"Atrophied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... simplicity, "one sole and self-same organ is the basis of it; according as it experiences an arrest of development, as it grows and fructifies, or as it becomes hypertrophied, it gives us a paraphyse, a basidium, or a cystidium—in other terms, atrophied basidium, normal basidium and hypertrophied basidium; these are the three elements which ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... two, and one to nearly four. In the Scotch deer-hound there is a striking and remarkable difference in the size of the male and female.[65] Every one knows how the ears vary in size in different breeds, and with their great development their muscles become atrophied. Certain breeds of dogs are described as having a deep furrow between the nostrils and lips. The caudal vertebrae, according to F. Cuvier, on whose authority the two last statements rest, vary in number; and the tail in shepherd dogs is almost absent. The mammae vary from seven to ten in number; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... atrophied by civilization, suddenly sprang up. He seemed to be able to read every sound. Not a whisper in the forest escaped his understanding, and this sudden flame of a great early life put into him new thoughts and a ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... there would care about what had happened to him in New York. But to leave him, an innocent man, to go to his death because he was too chivalrous to betray his partner in an adventure—this was something that even Bromfield's atrophied conscience revolted at. Clay was standing by him, according to Durand's story. The news of it lifted a weight from his soul. But it left him too under a stronger moral obligation to step out and face ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... was represented by a smooth, slightly elevated deep black eminence 1 cm. in length and 1-5 mm. in breadth at its upper end. These authors also mention three ducks in male plumage in which the ovary was similarly atrophied but not pigmented. They regard the condition of the ovary as insufficient to explain the development of the male characters, and suggest that such birds are really hermaphrodite, a male element being possibly concealed in a neighbouring organ ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... dark haunting eyes and mobile lips, and her slim young figure and her splendid courage. A girl apart from the girls he had known, apart from the women he had known, the women whom he had imagined—and he had not imagined many—his training had atrophied such imaginings of youth. Jeanne. Again her name conjured up visions of the Great Jeanne of Domremy. If only he could have seen her ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... here: it is still here. I think you have the power of making people love you, yet you do nothing for it except, perhaps, exist. One ought not to ask any more; I don't ask it, but you ought to learn to give. You'll find it's the only thing worth doing. Taking—taking—one becomes atrophied. No, it isn't that I don't care for you, it isn't that. I am going ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... "the presence of other living things." The "telepathic sense." How man may sense the presence of other living things apart from the operation of his ordinary five physical senses. This power is strongly developed in savages and barbarians, but has become atrophied in most civilized men, by continued disuse. It is now vestigal in civilized man, but may be developed by practice. Animals have this extra sense highly developed, and it plays a very important part in ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... indulgence. This had had its effect on him: he did not wish to grow red-faced, slothful, and fleshy, as they had done, nor to busy himself with trivialities until such capacities for useful work as he possessed had atrophied. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... which makes these things plain to a generous woman; but usually by the time she has suffered enough to be able to blame those whom it has been her habit to love and respect, and to judge of the wrong they have done her, it is too late to remedy it. Even if her faculties have not atrophied for want of use, all that should have been cultivated lies latent in her; she has nothing to fall back upon, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a model of dignity, of restrained indignation, of good common sense. The most difficult part of his task was getting Hugo Galland into condition for a creditable appearance in court. In so far as Hugo's meagre intellect, atrophied by education and by luxury, permitted him to be a lawyer at all, he was of that now common type called the corporation lawyer. That is, for him human beings had ceased to exist, and of course human rights, also; the world as viewed from the standpoint of law ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... first rank. She has sacrificed the most wonderful part of her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her intuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superior affectability crushed, leaves her atrophied. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... leisurely, stopping to watch the spirals with a certain lazy enjoyment. They seemed to grow increasingly larger. They spun themselves about into all kinds of shapes, wavering and illusive, that defied the somewhat atrophied imagination ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... writing, many terms that should be illuminative have become meaningless. So often has the barren been called "pregnant," the chill of death "the breath of life," the atrophied "pulsating," that when we really come upon a work with beating heart we find it difficult to give it place that has not already been stuffed to suffocation ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... rejoined. "Not even citizeness Evrard. I was the only one who knew. I had to go and see the child once every month. It was a wretched, miserable brat," the woman went on, her shrivelled old breast vaguely stirred, mayhap, by some atrophied feeling of motherhood. "More than half-starved ... and the look in its eyes, citizen! It was enough to make you cry! I could see by his poor little emaciated body and his nice little hands and feet that he ought never to have been put ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... eminently the case with the most dangerous poisonous snakes. In them a highly peculiar specialization has been carried to the highest point. They rely for attack and defence purely on their poison-fangs. All other means and methods of attack and defence have atrophied. They neither crush nor tear with their teeth nor constrict with their bodies. The poison-fangs are slender and delicate, and, save for the poison, the wound inflicted is of a trivial character. In consequence they are helpless in the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... strange contrivance called a concerto, put together to enable the player to exhibit within a brief space the utmost possible variety of finger gymnastics. To learn to perform these feats one had to devote his whole lifetime to practising them, just like any circus acrobat; and so his mind became atrophied, and a naive and elemental vanity was all that ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Rosalind—each like a separate knife-thrust; they had plunged her into a mental vacuum in which her brain, atrophied, reeled, paralyzed. She staggered—a man caught her, muttered something about there being too much excitement for a lady, and gruffly ordered others to clear the way that he might lead her out of the jam. She resisted, for she was determined to stay to hear the Judge to the end, and the man grinned ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... that the so-called rudimentary organs in the human body such as the appendix, are the remnants of more complete organs inherited from our animal ancestors. It is a strange argument that a once complete and useful organ in our alleged animal ancestors, when it becomes atrophied in man, causes such an improvement and advance, as to cause man to survive, when his ancestors with more perfect organs became extinct. Man with less perfect organs became the dominant species. If the perfect organ were better than ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... and consequently in the germ whence he sprang. Thus, for instance, there is no proof that the mole has become blind because it has formed the habit of living underground; it is perhaps because its eyes were becoming atrophied that it condemned itself to a life underground.[40] If this is the case, the tendency to lose the power of vision has been transmitted from germ to germ without anything being acquired or lost by the soma of the mole itself. From the fact that the son of a fencing-master ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Vertebrates, is the fourth part in order in the anterior member, and its homologue can always be recognised by this fact of its connections (p. xxvi.). The principle of connections serves as a guide in tracing an organ through all its functional transformations, for "an organ can be deteriorated, atrophied, annihilated, but not transposed" ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... mind and body which he had supposed final, vanished. Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated senses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in memories ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... was a scene that I shall remember. They drank to England. I raised my glass to Italia irredenta—might it soon be redenta. They all sprang to their feet and the circle of dark faces flashed into flame. They keep their souls and emotions, these people. I trust that ours may not become atrophied ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fair frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal sea" which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least in old people, who alone, as a class, have the time ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... that I should strive to awaken it in her. Cultivate enough vanity to care about your personal appearance and your deportment. No amount of education can recompense a woman for the loss of complexion, figure, or charm. And do not let your emotional and affectional nature grow atrophied. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the matter and to have seen the eternal underlying verity face to face—and even though he could see it he could not grip it and hold it and convey it to another who has not. Therefore either these feelings must be left altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed, then soon undeveloped and atrophied, or they must be expressed by the help of images or idols—by the help of something not more actually true than a child's doll is to a child, but yet helpful to our weakness of understanding, as the doll no doubt gratifies and stimulates the motherly ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... animals' bodies, especially into the bodies of wild beasts if they have given way to excesses of anger ... those who have sought only to satisfy their lust and gluttony, pass into the bodies of lascivious and gluttonous animals ... those who have allowed their senses to become atrophied, are sent to vegetate in trees ... those who have reigned tyranically become eagles, if ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... lovers of the hard-bitten working "earth dogs" who still keep these strains inviolate, and who greatly prefer them to the better-known terriers whose natural activities have been too often atrophied by a system of artificial breeding to show points. Few of these old unregistered breeds would attract the eye of the fancier accustomed to judge a dog parading before him in the show ring. To know their value and to appreciate their sterling good qualities, one needs to watch them at work ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... awake the sense of duty which seems to us to have become atrophied, even among the professedly ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... chance with men for distinction and reward, for triumphs commercial and professional as well as social, and hence, needing men less, either to make them homes, or to gratify indirectly their ambitions, their affections will become atrophied, the springs of domestic life will disappear in the arid sands of an unfeminine publicity, and marriage, with all the wearying cares and burdens and anxieties that it inevitably brings to every earnest woman, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... artist is the voice of the earth. A rich man cannot be a great artist. He would need a thousand times more genius to be so under such unfavorable conditions. Even if he succeeds his art must be a hot-house fruit. The great Goethe struggled in vain: parts of his soul were atrophied, he lacked certain of the vital organs, which were killed by his wealth. You have nothing like the vitality of a Goethe, and you would be destroyed by wealth, especially by a rich woman, a fate which Goethe did at least avoid. Only the man ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... vermifuge and philosophy. Although Jay Jay finds it necessary to mix display ads with his reading matter to make the latter palatable, he declares that his painful monthly emission has "the largest circulation of any medical magazine in the world"—thereby indicating that while his mentality may be atrophied, his imagination is intumescent. I have long noticed that journals having large bonafide circulations do little tooting of their own horns on the house-tops—they don't have to. It is a species of journalistic ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the spirit up. To defile or despoil such beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is evident that somewhere along the line his spiritual education was neglected. He excites our sympathy and our hope that his children may ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... or to be exempted from punishment if they have committed a crime, but who, in the common expressive phrase, 'are not all there'—whose eccentricities, illusions and caprices are on the verge of madness, whose judgments are hopelessly disordered; whose wills, though not completely atrophied, are manifestly diseased. In questions of property, in questions of crime, in questions of family arrangements, such persons cause the gravest perplexity, nor will any wise man judge them by the same moral standard as well-balanced and ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... too seem to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is our pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is at any ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... a slow business with Joey at first because his legs had got thin and weak—partially atrophied muscles, Doc said—and it took time to make them round and strong again. But in a couple of weeks he was stumping around on crutches and after that he never ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... inmost natures over to the dominion of self—and that is the definition of sin—that such men are, ipso facto, by reason of that very surrender of themselves to their worst selves, dead on what I may call the top side of their nature, and that all that is there is atrophied and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... this been noticed that its association with prostatic trouble or disease tends to the belief that the irritation produced by this condition of prepuce often lays the foundation for prostatic disease in not a few cases.