"Mordant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... solution of the dye is sufficient, but very often the best result is obtained by increasing the staining power, e.g. by addition of weak alkali, application of heat, &c., and by using some substance which acts as a mordant and tends to fix the stain to the bacteria. Excess of stain is afterwards removed from the tissues by the use of decolorizing agents, such as acids of varying strength and concentration, alcohol, &c. Different bacteria behave very differently to stains; some take them ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... paid homage in the dark ages of the past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose which unites Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has been born which will prove stronger than ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... occasionally the raising of stock and the tilling of soil, though usually as proprietors only, it is true. Sometimes they are swept into strange waters where, if they float about long enough, they manage by some inherent mordant capacity to colour the entire complexion to their own. There ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... a bit of the treacherous stuff. It takes the eye, but it is a fickle friend. They say a mordant has been found to stay the flight of its lovely colours. Perhaps; it may be. But what weaver of tapestry would be willing to confide his labour to the care of a dye that has not known the test of ages? Aniline dye, says the director of a tapestry factory, may last twenty years—but twenty ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... flower between My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white and keen, And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh, Until her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... things. Humour was, however, one of the few gifts which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] Pacheco's opinion of Luis de Leon's versatile talent is borne out by the scrap of evidence given at the ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... trunk. As he thought that the white colour would only be visible in a strong light, he tried to stain his flag with the berries of a sort of shrub which grew at the foot of the dunes. He obtained a very vivid red, which he could not make indelible owing to his having no mordant, but he could easily re-dye the cloth when the wind or rain ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole. Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss A magic soup-spoon of anchovy ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a goddess—he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She was that other Lilith, the only offspring of the old Serpent. On what ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the film as much of the mordant as the cover-glass will hold. Grasp the cover-slip with the forceps and hold it, high above the flame, until steam rises. Allow the steaming mordant to remain in contact ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... greenish tinge; upon boiling and immersing a piece of calico on which the mordants of iron and alumina had been printed, it was dyed a sea green color of greater or less intensity according to the strength of the mordant—the portions not ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... characters are caricatures par excellence, embodiments of a single attribute. Leaena of the Cur. is the perpetually thirsty lena: "Wine, wine, wine!"[164] Cleaerata of the As. is a plain caricature, but is exceptionally cleverly drawn as the lena with the mordant tongue. Phronesium's thirst in the Truc., is gold, gold, gold! The danista of the Most. finds the whole expression of his nature in the cry of "Faenus!"[165] Assuredly, he is the progenitor of the modern low-comedy Jew: "I vant my inderesd!" Calidorus of the Ps. and ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... sixteenth century owing to his viridity, his crudity, his lack of avoidance of obscenity, even though he was a true poet, vigorous, powerful, oratorical, and epigrammatical, as well as a witty and mordant caricaturist. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the dead! At first those endless groups of drawn and grinning faces filled us with a shuddering horror. So vivid and mordant was the impression that I can live over again that slow descent of the station hill, the passing by the nurse-girl with the two babes, the sight of the old horse on his knees between the shafts, ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... summing up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached its hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed, the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated humorous mordant conversation about cafe ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... mercy of Whistler, once, in some Velasquez controversy of which I forget the details, but they are all set out, for those who like mordant ridicule, in "The Gentle Art of ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the changes in colouring materials has arisen the necessity for discovering new mordants. The gas colour of madder is exactly the same chemically as that extracted from the vegetable, but the old mordant does not fix it, and it changes very soon to ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire and its ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... inspiration to Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, James Thomson, or Baudelaire. The city of dreadful night shown us by Rops is the city through whose streets he has passed his life long. Not the dream cities of James Ensor or De Groux, the Paris of Rops is at once an abode of disillusionment, of mordant joys, of sheer ecstasy and morbid hallucinations. The opium of Rops is his imagination, aided by a manual dexterity that is extraordinary. He is a master of linear design. He is cold, deadly cold, but correct ever. Fabulous and absurd, delicious and abominable as he may be, his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... swagger; it had not the Restoration cynicism; it had not the Augustan urbanity. Go back now to the Elizabethan, and avoiding Shakespeare as a law unto himself, which is the right of genius—for the sonnets have wit as well as passion (but a mordant wit), everything that real love-poetry must have, and much that no poetry but Shakespeare's could possibly survive—avoiding Shakespeare, I say, take two ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... there, which for her sake I am a little sorry for, though for his it is but fit she should live where he hath a mind. Here were several people come to see and take leave of her, she going to-morrow: among others, my Lady Mordant, which was Betty Turner, a most homely widow, but young, and pretty rich, and good natured. Thence, having promised to write every month to her, we home, and I to my office, while my wife to get things together for supper. Dispatching my business at the office. Anon come our guests, old Mr. Batelier, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... purple crystals and have some practical uses in the tanning industry and in photography. A number of the salts of chromium are also used in the dyeing industry, for they hydrolyze like aluminium salts and the hydroxide forms a good mordant. ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... not stay as they used to! They will be voyaging," said the guest. "They build outlandish craft and forthfare, no matter what you cry to them!" His voice had a mordant note. "I know. I've got one myself—a nephew, not a son. But I am his guardian and he's in my house, and it is the same. If I buy Black Hill, Glenfernie, I hope that your son and my nephew may be friends. They're ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... mordant of fancy, And, despite the wear and tear Of time or distance or trouble, Insists on its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... their own nationality. Hajji Baba is a Persian of the Persians, typical not merely of the life and surroundings, but of the character and instincts and manner of thought of his countrymen. And yet it is from his lips that flows the delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however, to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents of the non-Oriental writer, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... reception of Ghosts was proved by the instant success of The Enemy of the People. Presented to the public in this new and audacious form, the problem of a "moral water-supply" struck sensible Norwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived it to be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched under the lash. Ghosts itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but The Enemy of the People received a cordial welcome, and has remained ever since one of the most popular of Ibsen's writings. It is still extremely effective on the stage, and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... to reviewing the metaphorical applications of such terms as 'caustic,' 'mordant,' 'piquant,' etc., in their burning, biting, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... comedy by Crowne is a mordant satire upon the Whigs. It was produced with great success at the Theatre Royal and printed quarto 1683. A certain Florio feigns to be dying in order to prevent the Podesta suspecting an intrigue between his wife, Rosaura, 'the Lady Mayoress', ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... could even get out on crutches, do you know whither I would go? Straight to church." And when his hearer looked incredulous, he added: "Most decidedly to church. Where else should one go with crutches?" Such exquisite and mordant irony is strange indeed in a defender of the holy ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... dissolved in hot water, but should not be boiled, as that partially destroys the size. When dissolved, a little powdered alum is also stirred in, about as much as will lie on a shilling to a pint of water. The addition of the alum is important, as it acts as a mordant and helps to make a better ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... cursed their drink, and asked if they had no Lyons Water-of-Life, stark and mordant, or social Hollands, or indeed anything that was not mere compound of whey and dirty water. Whereat they wondered, and held me thereafter in great respect as a good companion ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... even a clever cobbler, much less a Prime Minister, into leading strings! No,—it is the spendthrift women of a corrupt society that I mean,—the women who possess beauty, and are conscious of it,—the women who have a mordant wit and use it for dangerous purposes—the women who give up their homes, their husbands, their children and their reputations for the sake of villainous intrigue, and the feverish excitement of speculative money-making;—with these—and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli |
