"Defect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dogs necessarily entails. "A small measure of success will be enough to show their possibilities, their ability to revolutionize polar transport. Seeing the machines at work to-day [leaving Cape Evans] and remembering that every defect so far shown is purely mechanical, it is impossible not to be convinced of their value. But the trifling mechanical defects and lack of experience show the risk of cutting out trials. A season of experiment with a small workshop at hand may be ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... argument used by the author of the tract above named has a striking defect. He talks of reducing this world and the next to "present value," as an actuary does with successive lives or next presentations. Does value make interest? and if not, why? And if it do, then the present value of an eternity is not infinitely great. Who is ignorant that a perpetual annuity ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of importance was the appearance of a defect in one of the two Primus lamps used by Joyce's party. The lamps had all seen service with one or other of Captain Scott's parties, and they had not been in first-class condition when the sledging commenced. The threatened failure of a ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... instruction as to the affairs, humors, disposition and general outlook and condition of Landshut, and Silesia in that juncture;—and though a good deal disappointed, have made an Abstract of it in the English language, which perhaps the reader too, in his great ignorance, will accept, in defect of better. Scene is Landshut among the Giant Mountains on the Bohemian Border of Silesia: an old stone Town, where there is from of old a busy trade in thread and linen; Town consisting, as is common there, of various narrow winding ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... There is one fatal defect in our Alaskan game law, in the perpetual and sweeping license to kill, that is bestowed upon "natives" and "prospectors." Under cover of this law, the Indians can slaughter game to any extent they choose; and they are great killers. For example: In 1911 at Sand Point, Kenai Peninsula, Frank ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... Logos. Now, that latter personality Christ was. Consequently, while he was a man, he was not merely a man, but was also a supernatural messenger from heaven, sent into the world to impersonate the image of God under the condition of humanity, free from every sinful defect and spot. Thus, being the manifesting representative of the Father, he could say, "He that hath seen me hath [virtually] seen the Father." Not that they were identical in person, but that they were similar in nature and character, spirit and design: ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... before the great white men of Ohio began to be born here, but in the meanwhile there were those born elsewhere who, like General Harrison, became Ohioans, and so did what they could to repair the defect of birth. There is no reason to think that such men were shaped by Ohio influences, but it is the habit of our generous Ohio state patriotism to claim as Ohioans not only those who were born here, and those who came to live here, but ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... great uncle, he left Scotland, and was taken to see Newstead Abbey, his future residence. He spent the winter at Nottingham, the most important of the towns round Newstead. His mother, who was blindly fond of him, could not bear to see any physical defect in him, however slight. She confided him to a quack doctor named Lavender, who promised to cure him, while his studies were continued under the direction of a Mr. Rogers. The treatment which he had to undergo being both painful and tedious, furnishes us with the opportunity ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... number of different woods the U.S. Forest Service concludes as follows: "Sapwood, except that from old, overmature trees, is as strong as heartwood, other things being equal, and so far as the mechanical properties go should not be regarded as a defect."[22] Careful inspection of the individual tests made in the investigation fails to reveal any relation between the proportion of sapwood and the ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... as regards personal strength and mental activity or power, they are much superior to any of the Javanese or Malays I have seen in Java, or at Batavia and Singapore. But, to our modes of thinking, the greatest defect in their character is their indolence and dislike to any bodily exertion, which are the effects of the sun under which they live; but their native maxims and their habits, although we may disapprove of them now-a-days, when ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... world, Mr. Emilius was not, perhaps, the man whom she would have selected. There were, indeed, attributes in the man, very objectionable in the sight of some people, which to her were not specially disagreeable. She thought him rather good-looking than otherwise, in spite of a slight defect in his left eye. His coal-black, glossy hair commanded and obtained her admiration, and she found his hooky nose to be handsome. She did not think much of the ancestral blood of which he had boasted, and ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... suffering from social proscription. Although his contention that the race problem is interwoven with the economic problems of the country is presented as the reason for directing more attention to this problem, the author does not treat the race question from an economic point of view. This has been the defect of the historical works which Dr. DuBois has written. He is at best a popular essayist with a bit of poetic genius. In all of his discussions of the race problem his mind has not as yet been adequate to the task of scientific treatment of the question. The Suppression ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... brought to light there is no insuperable difficulty in making them available for purposes of joint interpretation. That is all I have attempted to do in these pages, and I beg to solicit pardon for any defect they ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... impossible, but Mary ran out in the midst to suggest that mayhap the defect was in the French measure. Each piece might not have been the true number of whatever they called them in that new ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the mosque-like larger buildings, which occasionally appeared, and which were supposed to be rural temples, some were grand and imposing. A profusion of bold sculpture, was the prevailing characteristic, and perhaps defect, of all. The inhabitants, who thronged the wayside in great numbers, appeared excited with surprise and exultation, on beholding the large company of strangers apparently in the custody of their military, while ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... Parliament, and the common Ministry of Austria-Hungary is responsible to the Delegations. This is true; but these exceptions are precisely of the class which prove the rule which they are cited to invalidate. The Cabinet system of the Dominion is a defect in the Canadian Constitution, and could not work were not Canada, by its position as a dependency, under the guidance of a power beyond the reach of the Dominion Parliament. What may be the real responsibility ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... production. Southey wrote an eloquent history of the War in the Peninsula, perhaps as good a history as an author well-trained in compositions of the kind could be expected to produce at a distance. But that was its defect. It lacked that knowledge and judgment of a complicated series of events which could be acquired only on the field and by one possessed of consummate military training. On the other hand, we can seldom look for any laborious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... movement becomes perceptible, on the contrary, and multiplied by the number of times that the gesture is repeated, it ends by throwing the conductor behind in the time he is beating, and by giving to his conducting a tardiness that proves injurious. This defect, moreover, has the result of needlessly fatiguing the conductor, and of producing exaggerated evolutions, verging on the ridiculous, which attract the spectators' attention, and become very disagreeable ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... a modern code the gravest defect of Laplace's great work is rather of a moral than of a mathematical nature. Lagrange and he advanced together in their study of the mechanics of the heavens, at one time perhaps along parallel lines, while at other times they ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... the minimum is considerably larger. (2.) Again, the farmer may decide upon the breadth of ground to be devoted to a particular crop, or upon the number of cattle he will maintain; but the actual returns will vary according to the season, and may prove far in excess or far in defect of his calculations. These circumstances all present obstacles to the adjustment of supply and demand, and consequently tend to produce frequent and extensive deviations of the market from the normal price. Nor are the other conditions of the case such as to neutralize the influence of such disturbing ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... downwards, and be spun there like a whip-top, thus overcoming the attraction of gravitation by the mere rapidity of revolution, "If you can keep it up for an instant, you can keep it up all day." Alas! it is just at this point that the fatal defect of Mr. Collins's mechanism appears. But for the artisan's hand, the complicated work would not start at all, and we perceive that, if he lifted it for a moment from the crank, the painfully contrived dream would drop to pieces, and the beautiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... other dramatists have to theirs, and as little right as they to be accused on that account of putting his personality into his work. But as Browning's style is very pronounced and original, it is more easily recognisable than that of most dramatists (so far, no doubt, a defect[9]) and for this reason it has come to seem relatively more prominent than it really is. This consideration, and not any confusion of identity, is the cause of whatever similarity of speech exists between Browning ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... inwards, and such are perhaps still used in rude and remote parts; but they are said not to last above two days. Where life is somewhat improved, they are now made of leather tanned with oak bark, as in other places, or with the bark of birch, or roots of tormentil, a substance recommended in defect of bark, about forty years ago, to the Irish tanners, by one to whom the parliament of that kingdom voted a reward. The leather of Sky is not completely penetrated by vegetable matter, and therefore cannot ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... a teacher is a great defect, especially when he glories in his ambiguity. If any Christians wish that Jesus had been more clear, then Jesus does not appear perfect to them, and they should admit ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... should imagine it would be one day carried away by that rapid river; especially as the arches are so small, that, after great rains they are sometimes bouchees, or stopped up; that is, they do not admit a sufficient passage for the encreased body of the water. In order to remedy this dangerous defect, in some measure, they found an artist some years ago, who has removed a middle pier, and thrown two arches into one. This alteration they looked upon as a masterpiece in architecture, though there is many a common mason in England, who would have undertaken and performed ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the jars, covers, and rubber rings be in perfect condition. Examine each jar and cover to see that there is no defect in it. Use only fresh rubber rings, for if the rubber is not soft and elastic the sealing will not be perfect. Each year numbers of jars of fruit are lost because of the false economy in using an old ring that has lost its softness and elasticity. Having the jars, covers, and rings in perfect ...
— Canned Fruit, Preserves, and Jellies: Household Methods of Preparation - U.S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 203 • Maria Parloa
... rounded, and so utterly free from acute angles, that they can, as yet, but faintly express strong, turbulent emotions, or display the furious passions. In a boy of his age, this, so far from being a defect, is a beauty, the reverse of which would be unnatural; and if it were a defect, every day that passes over his head would remedy it. What is now wanting in muscular expression, is in a great measure supplied ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... in an electric bath, or if a magnet is placed on his head, it looks at first sight as though a complete physical cure had been effected. All paralysis, all defect of sensibility, has disappeared. His movements are light and active, his expression gentle and timid, but ask him where he is, and you will find that he has gone back to a boy of fourteen, that he is at St. Urbain, his first reformatory, and ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... suggested. Then, remembering my new part, "It'll have to be some defect if one of us can't ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... extraordinary advantages. His unwarlike disposition, increased by age, rivetted him still faster in his errors, and determined him to seek the restoration of his son-in-law, by remonstrances and entreaties, by arguments and embassies, rather than by blood and violence. And the same defect of courage which held him in awe of foreign nations, made him likewise afraid of shocking the prejudices of his own subjects, and kept him from openly avowing the measures which he was determined ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... etymologies. When the word is easily deduced from a Saxon original, I shall not often inquire further, since we know not the parent of the Saxon dialect; but when it is borrowed from the French, I shall show whence the French is apparently derived. Where a Saxon root cannot be found, the defect may be supplied from kindred languages, which will be generally furnished with much liberality by the writers of our glossaries; writers who deserve often the highest praise, both of judgment and industry, and may expect at ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... One after another he had with the utmost fervour taken up photography, sailing, carpentry, metal working—a dozen and one occupations—only to drop them as suddenly. This restlessness of childhood came to be considered a defect in young manhood. It indicated instability of character. Only his mother, wiser in her quiet way, saw the thoroughness with which he ransacked each subject. Bobby would read and absorb a dozen technical books in a week, reaching eagerly for the vital principles ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... outlined first with a pencil in the fingers of an artist who understood. And there were her lashes, dark and long, and curled up at the ends; and her cheek, with its changing, come-and-go coloring; her mouth, with its upper lip creased deeply in the middle—so deeply that a bit more would have been a defect—and with an odd little dimple at one corner; luckily, it was on the side toward him, so that he might look at it all he wanted to for once; for it was always there, only growing deeper and wickeder when she spoke or laughed. He could not see her eyes, for they were turned away, but he knew ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... them, round them, to the very edges of her eyelids, there was beauty, movement, life. In them—death! A more charming creature—with that one sad drawback—I never saw. There was no other personal defect in her. She had the fine height, the well-balanced figure, and the length of the lower limbs, which make all a woman's movements graceful of themselves. Her voice was delicious—clear, cheerful, sympathetic. This, and her smile—which added a charm of its own to the beauty of her mouth—won ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... size, will compare favorably with many of the cathedrals. In fact, it originally was a cathedral, but in an early day the bishopric was transferred to Wells. There is no ruined fortress or castle in Bath, with its regulation lot of legends. Possibly in an effort to remedy the defect, there has been erected on one of the hills that overlook the town a structure which goes by the epithet of ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... often possess too wide a diversity of viewpoints. The reader comes away with no underlying thought and no controlling principles. To overcome this defect, so common in books of this type, a tentative outline was formulated, setting forth a desirable mode of treating, in the confines of one chapter, the teaching of any subject in the college curriculum. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... and Frederic Bancroft's "Life of William H. Seward", 2 vols. (1900). Good, but without the requisite detachment, is Moorfield Storey's "Charles Sumner", ("American Statesmen Series", 1900). With similar excellences but with the same defect, though still the best in its field, is Albert Bushnell Hart's "Salmon P. Chase" ("American Statesmen Series", 1899). Among the Southern statesmen involved in the events of this volume, only the President of the Confederacy has received adequate reconsideration in ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Voltaire gets out of the business; glad to close the intolerable rumor, at some cost of money. For all tongues were wagging; and, in defect of a TIMES Newspaper, it appears, there had Pamphlets come out; printed Satires, bound or in broadside;—sapid, exhilarative, for a season, and interesting to the idle mind. Of which, TANTALE EN PROCES ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... The principal defect pervading the "Lectures," and one which most readers will be disposed to view in an opposite light, appears to be, a charity too broad, a catholicity too expansive, to be easily reconciled with a consistent position among the mystic witnesses. ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the different dramas, whether serious, comic, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... not a bad looking woman and in fact it was difficult to see how she expected to be improved by cosmetics that would lighten her complexion, bleaches that would flaxen her hair, tortures for this, that, and the other defect, ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... historic narrative called forth admiration. One must admit Peter's great strength of character, his power of quick decision, and immediate achievement. Some held that his inability to retain the lady's affection in the first place argued a defect in his nature; but remembering the lady's youth and beauty (implied by the spirit of the whole poem), they could only reiterate their appreciation of the way he conquered circumstances, and proved himself master of his fate, and captain of his soul! Truly, ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... contrast appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt for such a precaution: in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect of Germany. ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... she said, "that your trials are in vain, not from the fault of the wings and their appurtenances, nor from any imperfectness and malformation of your own corpuscular system, but from irremediable, because organic, defect in your power of volition. Learn that the connection between the will and the agencies of that fluid which has been subjected to the control of the Vril-ya was never established by the first discoverers, never ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... lines and redundant syllables are numerous, but under his hand they become things of beauty, and "the irregularity is the foundation of the larger and nobler rule." To quote the historian of English prosody—"These are quite deliberate indulgences in excess or defect, over or under a regular norm, which is so pervading and so thoroughly marked that it carries them off on its wings."(44) Heine in his unrhymed "Nordseebilder," has many irregular lines—irregularities suitable to the variety of the subjects ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... has been pretty exhaustively figured and described in various aeronautical publications. The unforeseen defect was the badness of the work in the silk netting. It tore aft as soon as I began to contract the balloon, and the last two segments immediately bulged through the hole, exactly as an inner tube will bulge through ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... indubitable virtues mainly on the outside. If ever any man of thirty-two in all this world was eligible, Adam Tellwright was. Decidedly he had a reputation for preternaturally keen smartness in trade, but in trade that cannot be called a defect; on the contrary, if a man has virtues, you cannot precisely quarrel with him because they happen to be on the outside; the principal thing is to have virtues. And then Mr Bostock looked uneasily at Ralph Martin, heavy, short, dark, lowering, untidy, often incomprehensible, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... an ordinance providing that, without a certificate of good physical condition, no child shall be permitted to work in a store or factory. So Dr. Goler refuses these certificates, not only in cases of low vitality and under-nutrition, but for any defect in the applicant's teeth, sense-apparatus, or tonsils, a fertile source of future debility. What is the result? There is a rush of these neglected youngsters to the clinics, and the Rochester schools graduate every year into the world of labor ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... unbroken narrative, in their own perspicuous and graphic language. Thence, in a great measure, the popularity and interest of their works. Michaud indulges more in lengthened quotations in his text from the old chronicles, or their mere paraphrases into his own language; their frequency is the great defect of his valuable history. But the variety and interest of the subjects render this mosaic species of composition more excusable, and less repugnant to good taste, in the account of the Crusades, than it would be, perhaps, in the annals ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... took holiday from his military duties, he was pretty sure to take it out of his regiment, the next day. On parade, next morning, he inspected the ranks, bent on detecting some defect in bearing or equipment, and peered into the faces of the men, as if hunting out the culprits in the latest breach of discipline. Men and officers looked for a three hours' drill, to improve their wind, and put them in condition. But, to their great comfort, he soon let ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... my judgment) a defect in what may be called the Brewsterian theory of other worlds, a defect not altogether dissimilar has characterised the opposite or Whewellite theory. Very useful service was rendered to astronomy by Whewell's treatise upon, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... is situated on the banks of the river, about half a mile inland; the only objection to it is, that the size thereof is not sufficient for vice-regal entertainments; but a very slight addition would remedy that defect. In all other respects it is a charming place, as I can gratefully testify. The drives and sights around the city are too well known to need much notice ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... was the downy bloom on the delicate cheeks, so vivid the hazel of the wide black-fringed eyes. A touch of something heavy and undecided in the lower part of the face made it perhaps less than beautiful. But any man who fell in love with her would see in this defect only the hesitancy of first youth, with its brooding prophecy of passion, of things dormant and powerful. Face and form were rich—quite unconsciously—in that magic of sex which belongs to only a minority of women, but that, a minority drawn ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this hidden drama; he never noticed his brother's love for Laurence. As to the girl herself, he liked to tease her about her coquetry,—for he confounded that odious defect with the natural desire to please; he was always mistaken in matters of feeling, taste, and the higher ethics. So, whenever this man of the middle-ages appeared on the scene, Laurence immediately made him, unknown to himself, the clown of the play; she amused her cousins by arguing with Robert, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... cheerfulness and pious wisdom, was a sort of benediction. It is of him that Sterling writes, in the Extract which Mr. Hare, modestly reducing the name to an initial "Mr. D.," has given us: [13] "Mr. Dunn, for instance; the defect of whose Theology, compounded as it is of the doctrine of the Greek Fathers, of the Mystics and of Ethical Philosophers, consists,—if I may hint a fault in one whose holiness, meekness and fervor would have made him the beloved disciple ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... all agree—critics, public, friends, and opponents. Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity, affection, and manly perseverance, almost without a stain or a defect. His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable egoism of the opulent middle classes; the religion of comfort, laisser-faire, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Messianic application. And in the Minor Prophets three passages (Hos. x. 6, Zech. xii. 10-12, and Micah v. 2) appear to have been thus affected. The rest of the free quotations and some of the variations in those which are less free may be set down to defect of memory ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... no flaw in the title-deeds of genius, if the same thoughts reappear as have been exhibited long ago. The indisputable sign of defect should be looked for in the proportion they bear to the unquestionably original. There are ideas which necessarily must occur to minds of the like magnitude and materials, aspect and temperature. When two ages are in the same phasis, they will ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... ancestor had a mole on his cheek, black and distinct as a fly in cream; and as in the case of the first Lord Amherst's wart, and Bennet Earl of Arlington's nose-scar, the painter had faithfully reproduced the defect on canvas. It so happened that the captain had a mole, though not exactly on the same spot of his face; and this made the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... news of the marriage he found that his worship of her had by no means vanished; rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of a happy love, untarnished and spotless; it would be like a mirror of gold without alloy, bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no defect in the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived an affection for certain moral or intellectual accidents, but for the very woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... stature of young men of his age, with a slight defect of curvature of the shoulders that does but confirm his ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... ideas that Americans hold to be sound. Thus If all between two stools—but it is more comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... A very important defect in the Regulations lies in the uncertainty it allows to exist as to the subdivision of the dismounted squadron, and how the skirmishers on ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... must paint, not what is there, but what you see there. They forget that human beings are men with two eyes, and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye, and so are contriving and striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the daguerreotype which the stereoscope ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... subject breaks off readily and can be resumed most easily. The technique is thoroughly mastered, and, barring some surface cracks, the paintings are in as perfect condition as when they came from the artists' hands. The chief defect is a somewhat crude opacity of pigments, a characteristic belonging to the debased period of wall-painting rather than to the "fresco buono et puro" of Giotto, Luini, ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... tremendous rolls of the ship, to fall upon the other ropes. The shroud most exposed had parted first; three or four more followed in succession, and before there was time to secure anything, the remainder had gone together, and the mainmast had broken at a place where a defect was now seen in its heart. Falling over the side, the latter had brought down with it the mizzen-mast and all its hamper, and as much of the fore-mast as stood above the top. In short, of all the complicated tracery of ropes, the proud ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... confounded: we trusted that an enthusiasm, founded in ignorance, and which, in no one stage, could be said to have prospered, must finally droop spontaneously, and that once having drooped, through mere defect of actions that bore any meaning, or tendencies that offered any promise, by no felicities of intrigue could it ever be revived. Whether we erred in the philosophy of our anticipations, cannot now be known; for, whether wrong or right in theory, in practice ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... times this Official Report leaves one's curiosity unsatisfied. For instance, here is a little paragraph out of the record of a certain band of 193 Thugs, which has that defect: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... them had now reverted the right of choosing their temporary Sovereign, he applied a principle, which ought to be reserved for extreme cases, to an exigence by no means requiring this ultimate appeal,—the defect in the government being such as the still existing Estates of the realm, appointed to speak the will of the people, but superseding any direct exercise of their power, were fully competent, as in the instance of the Revolution, to remedy. [Footnote: The most luminous view that has been ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... united in it have been indicated by Matthew Arnold in a famous passage ('On the Study of Celtic Literature'): 'The Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has steadiness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for its excellence. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for its defect.' The Germanic ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... which are hideous, well shaped. The shape of all her features is fine, as is the form of her head, and particularly her ears; her teeth are a little irregular, but tolerably white; her eyes light blue, with a brown spot in one, which, though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty or expression. Her eyebrows and hair, which, by the bye, is never clean, are dark and her complexion coarse. Her expression is strongly marked, variable, and interesting; her movements in common life ungraceful, her ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... use similar ones. And where there exists any mental idiosyncrasy—where there is a deficient verbal memory, or an inadequate sense of logical dependence, or but little perception of order, or a lack of constructive ingenuity; no amount of instruction will remedy the defect. Nevertheless, some practical result may be expected from a familiarity with the principles of style. The endeavour to conform to laws may tell, though slowly. And if in no other way, yet, as facilitating ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... possibilities of an object used for form study should not be too varied. "It must be suggestive through its limitations," says Miss Blow, "for the young mind may be as easily crushed by excess as by defect."[36] ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that it has no passions. "O noble privilege of age! if indeed it takes from us that which is in youth our greatest defect." But the higher feelings of our nature are not necessarily weakened; or rather, they may become all the brighter, being purified from the grosser elements of ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... the military wish to unload a ship, they find that the naval authority has already ordered it away. Lord Raglan and Sir Edmund Lyons should be asked to concert between them the mode of remedying this defect. Neither can see with his own eyes to the performance of all the subordinate duties, but they can choose the best men to do it, and arm them with sufficient authority. For on the due performance of these subordinate ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... played like little demons, from the drop of the ball till the game was scored. 'Furious' is the word, for they and their captain play with headlong fury, and that, I might say, is about their only defect, for if they ever should run into a bigger team, who had any semblance of head about them, and were not merely feet, they would surely come ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... artist has a false complacency in his own very imperfect work only so far as his ear or eye or taste is not yet trained to accurate discrimination; but, as he becomes more accomplished in a fine art, and more appreciative of it, he recognizes every defect or blemish of his previous work, until the musical performance seems a wretched failure and the painting a mere daub. The change, however, is wholly in the workman and not in the work: both the music and the painting are in themselves ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe. A distinct chapter of Pliny is designed for eclipses of an extraordinary nature and unusual duration; but he contents himself with describing the singular defect of light which followed the murder of Caesar, when, during the greatest part of the year, the orb of the sun appeared pale and without splendour. This season of obscurity, which surely cannot be compared with the preternatural darkness of the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... defect of the historical system that it tends to make men do as people in the past have done—to make them work by rule. Clerk's method took no note of what had been done before, but confined itself to working out what should be done at the moment (that is, by what we now call the "applicatory ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... aid of its first foundation, would probably continue; and would diminish the intensity of the power in the same proportion as it promoted its extension. This monarchy would be absolute only by the personal presence of the monarch; elsewhere, from mere defect of organization, it would and must betray the total imperfections of an elementary state, and of a first experiment. More by the weakness inherent in such a constitution, than by its own strength, did the Persian spear prevail against the Assyrian. Two centuries revolved, seven or eight ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... frequently accepted. To the man who knows, the doctrine is simply foolish. Success is not the only or the final test of character, but it is the best rough-and-ready reckoner. The contrary view that success probably implies a moral defect springs from judging a man by the opinions of his rivals, enemies, or neighbours. The real judges of a man's character are his colleagues. If they speak well of him, there is nothing much wrong. The failure, on the ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... of this work should not be confined to male pupils. It has long been considered a striking defect in our system of education, that females are not more generally instructed in the principles of civil government, and in matters of business. Although they take no active part in public affairs, the knowledge here commended would enable them to exert ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young
... complexions were charmed with their handiwork. "We appeared then to be a great subject of admiration for these women; they seemed to regard us with a tender satisfaction," wrote Peron; and the reflection occurred to him "that the white European skin of which our race is so proud is really a defect, a sort of deformity, which must in these distant climates give place to the hue of charcoal, dull red ochre, or clay." Bonaparte would not have concurred; for he, as Thibaudeau tells us, emphatically ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... elle va comme ca," and sticking his umbrella upright in the road, he sketched the steps and gestures. All his criticisms of the present, all his regrets for the past, struck me as temperate and sensible. The short term of office of the Resident he thought the chief defect of the administration; that officer having scarce begun to be efficient ere he was recalled. I thought I gathered, too, that he regarded with some fear the coming change from a naval to a civil governor. I am sure at least that I regard it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... known as deaf-mutism is due to innate defect in about half of all cases. Deaf children have one or two deaf parents or grandparents. There may be two or three such children in a family. That the deaf should not marry is generally conceded by those who work amongst them. It ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... ephemeral and less fundamental than others—hence the first to "go." This accounts for the increasing difficulty in the aged for remembering names—theirs is a physiological rather than a psychological defect. By analogy, therefore, there is every reason to believe that proper names are hard to recall—every reason for thinking that they should be—by "spirits" after the shock and wrench of death. The necessary psychical mechanism would be so shaken and disturbed ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... under the same defect, namely, that they leave out of view that which is the real point at issue. The point is not to prove that the Mosaic law was not in force in the period before the exile. There are in the Pentateuch three strata of law and three strata of tradition, and the problem is to place them ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... she was born here, and married and slain, from Cary, Boyd, and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scornfully on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favourite with his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentle feelings. "Not a favourite! Why they talk Dante—write Dante—and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . . Of gentle feelings!—and Francesca of Rimini—and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... be nothing more directly offensive to the eye of an artist than the interior of what is termed in the United States—that is to say, in Appallachia—a well-furnished apartment. Its most usual defect is a want of keeping. We speak of the keeping of a room as we would of the keeping of a picture—for both the picture and the room are amenable to those undeviating principles which regulate all varieties of art; and very ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... knowledge, only to find that content will not dwell in the great house they have built. To number the varieties of human endeavour to escape discomfort would be to enumerate all the modes of such life as does not know how to live. All seek the thing whose defect appears the cause of their misery, and is but the variable occasion of it, the cause of the shape it takes, not of the misery itself; for, when one apparent cause is removed, another at once ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... make, he took it to the Cambridge Observatory to be tested by one of the astronomers. The latter called his attention to a little tail which the glass showed as an appendage of a star, and which was, of course, non-existent. It was attributed to a defect in the glass, which was therefore considered a failure. Mr. Clark was quite sure that the tail was not shown when he had previously used the glass, but he could not account for it at the time. He afterwards traced it to the warm air collecting in the upper part of ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... other form as well—the song, chamber music, works for orchestra, and for orchestra with solo voices and chorus—and won distinction to a greater or less degree in every field save that of the opera. Notwithstanding the beauty of poetic inspiration enshrined in the four symphonies, a grave defect is the quality of orchestral tone which greets the ear, especially the modern ear accustomed to the many-hued sonority of Wagner, Tchaikowsky, Debussy and others. These symphonies have been called "huge pieces for four hands" which were afterwards orchestrated, and the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... humor could be written for a lame heroine. One excellent writer has offered to do it, and Hamlin Garland could do it excellently. Balzac in his marvellous book, "The Alkahest," declares that she is blest among women, who, having some great bodily defect, nevertheless wins a man's affections, for she never loses her hold on them, and it might very easily be the same with a lame actress and the affections of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime. A crime is, in the first instance, a defect ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... sees it merely as a struggle between Germany and the Allies; and inferentially he is perfectly willing the Kaiser should remain in power. He is of course a patriotic man and a man of great cultivation. But he doesn't see the deeper meaning of the conflict. Add to this defect of understanding, a long period of bad health and a lasting depression because of the loss of his son, and his call to the war-weary ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... carefully determined, by the methods employed during the former years, at a sufficient number of points. The longitudes have been estimated by the use of chronometers, but the sudden recall of the party left the latter part of the task incomplete. Any defect arising from the latter cause may be considered as in a great degree compensated by the connections referred to with the work of Major Graham and the surveys of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... employes, which while protecting these particular sections leave other employes of the same firms out in the cold, either because the latter have no agreement at all, or because it is worded differently, or, most common defect of all, because it terminates upon a different date, three months, say, or a year later. It was on this rock that the printing pressmen struck during the huge newspaper fight in Chicago which lasted the whole summer of 1912, ending in a defeat costly to the conqueror, as well as ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... the picture. It has what I conceive to be that most rare merit,—it has the same universal hue of nature and truth in both the shadows and the lights which Nature has, but Art almost never, and which is the great cross to the artist. The great defect and the great difficulty, in imitating the hues of flesh, lies in the shadows and the half-shadows. You will often observe in otherwise excellent works of the most admirable masters, that, the moment their pencil ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... has been found that a complete metallic circuit (two wires) is practically free from interference, though where a number of wires are hung on the same poles, speech-sounds may be faintly induced in one circuit from another. This defect is, however, minimized by crossing the wires about among themselves, so that any one line does not pass round the corresponding ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... who appear in all other respects to be Christian, a strange defect of truth, or truthfulness. They are not conscious of it. They would take it as a cruel injustice were they only to suspect their acquaintances of holding such an estimate of them. And yet, there is a want of truth in every sort of demonstration they make. It is not ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... justice and cannot be considered satisfactory, for the heroine Rebecca who loves her knightly succourer Ivanhoe, is only pitied by him, and so the difficulty of the situation is not solved to our liking. Apart from this defect, the opera {324} is most interesting and we are won by its beautiful music, which may be called essentially chivalrous and therefore particularly adapted to the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... bastards, among those whose escutcheons would otherwise indicate the first order of their class: these often deceive the most practised eye. The only remedy is to become familiar with the infallible marks given by Guenon by which bastards may be known. This defect will account for the irregularity of many cows, and their suddenly going dry on becoming with calf, and often for the bad quality of their milk. They are distinguished by the lines of ascending and descending hair ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... thought Mr. Jones, the gentleman with the horns, stood over you with a warrant in his hand," mine host whispers in his ear, shrugging his shoulders, and giving his face a quizzical expression. "You appreciated the mental of the property then; but now you view it as a decided defect." ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... attained its true effective manhood at Soho The Newcomen engine was in fact a condensing engine, but as the condensation was effected inside the steam cylinder it was a very costly source of power in respect to steam. Watt's happy idea of condensing in a separate vessel removed the defect. This was first done in his experimental engine in the Glasgow University workshop, and before he had made the one at Kinniel for Dr. Roebuck. ...] of the condensing steam-engine it was the place where it attained its full manhood of efficiency, and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... express admission of that supremacy by the same vote which accepted Local powers. It is true that the wording by the draftsman of the sentence reserving the supremacy of Parliament was justly found fault with as inaccurate and doubtful, but that defect would have been cured by an amendment in Committee; and, even if there had not been any such clause in the Bill, it is clear, from what has been said above, that the Imperial Legislature could not, if it would, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... directed LOUIS DE VEAU to finish it, by making the additions and embellishments which have brought it to its present state. These deviations from the first plan have destroyed the proportions required by the strict rules of art; but this defect would, probably, be overlooked by those who are not connoisseurs, as the architecture, though variously blended, presents, at first sight, an ensemble which is magnificent ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... of culture and that the Puritans were the uncultivated has been a hundred times confuted, though it reappears in the discourses of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and, what is much more astonishing, in this work of Mr. Pattison. But in a party of action great defect of culture would be amply redeemed by the possession of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... minds were so incompetent to conceive, their tongues so inadequate to utter the promptings of their hearts, that they preferred to confess their impotence by modest silence rather than to disparage so great a benefit by the defect of their words. Yet one of the points they had so long desired was still unfulfilled, and that the most important, namely the acceptance of their service as agreeable. Would to God that so happy ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... be admitted into active service in the Temple he had to undergo bodily inspection at the hands of the syndicate of the Sanhedrin. If they found the least defect in his body, even a mole with hair upon it, he was ordered to dress in black and be dismissed; but if he was perfectly free from blemish, he was arrayed in white, and at once introduced to his brother ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... got up by the faithful and very persevering labours of Rev. F. R. A. Glover, M.A., and Rev. A. B. Grimaldi, M.A., two Episcopalian clergymen of England. The chart is supposed to be as near perfect as any such thing can be. If any of you find any defect be kind enough and let me know. In the following genealogy those who reigned have K. prefixed—the dates after private names refer to their birth and death, those after Sovereign's names to their ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... classes of society, those who mainly promoted the revolution; and still more strange, the greater number of victims were murdered by the verdicts of juries—a striking example of that general subserviency which has since become the most significant defect ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... cast; and her left cheek bore a small scar left by a single drop of vitriol—happily the only drop of an entire phial—thrown upon her by one of her own jealous sex, that reached the pretty face it was intended to mar. But when the observer had studied the eyes sufficiently to notice this defect, he was generally incapacitated for criticism; and even the scar on her cheek was thought by some to add piquancy to her smile. The youthful editor of THE FIDDLETOWN AVALANCHE had said privately ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... have noticed this defect, with much anxiety, ever since you were a child; and having had my attention called to it, have frequently made comparisons, and have found that you are remarkably narrow and flat, and what is more, have a tendency to stoop, ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... Penances.—For every defect in the rites, a penance is necessary, often a terrible one. He who involuntarily kills a cow must clothe himself in its skin, and for three months, day and night, follow and tend a herd of cows. Whoever has drunk of arrack[25] must swallow a boiling liquid which burns the internal organs ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... danger of obscuring the point of the story with too many details is not peculiar to teachers, nor is it shown only in the narrative form. I have often heard really brilliant after-dinner stories marred by this defect. One remembers the attempt made by Sancho Panza to tell a story to Don Quixote. I have always felt a keen sympathy with the latter in his ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... allotted Miss Julia Arden, a young woman with a pretty, pale face, and black hair worn in ringlets. Her head was not firmly fixed on her shoulders, and was always in motion, as if she had some difficulty in balancing it, the reason being, not any physical defect, but a wandering imagination, which never permitted her to look at any one thing steadily for an instant. Nine-tenths of what she said was nonsense, but her very shallowness gave occasionally a certain ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... His ideas in relation to pathology did not proceed much further than the belief that disease was due to corruption of the humors. He was more scientific and accurate when he taught that paralysis results from a defect ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... have not yet adventured into the holy state, to see how soon the flame of romantic love burns out, or rather is quenched in matrimony; and how deplorably the passionate, poetic lover declines into the phlegmatic, prosaic husband. I am inclined to attribute this very much to the defect just mentioned in the plays and novels, which form so important a branch of study of our young ladies; and which teach them how to be heroines, but leave them totally at a loss when they come to be wives. The play from which the quotations ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... them as in many respects the best elements of Jewish life. They were earnest, patriotic, religious, many of them wise and holy men; but their judgment was held in bondage by the influence of tradition, and in this lies the cardinal defect of their life. They had set up between their souls and the spirit of God a sort of graven image of ritualistic observances, and traditional usages and interpretations. They depended on externals, or what came to them from ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... of a forest conflagration. Giving up dry disputation, have recourse to Sruti and Smriti, and seek thou, with the aid of thy reason, the knowledge of the Undecaying One that is without a second. One's search (after this knowledge) becometh futile from defect of means. Therefore, should one carefully strive to obtain that knowledge by aid of the Vedas. The Vedas are the Supreme Soul; they are His body; they are the Truth. The soul that is bounded by the animal organism is incompetent to know Him in whom all the Vedas merge. That Supreme Soul, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... their own, adding to each an oath, by way of epithet; a habit so inveterate with them, that even at confession, at the moment of seeking absolution for the practice, it is no uncommon thing with them to swear they will be guilty of it no more. To balance, however, this defect, their morals are uncorrupted, their fidelity is exemplary, and they are laborious and charitable, and zealous for the honor of their country, in whose cause they often bleed, as well as for their priests, in defence of whom they ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art." His art never taught him prejudice or to wear only one eye. "His art is less for every deduction from his holiness and less for every defect of common sense." And this common sense has a great deal to do with this distinguishing difference of Emerson's between genius and talent, repose and truth, and between all evidences of substance and manner in art. Manner breeds ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... was too broad at the back, and too large altogether for his slight frame, though probably the thickness of his fluffy light hair, which stood up all over it, innocent of parting as the Tenor's own, added considerably to this last defect. There was nothing so very extraordinary about it, however, and the Tenor did not see why he should be sensitive on the subject, and rather suspected that the boy was gravely poking fun at him; but as he ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... incomplete through the exposure of the suction-holes, it was then his duty to proceed to the bottom of the shaft and plug the tube so that the pump should draw: hence the designation of "plugman." If a stoppage in the engine took place through any defect which he was incapable of remedying, it was for him to call in the aid of the chief engineer to set ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... father's delicate constitution in inflicting germs of disease had merely determined the variation represented by the marked artistic impulses which John presented to the normal type of either his father's or his mother's family. It would therefore seem that any too sudden corrective of defect will result in anomaly, and, in the case under notice, direct mingling of perfect health with spinal weakness had germinated into a marked yearning for the heroic ages, for the supernatural as contrasted with the meanness of the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... we had not evolved the use of voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for the purpose of stimulating ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... resentment; when he perceives clamour and malice let loose upon him as a public enemy, and incited by every stratagem of defamation; when he hears the misfortunes of his family or the follies of his youth exposed to the world; and every failure of conduct, or defect of nature, aggravated and ridiculed; he then learns to abhor those artifices at which he only laughed before, and discovers how much the happiness of life would be advanced by the eradication of envy from ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the spell of feminine modesty. Her pleasant grey eyes and full red lips seemed created only for laughter, and the plump outlines of her figure were better suited to a matron than a maiden in her early girlhood. Not the slightest defect escaped Eva during this inspection. Meanwhile she remembered her own image in the mirror, and a smile of satisfaction hovered round ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... doubtful; it may wear well, and it may not. There is always a reason for a bargain sale of silks. The store may wish to clear out a collection of remnants or to get rid of a line of goods which are no longer to be carried; but aside from this, there is usually some defect in the goods themselves or else they have failed to please the fashionable whim of the moment. Silk is always silk, and if you want it, you ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... are generally sound and of good quality. The hemlock trees are not so good, being subject to decay at the butts. This often causes fluted trunks. The butt logs from such trees usually are inferior. This defect in the hemlock reduces its market value to about one-half that of the spruce for paper making. Some of the paper mills in British Columbia are now using these species of pulpwood and report ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... lacking in the third foot. But artistically this is no defect. We cannot ask that Jessica and Lorenzo always have the right word at hand. The defective line simply means a pause and, therefore, instead of being a blemish, ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... era were all physically perfect, he thought he might be able to discover the cause of the trouble. The result of this experiment was somewhat reassuring, for our scientist told us there was no defect of organ or injury to any part, closing his report with the remark that the case presented the greatest mystery of the kind he had ever encountered. My companion, the doctor, now expressed his opinion, which coincided ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... repaired to the present station, it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... the car was perfect. I fancy that I know something about cars, but even with my object to lower the price I failed to discover any defect in ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... and carries the eye to distances even more poetic than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fitful stream, and is sometimes observed to run thin and expose all the crudities of its channel—a great defect certainly in a river which is so much depended upon to give an air to the places it waters. But I speak of it as I saw it last; full, tranquil, powerful, bending in large slow curves and sending back half the light of the sky. Nothing can be finer than the view of its course which you ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Lulli in the thirteenth century to the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was something much more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim has never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can be; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conception of the possibilities of the human mind and the field it ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... give happiness to the parents of Godless, wayward children. Some one has said, "Every drunkard, every gambler, every lost woman once sat in a mother's lap, and the downfall of the most of them may be traced to some defect in ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... Claude might well reply, that what he intended was not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it requires nothing else than itself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... differences, let him study the school-men; for they are Cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind may ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... song. An old Scottish melody,[7] sung by an eccentric female, an attendant on Lady Balcarres, was connected with words unsuitable to the plaintive nature of the air; and, with the design of supplying the defect, she formed the idea of writing "Auld Robin Gray." The hero of the ballad was the old herdsman at Balcarres. To the members of her own family Lady Anne only communicated her new ballad—scrupulously concealing the fact of her authorship from others, "perceiving the shyness ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... colour and variegated architecture," would suit the most fastidious home-seeker. In his prospectus to the public he informed that the view from the windows was unrivalled, as it commanded the whole island and its surroundings. But either "The House of Mansions" had some defect, or the situation was still too remote from the city. The project was not a success, and in 1860 the Rutgers Female College, incidentally the first institution for the higher education of young women in the city, moved ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... resemblance to him. The truth is, they were knocked out of him in rows, before he had reached his thirty-fifth year—a circumstance which the kind reader will be pleased to receive in extenuation for the same defect in myself. That, however, is but a trifle, which never gave ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... several of my friends, but not one of them came up. I began to reflect, that Poictou not being by far so warm as Louisiana, these seeds would have difficulty to shoot; I therefore thought it was necessary to supply by art the defect of nature; I procured horse, cow, sheep, and pigeon's dung in equal quantity, all which I put in a vessel of proportionable size, and poured on them water, almost boiling, in order to dissolve their salts: this water I drew off, and steeped the grains in a sufficient quantity thereof for forty-eight ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... hardly be mistaken in supposing that, at the great crisis of the civil conflict, they employed themselves in versifying all the most powerful and virulent speeches of the Tribunes, and in heaping abuse on the leaders of the aristocracy. Every personal defect, every domestic scandal, every tradition dishonorable to a noble house, would be sought out, brought into notice, and exaggerated. The illustrious head of the aristocratical party, Marcus Furius Camillus, might perhaps be, in some measure, protected by his venerable age and by the memory of his ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... decoration; nor, in justice to Jack, can we allow that he was in error. He was a model of a man for five feet ten; square, compact, capitally built in every particular, excepting that his legs were slightly imbowed, which defect probably arose from his being almost constantly on horseback; a sort of exercise in which Jack greatly delighted, and was accounted a superb rider. It was, indeed, his daring horsemanship, upon one particular occasion, when ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... other; and on his part, Walter did his best to respond to his father's love-courtesy. He was not of such as keep no rule over themselves; not willingly would he allow discomfort to wake temper; he did not brood over defect in those he loved; but it did comfort him that he was so soon to leave his uncongenial surroundings, and go where all would be as a gentleman desired to see it. No one needs find it hard to believe such snobbishness in a youth gifted like Walter ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... is both ingenious and industrious when working in his own interest, and with tactful management he becomes a faithful and fairly efficient laborer. Perhaps the most serious defect in the present system of employment in Papua is the usually long interval between payments. The natives are not paid at intervals of less than one month and, often, not until the expiration of their three-year term of service. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... brought into the world by unwilling mothers suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by cold statistics. Their lives are blighted from the start. To substantiate this fact, I have chosen to present the conclusions of reports on Child Labor and records of defect and delinquency published by organizations with no bias in favour of Birth Control. The evidence is before us. It crowds in upon us from all sides. But prior to this new approach, no attempt had been made to correlate the effects of the blind ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... have been acquired by individuals from the influence of their environment. When we attribute a certain per cent of poverty to intemperance, for example, it is probable that that particular personal defect may be ascribed almost wholly to the environment. On the other hand, there are other personal defects, such as sickness, vice, and mental deficiency, that cannot always with certainty be traced to environmental factors. It is safest to ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... to combine the real work of his life with bread-and-butter-making in Oxford, it would be still more difficult to combine it with steering the ship of the Merchants' Guild College. But he had the sensitive man's defect of too often deferring to the judgment of others, less informed or less judicious than himself. He found it impossible to believe that the opinion of the Master of Durham was not better than his own; and his old friend and tutor was strongly in favor of his accepting the headship. His ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... are any defects in the Boston girl, but if there are defects, as is alleged by the writer above, and by other scientific persons, we do not see how giving less prominence to her intellectuality is going to do away with them. For instance, there is a defect in the girl whereby she has a shin on both sides of her lower limb, or an indentation where there should be the customary calf—we say calf advisedly, because it is a calf, and no person need be ashamed of it, even if it is terrible slim—we don't see how that defect can be done away with by ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... the primates is the character of their self-consciousness. This useful faculty, that can probe so deep, has one naive defect—it relies too readily on its own findings. It doesn't suspect enough its own unconfessed predilections. It assumes that it can be completely impartial—but isn't. To instance an obvious way in which it will betray them: ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... blows nobody good, says the comfortable proverb. Which would appear to be but another manner of declaring that the law of compensation works permanently in human affairs. All quantities, material and immaterial alike, are, of necessity, stable; therefore the loss or defect of one participant must—indirectly, no doubt, yet very surely—make for the gain of some other. As of old, so now, the blood of the martyrs is the seed ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... has been fulfilled in many a school chapel. Those of us who have had to pass through the valley of sorrow and temptation and loneliness—and who has not?—know that this is no mean claim. Boys, even men, often grumble at what they really value. To do so is our national defect, misleading to the onlooker. The truth is, we are so fearful of being accused of casting our pearls before swine, that we often pretend, even to ourselves, that what we know to be the most precious pearl in our possession ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... gatherers; for in the Red Sea the fish are plucked from the rocks alive and vigorous, but in Britain they are collected as the sea throws them up. For my own part, I can more readily conceive that the defect is in the nature of the pearls, than in ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... more clearly that my representations concerning the untenableness of the basic doctrines of Christian supernaturalism are in alignment with the conclusions of outstanding authorities in the newly developed sciences of historical and biblical criticisms is indeed a defect and an attempt will here be made to remove it by a short but faithful and, as I think, convincing summary of what such authorities in these sciences have to say on ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... a reward of twenty thousand pounds had been held out. But it had been held out only to the ships belonging to any of his majesty's subjects, exclusive of his majesty's own ships. The act had a still more capital defect. It held out this reward only to such ships as should discover a passage through Hudson's Bay; and, as we shall soon take occasion to explain, it was, by this time, pretty certain that no such passage existed within those limits. Effectual care was taken to remedy both these defects by passing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... on any stage, and the principal part, too, by one of the most charming of prima donnas. Allow me, sir—don't interrupt me! it is too delicious to be shared; it is, indeed. Mr. Richards, and you, Mr. Quillet, will you permit me to observe that this admirable will has one slight defect?" ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... difficult to propagate from cuttings. The horticultural possibilities of Bicolor are probably much the same as those of AEstivalis, although many think it to be more promising for the North. It is as yet cultivated but little. Its chief defect for domestication is the small size of ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... touching with your finger the positions indicated, either upon your hand or upon the hand of your interlocutor. An alphabet of the same character, however, was not unknown at an earlier date. For Bulwer, in 1648, says: "A pregnant example of the officious nature of the Touch in supplying the defect or temporall incapacity of the other senses we have in one Master Babington of Burntwood in the County of Essex, an ingenious gentleman, who through some sicknesse becoming deaf, doth notwithstanding feele words, and as if he had an eye ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... indiscriminately, present the same relative difference of size. We do not, therefore, make our own proportions in this respect: we come into the world with them, and our occupations merely exaggerate a natural defect. An idle man will have one arm half an inch longer than the other; while a woman, who has been accustomed in early years to carry a child, exhibits a difference amounting sometimes to an inch ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... with it, no doubt; yet, strangely enough, she must have been four years old, and possibly five, before we knew of its existence. It is not easy to understand how that could have happened. I discovered the defect by accident. I was half-way up the hall stairs one day at home, and was leading her by the hand, when I glanced back through the open door of the dining-room and saw what I thought she would recognise as a pretty picture. It was "Stray Kit," the ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and d. No word begins with an l. The same observation has been made on the Mexican tongue, though it is overcharged with the syllables tli, tla, and itl, at the end or in the middle of words. The Chaymas substitute r for l; a substitution that arises from a defect of pronunciation common in every zone.* (* For example, the substitution of r for l, characterizes the Bashmurie dialect of the Coptic language.) Thus, the Caribbees of the Orinoco have been transformed ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... however, is in many cases an advantage rather than a defect, and Falieri was young in vigor and character, and still full of life and strength. He was married a second time to presumably a beautiful wife much younger than himself, though the chroniclers are not agreed even on the subject of her name, whether she was a Gradenigo or a Contarini. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... more economically by a recent improvement. Neither does he go blindfold upon a mere chance,—seldom even upon a sagacious conjecture,—unless there be some good grounds for its formation. In every successive stage of his operations, he is awake to the slightest appearance of defect; and he hesitates not a moment in abandoning a lesser good for a greater, whenever he perceives it. He husbands time;—he husbands expense;—he husbands supervision and risk. Every step with him is a step in advance;—every operation has a design;—every movement has a meaning;—and he makes ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall |
