elevation as far as it went, and by this means some portion of the immense labor of constructing the terrace had been saved." [Footnote: Incidents of Travel ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... says, "The subsoil north of latitude 56 degs. is perpetually frozen, the thaw on the coast not penetrating above three feet, and at Bear Lake, in latitude 64 degs., not more than twenty inches. The frozen substratum does not of itself destroy vegetation, for forests flourish on the surface, at a distance from ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... sandal-string of the foot, infers and judges the soul of the man—it is comparative anatomy under the most speculative conditions. How a writer of his talents and pretensions could make up his mind to make up a book on such slight substratum, is a curious proof of the state of literature in America. Do you not think so? Why a lecturer on the English Dramatists for a 'Young Ladies' academy' here in England, might take it to be necessary to have better information than he could gather from ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... be the things people are—nobody. YOU don't want to preside over this—this bottling; I don't want to wear these beastly clothes and be led about by you; nobody wants to keep on sticking labels on silly bottles at so many farthings a gross. That isn't existing! That's—sus—substratum. None of us want to be what we are, or to do what we do. Except as a sort of basis. What do we want? You know. I know. Nobody confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetually young and beautiful—young Joves—young Joves, Ponderevo"—his voice became loud, harsh and declamatory—"pursuing ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... dispose of material removed in excavating, it was necessary to start a trench from the slope outside the mouth of the cave. As it progressed the substratum of clay became wetter and more difficult to dig. At 40 feet from the beginning, where the trench was 11 feet deep, the seeping water accumulated until it covered the bottom of the trench, so that no greater depth could be reached. A crowbar forced downward for 18 inches, as far as it could be ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere. The same substratum, if I may so speak, supports the most different modifications, without any difference in itself; and varies them, without any variation. Neither time, nor place, nor all the diversity of nature are able to produce ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... run with a kind of materiality; and the probability is that the progress of science, by connecting the phenomena of magnetism with the luminiferous ether, will prove these 'lines of force,' as Faraday loved to call them, to represent a condition of this mysterious substratum ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... irregularly rounded. Any increase of size in the exit wound in the soft parts due to the passage of bone fragments with the bullet, was equalised in that of entry by the fact that the latter, as supported by a hard substratum, was usually larger than those met with in situations where the skin ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins

... instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir, of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,' in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is not 'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent condition, the main trunk ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... which yet shook the heavens. Marjory again took her seat on the casement; and her fancy, stimulated by her fears, became again busy in the conjuration of images which, however fearful, unhappily stood too great a chance of being realized. The substratum of indisputable facts was itself a good foundation of fear:—The king, angry, and breathing revenge against his rebellious subjects of the Border, was at hand—even within a few miles of her husband's residence; and the ensign ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... Mrs. Barker, expanded into an attendance of all the older boys (when not in bed for moral baking purposes) upon a series of bi-monthly soirees, given by the remaining Miss Moodle, with a superficial view to her pupils' attainment of ease in society; and a material substratum of sandwiches, which Miss Moodle preferred to see, through the atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality, as "a simple repast." To this was occasionally added a refreshment, which I have seen elsewhere only at Sunday-school ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... Him as a force, a substance, a 'something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' Things do not 'make for righteousness'; and in using the term Person we shall at least make it clear that we do not think of Him as a 'thing,' or a collection of things, or a vague substratum of things, or even a mere totality of minds ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... once more, may be dissociated into yet simpler groups—hyper-meta-proto-elements—equally capable of separate, independent existence, and resolvable into single ultimate physical atoms, the irreducible substratum of the physical world ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

... in, Mrs. Davis was standing behind the counter, dressed in a cap of wonderful grandeur, and a red tabinet gown, which rustled among the pots and jars, sticking out from her to a tremendous width, inflated by its own magnificence and a substratum of crinoline. Charley had never before seen her arrayed in such royal robes. Her accustomed maid was waiting as usual on the guests, and another girl also was assisting; but Norah did not appear to ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune; it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick. He has no ambition; no incentive; no force. Of course, there are those who have bad health and cannot help it: you cannot expect that such persons can accumulate wealth, but ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum

... default of this intuition, the moral law assures us of this distinction between the relation of our actions as appearance to our sensible nature, and the relation of this sensible nature to the supersensible substratum in us. In this view, which is natural to our reason, though inexplicable, we can also justify some judgements which we passed with all conscientiousness, and which yet at first sight seem quite opposed to all equity. There are cases in which men, even with the same education which ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant

... greater size from the swarm-cells, while it exhibits essentially the same movements and changes of shape. The plasmodia gradually increase in size, and as they grow assume commonly the form of branched strands; these spread over the surface of the substratum, which is usually the decaying parts of plants, in the form of veins and net-works of veins, giving rise to a copiously-branched reticulated or frill-like expansion, which covers surfaces varying in extent ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan

... as by angular bastions; the northern face had a cant of 32 degrees east (mag.); and the northwestern tower was distant from the sea seventy-two me'tres, whereas the south-western numbered only sixty. The spade showed a substratum of thick old wall, untrimmed granite, and other hard materials. Further down were various shells, especially benitiers ( Tridacna gigantea) the harp (here called "Sirinbaz"), and the pearl-oyster; sheep-bones and palm ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... unity, or the unbroken continuity of all existence, but it also negates all differences, except those which are expressions of that unity. It is not the mere assertion of a substratum under qualities; but it implies that the substratum penetrates into the qualities, and manifests itself in them. That which develops—be it plant, child, or biological kingdom—is, at every stage from lowest to highest, a concrete unity of all its differences; and ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... the oldest parts of the archipelago; that it has been formerly more completely isolated both from India and from Australia than it is now, and that amid all the mutations it has undergone, a relic or substratum of the fauna and flora of some more ancient land has been here ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... not in poetry, at least in fact; And fact is Truth, the grand desideratum! Of which, howe'er the Muse describes each act, There should be ne'ertheless a slight substratum. But now the town is going to be attacked; Great deeds are doing—how shall I relate 'em? Souls of immortal Generals! Phoebus watches To colour up his rays ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... momentary sympathy with its rulers. Yet this was but an underlying element in the instinctive delight of the people in the outward forms of their religion. Odo's late experiences had wakened him to the influences acting on that obscure substratum of human life that still seemed, to most men of his rank, of no more account than the brick lining of their marble-coated palaces. As he watched the mounting excitement of the throng, and pictured to himself the lives suddenly lit ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... substance is rather the same absurdity as an immaterial body. Bodies, being, substance are but different terms for the same reality. One cannot separate thought from matter that thinks. It is the substratum of all changes. The word infinite is meaningless unless it signifies the capacity of our minds to perform an endless process of addition. As only material things are perceptible and knowable, nothing can be known about the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider. There is the original substratum of Slavs, overlaid by Szeklers, Magyars, German immigrants, Wallacks, Rusniacks, Jews, and gipsies. An old German writer has quaintly described the characteristics of these various peoples in the ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... punishments for virtues or vices, nor ought he to be. We hold life, liberty, and property in this country upon a system of oaths; oaths founded on a religious belief of some sort. And that system which would strike away the great substratum, destroy the safe possession of life, liberty, and property, destroy all the institutions of civil society, cannot and will not be considered as entitled to the protection of a court of equity. It has been said, on the other side, that there was no teaching against religion or ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... contributed to Christendom, there is no such intimate relation between them as that which connects Christian Ethics with the morality of Israel. Christ Himself, and still more the Apostle Paul, assumed as a substratum of {45} their teaching the revelation which had been granted to the Jews. The moral and religious doctrines comprehended under the designation of the 'law' served, as the apostle said, as a paidagogos or usher whose function it was to lead them to ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... supposing it to have once existed and to have perished—that we can know it exists even now? Their opponents used formerly to reply, that the uniform order of sensations implies an external cause determining the law of the order; and that the attributes inhere in this external cause or substratum, viz. matter. But at last it was seen that the existence of matter could not be proved by extrinsic evidence; consequently, now the answer to the idealist argument simply is, that the belief in an external ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... the enormous eggs were discovered in Madagascar about the year 1850. It is an instance proving the caution needed before rejecting as fictitious many apparently fabulous legends, but which on examination may prove to possess a substratum of truth. "To the north of Greater Java," says Pigafetta, "in the gulf of China, there is a very large tree called campanganghi inhabited by certain birds called garula, which are so large and strong that they can bear away a buffalo and even an elephant, and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... grandiflora, not less than 40 feet in height, while other portions of its walls are covered with the finest varieties of climbing roses and other suitable plants. The surrounding country, although somewhat flat, is well wooded, and the soil is a rich loam upon a substratum of gravel, and is consequently admirably suited to the development of the finer kinds of coniferous and other ornamental trees and shrubs, so that the park and grounds contain a fine and well ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... principally in the story, will help to show to those who wish to read it intelligently, how much of it is genuine history. They will see that the tale is mainly constructed on a succession of hypotheses, but that every hypothesis rests on a substratum of fact, however slender, and in many cases on careful weighing and comparison of a number of facts together. Some of these conjectures are perhaps the only ones which will fully and satisfactorily account for the sequence ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt

... left, and from this open space the mud is dipped up and poured upon the bed of dry rushes, where it dries, and forms a rich "muck" soil, which constitutes the garden. As the specific gravity of this garden is much greater than that of the water, or of the substratum of mud and water combined, it gradually sinks down into its muddy foundation; and in a few years it has to be rebuilt by laying upon the top of the garden a new coating of rushes and another covering of mud. Thus they have been going on for centuries, one garden being placed upon the top of another, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... the monosyllabic—the Chinese, we shall find all this evidenced in the clearest manner. To note but one illustration, a study of the scientific and philosophical ideas involved in and conveyed by the word k'ung, for Space, ether, the fundamental substratum of sound or vibration, as well as the "interetheric" central point of balance and power, will disclose an understanding that has nothing to fear ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... work as important, as it is in a great measure new, to the English reader. Not the least valuable part of the book will be Sir Francis Palgrave's account of the nature and character of the Continental Chronicles, which form the substratum of his work, but which, existing only in the great collections of Duchesne, Bouquet, Pertz, &c., are generally very imperfectly known ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various

... that nevertheless run counter to his own; the economic conditions that defy his preconceptions; the virtues and the vices that equally rub him up the wrong way—all these things are highly conducive to the production of that first substratum of philosophic thinking, a Socratic attitude of supreme ignorance, a pure Cartesian frame ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... homeless, aimless. In all this there is indeed enough of the pathetic, but Sandy Graff in his utter and complete abasement was even more deeply, tragically sunken than they. For them there was still some sheltering aegis of secrecy to conceal some substratum in the uttermost depths of personal depravity; but for Sandy—all the world knew the story of his life, his struggle, his fall; all the world could see upon his blotched and bloated face the outer ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... to be found in a multitude of Continental stories of witch gatherings which have been shown to be the outcome of physical or mental pressure and of leading questions. It seems unnecessary to accept even a substratum of fact.[3] Probably one of the accused women invented the story of the witch feast after the model of others of which she had heard, or developed it under the stimulus of suggestive questions from a justice. Such a narrative, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... hold not on the reality of things but on the relation which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of wants and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the life of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life. Experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is something morally dangerous about experience, as such words ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... so sensible a suggestion from you, Reginald," she said. "It is a very good plan. It shows that you really have a definite substratum of intelligence; and it is all the more deplorable that you should idle your way through the world as you do, when you might be performing ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... of morality is presupposed in the reception of Christianity; it is the 'substratum' of the moral interest which substantiates the evidence of miracles. The instance of a profligate suddenly converted, if properly sifted, will be found but ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... the unrest of fever dreams there was in Gerald, after Aurora's visit, as if a substratum of quiet and content. As a good Catholic, having confessed and received absolution, would be less troubled by either his symptoms or any visions that might come of Satan and his imps, so Gerald, with the weight of his sins of brutality and ingratitude lifted off him, could feel almost ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplish'd, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote—and yet the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... contracting surface being free to move laterally on account of there being a more heated and plastic layer below it, the cracks once initiated above would continually widen at the surface as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the slightly heated substratum. Now, as basalt begins to soften at about 1400 deg. F. and the surface of Mars has cooled to at least the freezing-point—perhaps very much below it—the contraction would be so great that if the fissures produced were 500 miles apart they might be three miles ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace

... plot for the sensational novelist. To the ordinary human being who knew Baring, there remains a substratum almost of uneasiness. Where did that voice come from that spoke along the wires, and what was its message? Baring, by all accounts, had no secrets in his life. What was the message—a warning or ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Such is the substratum for this content considered on the subjective side. Here the content is that Being in which is no difference, no schism; Being which abides in itself, the universal; and thought is the form for which ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... body, to constitute its vital principle, something in the same manner as the steam becomes the mechanic power of the steam-engine, in consequence of its compression by the steam-engine; or as the breeze that murmurs indistinguishably in the forest becomes the element, the substratum, of melody in the AEolian harp, and of consummate harmony in the organ. Now this hypothesis is as directly opposed to my view as supervention is to evolution, inasmuch as I hold the organized body ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... people, carry on the work-day world. Not that it would be giving a fair account of them to describe them thus, and leave the impression that such are their essential characteristics. They are all that has been said; but there is in most a good substratum of practical sense; and they do fairly, or even remarkably well, the particular thing which it is their business in this life to do. When Mr. Carlyle said that the population of Britain consists of so many millions, 'mostly fools,' he conveys a quite wrong impression. No doubt there are some ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... of those broad principles and large axioms which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as above all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: "Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere right of Nature." The old rules which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless "as moonlight ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... how he must dress, and whom he may marry. There are four fundamental divisions of caste—the priestly or Brahmin (which has close upon fifteen million devotees), the warrior, the trading, and the laboring; and these have interminable subdivisions. Below the laboring caste there is a substratum which is termed pariah or outcast, and these degraded specimens of humanity are not better than animated machines performing ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... consequently there were lake districts, slimy reaches of mixed oil and mud and dried, hard-looking islands that were in reality traps to the unwary. The top only was firm, and it had the playful property of sliding rapidly on the greasy substratum and thus sitting you down without warning when you thought you had ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... we find in early Buddhism the thought that there is no such thing as a self in the human being; a man is made up of various bundles of attributes and sensations called skandhas, but he himself is none of these. There is no persistent substratum of a self under these activities and forms, any more than there is a carriage in addition to the wheels, shafts, nails, etc., of which a carriage is composed. The Buddhist is called on to give up the belief in a permanent ego; only where the various parts come together is the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... have been beneath all his coldness a substratum of warm and strong feeling. He possessed to a rare degree the power of making friends and of giving sympathy to his fellow-beings. The man who can command the affection of others, and enter into their emotions, must know how ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... was not difficult to disentangle a thread of truth here and there, or to detect under the most extravagant of these fictions, a substratum of fact. Among other significant circumstances, my father, chancing one day to see a portrait of the late minister in a shop-window at Cologne, discovered that his former visitor, the Count von Rettel, and the Baron von Bulow were one and the same person. ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards

... and fortunate generals would sacrifice the public welfare to their ambition. Order was better than anarchy, even though a despot reigned supreme. When men are worse than governments, they must submit to the despotism of tyrants. It is idle to dream of liberty with a substratum of folly and vice. The strongest man will rule, but whether he rule wisely or unwisely, there is no remedy. Providence gave the world to the Romans, after continual and protracted wars for seven hundred years; and when the people who had ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... without plectenchymatous cortex (Fig. 2, a), varying from granulose and often evanescent to conspicuous, areolate, or even subsquamulose conditions, attached to the substratum by hyphal rhizoids (Fig. 2, d), and in a few instances extending up as a veil and surrounding the apothecia laterally, the hyphae densely interwoven toward the upper surface, but more loosely disposed below (Fig. 2, a and b); ...
— Ohio Biological Survey, Bull. 10, Vol. 11, No. 6 - The Ascomycetes of Ohio IV and V • Bruce Fink and Leafy J. Corrington

... solution of sugar, they swell, and shoot forth germinating utricles, which quickly grow to mycelia, which bear sporangia. This is easily produced on the most various organic bodies, and Mucor mucedo is therefore found spontaneously on every substratum which is capable of nourishing mildew, but on the above-named the most perfect and exuberant specimens are generally to be found. The sporangia-bearers are at first always branchless and without partitions. After the sporangium is ripe, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical, the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our Revolutionary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... critic has ventured to prophesy that Schumann's greatest claim to immortality would yet be found in such works as the settings of "Ich grolle nicht" and the "Dichterliebe" series—a perverted estimate, perhaps, but with a large substratum of truth. The duration of Schumann's song-time was short, the greater part of his Lieder having been written in 1840. After this he gave himself up to oratorio, symphony, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... that in France it was proper to do as the French did. Mrs. Phillips felt offended, and, for the first time in her life, a little jealous—not very jealous, for she was so conscious of her own beauty, and so unconscious of her defects of mind and temper, that she had a strong substratum of confidence in her husband's affection—but at this time, Elsie was looking really very pretty; her movements were quick and graceful—a great contrast to Mrs. Phillips's slow, dignified, Juno-like deportment—and her ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... 7 A.M. we were on the march. For the two hours after starting, the surface was tolerable and then changed for the worse; the remainder of the day's work being principally over a hard crust, which was just too brittle to bear the weight of a man, letting him through to a soft substratum, six or eight inches deep in the snow. Only those who have travelled in country like this can properly realize how wearisome ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... first to be observed that they are both processes of change. Without change food cannot be taken into the blood nor transformed into tissue: neither can conclusions be obtained from premises. This conspicuous manifestation of change forms the substratum of our idea of life in general. Comparison shows this change to differ from non-vital changes in being made up of successive changes. The food must undergo mastication, digestion, etc., while an argument necessitates a long chain of states of consciousness, each implying a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... plaster of Paris, mixed with water to the consistence of a stiff paste, merely smoothing it as it sets, up to the required shape with a broad knife. The plaster will soon set, and may be further rasped or trimmed into shape. Plaster alone may be used, but my reason for making a substratum of peat is, that if the former only is used it renders the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... substantiality, hypostasis; person, being, thing, object, article, item; something, a being, an existence; creature, body, substance, flesh and blood, stuff, substratum; matter &c 316; corporeity^, element, essential nature, groundwork, materiality, substantialness, vital part. [Totality of existences], world &c 318; plenum. Adj. substantive, substantial; hypostatic; personal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... nothing can be known or disclosed to the object by means of this concept, which is indeterminate in itself and not adapted for knowledge. Its determining reason is perhaps situated in "the suprasensible substratum of humanity." Thus beauty becomes a symbol of morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is, the indeterminate idea of the suprasensible in us, can be indicated as the sole key to reveal this faculty, which remains unknown to us in its origin. Nothing but this ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... poet, to whom I have already alluded, first invokes his muse, and then brings his smaller events gradually out upon his stage, so did Miss Grantly with sacred fervour ask her mother's aid, and then prepare her list of all those articles of underclothing which must be the substratum for the visible magnificence of her trousseau. Money was no object. We all know what that means; and frequently understand, when the words are used, that a blaze of splendour is to be attained at the cheapest possible price. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... acid is volatilized. The honey of vicious swarms of bees is characterized by a tart taste and a pungent odor. This effect is produced by the formic acid, which is present in excess in the honey. Hitherto it has been entirely unknown in what way the substratum of this peculiarity of honey, the formic acid in the honey, could enter into this vomit from the honey stomach of the workers. Only the most recent investigations have furnished us an explanation of this process. The sting of the bees is used not only for defense, but quite ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various

... I was still awake and critical. You know there is a substratum of your mind which is critical, when you are dreaming, standing looking on ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... speculation, but beyond the reach of demonstration. But below these lie finite possibilities which the human mind may now be, or may become, capable of comprehending, and prominent among these lies the problem just mentioned, that of the existence of a spiritual substratum in man, a soul which is capable of surviving the death of the body. This is a subject with which all of us are deeply and intimately concerned, and it may be well to close this volume with a brief glance at its status as ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... filament, or hyphae, which at once branches out in search of food material, and which always forms a more or less felted mass, called mycelium. When first formed the hyphae are continuous and ramify through the nourishing substratum from which there arises afterward a spore-bearing growth known as the sporocarp or young mushroom. This vegetative part of the fungus is usually hidden in the soil, or in decayed wood, or vegetable matter. In Figure 3 is a representation of the mycelium of the small pear-shaped puff-ball ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... of the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often intricate operations ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda

... lapis molaris, twenty tons weight, supported by a circle of others—the remains of Druidism—invites the attention of the antiquary, on the north-west point of Cefyn-bryn. We may here remark that this district, especially the coast, offers a rich harvest to the geologist. The general substratum of the peninsula is limestone and marble, bounded to the north by an immense iron and coalfield. The limestone stratum is continually "cropping out" in the interior, and of course it can be worked at a trifling expense. This may account for the general healthiness of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various

... subsist of themselves, but have need of a basis or support; they are not conceivable apart from a thing whose properties or states they are. We notice that certain qualities always appear together, and habitually refer them to a substratum as the ground of their unity; in which they subsist or from which they proceed. Substance denotes this self-existent "we know not what," which has or bears the attributes in itself, and which arouses the ideas of them in us. It is the combination of a number of simple ideas which ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... such an oligarchy. There was no middle class visible anywhere—nothing but the two extremes. A man was either a "gentleman," and wore white shirt and city-made clothes, or he was a loutish hind, clad in mere apologies for garments. We thought we had found in the Georgia "cracker" the lowest substratum of human society, but he was bright intelligence compared to the South Carolina "clay-eater" and "sand-hiller." The "cracker" always gave hopes to one that if he had the advantage of common schools, and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... a carbon point, and attracted or repelled by the magnet. This analogy certainly sets aside the necessity of assuming the existence of metallic vapors in the atmosphere, which some celebrated physicists have regarded as the substratum of the northern light. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... given, as belonging to the 'large mass of critics' who recognise that the Ignatian Epistles 'can only be considered later and spurious compositions.' Of these Bleek (already cited in a previous note) expresses no definite opinion. Gfroerer declares that the substratum (Grundlage) of the seven Epistles is genuine, though 'it appears as if later hands had introduced interpolations into both recensions' (he is speaking of the Long Recension and the Vossian). Harless avows that he must 'decidedly ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... first place, as the substratum of his faculties, the power of observation, with the passion that keeps it active and the skilful hand to serve its needs. Secondly, a quick eye for resemblances and differences. Thirdly, a wide range of mental vision. Fourthly, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... stolid Ancient Austrian Tories, that definition will suffice for us;—and Toryism too, the reader may rely on it, is much patronized by the Upper Powers, and goes a long way in this world. Nay, without a good solid substratum of that, what thing, with never so many ballot-boxes, stump-orators, and liberties of the subject, is capable of going at all, except swiftly to perdition? These Austrians have taken a great deal of ruining, first and last! Their relation ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... violation of Nature's laws. The negro, by Nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material,—the granite; then comes the brick or marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by Nature for it; and by experience we know that it is best not only for the superior, but the inferior race, that it should be so. It is indeed in conformity with the Creator. It is not safe for us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... dramatist! They indicate substratum enough for any art if only the art be there. Even those who cannot enter into the philosophy of them, which ranks him among the mystics of whom I have yet to speak, will understand a good deal of it symbolically: for how could he be expected ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... Greek philosophy on science. That influence has issued in one long misconception of the metaphysical status of natural entities. The entity has been separated from the factor which is the terminus of sense-awareness. It has become the substratum for that factor, and the factor has been degraded into an attribute of the entity. In this way a distinction has been imported into nature which is in truth no distinction at all. A natural entity is merely a factor of fact, considered in itself. Its disconnexion ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... who has observed his conduct and utterances, and especially no one who has read his sermon and prayer on the deck of one of his war-ships just at the beginning of the Chinese war, can doubt that there is in his thinking a genuine substratum of religious feeling. It is true that at times one is reminded of the remark made to an American ecclesiastic by an eminent German theological professor regarding that tough old monarch, Frederick William I; namely, that while he was deeply religious, his religion ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... she would venture to say, her ideal of an English gentleman. 'But now,' she added commiseratingly, 'ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.' A lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him. Lady Wathin's answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London: 'He is the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back to-morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.' Morality had something to say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be feared, to weakness of character ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... progressed on his father's porch. General Cox dropped in for an afternoon call and I scanned eagerly his scholarly face and figure, well knit through the harshest experiences in camp and battle. He was a man of fine tastes and well accomplished both in science and literature with a substratum of manly tenacity and good sense, who did noble duty on many a field and produced, in his Military Reminiscences one of our most satisfactory books on the Civil War period. The manner of the veteran was simple and pleasant. Nothing betrayed that he had been the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... was thus possible. Pliny has a story which looks like a ghost story; but it is all moonshine—a mere simulacrum.] as to reject all counterparts or affinities from other modes of the supernatural. The Christian ghost is too awful a presence, and with too large a substratum of the real, the impassioned, the human, for our present purposes. We deal chiefly with the wilder and more rial forms of superstition; not so far off from fleshly nature as the purely allegoric—not so near as the penal, the purgatorial, the penitential. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... their mark. He and the pages form an underplot of farce, upon which Lyly improved in his later plays, bringing it also more into connexion with the main plot. In passing, we may notice that few of Shakespeare's plays are without this farcical substratum. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... what sum you are prepared to spend on your little garden in two. Lay out half in making good soil, and spend the rest on a limited range of hardy plants. If mother earth is well fed, and if you have got her deep down, and not a surface layer of half a foot on a substratum of builder's rubbish, she will take care of every plant you commit to her hold. I should give up the back of the borders (if the aspect is east or south) to a few very good "perpetual" roses to cut ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... unearthed them. Those papers you marked I have read. Genuine endeavor; which may the Heavens forward!—In this poor Country all is swallowed up in the barren Chaos of Politics: Ministries tumbled out, Ministries tumbled in; all things (a fearful substratum of "Ignorance and Hunger" weltering and heaving under them) apparently in rapid progress towards—the melting-pot. There will be news from England by and by: many things have reached their term; Destiny "with lame foot" has overtaken ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... open the door was not resisted for one moment, and forth rushed a cloud of dust and feathers, a quacking waggling substratum of ducks, and a screaming flapping rabble of chickens, behind whom, when the mist cleared, were seen, looking as if they had been tarred and feathered, various black and grey figures, which developed ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... more modern one—inclines to repudiate any substance or substratum of the sort accepted in the Middle Ages and believed in by many men now. To him the mind is the whole complex of mental phenomena in their interrelations. In other words, the mind is not an unknown and indescribable something ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... Sophroniscus, and Plato son of Ariston, both natives of Athens, entertain the same opinion concerning the universe; for they suppose three principles, God, matter, and the idea. God is the universal understanding; matter is that which is the first substratum, accommodated for the generation and corruption of beings; the idea is an incorporeal essence, existing in the cogitations and apprehensions of God; for God is the soul and mind of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... character than all the sermons that have ever been preached. Even in the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm, music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... France during this present Mexican imbroglio. I will do my utmost to explain to influential senators the truth concerning Louis Napoleon's political conduct towards the North, the absurdity of any hostile demonstration against France, and the dirt constituting the substratum of the new ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... formed something more like a trail than anything she had as yet seen. Guessing at their general direction, she hurried on, coming finally into a region where the soil was shallow and scarcely served to cover the rocky substratum. A low bluff rose on her left, and along its crest scattered Spanish daggers were raggedly ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... such drastic scepticism is reduced to complete silence. You cannot build up anything except illusion from a basis that is itself illusion. If I were not self-conscious there would be no centre or substratum or coherence or unity in any thought I had. If I were not self-conscious I should be unable ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... this incident, his best friends seem to know nothing of it: Liszt does not mention it, Hiller and Franchomme told me they never heard of it, and notwithstanding Karasowski's contrary statement there is nothing to be found about it in Sowinski's Musiciens polonais. Still, the story may have a substratum of truth, to arrive at which it has only to be shorn of its poetical accessories and exaggerations, of which, however, there is little in ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... we know Him so no more." Here, they say, is a distinct admission that the worship of the historical Christ, "the man Christ Jesus," is a stage to be passed through and then left behind. There is just this substratum of truth in a very mischievous error, that St. Paul does tell us[100] that he began to teach the Corinthians by giving them in the simplest possible form the story of "Jesus Christ and Him crucified." The "mysteries" of ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... rhetorical garb, Douglas's speech of January 27, 1846, must be acknowledged to have a substratum of good sense and the elements of a true prophecy. When it is recalled that recent developments in the Orient have indeed made the mastery of the Pacific one of the momentous questions of the immediate future, that the United States did not then possess ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... rites differed in minor details rather than in essential variations. An important factor which thus served to maintain the rites in a more or less stable condition was the predominance of what may be called the astral theology as the theoretical substratum of the Babylonian religion, and which is equally pronounced in the religious system of Assyria. The essential feature of this astral theology is the assumption of a close link between the movements going on in the heavens and occurrences on earth, which led to identifying the gods and goddesses ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... mock-heroics, he always preserves a substratum of good sense. An instance of this is the address of the redoubtable wooden-legged governor, on his departure at the head of his ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... between Russia and Turkey. It is distant thirty-five miles from Kars and eighty-four miles from Tiflis. The plain on which it is situated is perfectly level and very peculiar. It has a stratum of alluvial soil for the depth of one foot six inches on the surface, and then a substratum of fine uniform lava, ten to fifteen feet thick, supposed to have issued from Mount Alagos (13,450 feet), an extinct volcano thirty miles from Alexandropol. The depth of the earth allows the growth of grain, but entirely prevents that of trees, which with their roots cannot ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... which is synonymous with being as a possibility. Being in its possibility is no more non-being than is reality. For that reason every existence is a realized possibility. Thus matter is to Aristotle a much more positive substratum than to Plato, who declares it to be pure non-being. And thereby it becomes plain how Aristotle could conceive of matter in its opposition to form ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... spacious and flame-lined gig, accompanied by his son, a lad of sixteen, awaited our arrival, and served to swell the cavalcade that wound slowly down the dusty road, with its sandy surface and red-clay substratum. A few young gentlemen on horseback completed ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... parcels or farms like a checker-board. The island, like the whole of the Yucatan peninsula, has evidently been upraised from the bottom of the sea by the action of volcanic fires, and the thin coating of arable loam of surprising fertility which covers a substratum of calcareous stones, is the result of the accumulation of detriti, mixed with the residuum of animal and vegetable life of thousands of years. The greater part of this island is as yet archaeologically unexplored. ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... to the preparation of the glasses before coating. It is very generally considered that it is better the glasses receive either a substratum of albumen or very weak gelatine. I use the latter on account of the great ease of its preparation. After your glasses are well cleaned, place them in, and rub them with a weak solution of hydrochloric acid of the strength of 2 ounces acid to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various

... stages and in what length of time those who had not emigrated rose out of native barbarism into that degree of culture to which the most ancient monuments bore testimony. No efforts of imagination were needful for the satisfaction of their curiosity: the old substratum of indigenous traditions was rich enough, did they but take the trouble to work it out systematically, and to eliminate its most incongruous elements. The priests of Heliopolis took this work in hand, as they had already taken in hand the same task with regard to the myths referring to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... staircase which leads up from the platform to the summit of the first story, composed of small polished blocks, twenty-two inches long, thirteen broad, and four and a half thick. The bed of the staircase is made of sun dried brick, and the marble was fastened to this substratum by copper bolts, some portion of which was found by Mr. Taylor still adhering to the blocks. At the foot of the staircase there appear to have stood two columns, one on either side of it. The construction of these columns is ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson

... facts, Miss Dwight. It's a matter of general knowledge." Beneath Verinder's bland manner there lurked a substratum of triumph. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... supposed to give her on this occasion, in which the desire imputed to the caste to make money out of their daughters is satirised. They are no doubt libellous as being a gross exaggeration, but may contain some substratum of truth. The gist of them is as follows: "Girl, if you are my daughter, heed what I say. I will make you many sweetmeats and speak words of wisdom. Always treat your husband better than his parents. Increase your private money ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... important bearing on all the relations and conditions of life. The connexion between religions faith and political practice is, in truth, far closer than is generally thought. Public opinion has not ripened into a knowledge that religious error is the intangible but real substratum of all political injustice. Though the 'schoolmaster' has done much, there still remain and hold some away among us, many honest and energetic assertors of 'the rights of man,' who have to learn that a people in the fetters of superstition, can never achieve political ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... importance; that is, not only a knowledge of the range and extent of each formation and its subdivisions, which may be called geographical geology, but also how far and to what extent the various lands do depend upon the substratum for their soil, and the local variations in the chemical or mineralogical character of the substrata themselves, and which may be called the differential geology of soils. For not only do the qualities of land ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... are some points on which all the three writers are agreed: we have the same substratum of facts, namely, THE TOMB FOUND ALREADY EMPTY WHEN THE WOMEN REACHED IT, a confused and contradictory report of an angel or angels seen within it, and the subsequent reappearance of Christ. Not one of the three writers affords ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... unique on Jamestown Island is a circular unlined pit, 14 feet in top diameter, excavated 7 feet into a sandy substratum, and corresponding in general character to known 17th-and 18th-century ice pits in England. This pit which lies 250 feet east of the Visitor Center may have served a spacious house which once stood ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter

... he remarked affably, "that under Allan's most asinine speeches there usually lurks a substratum of truth. Are you really going to write a serious ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... amalgamate, in my mind, with the grand and noble conceptions formed by me, of the dignity of the human species. Hope deceived me, it is true, but my error was too glorious to allow me to repent of it."—Self-admiration is likewise the mental substratum of Madame Roland, Roland, Petion, Barbaroux, Louvet, etc., (see their writings). Mallet du Pan well says: "On reading the memoirs of Madame Roland, one detects the actress, rehearsing for the stage. "—Roland is an administrative ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... Asia, and as we shall see, also even across the Pacific to America. Although in the different localities a great number of most varied ingredients enter into its composition, in most places where the dragon occurs the substratum of its anatomy consists of a serpent or a crocodile, usually with the scales of a fish for covering, and the feet and wings, and sometimes also the head, of an eagle, falcon, or hawk, and the forelimbs and sometimes the head of a lion. An ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... and the internal workings of the mind with their material antecedents. Yet none of them can be dispensed with; we can only be on our guard against the error or confusion which arises out of them. Thus in the use of the word 'substance' we are far from supposing that there is any mysterious substratum apart from the objects which we see, and we acknowledge that the negative notion is very likely to become a positive one. Still we retain the word as a convenient generalization, though not without a double sense, substance, and essence, derived from ...
— Parmenides • Plato

... of Shrewsbury are built of it, and I am informed that it was to some extent used in the Exchange buildings. The rocky substratum of a district can be well seen in its ancient buildings, for in old times carriage was so important an item that the old builders could not go far for their stone; hence we see that the old churches of part of Lancashire and most of Cheshire, and a ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class. In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel oppressor the nobleman, he believed he could trace a substratum of simple- minded brotherly love, and that instinct which leads animals to hate the men who hunt them. In support of this idea he cited the childish, almost demoniac delight of the Russian people in fire, a quality on which Rostopschin calculated in his strategic burning ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... which is a carbonate of lime containing silica, and oxide of iron. In proportion as it contains the last, the kunkur is more or less red. That which contains none is of a dirty-white. It is found in many parts of India in thin layers, or amorphous masses, formed by compression, upon a stiff clay substratum; but in Oude I have seen it only in nodules, usually formed on nuclei of flint or other hard substances. The kingdom of Oude must have once been the bed, or part of the bed, of a large lake, formed by the diluvial detritus of the hills of the Himmalaya chain, and, as limestone abounds ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... earth is very fine, pulverised, and sandy, quite black, and, no doubt, of good quality; when sharpened with sheep-feeding it produces heavy crops. The fallen trees, which are very numerous, shew that the substratum of clay is too hard to produce anything. The roots of the pine never penetrate it. In some places the spontaneous vegetation testifies to the richness of the soil—such as wild pease or vetches, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne

... traced among races of the Sudan and East Africa. These are perhaps in part to be explained as the result of contact and cultural inheritance. But at the same time they are evidence of an African, but non-Negroid, substratum in the religion of ancient Egypt. In spite of his proto-Semitic strain, the ancient Egyptian himself never became a Semite. The Nile Valley, at any rate until the Moslem conquest, was stronger than its invaders; it received and moulded them ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... a manner which will excite their interest. By the use of sensible images, more or less gross, he will first give those whom he teaches definite conceptions, purifying these conceptions afterwards, as the minds of his pupils become more capable of abstraction. By thus giving them a distinct substratum for their reasonings, he will confer upon his pupils a profit and a joy which the mere exhibition of facts without principles, or the appeal to the bodily senses and the power of memory ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, has explained the Pied Piper as a wind myth. Mrs. Gutch is inclined to think there may be a substratum of fact at the root of the legend, basing her conclusions on a pamphlet of Dr. Meinardus, Der historische Kern, which I have not seen. She does not, however, give any well-authenticated historical event at Hameln in the thirteenth century which could have plausibly given rise to the legend, ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various

... the gentlemen of the robe had gone to the fight with all the animation and courage of Matadors and Picadors in a bull-ring. It was delightful to see the way in which Roman Catholic skill combated Protestant fury, with a substratum below of Irish fun which showed to everybody that is was not all quite in earnest;—that the great O'Fagan and the great Fitzberesford could sit down together afterwards with all the pleasure in life over their modicum of claret in the barristers' ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... human life, however, was merely one substratum of the Astor fortune. It is very likely, if the truth were fully known, that the stupendous sums in total that the Astors cheated in taxation, would have been more than enough to have constructed a whole ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... smaller and lighter cells, and is the gut-fibre layer. The only exception is in the cavities of the mouth and anus, because these originate from the skin. The inner coat of the mouth-cavity is not provided by the gut-gland layer, but by the skin-sense layer; and its muscular substratum is provided, not by the gut-fibre, but the skin-fibre, layer. It is the same with the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel

... himself made, and turned on his electric torch. Bit by bit in the course of his night visits he had accumulated a few necessary stores—some firewood, a few groceries hidden in a corner, a couple of brown blankets, and a small box of tools. A heap of dried bracken in a corner, raised on a substratum of old sacks, had often served him for a bed; and when he had kindled a wood fire in the rough grate of loose bricks where Colonel Shepherd's keepers had been accustomed to warm the hot meat stews sent up for the shooting luncheons, and had set out his supper on the upturned fragment ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... solid substratum of tenants whose sound common sense prevents them from listening to the rather enchanting cry, 'Every man his own landlord.' They may desire and obtain a reduction of rent, but they treat it as a purely business transaction, and there lies all the difference. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... peasant holder as compared with that of the Cossack circle. The law of the forest afforded an education in itself. The intimate relationship of Russian family life, from the highest to the lowest, was constantly laid bare before me with all its romance and mediaeval trappings and its sordid substratum of violence and superstition. In fact, I became so interested in this work that it was with the greatest regret that I relinquished it for a ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... Maisonette dans les Bois," "Victor, ou l'Enfant de la Foret,"—and many others of the same date and style so much discredited nowadays. And I thought that what caused the discredit now, accounted for their vogue formerly; that they had a substratum of truth under a mass of absurdity; that these stories of brigands in their traditional haunts, forests, caverns and subterranean passages, charmed by their likelihood the readers of those times to whom an attack on a coach by highwaymen with blackened ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... tokens of which, in the nature of a cupola and a couple of frame turrets, were terrifyingly apparent. These romantic misplacements seemed to me not inharmonious with the library, a cheerful and pleasantly shabby apartment down-stairs, where I found (over a substratum of history, encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey's Lady's Book, an early edition of Cooper's works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay, Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac; Clarissa, Lalla ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington

... and drama—English, Continental, and American to boot—is always represented as outdoing John Bull himself in Anglo-Saxon phlegm? In the courts of ethnology, I shall be told, "what the caricaturist says is not evidence;" but no caricature could ever have gained such world-wide acceptance without a substratum of truth to support it. The probabilities of the case are greatly against the development of any special "vivacity" of temperament, for though there has no doubt been a large Keltic admixture in the Anglo-Saxon stock, there has been a large Teutonic ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... the West, the Greeks and the Romans. They greatly increased the heritage by their own spiritual achievements, and so produced a much more complex and diversified civilization, which has served as the substratum for the further development of the better part of mankind. Even the classic nations had to step aside as soon as their historical mission was fulfilled. They left the field free for the younger nations, with greater capability of living, which at that time had barely worked their ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... little. There is no distinct line of demarkation between the two varieties of love, and one merges imperceptibly into the other. Most, if not all, of our apparently altruistic actions and feelings have an egotistic substratum; and the quality of the love depends upon the lover. In other words, there are not two separate, distinct varieties of love, but there are separate, distinct varieties of men. A fine and noble man will love finely and nobly; a coarse and brutal man will love coarsely and brutally. ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... one more curiously by force of contrast than in the wilder parts of Hungary. Just outside the railway station life and manners are what they were two centuries ago, and yet here are the grappling-irons of civilisation. No doubt a change will come to all this substratum of humanity, but it takes time. Even the railways in these wilder parts have not exactly settled themselves down to the inexorable limits of "time tables." It occurred on this very journey that we stopped at some small station, ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... arises the possibility of the "Vita Nuova;" arises the possibility of the romantic and semi-religious love of the Middle Ages. Or, rather, let us say that this mere loose love of the albas and Wachtlieder and "Flamenca," is the substratum, nay, is the very flesh and blood, of the spiritual passion to which, in later days, we owe the book ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... the earth, to grant him long life. In addition to this, the antiquity of the literary productions in which her name appears justifies us in reckoning her among the gods of Babylonia of Hammurabi's time. Her name signifies 'lady of the earth,' and there is evidently a theoretical substratum to this association of Ea, the water-god, with an earth-goddess. The one forms the complement to the other; and Marduk, as the son of water and earth, takes his place in the theory as the creator of the world. In this form the 'natural philosophy' of Babylonia survived to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... down with pleurisy and Peckham suddenly found himself at the head of affairs. Hillerton had no partner; no one but Peckham could take his place. And in Peckham's moral constitution was a substratum of unshakable fidelity upon which the astute Hillerton had built. Cursing his own unimpeachable sense of duty, Peckham could see but one straw of hope to clutch at. It ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... destruction, in each of which every human being has his transmigratory [67] representative, Gautama proceeded to eliminate substance altogether; and to reduce the cosmos to a mere flow of sensations, emotions, volitions, and thoughts, devoid of any substratum. As, on the surface of a stream of water, we see ripples and whirlpools, which last for a while and then vanish with the causes that gave rise to them, so what seem individual existences are mere temporary associations of phenomena circling round ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... overstated. Whatever else Cardinal Manning was, he was an English gentleman of the old school, with a nice sense of honour and propriety. But still, under a mass of calumny and exaggeration, there lay this substratum of truth—that he who wills the end wills the means; and that where the interests of a sacred cause are at stake, an enthusiastic adherent will sometimes use methods to which, in enterprises of less pith and moment, recourse could not properly ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... "smudging-on" of a black pigment taking place. The subsequent "greening" of the black hats after a short period of wear is simply due to the ease with which such badly fixed dye rubs off, washes off, or wears off, the brownish or yellowish substratum which gradually comes to light, causing a greenish shade to at length appear. If we examine under the microscope a pure unproofed fur fibre, its characteristic structure is quite visible. Examination of an unproofed fibre dyed with logwood black shows again the same characteristic structure ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... what is supposed to be a natural substratum for the manna, in a certain vegetable product, found in small quantities in parts of the Arabian peninsula. No doubt, we are to recognise in the plagues of Egypt, and in the dividing of the Red Sea, the extraordinary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... vulgarise and lower the nobleness and the loftiness of this great promise as to suppose that it only means—If you remember His words you will get anything you like. It means something a great deal better than that. It means that if Christ's words are the substratum, so to speak, of your wishes, then your wishes will harmonise with His will, and so 'ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... for believing that the narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a possible substratum of actual fact. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... area of 250,000 square miles and ranging in altitude from a few hundred feet to a height 10,000 feet above the limit of flowering plants. The nature of the vegetation of any tract depends on rainfall and temperature, and only secondarily on soil. A desert is a tract with a dry substratum and dry air, great heat during some part of the year, and bright sunshine. The soil may be loam or sand, and as regards vegetation a sandy desert is the worst owing to the rapid drying up of the subsoil after rain. In the third of the maps appended ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... overflowing, prize flowers, fruit and vegetables everywhere. For the soil hereabouts, if indeed soil it can be called, and the climate of Bourron, possess very rare and specific qualities. On this light, dry sand, or dust covering a substratum of rock, vegetation springs up all but unbidden, and when once above ground literally takes care of itself. As to climate, its excellence may be summed up in the epithet, anti-asthmatic. Although we are on the very hem of forty thousand acres of forest, the atmosphere is one of extraordinary ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... where the knights appear with the most ludicrous armament. The poet utters his ironical regrets over the inexplicable faithlessness which seems implanted in the house of Gano of Mainz, over the toilsome acquisition of the sword Durindana, and so forth. Tradition, in fact, serves him only as a substratum for episodes, ludicrous fancies, allusions to events of the time (among which some, like the close of cap. vi. are exceedingly fine), and indecent jokes. Mixed with all this, a certain derision of Ariosto is unmistakable, and it ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... Philo,[2069] resemble these Sarapis monks in certain respects, particularly in their habit of contemplation. Their kernel, however, was Jewish—they had the Jewish Scriptures and observed the seventh day of the week. On this Jewish substratum was imposed Greek thought; they adopted the Alexandrian allegorizing interpretation of the Scriptures, and Philo includes them in that group of persons who found it desirable to withdraw from the common life of men in order to cultivate philosophical and ethical thought. Six days they lived each ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... suppose that the substratum of limestone in all the country for many miles in the vicinity is perforated with these tremendous shafts; as those which are seen in the cave are only such as happened to be in the course of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various



Words linked to "Substratum" :   stratum, surface, indigenous language, substrate



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com