[100] In elderly people, with the atrophied penis and elongating prepuce, the constant moisture from the urine on the inner fold and glans adds greatly to the irritation as well as to the discomfort ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... her, who had mourned and been idle while Una had planned for her, and who had always been a compound of selfishness and love, was more and more accustomed to taking her daughter's youth to feed her comfort and her canary—a bird of atrophied voice and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... their thermic environment, and the thermotaxic balance being habitually anomalous, the emergency was not successfully encountered; and this was more particularly the case because the nerve-centres of vital resistance to sudden and extreme thermal abstraction were atrophied." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... to tell you that it is a hopeless case," said the physician to the Proprietor, who was standing with the Stranger in front of the cage watching the examination. "Both optic nerves are atrophied, and the animal must have received some serious injury, possibly a heavy blow on the forehead." The Proprietor, who has the reputation of being a "good loser," thanked him and gave some directions to the trainer about ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... the microscope, and saw, among other things, two hairs—originally white, but encrusted with a black, opaque, glistening stain. The root bulbs, I noticed, were shrivelled and atrophied. ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... of odours to which we are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less atrophied. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Unfortunately, diseases of the vines interfered and also the pride of a quill-driver; the family moved to town, and now he would have felt it a derogation to return to his real nature, which was too much atrophied, even if he had wished it. Not having found his true place in society, he blamed the social order, serving it, as do millions of functionaries, like a bad servant, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... talking nonsense, Mr. Theydon?" demanded Furneaux. "Didn't your flesh creep when that queer perfume assailed your nostrils, which are not yet altogether atrophied by the reek of thousands of ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... the table. The demands of digestion upon the human economy produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces which rivals the highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Jovians first landed on your planet. If you can form thoughts without speaking, you may save the effort of speech. The air has become so thin on Mars that sound will not carry over large portions of it. As a result, we have no organs of hearing, for they have been atrophied from ages of disuse. We use thought as our ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... second sub-class, come next to the oviparous monotremes, the oldest of the mammals. But as in their case the food-yelk is already atrophied, and the little ovum develops within the mother's body, the partial cleavage has been reconverted into total. One section of the marsupials still show points of agreement with the monotremes, while another section of them, according ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... were unable to give utterance to a guttural. This dislike they communicated to the English; and hence, in the present day, there are many people— especially in the south of England— who cannot sound a guttural at all. The muscles in the throat that help to produce these sounds have become atrophied— have lost their power for want of practice. The purely English part of the population, for many centuries after the Norman invasion, could sound gutturals quite easily— just as the Scotch and the Germans do now; but it gradually became the fashion in England ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... going to begin again," said the professor, "but this—this is an exception. Come with us, Zena. Come and ask some of your absurd questions. I wonder whether my brain is atrophied. There are cleverer criminals than there used to be in my time, are ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... her speech struck home; the seemingly soft-brained weakness that had forbidden the rape and pillage of the schooner stood in part explained. And as the light filtered through thick skulls and shone upon all but atrophied brains, a deep muttering swelled into the embryo of a throaty cheer that needed but one look of encouragement from Dolores to spring into noisy life. As for Venner, his expression was reflected in Tomlin, and both in Pearse; and ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... That she was living alone like this because there was no one else for her to go to, and that she really hadn't more than enough to keep alive on till the wretched little legacy was paid? The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in him, but he was suffering so intensely that he had a faint glimpse of what other sufferings might mean—and, as she perceived, an almost simultaneous perception of the way in which her particular misfortunes might ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the bodily life capacities untrained and unexercised become faint and disappear; just as the Indian fakir, who holds his arm up above his head for years, never using the muscles, has the muscles atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down to his side;—so the people who neglect to use the ears that God has given them by degrees will lose the capacity of hearing at all. Which, being put into plain English, just ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and walked over to the nearest spear, trailing the feeble, atrophied legs of their rider as they went. They squatted close to the floor, and the staring eyes examined the spears at close range. Then the owner of the eyes apparently sent out another command; for one of the guards at the door left its post ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... September. Probably at the beginning of the war they would have felt uneasy at slaying one man per day by such means, but as retribution came not, and as their appetite for slaughter grew with feeding, and as their sympathy with human misery atrophied from long suppression, they ventured upon ever widening ranges of destructiveness. Had the war lasted another year, and they lived, five hundred deaths a day would doubtless have ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the fact that he is a many-sided man. Success has not atrophied either his manners or his impulses. He is not ashamed to be very human because he has become very important. I remember how, during the stress of the Budget fight, when, if ever, he was at a tension, he went off for a week-end with the Attorney-General and a distinguished journalist. They had a ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... are not like human beings; their muscles are always exercised from the first and so they develop themselves in a natural manner. If you have to fly about to find every meal you eat, your muscles do not become atrophied (atrophied means wasted away ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... It will suffice to indicate her improvement if I say that in eight weeks from the commencement of treatment she was dressed, sitting up to meals, able to walk up and down stairs with an arm and a stick, and had also walked in the same way in the park. Considering how completely atrophied her muscles were from twenty years' entire disuse, this was much more than I had ventured to hope. She has now left with her nurse for Natal, and I have no doubt that she will return from her travels ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... oft-told story, how, with the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish desire for song temporarily ceased. The sorrow-laden heart could not sing of love. The disuse of a faculty leads to its loss; and so, with the cessation of the desire for song, the gift of singing became atrophied. But the decay was not quite complete. It is commonly assumed that post-Biblical Hebrew poetry revived for sacred ends; first hymns were written, then secular songs. But Dr. Brody has proved that this assumption is erroneous. In point of fact, the first Hebrew poetry after the Bible was secular not ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... become reunited, and presented a thickened portion at the point of junction, but not so large as that of the outer side, and situated in the lower half of the tendon, about 2 inches higher than that on the external nerve. This nerve trunk was atrophied below the thickening, and had undergone gelatinous degeneration. Judging from the scars on the skin, this side had evidently been unnerved a week or ten days previously to that on the outer side. The band stretching ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... which make up those races. Yet intellect was all he was. Vast areas of thought, feeling, and conduct, in which the people around him spent so much of their time, were entirely closed to him. He had no personal life at all. That part of him had atrophied from lack of use, like the eyes of the mole and of those sightless fishes men take from the waters ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in the world of spirit, any more than we ought to live wholly in the world of matter, for our nature is double, and no portion of it should be atrophied. Extreme mysticism is as falsifying of our nature as is extreme worldliness. The stupidity and charlatanism of modern spiritualism is the rebellion of men and women against the materialism of present conception of life. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... so greatly upon the perfection of his senses. His power to reason has relieved them of many of their duties, and so they have, to some extent, atrophied, as have the muscles which move the ears ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... child, or prevents them from developing, gives rise to the phenomena which we have described when speaking of castration. This is the case, for instance, with cryptorchidism in which the testicles remain in the inguinal canal and become atrophied, instead of descending into the scrotum. The following case is an example, and ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the moonlit maples and talked until he was hoarse. He could not rouse a sense of shame in Bessy, because that had been atrophied, but as he closely watched her, he realized that his victory would come through the emotion he was able to arouse in her, and the ultimate appeal to the clear ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... think and believe as others tell them. You may be drawn to one or the other, detecting an unusual kindliness of nature or some endearing trick; for the most part, one studies them with a kind of medical interest. How comes it that this man, respectably equipped by birth, has grown so warped and atrophied, an animated bundle ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... with a good woman, or within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature. There is no balance in their lives. Their masculinity, which in itself is of the brute, has been over-developed. The other and spiritual side of their natures has been dwarfed—atrophied, in fact. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... disconnected from their etymological or formal group to preserve traces of phonetic laws that have otherwise left no recognizable trace or to preserve a vestige of a morphological process that has long lost its vitality. A careful study of these survivals or atrophied forms is not without value for the reconstruction of the earlier history of a language or for suggestive hints ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... warmly, and again and again, as would be fitting with old friends. He had determined to be master of the situation, and to turn the moment to the credit of his account—not hers; and it was easy to do it, for love was dead, and the memory of love atrophied. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... bronzed carpet of needles beaten smooth by decades of rain and snow. No animal would have trodden that suspicious space. But it was with man she had to deal—a dangerous but reasoning man with few and atrophied instincts—and with no experience in traps; and, therefore, in ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... white Persian cats purring on either knee, he read and reread the letter summoning him on the morrow to Seabright. He knew who his hostess was—a large lady lately emerged from a corner in lard, dragging with her some assorted relatives of atrophied intellects and a husband whose only mental pleasure depended upon the speed attained by his racing car—the most exacting audience ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... terror suddenly tweaked Susan Hetth's heart, the social one, the maternal one having long since atrophied through want of use; for the shadow of lunacy is about the blackest of all the shadows that can fall across a ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... highly organized or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered: and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... corporeally fat! I want that kind of individual kept out. I don't trust them. I'm afraid of them. Their minds are atrophied. They are unmoral, possibly even criminal! I don't want them in my room snooping about to see what I have and what I'm doing. I don't want them to sneak in, eaten up with jealousy and envy, and try to damage the eggs of the Silver Moon butterfly because the honour and glory ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... The atrophied corner of Yorkshire that embraces the lowest reaches of the Humber is terminated by a mere raised causeway leading to the wider patch of ground dominated by Spurn Head lighthouse. This long ridge of sand and shingle is all that remains of a very considerable ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... no aspect of the Irish question in regard to which more dust is thrown in Englishmen's eyes than that which is summed up in the one word disloyalty. The prestige of the Crown in Great Britain, where its functions are atrophied to a greater extent than in any other country in Europe, is one of the most striking features in contemporary English life. The loyalty of a nation is chiefly due to associations formed by events in its history. The extreme ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... the praeoral lobe is a tuft of cilia. Just behind the ciliated ring is a pair of larval eyes which disappear in the adult; these correspond to the cephalic eyes of Lamellibranchs. An ectodemic invagination forms a large mucous gland on the foot, which is more or less atrophied in adult life. The gonads originate by proliferation of the anterior wall of the pericardium. The shell-valves arise as transverse thickenings of the dorsal cuticle behind the ciliated ring, the tegmentum being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... impulses have been trained to come to heel through many a painful sacrifice. In other cases an approximation to this ideal state is the result of early training; by skillful guidance the growing boy or girl has had his safe impulses fostered and his perilous desires atrophied with disuse. The proverb, "Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart there from," has much truth in it. But no parent and no man himself can ever breathe quite ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and unusual. All at once the world seemed to be a vast vacuum in which his brain strove for air, and all his senses were numbed and overpowered. Distempered and vague, his soul seemed spinning in an aching chaos. It was being overpowered by vast elements, and life and being were atrophied in a deadly smother. The awful forces behind visible being hung him in the middle space between consciousness and dissolution. He heard David's voice, at first dimly, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... they are, whether to engage the separated enemies to windward or to leeward, as occasion may offer, in support of the van. The provisions of 1665 afterwards disappear. In 1740, and even as late as 1781, they are traceable only in certain colorless articles, suggestive of the atrophied organs of a body concerning whose past ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... at the heel, too elongated and less rounded than normal. The changes in the appearance of the inferior surface of the hoof vary. The changes here may be so slight that they are not noticed. In well advanced and neglected cases the arch of the sole is increased, the frog is narrow and atrophied and the bars high and perpendicular. Corns may accompany the contraction. The foot may feel feverish. The animal may manifest the pain in the feet when standing at rest by pointing and changing their position. When lameness is present, it may ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... in death from starvation are as follows: There is marked general emaciation; the skin is dry, shrivelled, and covered with a brown, bad-smelling excretion; the muscles soft, atrophied, and free from fat; the liver is small, but the gall-bladder is distended with bile. The heart, lungs, and internal organs are shrivelled and bloodless. The stomach is sometimes quite healthy; in other cases it may be collapsed, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... seclusion and protection from the world outside. "A plant carefully protected under glass from outside shocks", says Sir Jagadis "looks sleek and flourishing; but its higher nervous function is then found to be atrophied. But when a succession of blows is rained on this effete and bloated specimen, the shocks themselves create nervous channels and arouse anew the deteriorated nature. And is it not shocks of adversity, and not cotton-wool protection, that evolve ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... mystery which pervaded the whole enterprise and refused to be dissipated by its most mortifying and vulgarizing incidents—a mystery dimly connected with my companion's obvious consciousness of having misled me into joining him; whether it was only the stars and the cool air rousing atrophied instincts of youth and spirits; probably, indeed, it was all these influences, cemented into strength by a ruthless sense of humour which whispered that I was in danger of making a mere commonplace fool of myself in spite of all my laboured calculations; but whatever it was, in a flash my mood ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Peter said was the only way to play a part well. Upon my soul, before we got to Holland I was not very clear in my own mind what my past had been. Indeed the danger was that the other side of my mind, which should be busy with the great problem, would get atrophied, and that I should soon be mentally on a par with the ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... to trace these puzzling features to their origin. They are the representatives of life forms which were originally modeled in full detail and which are still so modeled in many cases. The nodes and like features are atrophied heads, hands, or feet, and in some cases are marked with indentations that refer to the eyes or to the fingers or toes, and the round fillets stand for the arms and legs of animals, or, if notched in peculiar ways, may be referred ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... I think; yet not elephantine altogether, since of them that crash amid jungle of atrophied semi-consciousness, strivingly ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... spoke, a little grimly, but there was laughter lurking in the corners of his eyes. A Puritan will sometimes smile in such a way at the thought of a sinful situation, too solemn to be laughed at openly, but appealing to a not entirely atrophied sense of ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... us still in a very primitive stage of social evolution. And these questions naturally lead up to another: Will humanity ever be able, on this planet, to reach an ethical condition beyond all its ideals,—a condition in which everything that we now call evil will have been atrophied out of existence, and everything that we call virtue have been transmuted into instinct;—a state of altruism in which ethical concepts and codes will have become as useless as they would be, even now, in the societies of the ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... the fallacy of ancient sayings, that there was nothing in that old epigram about the loneliness of the great. The higher he had risen in the scale of greatness the more insistently and persistently had the world invaded his life, until even his appreciation of solitude had atrophied. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... fat is the best antidote for its virulence; and who taught them that the essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis), which looks to have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes it to be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet meadow of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It looked potent; the cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink stems and fruity bloom. A little ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... life was to him a commonplace. He was not capable of remorse, any more than he had been disposed to pity. He was not a man, only the blighted and cursed husk of a man, indeed, but doubly dangerous for his irresponsibility, for his atrophied small understanding. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... filled with cotton. Their limbs were truly skeletal, and curiously I tugged the white robe from the strange insect body as I followed the prince. The thorax, the wasp-waist, the long pendulous abdomen, the atrophied center limbs folded across the wasp-waist—the whole thing was like a great white wasp without wings. As we flung them into an empty chamber, I turned the burden face down, and on the back were two thin wisps of residual wings. Once these things had ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... they generally were "adopted" by their fathers and taken into the latter's households, where they enjoyed luxuries far in excess of their own earning power. It was not that their fathers wasted any affection on them, for as I have explained before, the Hans were so morally atrophied and scientifically developed that love and affection, as we Americans knew them, were unexperienced or suppressed emotions with them. They were replaced by lust and pride of possession. So long as it pleased a father's vanity, and he did not miss the cost, he would keep a son with ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... (selection), and to indicate the important laws of divergence (or differentiation) and complexity (or division of labour), which are the direct and inevitable outcome of selection. Finally, I marked off dysteleology as the science of the aimless (vestigial, abortive, atrophied, and useless) organs and parts of the body. In all this I worked from a strictly monistic standpoint, and sought to explain all biological phenomena on the mechanical and naturalistic lines that had long been recognised in the study of inorganic ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... pleasant, playing on a breeze-fanned veranda that overlooked the terrace and harbour, and proved a tolerably apt pupil. A very little practice evoked helpful memories of whist-lore that she had thought completely atrophied by long disuse, and she was aided besides by a strong infusion in her mentality of that mysterious faculty we call card-sense. Before the end of the second rubber she was playing a game that won the outspoken ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... kind of steadfastness into them. Look at that man lying at the door of the Temple, who never had walked since his mother's womb, and had lain there for forty years, with his poor weak ankles all atrophied by reason of their disuse. 'He held Peter and John.' Would not his grasp be tight? Would he not clasp their hands as his only stay? He had not become accustomed to the astounding miracle of walking, nor learned ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... vision of these creatures before they developed bones were of a rudimentary nature, at least such was the condition of the two eyes in front with which they sought for their food upon the ground. But there was a third eye at the back of the head, the atrophied remnant of which is now known as the pineal gland. This, as we know, is now a centre solely of astral vision, but at the epoch of which we are speaking it was the chief centre not only of astral but of physical sight. Referring to reptiles which had become ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... often the imagination, the really individual part of the mind, is starved and atrophied. Especially in childhood there ought to be a space left between useful work and ordered play for the individually invented games, the pursuits that are not for any definite end, for dreams and lived-out tales, when the child may make ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... with her. She had been gradually hardening; and I had felt rather than seen the shutting down of the prison-house gates upon that little soul, and had, as a last resource, appealed to the sense, not wholly atrophied, the sense that recognises the supernatural. God is, I told them briefly; God takes cognisance of what we are and do: God will repay: some time, somewhere, God will punish sin. The arrow struck through to the mark. Startled, ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... house and went away, but he felt no curiosity. That part of him seemed to be atrophied for the present, but after awhile something aroused his interest. It was not any of the men or women who passed and repassed, but that curious, dull, steady, distant sound which had beat softly upon his ears ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... off. But those who lost themselves now and then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It begins with a note like ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the day Mrs. Robson's two sisters arrived in answer to Claire's summons. Claire's impulse to send for them had been purely instinctive—an atrophied survival of clan-spirit that persisted beyond any real faith in its significance. Perhaps she had a feeling that her mother wished it; certainly she had no illusions as to the manner in which the unwelcome news of Mrs. Robson's illness would be received by these ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... refuge from the present in memories or in anticipations, we are using it. The first point then that I shall consider is whether this restless and influential faculty ought not in any case to be trained, so that it may not either be atrophied or become over-dominant; and the second point will be the further consideration as to whether the faculty of creative imagination is a thing which should ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the Quakers proceeded on the principle that all men are brethren and, being equal before God, should be considered equal before the law. On account of unduly emphasizing the relation of man to God the Puritans "atrophied their social humanitarian instinct" and developed into a race of self-conscious saints. Believing in human nature and laying stress upon the relation between man and man the Quakers became ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... competent to effect that change of one species into another, which De Maillet had only supposed to occur. And Lamarck conceived that he had found in Nature such causes, amply sufficient for the purpose in view. It is a physiological fact, he says, that organs are increased in size by action, atrophied by inaction; it is another physiological fact that modifications produced are transmissible to offspring. Change the actions of an animal, therefore, and you will change its structure, by increasing the development of the parts newly brought into use and by the diminution of those less used; ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... my sad experience, ending in debauchery, contempt of love, abuse of everything, that is what I had in my heart although I did not suspect it; and at the moment when life and hope were again being born within me, all these furies that were being atrophied by time seized me by the throat and cried that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... followed on generation; for the struggle for life made this expeditious way of establishing yourself one of the most favourable conditions for the success of the offspring. At the same time, the organs of work, left unemployed, became atrophied and disappeared, while certain details of shape and colouring were modified more or less, so as to adapt themselves to the new circumstances. Thus the ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... by one of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance to the face of the victorious Pharaoh. The mummy is thin, much shrunken, and light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the figure is still tall and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... due? Is it the delectable civilization, the religion of salvation of the friars, called of Jesus Christ by a euphemism, that has produced this miracle, that has atrophied his brain, paralyzed his heart and made of the man this sort of vicious animal that the ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... himself at twenty-five years of age. They want, like an old hen, to mother the young mind as long as possible. They will not let it find its own feet, till very late, and till, as the scoffer might well say, its limbs are absolutely atrophied. I do not say that they are wrong. The man who has taught himself is apt to be a vain, conceited fellow who takes pleasure in thinking for himself, and has an absolute delight in despising the thoughts of others. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... impracticable: "Ah, yes! what is at the heart of it all? What but this awful experience which they have known and you have not—the sight of your own folk hungering, life and faculty wasted for want of mere food, and children growing up atrophied from the cradle"? It is not easy to dissociate the language and the terms of others from the meaning one gives to them oneself; it means intellectual effort and intellectual discipline, a training ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... at the open window through which the terrible news had come. Then she dragged herself to it, and making no sound leaned her arms on the sill and listened again, her heart seeming to be in the clutch of icy fingers, her brain atrophied, reeling in a chaos of ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... subjects for this branch of the profession are sadly few; those of the other, for whom hatred is the right treatment, are reckoned by the thousand. Indeed there is some danger of the one feeling being atrophied, while the other ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... particularly the distal fragment, cast a comparatively faint shadow, and there may even be a clear space between the fragments. When the parts are exposed by operation, the bone is found to be soft and spongy and the ends of the fragments are rarefied and atrophied; sometimes they are pointed, and occasionally absorption has taken place to such an extent that a gap exists between the fragments. The bone is easily penetrated by a bradawl, and if an attempt is made to apply plates, the screws fail to bite. These changes ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body. Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching his mind. His brain ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... was jaded and world-worn?" he thought amusedly. His critical faculty did not become atrophied when applied to himself, as is the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... only ideal possible. The excellence of societies is measured by what they provide for their members. A cumbrous and sanctified social order manifests dulness, and cannot subsist without it. It immerses man in instrumentalities, weighs him down with atrophied organs, and by subjecting him eternally to fruitless sacrifices renders him stupid and superstitious and ready to be himself tyrannical when the opportunity occurs. A sure sign of having escaped barbarism is therefore to feel keenly the pragmatic ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... endeavoured to retain for her own benefit the riches of her colonies was undoubtedly one of the most benighted ever conceived by a European nation. It amounted to nothing less than a consistent checking and deadening of the intelligence of her sons oversea in order that their atrophied senses should fail to detect the true manner in which they were being shorn of their ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... counted the loss?" said the other. "The Balkans have long been the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise. In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low Countries always at our doors, as it were; there was no need to go far afield into malaria-stricken wilds if one wanted a life of boot and saddle and licence to kill and be killed. Those who wished to see life ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... laughed, "the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... consequence of the same, our people has become a people with modern thoughts and modern ideals, with a constitution sufficiently robust and strong to withstand the ravages of the struggle for existence, instead of remaining a sickly and atrophied organism, afraid of everything new and opposed to material struggles from fear of the wrath of Heaven and from a passive desire to live in an ideal state of ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... stands on the tongue of land between the two streams. On the way J.W. assured himself that if Calcutta seemed without religion, here was more than enough of it to redress the balances. In the throng was a holy man whose upraised arm had been held aloft until it had atrophied, and would never more swing by his side. And yonder another holy one sat in the sand, with a circle of little fires burning close about him. The seeker after he knew not what who made his search while lying on a bed of spikes was here. And once a procession passed, ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... for once at fault? A swift incision with the scalpel, a glance with a lens, and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. The optic nerve is a shrunken, atrophied and insensate thread. These animals have organs of vision, and yet they have no vision. They have ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... revolver in his bedroom, wild and unfamiliar emotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they were the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination which might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as thoroughly in its control as ever he had ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... owing to our weakness and the atrophied state of our stomachs, proved disastrous to a good many. They soon recovered though. Our beds were just shake-downs on cushions and settees, though the officer on watch very generously gave up his bunk to two of us. I think we got very little sleep that ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... coupled with the inherent distrust of any notion of help from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which a critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power, both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a self-indulgent man may sometimes perform a single prodigious feat of strength. Wherein they have an infinite advantage over the far flabbier resolutions of a self-indulgent man. And Frederik Grimm's weak, atrophied better self was not equal to ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Schirmer some years ago, which is serving me a good turn now. For the incomprehensible the Supernatural is the only accounting. These things are products of man's myth-making capacity and desire. With the advancement of knowledge this capacity and desire become atrophied, but spring into life again in the presence of a popular stimulant. The superstitious peasantry of Bavaria beheld a man in league with the devil in the engineer who ran the first locomotive engine through that country, More recently, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... ten minutes he sat there. He thought of the first time he had ever entered a tiger cage as a mere boy, way back in the Middle West of the States, travelling with the circus. A bored show tiger in that cage, and he had blinked unconcernedly at the boy. Years of circus life had atrophied that tiger's organs of resentment. Miles and miles of the public stream had passed his cage with awe, speculating upon the great cat's ferocity. Skag had merely to learn after that, the trick of it all—that one's perfect self-control not only ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... be said, "Granting fully that you are right, that, as woman's old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, or must become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the other elements of human nature in her becoming atrophied and arrested through lack of exercise: and, granting that her evolution being arrested, the evolution of the whole race will be also arrested in her person: granting all this to the full, and allowing that the bulk of human labour tends ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... wanting signs that Gilder was impressed. But the gentler fibers of the man were atrophied by the habits of a lifetime. What heart he had once possessed had been buried in the grave of his young wife, to be resurrected only for his son. In most things, he was consistently a hard man. Since he had no imagination, he could have no ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... to you. Here there is not, as in the Catasetum, any external change visible in the respective unisexual and bisexual flowers. And yet it would appear from your researches that the ovules of Acropera are in a more highly atrophied condition than occurs in Catasetum, though, as you likewise remark, M. Neumann has never succeeded in fertilising C. tridentatum. If there be not, then, an arrangement of the reproductive structures, such as I have indicated, how can the different ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... intracortical vessels showed plugs of leucocytes possibly indicating an early encephalitis—Bacillus cold and a Gram-staining bacillus were cultivated from the cerebrospinal fluid.) Though the convolutions were neither flattened nor atrophied and absolutely no lesion was grossly visible, the cortex cerebri and also the cerebellum were found undergoing an active satellitosis with nerve-cell destruction in ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... and pot-shaped vessels have a great variety of handles, knobs, and ornaments. Some of the latter seem to be atrophied handles. In some cases a low horizontal ridge, from 1 to 4 or more inches in length is placed near the rim, in place of the continuous collar. In other cases a narrow, crescent-shaped ridge is attached, the points reaching down on the shoulder, the arch lying upon the neck. Still ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes
... for him. It was not that she had any spirit of getting her own back on Andrew for his tyranny, his impoverishment, his ill-usage of her in the past. She would have given him her last crumb of food if she had thought of it. But a thing atrophied as she was could not think or feel, and so he went without the small tendernesses that would have come to him had Rose, the soft little Englishwoman, lived. She sat up with him night after night patiently. She ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... incompatible with reason, and love with logic. So strong is the emphasis on this that he is led to suspect that indolence is seeking to deify ignorance, and that men whose intellectual faculties have atrophied by their subjection to the emotional now are envious of those who retain the power to think clearly, and would have them also deprived of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... 104 years, she lived here as if forgotten by the world, a quiet madwoman with an ossified brain, with whom insanity might remain stationary for an indefinite length of time without causing death. Old age had come, however, and had gradually atrophied her muscles. Her flesh was as if eaten away by age. The skin only remained on her bones, so that she had to be carried from her chair to her bed, for it had become impossible for her to walk or even to move. And yet she held herself erect against the back of her chair, a yellow, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Elsa came to him, dressed in all her pretty finery, he loved to look on her, and his dulled eyes glowed with an enthusiasm which had lain atrophied in him ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... improved, of having their functions developed and of acquiring more strength (as, for example, the muscles of boxers, the breast of foot racers, the voice of singers, etc.), these same organs, on the contrary, can be atrophied or modified, and their functions be changed in nature. It is in such degradation and such degeneration of human nature that fakirs excel, and it is from such a point of view ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... few weeks came tales that atrophied belief—tales corroborated by a printed catalogue and by certain deposits of money in our bank to the account of Miss Caroline. That six wretched chairs, plain to ugliness, had sold for three hundred dollars spread consternation. The plain old sideboard for a hundred and ten dollars only ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... comprehend some of the noblest parts of man's nature, Voltaire possessed other qualities of high importance which went far to compensate for his defects. If he was blind to some truths, he perceived others with wonderful clearness; if his sympathies in some directions were atrophied, in others they were sensitive to an extraordinary degree. In the light of these considerations his attitude towards religion becomes easier to understand. All the highest elements of religion—the ardent devotion, the individual ecstasy, the sense of communion ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... capital offences. It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed to the quick ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... conscience. As Napoleon enjoyed manoeuvring armies or Lasker studying chess, so {184} Iago enjoys the sense of his own mental power in handling his human pawns, in feeling himself master of the situation. If he ever had natural affections, they have been atrophied in the pursuit of ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. But even in the highbrow the educated appreciation of humour is there—away down. Generally, if one attempts to amuse a highbrow ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... bluish color, with sometimes swelling, and tenderness and shooting pains. The termination is usually in gangrene of a dry character, with, in some instances, vesicles and blebs along the edges; in other cases the parts become atrophied, ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... of the said muscular coat, but when constipation has existed for any length of time, the accumulated matter adhering to the walls of the colon renders that organ partially, if not wholly rigid, hence the difficulty of evacuation; consequently, through disuse, the muscles become to a certain extent atrophied, and require stimulation to resume their natural function even after the colon has been cleansed. It is largely owing to the use of this antiseptic "tonic" that the "Cascade Treatment" has been so successful in cases of obstinate constipation, as by its use the intestine ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... us sometimes there is no such thing as an atheist. There must be. There are some men to whom it is true that there is no God. They cannot see God because they have no eye. They have only an abortive organ, atrophied by neglect. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... figures that knew not elasticity. This softer subject led him to no conclusion, leaving him stranded among misty woods and fields of flowers that had no outlet. He realised, however, clearly that this side of him was not atrophied as he thought. Its unused ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood |
