"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the orchestra some had already attained fame, and others achieved it in after years. In this collection of geniuses the attrition of mind on mind must have been of benefit to each. The conductor, Joseph Reicha, had a nephew, Anton Reicha, whom he adopted, who played the flute in the orchestra. He and Beethoven were intimate, and the prominence which Beethoven gives to the flute in his orchestral works may in ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... their education, but she could not give them the culture which comes from the attrition of thought, and from contact with the ideas of others. Since her school-days she had read extensively and thought much, and in solitude her thoughts had ripened. But for her children there were no companions except ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... may indeed be deferred till the approach of manhood. When solidity is obtained by pursuing the modes prescribed by our fore-fathers, then may the file be used. The firm substance will bear attrition, and the lustre then ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... appearance and in microscopical structure, closely resemble those of the Pampas. Dr. Carpenter informs me that it is well known that chemical precipitation throws down carbonate of lime in the opaque amorphous state; and he is inclined to believe that the long-continued attrition of a calcareous body in a state of crystalline or semi-crystalline aggregation (as, for instance, in the ordinary shells of Mollusca, which, when sliced, are transparent) may yield the same result. From the intimate ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... might to the British navy. It was hoped, perhaps, that the naval forces of the two powers could be equalized and a battle fought on even terms after the Germans had cut down British advantage by a policy of attrition. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... realized; though they were always greatly outnumbered; they continued stubbornly to defy for the space of two years and seven months the most numerous and the most efficient Army which has ever left the shores of Great Britain, until at last they were worn down by mechanical friction and attrition, and not by the stroke of war. When the Boers were driven out of the Hlangwhane positions, they took up a new position facing S.E. on the left bank of the Tugela. Their right was near the head of Hart's ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... with literature, nor seemed to have conversed with cultivated minds, yet the results of such acquaintance and converse were here. Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man awake ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... feet long, 22 high, and 21 broad, in the form of a parallelopipedon. It was cleft by a blast, the middle part taken away, and in the cavity was constructed a forge for the wants of the journey. Carburi did not use cylindrical rollers for his undertaking, these causing an attrition sufficient to break the strongest cables. Instead of rollers he used balls composed of brass, tin, and calamina, which rolled with their burden under a species of boat 180 feet long, and 66 wide. This extraordinary spectacle was witnessed ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... mine-fields. Submarines had played a greater part than expected, because Germany had chosen a guerrilla naval warfare: to harass, to wound, to wear down. Doubtless she hoped to reduce the number of British fighting units by attrition. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... genius—I mean that kind which depends on the imaginative power—perhaps cannot exist to great extent. The wheels of a machine, to play rapidly, must not fit with the utmost exactness, else the attrition diminishes the impetus. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... calling were classed before the law, and liable to be treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued to a company was regarded as a valuable corporate asset by its sharers. At times a company possessing a licence would diminish by attrition until the ownership of the licence became vested in the hands of a few of the original sharers, who, lacking either the means or ability to continue to maintain themselves as an effective independent organisation, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... substances to Gilbert's list of "electrics," experimented on smooth and rough surfaces in exciting of electricity, and made the important discovery that amber retained its attractive virtue after the friction that excited it bad ceased. "For the attrition having caused an intestine motion in its parts," he says, "the heat thereby excited ought not to cease as soon as ever the rubbing is over, but to continue capable of emitting effluvia for some time afterwards, longer or shorter according to the goodness of the electric and the degree of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... surely look upon this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its ultimate stage of schism—that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the children of God as the past ages of church history have failed ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... produce, on an average, about a sofa per annum. The whiskers, if properly attended to, may be made to yield about an easy chair in the same space of time; whilst luxuriant moustachios will give a pair of anti-rheumatic attrition gloves every six months. Mr. M. recommends, as the best mode of cultivation for barren soils, to plough with a cat's-paw, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... that served us so well in both cold and hot wars such as tanks, fixed wing aircraft, and large surface ships and submarines represent the most effective mix of numbers, technology, strategic mobility, and fighting capability. Our national preference for "attrition" and "force on forces" warfare continues to shape the way we design and rationalize our military capability. Therefore, it is no surprise that in dealing with the MRC, American doctrine, in some ways, remains ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... into thirds, plus compelling Cornwallis to divide his own army. Greene knew that Cornwallis, victorious as he might have been, was detached from Charleston and had to live off the land. He would fight a war of attrition and wear Cornwallis down. His strategy worked, although not without fateful moments. He had great faith in his command officers and gave them considerable leeway. They rewarded him with two stunning victories—King's Mountain, North Carolina in October 1780 and ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... one age and its limitations like so many helpless galley-slaves! Think of the dull sameness of a society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks, habits, tastes and feelings. Think how superior to it earth would be, with its variety of types and faces and ages, and the enlivening attrition of the myriad interests that come into pleasant collision in such ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... takes place in the rock during some period of its history is certain. I exhibit a quartzite pebble taken from the Triassic sandstone at Stanlow Point, which, as can be easily seen, was at one time worn perfectly smooth by attrition and long-continued wear, for the quartzite is very hard. Upon this worn surface you will see spangles and facets which reflect the light, and on closer inspection it will be evident that they are crystals of quartz that have been deposited upon the surface of the worn pebble after it became finally ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... foot pattered along a stone floor within, and in a moment a little woman stood in an arch raised by two steps from our own level. Carrying a candle, she descended and tripped toward him. She was not pretty, but sprightly and keen, as the perpetual attrition of life must needs make her, and wore the everlasting grisette costume, which displays the neatest of ankles, and whose cap is more becoming than wreaths of garden millinery. I am too minute, I see, but it is second ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... have been averted. However, the President and his cabinet decided to continue the old tactics of dodging from place to place, meeting the hard, stubborn blows of the enemy, only waiting the time, when the South, by mere attrition, would ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... time the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch with all ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... attrition with the world the mail-rider was more sophisticated than his enemy, and sooth to say, ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... were apt to call his notions were not of such aggressive nature that he was accused of outlawry, and he was apt to speak his mind uncontradicted and undisturbed. He cared little for the friction and attrition, indeed for the inspiration, which one is sure to have who lives among many people, and which are so dear and so helpful to most of us who fall into ruts if we are too much alone. He loved his friends ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... in the same places, make it more probable that they lay originally in the situations where we now find them, than that they have been transported from any considerable distances, or elevated by any very turbulent operation. Captain de Freycinet, indeed, mentions that patellae, worn by attrition, and other recent shells, have been found on the west coast of New Holland, on the top of a wall of rocks an hundred feet above the sea, evidently brought up by the surge during violent storms;* but such shells are found in the breccia of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... aphorism, though some eminent writers have lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark was le style c'est de l'homme. That only proves that, like many other good sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... subject to a rapid decomposition. The morvine of some of the Chamouni and Allee Blanche glaciers is composed of a white granite, being chiefly composed of quartz and felspar, with a little chlorite. The sand and gravel at the edge of these glaciers appears far more the result of decomposition than attrition. All finely foliated rocks, slates, etc., are liable to injury from frost or wet weather. The road of the Simplon, on the Italian side, is in some parts dangerous in, or after, wet weather, on account of the rocks ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... assumed by this struggle—a war of attrition—the Germans are bound ultimately to lose, and it is the consciousness of this fact that inspires their present policy. This is to achieve as early as possible some success of sufficient magnitude to influence the neutrals, to discourage the Allies, to make them weary of the struggle and ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... middle of the seventeenth century an agent which all experience since that time shows to be necessary to the most productive intellectual activity was wanting. This was the attrition of like minds, making suggestions to one another, criticising, comparing, and reasoning. This element was introduced by the organization of the Royal Society of London and the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... particularly, sleeping with the mouth open, are habits which are very prejudicial to the teeth and gums. In this way the mouth forms a trap to catch the dust and gritty particles floating in the atmosphere, which soon mechanically injure the enamel of the teeth by attrition. ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... is expressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of all life. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a man who thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turns toward the past. At the moment, as the world closes in about him, his spirit, dulled by the attrition of daily use and wont, is unable to discern the beauty and significance of the present life around him. For a time his imagination finds abundant nourishment in the mighty past. Many spirits are content ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... evaporated. Your very gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join Mr. Tatler in his simple division of students into Law, Divinity, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was started, I, with every fact and circumstance before me, with more information, perhaps, than any other man breathing, predicted peace within three months. I was wrong. Germany to-day is great and unconquered, but Germany has lost her opportunity. This may be a war of attrition, or even now the unexpected may come, but to all effects and purposes ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the larger blocks, none larger, and many not more than five feet square. The stones exposed are each about seven by twelve inches square, and four inches thick, those in their original position retaining correct angles, but, when thrown down, worn away by attrition to shapeless bowlders." ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... mind like Ram Mohun Roy's the effect was probably much more immediate than on his followers, so that it took several years before they decided on sending their commissioners to Benares to report on the Veda and its real character. Yet that mission was, Ibelieve, the result of a slow process of attrition produced by the contact between native and European minds, and as such I wished to present it in my address at ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... and apposite words, and meditated an exchange, but that, from circumstances, was out of the question. At last, subdued by grief, and probably his spirit having chafed itself smooth by such constant attrition, he became, to all seeming, calmer; but it was only the calm of a broken and weary heart. Such was Major Jones at the time, when, "suadente diabolo," it seemed meet to Fathers Mooney and D'Array to make him the butt ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... Falls, where the attrition of a stream had worn pot-holes in the rocks, there were meetings of Haddam witches, to the number of a dozen. They brewed poisons in those holes, cast spells, and talked in harsh tongues with the arch fiend, who sat on the brink of the ravine with his tail laid against his shoulder, like a sceptre, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... so long and so zealously discharged his duties as a citizen, returned to his Josephine, to his children; and, weary with the storms and debates of the last months, longed for a quiet little place, away from the turmoil of the capital and from the attrition of parties. Josephine acquiesced gladly in the wishes of her husband, for she felt her innermost being shattered by these last exciting times, and perhaps she cherished the secret hope that her husband, once removed from Paris, would be drawn away from the dangerous arena ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... was left of her after seventy-four years of time's attrition—had a way of speaking which made it easy enough to believe that she had, in her day, been a beautiful singer. As her message to the world was usually one of promise and reassurance, she had the gift of dwelling with songlike sweetness ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... What may have been his cause of dislike I know not—but I have frequently remarked, that if a man has made himself enemies either from neglect of that sophistry and humbug, so necessary to enable him to roll down the stream of time with his fellows without attrition, if they can find no point in his character to assail, their last resort is, to assert that he is an uncertain tempered man, and ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... afternoon in wandering hither and thither over the hills that encircle the little cove in which I had landed, heedless of the minutes and my steps, watching the sailing clouds and the cloudy sails on the horizon, listening to the musical attrition of the tidal pebbles, killing innocuous suckers. The only particular sensation I remember was that of being ten years old again, together with a general impression of Saturday afternoon, of the liberty to go in wading or even swimming, and of the prospect of limping home in the dusk with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Indian (as we are pleased to call him) to breathe into the nostril of the buffalo or the wild horse, and by that single act to subdue his angry rage, or that impelled the first discoverer of combustion to extract fire from the attrition of two pieces of wood. The American Indian, living entirely on flesh, "discovered for himself in tobacco smoke a means of retarding the change of matter in the tissues of the body, and thereby of making hunger more endurable."—(P. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... of darkness above and beneath and around her ... a suffocating compression of the stagnant air ... a thrilling consciousness of the close approach of the two cruel orbs.... a superlative stillness ... and then a mighty attrition, in which the mortal part of the poor girl was about to be ground to atoms, when she ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... of attrition. One by one we were losing the gallant young officers that came over with us to Flanders. Darling was wounded, Sinclair wounded, Warren killed. Sinclair had had a dixie of boiling water spilled on his leg while in the trenches and had ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... almost certain that the usually fine gold got by hydraulicing in Californian canyons, in the gullies of the New Zealand Alps, and the great New South Wales drifts, is largely the result of the attrition of the boulders and gravel of moraines, which has thus freed, to a certain extent, the auriferous particles. But when we find large nuggety masses of high carat gold in the beds of dead rivers, another ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... which they stood was smooth as a marble pavement, apparently from attrition by the action of water through countless centuries, though the place was now perfectly dry. What chiefly excited their admiration, however, was the circumstance that the floor was not only smooth, it was as polished as glass, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... arms by their exploits in the naval service. Born of an old and distinguished Philadelphia family, so proud of its name that in his instance they had doubled it, the usual bluntness and roughness of the sea were tempered by this gentle birth and breeding, and by frequent attrition with men and women of the politest society of the largest and most important city of the colonies. Offering his services as soon as the news of Lexington precipitated the conflict with the mother country, he had already made his name ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... purposes is produced by the attrition of two pieces of wood. In marriage and other solemn covenants fire is regarded as the holy witness in whose presence the agreement is made. Spenser in a description of a marriage, has borrowed from the Roman rite what he calls the housling, or ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... cent. would be a liberal deduction for the sick, camp-guards, orderlies, etc. The navy was equally powerful in its way, though it did little service here. Large as it was, this army was virtually destroyed by continued attrition. ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... reason of his more intimate contact with the normal truth of things. In life, for instance, the conflict of will with will, the passionate crises of human existence are but rarely concentrated into a brief space of time or culminate in a highly salient situation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have been such only in the retrospect of calmer years are the rule. In so telling a bit of dramatic writing as the final scene in Augier's Le gendre de M. Poirier the material of life has been dissected into mere shreds and these have been rewoven into a pattern as ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... exclusively of one kind. Beyond Grey's Range, no elevation in the interior, on the N.W. line traversed by the Expedition, was seen; but on the Stony Desert the fragments of rock, with which it was covered, were composed of indurated quartz, rounded by attrition, and coated with oxide of iron. North of the Stony Desert, sandstone occurred in the bed of Eyre's Creek, and milky quartz cropped out of the ground, in lat. 25 degrees 35 minutes, and in long. 138 degrees 39 minutes. The valley of Cooper's Creek was, however, bounded in by low quartzose ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... see, that the face of nature everywhere, instead of being rigid and immutable, is perennially plastic, and year by year is undergoing metamorphic changes. The solidest rocks are day by day disintegrated slowly, but none the less surely, by wind and rain and frost, by mechanical attrition and chemical decomposition, to form the pulverized earth and clay. This soil is being swept away by perennial showers, and carried off to the oceans. The oceans themselves beat on their shores, and eat insidiously into the structure of sands and rocks. Everywhere, slowly ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... an hour we were all comfortably encamped, with good grass beside us for the cattle. The bottom of this small river-channel was in no part gravelly, but consisted of soft earth, in which however the cattle did not sink very deep. Fragments of flint, basalt, and quartz, apparently not worn by attrition, abound in the adjacent soil. The general direction of the watercourse appeared to be about 36 ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... as singular-looking a human being as I remember seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show. His black coat shines as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the wearer's back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum attrition are particularly smooth and bright. Round shoulders,—stooping over some minute labor, I suppose. Very slender limbs, with bends like a grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if he might straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... neither formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled "mug" rather than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the same time add ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... accommodate themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be carried off by the free circulation of society. A peculiarity of character of which the inhabitants themselves are hardly sensible will be rubbed down and worn away by the attrition of foreign substances. Much of the result will be good; there will likewise be a few things not so good. Whether for better or worse, there will be a probable diminution of the moral influence of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lack of water. He is an unfortunate article of personal belonging requiring much looking after to keep in order. He is a credulous and convenient response to practical jokes, huge tales, misinformation. He is a laudable object of attrition for the development of your character. But somehow, in the woods, he is not as other men, and so you do not come to feel yourself in close human relations ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... do with pronouncing on Solomon's final condition, But he stands on the page of this history, a sad, enigmatical figure, a warning to all young people to take heed that the attrition of the world does not rub off the bloom of early religion, or make them cynically ashamed of the unselfishness of their early desires. There is no sadder sight than an old man whose youthful enthusiasm for goodness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... very necessary to the conduct of this private war. You prate of my attitude, Mr. Cornell. You claim that such an attitude must be defeated. Yet as you stand there mouthing platitudes, we are preparing to make a frontal assault upon their main base at Homestead. We've waged our war of attrition; a mere spearhead will break them and scatter them to the ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... and yet so hard as never to betray the touch or moulder away beneath the steel; and so admirably crystallized, and of such permanent elements, that no rains dissolve it, no time changes it, no atmosphere decomposes it: once shaped, it is shaped for ever, unless subjected to actual violence or attrition. This rock, then, is prepared by Nature for the sculptor and architect, just as paper is prepared by the manufacturer for the artist, with as great—nay, with greater—care, and more perfect adaptation of the material to the requirements. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... studies, no movements had yet been made that were not evidently unaccurate and uncertain: and even of the mechanical labours which I now hear so loudly celebrated, when I consider the obstruction of movements by friction, the waste of their parts by attrition, the various pressure of the atmosphere, the effects of different effluvia upon metals, the power of heat and cold upon all matter, the changes of gravitation and the hazard of concussion, I cannot but fear that they will supply ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... The incisores are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... infant baptism like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... the land, in those regions which were not submerged, was covered with glaciers, much as Greenland is now, and from these glaciers vast icebergs must from time to time have been detached by the sea and floated off, carrying with them fragments of rock, some freshly broken, some rounded by long attrition, which were deposited on the then submerged lands as the ice melted, and are now found as boulders, sometimes lying on the surface, at others dispersed through beds of clay and sand formed under water from the debris worn down by the glaciers. A subsequent ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... the same force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal section of our common country to the constitution ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... whither he had come on a steamboat, up the Missouri. This was his maiden venture upon the plains, and his habit of querulous faultfinding had, on the first day out, secured him the sobriquet of Old Pernicketty, which the attrition of time had worn down to Old Nick. He knew no more of wolves and other animals than a naturalist, and he was now a trifle frightened. He was crouching beside his saddle and kit, listening with all his soul, his hands suspended before him with divergent fingers, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Atomic Theory, that men are neatly manufactured of Atoms of matter, which are continually combining together until they form Man; and then going through the process of Life, which is but the mechanical effect of their combination; and then wearing apart again by attrition into the exhaustion of cohesion called Death; and then crumbling into separate Atoms of native matter, or dust, again; and then gradually combining again, as before, and evolving another Man; and Living, and Dying, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... might lean, in case of accident or megrim. Indeed, anybody that had able nerves might have crossed the planks without this precaution, had they been dry; but, in consequence of the rain, and the frequent attrition of feet, they were quite slippery; and, besides, the flood rolled terrifically two or three yards below them, which might be apt to beget a megrim that would not be felt if there ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... rubber; but in most carved work the surface is not accessible, and the brush must be used. Sometimes the carving is extremely coarse, and with an open porous grain, in which case it is best to oil it first and then to fine-paper it down; by this process a thin paste is formed by the attrition, which materially assists in filling up the pores. Before commencing to use the varnish have ready an earthenware dish or box,—one of the tins used for the preserved meats or fish will answer the purpose,—with two holes drilled so that a piece of wire can ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... through chevaux-de-frise. The morning sun came upon them over treeless ridges of sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid. The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins. It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Louisville an intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with them if they did. The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the railroad cars; they go to the cities and by attrition they wear away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when suffrage is given them what must ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... intellect which saw that supremacy either of or through the people was an illusion, that the power of the nobility must be resisted by keener and more durable weapons than the Comitia and its temporary leaders, that the authority of the senate might yield to a slow process of attrition, but would never be engulfed by any cataclysmic outburst of popular hostility. It was no part of the statesman's task to pry into the future and vex himself with the query whether a new and permanent headship of the State might not be created, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... figure on employing the submarine as a separate offensive tactical unit being sufficiently equipped in large ships carrying large guns. And being weaker in capital ships Germany was compelled to rely upon underwater warfare in her campaign of attrition. Not only were the naval authorities of the rest of the world uninformed about the improvements that German submarines carried, but they were fooled even as to the actual ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... often contain pebbles rounded by attrition, and of a figure more or less elliptical. In the places where the stratification is horizontal, the longer axes of these pebbles are all horizontal, for the same reason that an egg cannot stand upon its point. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... time his terrible antagonist watched him as a tiger gloats on a helpless and certain prey—silent, merciless, inexorable. Then the end came suddenly. As soon as the process of attrition was sufficiently far advanced to demoralise the Dervish host, without completely dissolving them, the Sirdar and his army moved. The victim, as if petrified, was powerless to fly. The tiger crept forward two measured strides—from Ras-el-Hudi to Abadar, from Abadar to Umdabia—crouched for ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw. A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered the trail ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... the common herd? These formidable shapes emerge from the dusk, offspring of momentous epochs; they stand aloof at first, but presently their luminous grandeur is dulled, their haughty contour sullied and obliterated by attrition. They are dragged down to the level of their lowest adorers, for the whole flock adapts its pace to that of the weakest lamb. No self-respecting deity will endure this treatment—to be popularized and made intelligible to a crowd. Divinity comprehended ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... another are for the most part effaced, the peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their points and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity. The prevalence of fashion, the influence of example, the desire of applause, and the dread of censure, obstruct the natural tendencies of the mind, and check the fancy in its first efforts to break forth ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... In families, at such times, they are, like Pharaoh's plague of frogs, ' in their bed-chambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens, and in their kneading-troughs.' * Their shrilling noise is occasioned by a brisk attrition of their wings. Cats catch hearth- crickets, and, playing with them as they do with mice, devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, like wasps, by phials half fined with beer, or any liquid, and set in their haunts; for, being always eager to drink, they will ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... have been that hearthstone, whose rose-coloured reminiscences linger so tenderly around your heart, and survive the attrition of a long residence in Paris. Your repertoire of charming memories tempts me almost to the verge of covetousness. In what portion of the United States ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... close contact; they must be jointed and glued together by the particularities of little incidents. Thus in the production of heat in the physical world, the flint and the steel produce not the effect without collision; the rudest Barbarian will tell us the necessity of attrition, and the chemist of mixture. Now, an object, it is admitted, is brought into closer contact with its corresponding passion, by being seen and conversed with. This we grant is one way; but does it follow that there is no other? To assert this, would be something like maintaining, in ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... the unquiet feverishness of democratic communities, not in times of great excitement, for such times may give an extraordinary impetus to ideas, but in times of peace. There is then, he says, 'a small and uncomfortable agitation, a sort of incessant attrition of man against man, which troubles and distracts the mind without imparting to it either loftiness or animation.' It rests with you to prove whether these things are necessarily so—whether scientific genius cannot find, in the midst ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... and be fed by many a mountain rill in the solitude, and the men who are to keep the freshness of their Christian zeal, and of the consecration which they will ever feel is being worn away by the attrition even of faithful service, can only renew and refresh it by resorting again to the Master, and imitating Him who prepared Himself for a day of teaching in the Temple by a night of communion ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... consider lexical elements only. But this statement must be clearly understood. It is postulated that in the growth of languages new words are formed by combination, and that these new words change by attrition to secure economy of utterance, and also by assimilation (analogy) for economy of thought. In the comparison of languages for the purposes of systematic philology it often becomes necessary to dismember compounded words for the purpose of comparing the more primitive forms thus obtained. ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... all fresh neighborhoods the new-comers should try to cultivate society. There is something in its attrition which stimulates the mind. Society brightens up the wits, and causes the dullest mind to bring its treasures ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... soft soap it became 1/34th. The fact appears to be that the amount of the resistance denominated friction depends, in a great measure, upon the nature of the unguent employed, and in certain cases the viscidity of the unguent may occasion a greater retardation than the resistance caused by the attrition. In watchwork therefore, and other fine mechanism, it is necessary both to keep the bearing surfaces small, and to employ a thin and limpid oil for the purpose of lubrication, for the resistance caused by the viscidity of the unguent ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... bed of the river, which was exceedingly interesting at this dry season, when all the secrets of its depths were exposed. In many places, the rocks that choked its bed for a depth of thirty and forty feet in the narrow passes, had been worked into caverns by the constant attrition of the rolling pebbles. In one portion of the river, the bottom was almost smooth, as though it had been paved with flagstones; this was formed by a calcareous sediment from the water, which had hardened into stone; in some places this natural pavement had been broken up into large slabs ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... thirty years the original stock of evidence current and in circulation even underwent a process of attrition. As in the story of the Eastern sage who first wrote the collected learning of the universe for his sons in a thousand volumes, and by successive compression and burning reduced them to one, and from this by further burning distilled the single ejaculation of the Faith, "There is ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... to the same laws of vibration, the lesson drawn from the string and the bit of paper applies to them, the node taking the place of the paper. Note, however, the difference. The string is single, and there is no attrition. If there were two strings, the bit of paper might be caught and twisted in the miniature whirlwind of opposing vibrations. But the vocal cords are wedded in phonation, and by their attrition the node is formed. Very often ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... attrition of glacier, the erosion of water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow—these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve miles, as different in character from all the other features of the prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,—soft-lined, undulatory, and plump,—seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her in the dance. And it is a greatly ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... first glance, that it rejected the idea of generalship in toto. Let us give General Grant his just dues, however. He was not a great commander, but he was a man of clear brain. He saw that brute force could alone shatter the army of Northern Virginia; that to wear it away by attrition, exhaust its blood drop by drop, was the only thing left—and he had the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... of unconsumable matter will be left, and this held up to the light will show a series of little points, arranged spirally and symmetrically, which are the portions of silex the fire had not dissipated; and it is this serrated edge which seems to render the plant so efficient in attrition. Wheaten and oaten straw are also found by the experience of our good housewives to be good polishers of their brass milk vessels, without its being at all suspected by them that it is the flint deposited in the culms which makes it so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... climb the woods and a foot-path branched off from it, skirting a small recess in the shore. A streamlet of clear water, hurrying down from the upland by the Devil's Hedge, here leapt the low cliff and fell on a pebbly beach, driving the pebbles before it and by their attrition wearing out for itself a natural basin. Encountering a low ridge of rock on the edge of the tideway, the stones heaped themselves along it and formed a bar, with one tiny outlet through which the pool trickled continually, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... twenty each—the most wonderful proofs of what Nature can produce, (the survival of the fittest, no doubt—all the frailer samples dropt, sorted out by death)—as if to show how the earth and woods, the attrition of storms and elements, and the exigencies of life at first hand, can train and fashion men, indeed chiefs, in heroic massiveness, imperturbability, muscle, and that last and highest beauty consisting of strength—the full exploitation and fruitage of a human identity, not ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... fish; this of a bird; and this of a hog. And again more generally; This phalernum, this excellent highly commended wine, is but the bare juice of an ordinary grape. This purple robe, but sheep's hairs, dyed with the blood of a shellfish. So for coitus, it is but the attrition of an ordinary base entrail, and the excretion of a little vile snivel, with a certain kind of convulsion: according to Hippocrates his opinion. How excellent useful are these lively fancies and representations of things, thus penetrating and passing through the objects, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... cataract is nearly perpendicular. The bank over which it is precipitated is of concave form, owing to its upper stratum being composed of lime-stone, and its base of soft slate-stone, which has been eaten away by the constant attrition of the recoiling waters. The cavern is about one hundred and twenty feet in height, fifty in breadth, and three hundred in length. The entrance was completely invisible. By screaming in our ears, the guide contrived to explain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... trance The pausing mind! we leave your awful gloom, And lo! the footway plank, that leads across 290 The narrow torrent, foaming through the chasm Below; the rugged stones are washed and worn Into a thousand shapes, and hollows scooped By long attrition of the ceaseless surge, Smooth, deep, and polished as the marble urn, In their hard forms. Here let us sit, and watch The struggling current burst its headlong way, Hearing the noise it makes, and musing much On the strange changes of this nether world. How many ages must have swept ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... stamping press pieces of the required size are cut out. The point intended for the nib is introduced into a gauged hole, and by a machine pressed into a semi-cylindrical shape. In the same machine it is pierced with the required slit or slits. This being effected, the pens are cleaned by mutual attrition in tin cylinders, and tempered, as in the case of the steel plate, by being brought to the required color by heat. Some idea of the extent of this manufacture will be formed from the statement, that nearly 150 tons ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... is usually of a sandy nature, but may be composed of carbonate of lime (when the rock is said to be a "calcareous conglomerate"). The pebbles in all conglomerates are worn and rounded by the action of water in motion, and thus show that they have been subjected to much mechanical attrition, whilst they have been mechanically transported for a greater or less distance from the rock of which they originally formed part. The analogue of the old conglomerates at the present day is to be found in the great beds of shingle and gravel which are formed by the action of the sea on every ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until, by mere attrition if in no other way, there should be nothing left to ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty |
