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Vertical   /vˈərtɪkəl/   Listen
Vertical

adjective
1.
At right angles to the plane of the horizon or a base line.  Synonym: perpendicular.  "The monument consists of two vertical pillars supporting a horizontal slab" , "Measure the perpendicular height"
2.
Relating to or involving all stages of a business from production to distribution.
3.
Upright in position or posture.  Synonyms: erect, upright.  "Erect flower stalks" , "For a dog, an erect tail indicates aggression" , "A column still vertical amid the ruins" , "He sat bolt upright"
4.
Of or relating to different levels in a hierarchy (as levels of social class or income group).



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"Vertical" Quotes from Famous Books



... convenient height. On this bed two massive iron rollers, six feet in diameter and fifteen inches face, revolved. Each weighed five tons. They had a common axle of wrought iron, of five inches diameter, and a vertical shaft of cast iron passing through the centre of the bed, having a rectangular cross-head through which the axle worked. This shaft connected below with the machinery which gave it motion from the ...
— History of the Confederate Powder Works • Geo. W. Rains

... hill, they came in sight of the lovely Tanganyika lake, which could be seen in all its glory by everybody but Lieutenant Speke, who was suffering from inflammation of the eyes, caught by sleeping on the ground while his system was reduced by fevers and the influence of the vertical sun. It had brought on almost total blindness, and every object before him appeared ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... been in the service from the beginning of the war. He was over six feet in height, a good-natured, manly fellow. George Dunn extended upward to an altitude of at least six feet and a half, besides running along the ground an extraordinary distance before being started in a vertical direction. Our tent was larger than the ordinary, ten by twelve ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride

... frequency currents—experiments, too, which are not unconnected with those on electric oscillations,—M. Tesla, demonstrated that these oscillations could be transmitted to more considerable distances by making use of two vertical antennae, terminated by ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... does he get his glider ten miles up? They've done some high-altitude gliding already. The distance record took someone across the Atlantic in 2009, didn't it? But it seems that ten miles straight up is a bit too steep for a glider. There are no vertical ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... he was equally a coxcomb. In his style of tattooing, for instance, which seemed rather incomplete; his marks embracing but a vertical half of his person, from crown to sole; the other side being free from the slightest stain. Thus clapped together, as it were, he looked like a union of the unmatched moieties of two distinct beings; and your fancy was lost in conjecturing, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... of quantities of ore. Capital expenditure. Caving systems. Churn-drills. Chutes, loading, in vertical shaft. Classification of ore in sight. Combined shaft. stopes. Commercial value of projects, determination. Compartments for shaft. Compressed-air locomotives. -air pumps. vs. electricity for drills. Content, average metal, determining. metal, differences. Contract work. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... of the rite, according to the account we have received, consisted in a low monotonous chant; the manual, in keeping a ball about the size of an orange constantly whirling in a vertical circle. The whole was performed in a kneeling posture. Like most other rude nations, the New Zealanders have certain fancies with regard to several of the more remarkable constellations; and are not without some conception ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik

... the road under a vertical sun; in the forest, in the paddy fields. I have seen her passing through the hallway of a friend's house—turning on the stair to look back at me! I saw her standing just back of the firing-line at Manoa Wells when we were preparing to rush the forts, and it scared me so ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers

... feet at angle of 30 deg. with a vertical line, the width of the stream is still narrowed to about forty yards, and then, as if mustering its whole force previous to its final descent, is precipitated, in one vast, continuous sheet of water, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... the seventeen mortars in the rebel batteries, Anderson could reply only with a vertical fire from the guns of small caliber in his casemates, which was of no effect against the rebel bomb-proofs of sand and roofs of sloping railroad iron; but, refraining from exposing his men to serve his barbette guns, his garrison was also safe in its protecting casemates. It happened, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... who travel alertly, beating their wings and rummaging in every corner in quest of a Spider. The largest of them waylays the Narbonne Lycosa (Known also as the Black-bellied Tarantula—Translator's Note.), whose burrow is not infrequent in the harmas. This burrow is a vertical well, with a curb of fescue-grass intertwined with silk. You can see the eyes of the mighty Spider gleam at the bottom of the den like little diamonds, an object of terror to most. What a prey and what dangerous hunting for the Pompilus! And here, on a hot summer afternoon, is the Amazon-ant, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... gravity. Bisected, upper Giles would have outweighed three lower Giles. But this very disproportion enabled him to do feats that would have baffled Milo. His brawny arms had no weight to draw after them; so he could go up a vertical pole like a squirrel, and hang for hours from a bough by one hand like a cherry by its stalk. If he could have made a vacuum with his hands, as the lizard is said to do with its feet, he would have gone along a ceiling. Now, this pocket-athlete was insanely fond of gripping the dinner-table with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... Principles: (1) Horizontal, vertical, oblique lines for machine practice. (2) Related margins and spots as used in the writing of letters, the orderly placing of ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman

... exhibited in a plain open or reticulated fabric constructed from ordinary untwisted fillets, such as are employed in our splint and cane products. Fig. 292 illustrates the surface produced by crowding the horizontal series of the same fabric close together, so that the vertical series is entirely hidden. The surface here exhibits a succession of vertical ribs, an effect totally distinct from that seen in the preceding example. The third variety (Fig. 293) differs but slightly from the first. The fillets are wider and are set close together ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes

... limestone rock forms a precipitous wall on either side, rising in some places to an altitude of more than two thousand feet sheer from the water's edge. The scenery of this wonderful pass is very varied; the bare rock with its vertical precipice gives place to a disturbed broken mass of cliff and scaur, flung about in every sort of fantastic form, or towering aloft like the ruined ramparts of some Titan's castle. Over all this a luxuriant vegetation has thrown a ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... equal height with the rest of the precipice, of which it was a part—a sort of buttress—and the grassy turf that appeared along its edge was but the continuation of the upper plateau. Its front to the valley was vertical, without terrace or ledge, although horizontal seams traversing its face showed a stratification of lime and sandstone alternating with each other. From the sward upon the valley to the brow above the height was one thousand feet sheer. To gaze up to it was a ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... on produced chiefly sugar. The milk by which the canes are crushed consisted of three vertical wooden rollers worked by mules. The most interesting subject connected with our trip was the cultivation and preparation of the mandioca. The chief produce is called farinha: the slaves are fed almost entirely on it. A field of mandioca, when ripe, looks something like a nursery ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... Wise and the Devonport Column.—I had correspondence with Sir Howard Douglas about the sea breaking over the unfinished Dover Pier. I have an idea that this followed evidence given by me to a Harbour Commission, in which I expressed as a certainty that the sea will not be made to break by a vertical wall." ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... and symbolic stories in the beginning of the Bible there is one about a tower built with such vertical energy as to take a hold on heaven, but ruined and resulting only in a confusion of tongues. The story might be interpreted in many ways—religiously, as meaning that spiritual insolence starts all human separations; irreligiously, as meaning that the inhuman ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... wholesome to look upon, a stout brune, with cool smooth cheeks, steady, dark eyes, and hands that neither art nor nature could improve. She was the sort of person over whom adversity passes like a summer cloud; she might, in the worst of conjunctions, knit her brows into one vertical furrow for a moment, but the next it would be gone. She had much of the placidity of a contented nun; with little of her piety, however; for Anastasie was of a very mundane nature, fond of oysters and old wine, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, crooked gems—if you cannot paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many generations and attached ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... method of constructing subaqueous foundations by the use of iron pile planks. These latter, by reason of their peculiar form, present a great resistance, not only to the vertical blow of the pile driver (as it is indispensable that they should), but also to horizontal pressure when excavating is being done or masonry being constructed within the space which they circumscribe. Polygonal or curved perimeters may be circumscribed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... the outskirts of a crowd surrounding the pillory, and above the heads of those in front they could see a huge red face under a thatch of tousled hair protruding stiffly through a hole in a beam supported at right angles to a vertical post about five feet high. On each side of the head a large and dirty hand hung through an appropriate opening ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... reporters employed on the Herald. They are liberally paid for their services. Any one bringing in news is well rewarded for his trouble. The composing rooms are located on the top floor, and are spacious, airy, and excellently lighted. A "dumb waiter," or vertical railway, communicates with the press room; and speaking tubes, and a smaller "railway," afford the means of conversation and transmitting small parcels between this room and the various parts of the building. Five hundred ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... seemed to overhang the waters, was broken by their incessant lashing for century upon century. The waves, like furious blue bulls, charged, frothing with anger, against the rock, wearing deep caverns, which were prolonged upward in the form of vertical cracks. This age-long battle was destroying the coast, shattering its stony armor, scale by scale. Colossal wall-like fragments loosened. They first separated by forming an imperceptible crevice which ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Vertical writing demands a commercial pen. The "S.T.A." pens are strictly a commercial pen, made after the famous models designed by John Jackson, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 33, June 24, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... What share America has had in achieving these mighty agencies is signified by the names of Fulton and Morse. Nor have other means of locomotion and communication been neglected. The horse-car has to a large extent taken the place of the omnibus and of the lumbering stage-coach; while vertical travelling, by means of the elevator, has become easy and luxurious in our day. In the making of carriages of every kind, the progress becomes very apparent when we compare the light and elegant vehicles which fill our fashionable ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle

... and the fragments were heard to tinkle as they fell within the barn. The chagrin of the mortified rifleman was cunningly abated by Peter's declaring that he himself was at fault in confining his master's attention to vertical rather than to horizontal considerations; but while he thus explained away the failure, he winked at the other servants and whispered aside to Plutarch that, though horticulture was his profession, he was a better shot than his ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... first piece, was a table of about 40 inches in diameter, and 8 or 9 inches thick, in the edge of which were 20 glazed dials, with the Jewish, Babylonian, Italian, Astronomical, and usual European methods of counting the hours: they were all vertical or declining Dials, the style or gnomon being a lion's paw, unicorn's horn, or some emblem from the royal arms. On the upper part of the Table were 8 reclining dials, glazed, and showing the hour in different ways—as by the shade of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various

... take some time to convince Kennedy. There it was in black and white, however, in Blanche Blaisdell's own vertical hand. Try to figure it out as I could, there seemed to be only one conclusion, and that was to accept it. What it was that interested him I did not know, but finally he bent down and sniffed, not at the scented letter, but at the covering on the dresser. When he raised his head I ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... to come. The teacher with the wound on his neck, who was with Garibaldi, led us at once to the vertical bars, which are very high, and we had to climb to the very top, and stand upright on the transverse plank. Derossi and Coretti went up like monkeys; even little Precossi mounted briskly, in spite of the fact that he was embarrassed with that jacket which ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... intermediate ones allowed to assume intermediate conditions, the former end would drop, the expanded wings would be brought into a slanting condition over a smaller area of supporting air, and the whole apparatus would tend to glide downwards in that direction. The projection of a small vertical plane upon either side would make the gliding mass rotate in a descending spiral, and so we have all the elements of a controllable flight. Such an affair would be difficult to overset. It would be able ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... shock are also in common use among Italians and Spaniards. An undulatory shock consists of one or several waves, the movement to and fro being along a nearly horizontal line; a subsultory shock of movements in a nearly vertical direction; while a vorticose shock consists of undulatory or subsultory movements crossing ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison

... her to exult. The evident anxiety of Chayne's words, and the silence which since had fallen upon one and all were alone enough to assure her that here was serious work. But she had been reading deeply of the Alps, and in all the histories of mountain exploits which she had read, of climbs up vertical cracks in sheer walls of rocks, balancings upon ridges sharp as a knife edge, crawlings over smooth slabs with nowhere to rest the feet or hands, it was the ice-slope which had most kindled her imagination. The steep, smooth, long ice-slope, white ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason

... dissectible model of the chest and its contents (Fig. 49). Note the relative size of the two lungs and their position with reference to the heart and diaphragm. Compare the side to side and vertical diameters of the cavity. Trace the air tubes from the trachea to their ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... keeping to the same general arrangement of the matter as he had adopted in his original sketch, he elaborated the arguments and added illustrations. Each of the 35 pages of the pencilled sketch, as it was dealt with, had a vertical line drawn across it and was thrown aside. While the 'pencilled sketch' of 1842 was little better than a collection of memoranda, which, though intelligible to the writer at the time, are sometimes difficult either to decipher or to understand the meaning of, the expanded ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd

... that the resultant of both horizontal and vertical forces should, at all points, fall within the middle third of the wall, or, in other words, that there should be no ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Site of the Terminal Station. Paper No. 1157 • George C. Clarke

... and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over great summer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would have afforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a pleasant journey. The cloudless sky and vertical sun—how intolerable they would now seem, and scorch my brain and fill my shut eyes with dancing flames! At present even this mild June sun is strong enough to make the old mulberry tree on the lawn appear grateful. It is an ancient, rough-barked tree, with ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... vertical lines are the divisions of tens of years; the thick black lines divide the centuries. The horizontal lines, then, at a glance, tell you the length and date of each artist's life. In one or two instances I cannot find the date of birth; in one or two more, of death; and the line ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... the Astara gave a lurch. The plates rattled on the table; the covers slipped; the glasses upset some of their contents; the hanging lamps swung out of the vertical—or rather our seats and the table moved in accordance with the roll of the ship. It is a curious effect, when one is sailor enough to ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne

... and ASPIRATES are shown in the vertical columns of the table below. The subvocals are sometimes called voice consonants and the aspirates breath consonants. These are fit terms, for they indicate ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins

... starting point, to repeat over and over again this series of motions. This simple device brought its owner a fortune. Isaac M. Singer, destined to be the dominant figure of the industry, patented in 1851 a machine stronger than any of the others and with several valuable features, notably the vertical presser foot held down by a spring; and Singer was the first to adopt the treadle, leaving both hands of the operator free to manage the work. His machine was good, but, rather than its surpassing merits, ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... wit on which he piqued himself, no idea could be formed of it. The judge major, Simon, certainly was not two feet high; his legs spare, straight, and tolerably long, would have added something to his stature had they been vertical, but they stood in the direction of an open pair of compasses. His body was not only short, but thin, being in every respect of most inconceivable smallness—when naked he must have appeared like a grasshopper. His head was of the common ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... simple elevation, the Mont Saleve, and in another of lateral compression, the Mont Brezon: but the investigation of the Mont Saleve had presented unexpected difficulty. Its facade had been always considered to be formed by vertical beds, raised into that position during the tertiary periods; the speaker's investigations had, on the contrary, led him to conclude that the appearance of vertical beds was owing to a peculiarly sharp and distinct cleavage, at right angles with ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... other historians argue a considerable amount of culture among the Filipino peoples prior to the Spanish conquest. A variety of opinions have been expressed as to the direction of the writing. Chirino, San Antonio, Zuniga, and Le Gentil, say that it was vertical, beginning at the top. Colin, Ezguerra, and Marche assert that it was vertical but in the opposite direction. Colin says that the horizontal form was adopted after the arrival of the Spaniards. Mas declares that it was horizontal and from left to right, ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga

... to the hottest part of the flame, but should be submitted to the heat gradually. If the substance is of such a nature that it will sublime at a low heat, the tube should be held more horizontal, while a higher heat is attained by bringing the tube to a more vertical position. ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous

... height, that mingled their foliage with strange monsters of the vegetable world, of types no longer recognisable among the existing forms—sculptured ullodendra, bearing rectilinear stripes of sessile cones along their sides—and ornately tatooed sigillaria, fluted like columns, and with vertical rows of leaves bristling over their stems and larger branches. Such were some of the dreams in which I began at this period for the first time to indulge; nor have they, like the other dreams of youth, passed away. The aged poet has not unfrequently to complain, that as he rises ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... place a needle suspended as delicately as possible assumed a nearly vertical position under the magnetic influence; hence the centre of attraction was near, if not immediately ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... and intensity as to envelop and shroud completely the entire airship, rendering it absolutely invisible from below. While this cloud expands and gradually grows thinner, the airship rises rapidly in a vertical direction, speeding away while under protection ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... before us a perpendicular rock descending straight as a wall to the Kali River. The corrosive action of dripping water and melting snow, of which last there seemed to be a thick layer higher above on the summit of the cliff, had worn the face of the rock quite smooth. The distance across this vertical wall-like ravine was not more than forty or fifty feet. On the other side of it the narrow track ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... they form well-marked groups, of which the most characteristic are (1) the black schists and phyllites, with calcflintas, and a thin band of tremolite limestone, (2) the main or Blair Atholl limestone, (3) the quartzite. These divisions are folded on highly inclined or vertical axes trending north-east and south-west, and hence the same zones are repeated over a considerable area. The quartzite is generally regarded as the highest member of the series. Excellent sections showing the component strata occur in Glen ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the lever of the vertical rudder, he now brought the head, or bow, of the airship up sharply, and for a moment the downward plunge was arrested. The Abaris shot along parallel to the plane of the ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis

... the sun is practically vertical over the whole lunar surface, so the only details then seen are those which are vaguely brought out ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful, sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... were foreheads, not as ours—high and broad and visored; their sides drawn forward into a vertical ridge, a prominence, an upright wedge, somewhat like the visored heads of a few of the great lizards—and the heads, long, narrowing at the back, were fully twice the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... primordials come not forth to light, 'Tis thine to know they are not clothed with colour— Truly, what kind of colour could there be In the viewless dark? Nay, in the light itself A colour changes, gleaming variedly, When smote by vertical or slanting ray. Thus in the sunlight shows the down of doves That circles, garlanding, the nape and throat: Now it is ruddy with a bright gold-bronze, Now, by a strange sensation it becomes Green-emerald blended ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... Many of these rituals are also found written, not in hieroglyphics, but in hieratic characters, which are an abbreviated form of hieroglyphic signs. Papyri with hieroglyphics are nearly always divided by ruled lines into narrow vertical columns of an inch or less in breadth, in which the hieroglyphic signs are arranged one under the other. Sometimes the papyri are found written in the enchorial character. Several manuscripts in Greek on papyrus have been also discovered in Egypt; ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... been constructed as follows:—The twenty specimens are first arranged in a series according to the body-lengths (which may be considered to give the size of the bird), from the shortest to the longest, and the same number of vertical lines are drawn, numbered from one to twenty. In this case (and wherever practicable) the body-length is measured from the lower line of the diagram, so that the actual length of the bird is exhibited as well as the actual variations of length. These can be well estimated by means of the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... the flying people could scarcely keep their feet. "And now," says Von Tschudi, "there followed during two or three minutes a terrible scene. The swaying motion which had hitherto prevailed changed into fierce vertical upheaval. The subterranean roaring increased in the most terrifying manner; then were heard the heart-piercing shrieks of the wretched people, the bursting of walls, the crashing fall of houses and ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... while in the recumbent position. If standing, she should be placed against a wall or a partition and her head held by a strong assistant. The legs also must be secured to prevent the animal from kicking. A vertical incision should be made in the left flank, about the middle of the upper portion, care being taken not to make the opening too far down, in order to avoid the division of the circumflex artery which ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... retreats backward into my face, the aesthetic solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt, necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without being gross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes, shirt, cravat, and stockings with pronounced horizontal stripes. If my face lacks fierceness and ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren

... controls of the ship, held the craft in a vertical lift while his eyes clung in horrible fascination to the mirrors that showed from a lower lookout the volcanic floor falling away. Amazement had almost stifled his breathing, until at last he let go a long breath ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... above the earth's surface. Should it start to rise, the diminished pressure of the atmosphere operating on the valve swung the tractor more to one side, and the horizontal acceleration was thus increased at the expense of the vertical.] ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... glanced at it carelessly, but the two vertical lines suddenly appeared in his forehead just above the inside corners of ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... gone with others to church, and come back much moved by the bronze-faced earnestness, and rough-voiced, deep-chested hymning of the fisherman congregation. Far ahead we saw the strait full of ice. Not that the ice itself could be seen; but the peculiar, blue-white, vertical striae, which stuccoed the sky far along the horizon, told experienced eyes that ice was there. Away to the right towered the long heights of Newfoundland, intensely blue, save where, over large spaces, they shone white with snow. They surprised us by their great elevation, and by the sharp ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... the ground, but the descent thence was so steep, so rugged and impracticable, that obviously no scheme of utility had prompted its construction. Jagged outcropping ledges, a chaos of scattered boulders, now and again a precipitous verge showing a vertical section of the denuded strata, all formed a slant so precarious and steep that with the sharp sound of the door, closing on its spring, Bayne looked up from his seat in the swing on the veranda across the ravine in blank amazement to see her there essaying the descent, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... jungle of metal and plastic to the gem vault appeared no more than half completed, and the prospect of being delayed over it until the Spy discovered them here began to look like a disagreeably definite possibility. He clambered and floated hurriedly up through the almost vertical passage he'd cleared, found daylight flooding the lock compartment, the system's yellow sun well above the horizon. Peeling off the salvage suit, he restored the communicator to his wrist and went over to the ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz

... decrease till the end of the third quarter, when it will again be the least, and must increase again till the new moon; that is, the solar and lunar counter-gravitation is greatest, when those luminaries are vertical, at the new moon, and full moon, and least about six hours afterwards. If it was known, whether more menstruations occur about six hours after the moon is in the zenith or nadir; and in the second and fourth quarters of the moon, than in the first and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... secured by means of a window-board. This is a board the edge of which rests on the edge of the window-sill, the ends being attached firmly to the window-frame. It affords a vertical surface three or four inches high and situated three or four inches in front of the window, so as to deflect the cold air upward when the window is slightly opened. The air will then reach the breathing-zone, instead of flowing on to the floor and chilling the feet, which is the usual consequence ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... window-frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draft. You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes hang airing. You stand in the doorway and realize that there remains not a minute's work for any one to do. Memories of the fetid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night's use float across ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... moment for diving. Sometimes we overshot the target, but more often we were short of it. Owing to the angle at which the rockets were mounted on the struts, it was very important that the dive should be vertical. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... nearly always has its bed full of loose stones, and becomes a series of humps and dumps of water wherever it is shallow; while the Wharfe swept round its curves of shore like a black Damascus saber, coiled into eddies of steel. At the Strid, it had risen eight feet vertical since yesterday, sheeting the flat rocks with foam from side to side, while the treacherous mid-channel was filled with a succession of boiling domes of water, charged through and through with churning white, and rolling out into ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin

... heating, and for shimmering forth rich in the search-lights; and the central ballroom, the clothes store, the original one-ninety-sixth model, the Ambassador-region, the steaming laundry, and the roof, where Rebekah saw her initials on the breeze, and the vertical pop-guns under shields for dealing with aeroplane attack, and the cream theatre, and the paymaster's suite, and the bunkers, the Government-offices, and the tax- receiving rooms, the telephone system, and the lady-telegraphists— till all were tired, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow stone—gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square" bowler hat—not often seen these days—and a red face with small eyes, and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... would begin to look for the other half of the ring on the west instead of the east; and if you went a little west of the Feejee Islands the ring would be over your head again. So if we only had a ring like that, not round the equator of the world,—as Saturn's ring is around Saturn,—but vertical to the plane of the equator, as the brass ring of an artificial globe goes, only far higher in proportion,— "from that ring," said Q., pensively, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... first natural curiosities we saw was Chimney Rock; a vertical column of sandstone something like forty feet high, with a rugged stone bluff rising abruptly near it. Its appearance, from our distant view, resembled a stone chimney from which the building had been burned away, as it stood, solitary on the flat earth at the south side of the Platte River, ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell

... to call this his mechanical burglar detector," continued Kennedy. "As you see, this frame carries two dynamometers of unequal power. The stronger, which has a high maximum capacity of several tons, is designed for the measurement of vertical efforts. The other measures horizontal efforts. The test is made by inserting the end of a jimmy or other burglar's tool and endeavouring to produce impressions similar to those which have been found on doors or windows. The index of the dynamometer moves in such a way ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... once cut do not shoot up again, [Footnote: It was not long ago stated, upon the evidence of the Government foresters of Greece, and of the queen's gardener, that a large wood has been discovered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of sending up both vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees and forming a new crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew only on the "mountains," of which the hero of About's most amusing story, Le Roi des Montagnes, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... clusters are formed. The larva, when hatched, falls into the water, its future residence; it is said to have a forked tail about one third the length of its body, and to "have the power of raising itself in the water by an incessant undulating motion in a vertical plane." I am not, however, acquainted with either larva or pupa, but hope to become so this summer. "It is very curious, papa," said Jack, "that the flies, after they have laid their eggs, should die there; why do not they fly away? Do any other animals ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... letters. He was a tall, thin man, with a close-shaven face, which had no beauty of feature, but which was wonderfully attractive all the same. It was not an old face, but it was deeply lined, and those who knew and loved him best could tell the meaning of each of those eloquent tracings. The deep vertical mark running up the forehead meant sorrow. It had been stamped there for ever on the night when Hubert, his first-born, had been brought back, cold and lifeless, from the river to which he had hurried forth but an hour before, a picture of happy boyhood. ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... Asia. Other scholars have detected signs of their origin in their language and system of writing, and, from the fact that they spoke an agglutinative tongue and at the earliest period arranged the characters of their script in vertical lines like the Chinese, it has been urged that they were of Mongol extraction. Though a case may be made out for this hypothesis, it would be rash to dogmatize for or against it, and it is wiser to await the discovery of further material on which a more certain decision may ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... sans Pretention" is a view of a flying-machine. In the midst of a frame of light wood sits the operator, steadying himself with one hand, and with the other fuming a cremaillere, which appears to give a very quick rotatory movement to two glass globes revolving upon a vertical axis. The friction of the globes is supposed to develop electricity to which his power of ascending ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion

... can almost see it moving "in the subtlest equilibrium, clinging with its hooked talons to the slippery surface of the leaf"; we watch all the details of its methods and the progress of its labours. We see the flexed leaf assume the vertical under the awl-stroke which the insect applies to the pedicle, "when, partially deprived of sap, the leaf becomes more flexible, more malleable; it is in a sense partly paralysed, only half alive." Then we follow the rolling process; "the imperturbable ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... pools of yellow clayey water at the sides of the drive, or stumbled over the rough ground and rugged rails laid down for the trollies. All along the gallery, at regular intervals, were posts of stringy bark in a vertical position, while beams of the same were laid horizontally across the top, but so low that Vandeloup had to stoop constantly to prevent himself knocking his head against their ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... opening of the maternal passages. It shows a vertical slit enclosed by lips, and interiorly it forms a passage that is continuous with the vagina. This passage is about six inches long in the larger animals. The different features that should be noted ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... is placed at times in some low bush surrounded with and grown through by grass, more commonly in clumps of grass, and never at any great height from the ground. It is more or less egg-shaped, and placed with the longer diameter vertical, the entrance being on one side above the middle. It is composed exteriorly sometimes of fine grass-roots, sometimes of the finest possible grass, loosely but sufficiently firmly interwoven, a little moss being often incorporated in the upper portion, and internally always, I think, exclusively ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... enough;" and he proceeded to increase the pressure by operating an apparatus of mercury in long vertical tubes acted upon automatically by a weight lever which stood near the coil. In a few moments the sound of the discharge again began, and then I made my first acquaintance with the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... have political parties that are made by vertical divisions among the voters. In each party we have the intelligent and the fortunate, with those who are not so intelligent nor so experienced nor so well circumstanced. What will be the tendency of this refusal to recognize ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft

... schooner was packed began to show signs of disintegration. The surface rotted by day and froze again by night and this destroyed its compactness. If the sun's arc above the horizon had been longer, its rays more vertical, the ice must infallibly have melted and freed the Karluk, for it was salt-water ice, and there were times when the thermometer stayed above its freezing point for two or ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... the passes, could strike from the centre at any one or more of a dozen alternative points and could shift his attack from one to another flank in a fraction of the time it would take Rumania to transport her forces to meet it. She had no lateral lines for her northern frontier, and of the vertical lines only two went up to the passes. If, however, she could reach the Maros, she would not only straighten her line and shorten it by half, but deprive her enemies of their railway and other strategic advantages. On that line she might hope to resist the Teutonic ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... broken in. He could now see the interior of the pit, which, being in the side of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost corner the square outline of a van appeared, with its back towards him. A light came from the interior, and threw a moving shadow upon the vertical face of gravel at the further side of the pit ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... measuring, as also to discover a law expressing a constant relation between magnitudes. The principle of Archimedes is a true experimental law. It takes into account three variable magnitudes: the volume of a body, the density of the liquid in which the body is immersed, the vertical pressure that is being exerted. And it states indeed that one of these three terms is a function of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... of the famous "Lion Gate" at Mycenae, instead of the winged disk, we find a vertical pillar to represent the Mother Goddess, flanked by two lions which are nothing more than other representatives of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... house and one mile south-east of the Gap station. This rotary motion or "whirl" probably resulted from the resistance encountered by these opposing currents of air, in their attempt to ascend vertically, there being less resistance in a lateral than in a vertical direction. The first movements of the cloud thus formed were of a decided character. Some children that were playing in a field near by, saw the danger ahead and fled to a lime-kiln, thus saving their lives. The cloud now reached a stream of water, and ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington

... Punin was completely bald; not a single hair was to be seen on the high conical skull, covered with smooth white skin. He passed his open hand over it, and he too laughed. When he laughed he seemed, as it were, to gulp, he opened his mouth wide, closed his eyes—and vertical wrinkles flitted across his forehead in three rows, like waves. 'Eh,' said he at last, 'isn't it quite like ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... suspended in the room running from one end of it to the other, and returning many times, making a length of seventeen hundred feet. The two ends of the wire were connected with an electro-magnet fastened to a vertical wooden frame. In front of the magnet was its armature, and also a wooden lever or arm fitted at its extremity to hold a lead-pencil.... I saw this instrument work, and became thoroughly acquainted with the principle of its operation, and, I may say, struck with the rude ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... two sides clear. The tower was the home of a wine and coal merchant, who had laid in a supply of cut wood on his roof to the height of several feet above the irregular parapet. Outside one of the narrow vertical slits, which in ages past had served as vantage point for a vizored knight fitting arrow to bow, hung a parrot cage. "Coco" was chattering ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... prickled less, and could be bent a little at the knee with small distress; so he led the old Michel at a good pace down the length of the enclosure, past the rose-gardens, a tangle of unkempt sweetness, and so to the opposite wall. He found the gates there, very formidable-looking, made of vertical iron bars connected by cross-pieces and an ornamental scroll. They were fastened together by a heavy chain and a padlock. The lock was covered with rust, as were the gates themselves, and Ste. Marie observed that the lane outside upon which they gave was overgrown with turf and moss, and even with ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... in a word, following a horizontal plan, I use an ordinary rudder fixed on the back of the stern-post, and with one wheel and some tackle to steer by. But I can also make the Nautilus rise and sink, and sink and rise, by a vertical movement by means of two inclined planes fastened to its sides, opposite the centre of flotation, planes that move in every direction, and that are worked by powerful levers from the interior. If the planes are kept ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... immense plains, scorched by the vertical rays of a burning sun, water, everywhere else so common, becomes an object of contest. The wells and springs, those secret treasures of the desert, are carefully concealed from the travellers; and frequently, after our most oppressive marches, nothing could ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... the laws of gravity, exactly like every other body; and the velocity with which any quantity may be falling is an expression of the full amount of work it contains. By a sufficiently accurate practical rule this velocity is eight times the square root of the head or vertical column measured in feet. Velocity per second 8 sqrt (head in feet), therefore, for a head of 100 ft. as an example, V 8 sqrt (100) 80 ft. per second. The graphic method of showing velocities or pressures has many advantages, and is used in all the following diagrams. Beginning ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various

... In the square door, certainly the side-posts of it are as important members as the lintel they carry; but the lintel is carved elaborately, and the side-posts left blank. Of the facing arch and shaft, it would be similarly difficult to say whether the sustaining vertical, or sustained curve, were the more important member of the construction; but the decorator now reverses the distribution of his care, adorns the vertical member with passionate elaboration, and runs a narrow band, of comparatively uninteresting work, round the arch. Between this outer shaft ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... bromide paper, and F is the reflector. The screen on the easel can be made either to rest on the floor or on a table. It can be made to run on a track or otherwise, and it can also be made so as to admit of either vertical or lateral adjustment or both, or it can be nothing more than an ordinary box set on a table. But however constructed it must be considerably larger than the largest sheet of bromide paper which is to be used, thus allowing for nearly ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant

... fire-place recess, round another smaller shoulder of rock, was a perfectly vertical wall of smooth stone terminating just above our reach at an opening three yards wide or more. The top of the wall of rock at the bottom of the opening was almost as straight as ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... drum with one vertical half in mercury, the other in a vacuum: the drum, I suppose, working round forever to find an easy position. Steam to be superseded: steam and electricity convulsions of nature never intended by Providence for the use of man. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... del Guacharo is pierced in the vertical profile of a rock. The entrance is towards the south, and forms a vault eighty feet broad and seventy-two feet high. This elevation is but a fifth less than the colonnade of the Louvre. The rock that surmounts the grotto ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... another, and so on. Or else—seeing that every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four months—he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense, devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear—browsing aloft from the sea-board, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... has seemed to be inviolably barred by an almost vertical facade, the ramparts are found to overlap each other like loosely clasped fingers, between which a zigzag path may be followed—a cunning construction that puzzles the uninformed eye. But its cunning, even where not obscured by dilapidation, is now wasted on the solitary forms of a ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... ground, tied to the lower wire to the right and left of the center, and on these are two or three canes, pruned long enough to reach to the middle wire at least, and if possible to the upper. They are tied so that they stand in a vertical or oblique position. Along the arms at intervals of a few inches are spurs, consisting of two buds. If the vineyardist maintains the arms permanently, these spurs furnish the fruiting ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... depending only on the medium, which means that there is a constant ratio between the tangents, instead of the sines, of the inclination of the incident and refracted rays to the normal. Experiment proved that this gave too high values for refraction near the vertical compared with those near the horizon, so Kepler "went off at a tangent" and tried a totally new set of ideas, which all reduced to the absurdity of a refraction which vanished at the horizon. These were followed ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant

... lines; you cannot take it abstractly with entire truth. It is, however, possible to find verbal equivalents for the character of the main types of lines. Horizontal lines convey a feeling of repose, of quiet, as in the wall-paintings of Puvis de Chavannes; vertical lines, of solemnity, dignity, aspiration, as in so much of the work of Boecklin; crooked lines of conflict and activity, as in the woodcuts of Durer; while curved lines have always been recognized as soft and voluptuous and tender, as in Correggio and Renoir. The supposition that ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... than felt in a tremulous, quivering, upward-moving dust along the flank of the mountain, through which the spires of the pines were faintly visible. There was no water in the bared and burning bars of the river to reflect the vertical sun, but under its direct rays one or two tinned roofs and corrugated zinc cabins struck fire, a few canvas tents became dazzling to the eye, and the white wooded corral of the stage office and hotel insupportable. For two hours no one ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte

... shale, and iron-stone of the lower coal-measures, and, on the East Lomond, with Mountain Limestone. I examined these trap-rocks in 1838, in the cliffs south of St. Andrews, where they consist in great part of stratified tuffs, which are curved, vertical, and contorted, like the associated coal-measures. In the tuff I found fragments of carboniferous shale and limestone, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... and on, the thirst was so bad now they could hardly speak to one another, still they pushed on under the burning rays of the almost vertical sun, every step it seemed must be their last. Was it really only last night they discovered they were lost, only last night? Another mile, and another, and the heat grew unbearable, and Helm, without a word, turned ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt

... extreme example and does not represent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to consciousness the well known fact that for these buildings we have substantially one method of construction—that of the vertical strut, and the horizontal "fill"—while in style they appear as Grecian, Roman, Renaissance, Gothic, Modern French and what not, according to the whim of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... both forearms flat on the carpet and lifted both legs into the vertical. Then, silver slippers pointing motionlessly ceilingward, she got up onto her hands and walked twice around a vacant chair. She then performed a series of flips that would have done credit to a professional acrobat; ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith

... houses in this street on the side towards the valley, but there were several bridges leading across the valley, as if it had been a river. Beyond the valley were to be seen the backs of the houses in High Street, which looked like a range of cliffs, divided by vertical chasms and seams, and blackened by time. At one end of the hill was the castle rock, crowned with the towers, and bastions, and battlemented ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott

... in upon him. The major, somewhat ignorant of the situation, pushed onward till he suddenly found himself on the brow of a precipice which descended at an almost vertical inclination for a hundred and fifty feet. Here was a frightful dilemma. To right and left the Indian runners could be seen, their lines extending to the verge of the cliff. What was to be done? surrender to the Indians, attempt to dash through their line, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... action than that of the duck, for example. The chief effort of the duck is to sustain its weight. Consequently the wing must lie flat (comparatively) upon the air, and be kept straight out, economizing its vertical pressure; and hence the noticeable stiffness and toilsomeness of its progression. The gull, less concerned to sustain itself, uses the wing more flexibly, bending it slightly at the elbow, and pressing back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... should like to possess a really good piano—not one of those dumpy vertical instruments, but a big flat one with a long tail. For a long time I hesitated between a Rolls Royce, a Yost, a Veuve Cliquot, and a Thurston. At last I put the problem to a musical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various



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