"Mutilation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leaving camp. Probably that point was the height of a divide. There were banks of snow in some of the hollows on the north side. Evidently the snow had very recently melted, and it was evident also that the depth of snow through here had been fully ten feet, judging from the mutilation of the juniper-trees where the deer, standing on the hard, frozen crust, had browsed upon ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... details—to relate the minutiae—is too agonizing! I can not do it! Imagination can supply these. The necessary mutilation of the bodies of those who had been my friends, rendered the ghastliness of my situation more frightful. When I could crawl about and my lame foot was partially recovered, I was chopping some wood one day ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... seen himself, Victor Durnovo would never have shown that face—or what remained of it—to a human being. He could only have killed himself. Who can tell what cruelties had been paid for, piece by piece, in this loathsome mutilation? The slaves had wreaked their terrible vengeance; but the greatest, the deepest, the most inhuman cruelty was ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... of those spumy and hissing waves it was all but impossible for them to make head against the current, and they felt it carry them nearer and nearer to the black, dripping mass, one blow of which would stun them, and one revolution of it mangle them with horrible mutilation. They reached the drowning wretch, and each seizing him by the arm, shouted for assistance, and buffeted gallantly with the headstrong stream. The senseless burden which they supported clogged their efforts, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... through which the water dripped on to puddled straw, or in holes beneath the carts with dampness oozing through the clay walls, or in boggy beetroot fields under a hail of shrapnel, and their physical discomfort of coldness and humidity was harder to bear than their fear of death or mutilation. ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... Lord Stanley's letter, it is identical practically with the English grant of '33-8, and I might have added with the Kildare Place grant. To exclude doctrine from exposition is in my judgment as truly a mutilation of scripture, as to omit bodily portions of the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... solemnly crowned by the patriarch; at the foot of the altar, they pledged their passive and unconditional obedience to his government and family. On his side he engaged to abstain as much as possible from the capital punishments of death and mutilation; his orthodox creed was subscribed with his own hand, and he promised to obey the decrees of the seven synods, and the canons of the holy church. [68] But the assurance of mercy was loose and indefinite: he swore, not to his people, but to an invisible judge; and except in the inexpiable ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... and mutilated among the prostrated pillars of their fanes. Such as he had rendered the country of Attica, formerly opulent and adorned, such, if he were suffered, would he render Aetolia and the whole of Greece. That the mutilation of their own city, also, would have been similar, if the Romans had not come to its relief: for he had shown the same wicked rage against the gods who are the guardians of the city, and Minerva who presides over the citadel; the same against the temple of Ceres at Eleusis; the same against Jupiter ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... who had spent his blameless life in the strictest of sects. Of course, an exhausted frame is incapable of fear, as anyone can vouch who is told, in the midst of his sea-sickness, that the ship is going to the bottom. That is why I rate courage in the face of mutilation to be higher than courage when a wasting illness is fining ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I suppose, always, among rankers, made any introduction needless; but there has unhappily come in a new and a super freemasonry which goes beyond anything that uniform could do. I mean the freemasonry of mutilation. By reason of their wounds these strangers ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... become Girondist through its late mutilation, strives in vain to arrest the downhill course of things, and maintain, as it has just sworn to do, "the constituted authorities";[26102] it strives, at least, to put Louis XVI. in the Luxembourg palace, to appoint a tutor for the Dauphin, to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with sleep, and not yet comprehending anything beyond the fact that he had been advised to put up his hands, and that a stranger had drawn an uncommonly fine bead on the head which he was in honor bound to preserve from mutilation, Tubbs blinked at Babe ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... of clean cloth, which one of the party recognised by the initials as one of his bed-sheets. Another identified as his sheet the cloth on which the corpse was lying. He cut off the corner with the initial, and a few days later the sheet was returned by the Dhobi, who pretended ignorance of the mutilation, and gave as an explanation that it must have been done in his absence by one of his assistants." [558] And Eha describes the same custom in the following amusing manner: "Did you ever open your handkerchief ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... at the four hands thus exhibited, and was more concerned that they bore no trace of wounds or mutilation than at the insult of the speech, particularly as he had a distinct impression that the action was intended to show him the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... was overheard in furious altercation with Ben Zoof. The orderly had been taunting the astronomer with the mutilation of his little comet. A fine thing, he said, to split in two like a child's toy. It had cracked like a dry nut; and mightn't one as well live upon an exploding bomb?—with much more to the same effect. The professor, by way of retaliation, had commenced sneering at the "prodigious" mountain ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... servant who had limped into the hall and stood waiting for his notice. He was the ruin of a man, physically powerful but as a tree wrecked by storm and grown strong again in spite of its mutilation. Pestilence in years long past had attacked him and had left him dumb, distorted of feature, wry-necked and stiffened in the right leg and arm. His left arm, forced to double duty, had become tremendously ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... the defence of Irish liberty. For this they drilled and armed in quiet but firm determination. When Partition became part of the policy of the Irish Party, Mr Redmond and his friends had many warnings that the Irish Volunteers were not in existence to support the mutilation of Ireland. They proclaimed their intention originally of placing themselves at the disposal of an Irish Parliament, but not of the kind contemplated by the Home Rule Bill. The Irish Party saw in ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... of the office should be integral. That is, the words and syllables are to be repeated fully without mutilation or abbreviation. Hence, if mutilation of the words occur to such an extent that the sense or meaning of the words is notably changed, mortal sin may be committed. But if the mutilation be small in quantity there is only a venial sin committed, and often no sin ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... he cannot yet be content without shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in two wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love of thorniness—(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limbless serpent and the spines of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... opposition, Mardukbaliddin, by removing the bodies of the latter's ancestors from the vaults wherein they were deposited. The bones of an enemy are enumerated by Ashurbanabal among the spoil secured by him.[1275] The mutilation of the dead body was also a terrible punishment to the dead,[1276] and we are told that the person who disturbed a grave is not to be permitted to enter the temple. The desecration of the grave affected not only the individual whose ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... second day of May, 1052, that my story opens, at the House of Hilda, the reputed Morthwyrtha. It stood upon a gentle and verdant height; and, even through all the barbarous mutilation it had undergone from barbarian hands, enough was left strikingly to contrast the ordinary ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cannot possibly be passed over. It may even be said that it would be unfair to him to do so; and a truthful idea of him, on the whole, redounds more to his credit than a maimed and mutilated one, even though the mutilation seems to consist in lopping off and casting out of sight a deformity. Psychologically, perhaps physiologically, these episodes are interesting, and as aiding a comprehension of Mr. Lincoln's nature they are ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... not in anger or with any revengeful feelings, as that would spoil one's ideal of the man. 5. The pain must not be excessive and must be what when we were children we used to call a 'tidy' pain; i.e., there must be no mutilation, cutting, etc. 6. Last, one would have to feel very sure of one's own influence over the man. So much for the idea. As I have never suffered pain under a combination of all these conditions, I have no right to say ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the bust as will suggest attachment to the body, in order that it may not seem decapitated! It is because the torso is so obviously a fragment of an ideal whole that we do not feel it to be an uncanny mutilation of a man or woman. In its present condition, the "Venus de Milo" is not the statue of an armless woman, but a statue of part ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... invention. Burke has distinctly stigmatized it as "the fable of Jenkins's ear." The fable, however, did its work for that time. It was eagerly caught up and believed in; people wanted to believe in it, and the ear was splendid evidence. The mutilation of Jenkins played much the same part in England that the fabulous insult of the King of Prussia to the French envoy played in the France of 1870. The eloquence of Pulteney, the earnestness of Wyndham, the intriguing genius of Bolingbroke, seemed only to have been agencies ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the deeper structures long after it outwardly is cured leads to unexpected communication of it to women, among whom may be the young wife. As a result she enters upon a period of ill-health that ultimately may compel the mutilation of her body by a surgical operation to save her life. Much of the surgery performed upon the female organs has been rendered necessary by disease contracted ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... than with them—it became fixed upon Westminster Hall; for there, in one of its chambers, the ceiling of which was adorned with gilded stars, were held the councils of that terrible tribunal which had robbed him of his inheritance, and now threatened him with deprivation of liberty, and mutilation of person. A shudder crossed him as he thought of the Star-Chamber, and he turned his gaze elsewhere, trying to bring the whole glorious ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... Corporal punishment was unknown to the Slav, and was abhorrent to his instincts. This seems a strange statement to make regarding the land of the knout! But it is true. And imprisonment, convict labor, flogging, torture, mutilation, and even the death penalty, came into this land by ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... two systems, both seductive from their apparent simplicity, and both simple only by mutilation, that the Philosophy of the Conditioned, of which Sir William Hamilton is the representative, endeavours to steer a middle course, at the risk of sharing the fate of most mediators in a quarrel,—being repudiated and denounced by both combatants, because it declares them to be both ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... to the dangers of a disputed succession, he proclaimed his eldest son heir to the throne. He purified the administration of justice by declaring that prince and peasant must be equally subject to the law; he abolished the too common punishment of mutilation, and had the satisfaction of seeing crime reduced to such low proportions in the empire that the jails contained only four hundred prisoners. Wenti was a strong advocate of peace, which was, indeed, necessary to China, as it had not recovered from the effects of the last Hun invasion. ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... find more to say for it than for cremation. Certainly it is not so bad as slander and backbiting. Human sacrifice offered to the Lord of life and death at His own behest, is something that did not seem wicked and inconceivable to Abraham. Head-hunting is not a pretty game; nor is scalping and mutilation the most generous treatment of a fallen foe; yet war has seen worse things done by those who professed ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... bloody struggle appeared on every hand in the form of broken fire-arms, fragments of accoutrements, and splintered trees. The dead had nearly all been left unburied, but as there was likelihood of their mutilation by roving swine, the bodies had mostly been collected in piles at different points and inclosed by rail fences. The sad duties of interment and of caring for the wounded were completed by the 5th, and on the 6th I moved my division ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... latter was taken by storm in the year 506, the ancestral temple of Ts'u was totally destroyed, and the renegade Ts'u ministers who accompanied the Wu armies even flogged the corpse of the previous Ts'u king, their former master, against whom they had a grievance. This mutilation of the dead (in cases where the guilty rulers have contravened the laws of nature and heaven) was practised even in imperial China; for (see page 57) the founder of the dynasty, on taking possession of the last Shang Emperor's palace, deliberately fired ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... Bonaparte's aide-de-camp. The captain, with the placid obedience of a subaltern to his superior officer, gave him the keys and followed behind him. Sir John was waiting before the porch, admiring, in spite of the mutilation to which they had been subjected, the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... education of ecclesiastics, and the Jesuits labored in their propaganda. The Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index redoubled their efforts to stamp out heresy by fire and iron, and by the suppression or mutilation of books. A rigid uniformity was impressed on Catholicism. The Pope, to whom such power had been committed by the Council, stood at the head of each section and department of the new organization. To his approval every ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... bar being quite perpendicular, and not oblique or slanting, as in the two other A's in the inscription. Besides, the middle cross stroke of the A is wanting; and the second descending bar of the letter is quite deficient in length—a deficiency not explicable by mutilation from the weathering of the stone, as the stone happens to be still perfectly entire both at the uppermost and the lowest end of this bar or line. This last reason is also in itself a strong if not a sufficient ground for rejecting the idea that the letter is an R; inasmuch as if it had been an ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... had used irreverent language. Nay, after his return from the Holy Land, he heard that the King ordered a man's nose and lower lip to be burnt for the same offense. The Pope himself had to interfere to prevent St. Louis from inflicting on blasphemers mutilation and death. "I would myself be branded with a hot iron," the King said, "if thus I could drive away all swearing from my kingdom." He himself, as Joinville assures us, never used an oath, nor did he pronounce the name of the Devil except when reading the lives of the saints. His soul, we cannot ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... reverence, for the spirit of reverence wherever we find it, that tenderness for the weakest fibres by which the hearts of our fellow-creatures hold to their religious convictions, which will make the transition from old belief to a larger light and liberty an interstitial change and not a violent mutilation. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... will come to the surface; but, when the organs described above are removed, the worms so mutilated will not respond to the tapping, but will remain in their tunnel. The worms are not appreciably impaired by such mutilation; on the contrary, they seem to thrive as well as those to which the knife has not ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... fact that the motmots, as Mr. Salvin has clearly shewn (70. 'Proceedings, Zoological Society,' 1873, p. 429.), give to their tail feathers the racket-shape by biting off the barbs, and, further, that this continued mutilation has produced a ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... perhaps be necessary to remark that by sterilization is here meant, not castration, but, in the male vasectomy (and a corresponding operation in the female), a simple and harmless operation which involves no real mutilation and no loss of power beyond that of procreation. See on this and related points, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... rarely sees a joke, and still more rarely makes one. He never reveals anger, but he will, with the most profound calmness, avenge himself, awaiting patiently the opportunity to use his bowie-knife with effect. Mutilation of a vanquished enemy is common among these Islanders. If a native recognizes a fault by his own conscience, he will receive a flogging without resentment or complaint; if he is not so convinced of the misdeed, he will await his chance to give ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... people of great worth, and many of them were innocent; while many whom he spared from an ignominious death, were sentenced to the most cruel punishments—to the lash of the pillory, to imprisonment in the foulest jails, to mutilation, to banishment, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... as their chargers near The inimical wall of flesh with its iron frise, A treacherous chasm uptrips them: zealous men And docile horses roll to dismal death And horrid mutilation. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... would already have been removed. He might, perhaps, find traces of the removal—a torn edge of a fly-leaf probably—and who could disprove, what Eldred was certain to say, that he too had noticed and regretted the mutilation? Altogether the chase seemed very hopeless. The one chance was this. The book had left the library at 10.30: it might not have been put into the first possible train, at 11.20. Granted that, then he might be lucky enough to arrive simultaneously with ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... incapable of defending themselves."[31] He further asserts that "even though the martial spirit of the people were of no use towards the defence of the society, yet to prevent that sort of mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness which cowardice necessarily involves in it, from spreading themselves through the great body of the people, it would still deserve the ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... offence, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds, current money.' Here is direct legislation to sanction beating without limit, with horsewhip or cowskin,—the application of irons to the human body,—and perpetual incarceration in a dungeon, according to the will of the master; and the mutilation of limbs is ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... Task had been represented at the Academy, and its young man, by a marvel of mutilation and misrepresentation, had put together a column to convey the impression that Dr. Gowdy was a carping Jeremiah, intent upon inflicting a deadly wound on local pride. "Oh, shucks!" said the worthy man, and went on with his ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... into the text. It was impossible for anyone to mistake the tense and meaning of "quem caederet," but I ventured to paraphrase the words and their context, instead of translating them. In this sentence, I may say, the "mutilation hypothesis" is introduced, and thereafter Tertullian proceeds to press against Marcion his charge of mutilating the Gospel of Luke, and I desired to contrast the doubt of the "videtur" with the assurance of the subsequent charge. I had ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... years he had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this—or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom. ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... was therefore consigned to the care of the eldest boy, who promised, in the words of the old song, that he should have A bit of his supper, a bit of his bed, and that he should be engaged in none of those perilous pastimes in which the race of Mustard and Pepper had suffered frequent mutilation. Brown now prepared for his journey, having taken a temporary farewell of his ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day,—if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of murder? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... were overrun, our island security would be at least diminished, and he had, therefore, in addition to his anxiety to avert a general war, a direct national interest to strive for, in the preservation of peace between Germany and France. Ever since the mutilation which the latter country had suffered, as the outcome of the War of 1870, she had felt sore, and her relations with Germany were not easy. But she did not seek a war of revenge. It would have been too full of risk even if she had not desired ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... you see the light burns as brightly and steadily as ever. We, now, that are not bibliolatrists, no more believe that, from the disturbance of a few words here or there, any evangelical truth can have suffered a wound or mutilation, than we believe that the burning of a wood, or even of a forest, which happens in our vast American possessions, sometimes from natural causes (lightning, or spontaneous combustion), sometimes from an Indian's carelessness, can seriously ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... visited by most travellers and tourists. It was situated in a beautiful spot at the head of the Adonis river,[472] a sacred stream fabled to run with blood once a year, at the festival which commemorated the self-mutilation of the Nature-god Adonis. Aphaca was a sort of Delphi, a collection of temples rather than a town. It was dedicated especially to the worship of the Syrian goddess, Ashtoreth or Venus, sometimes called Beltis or Baaltis, whose orgies were of so disgracefully licentious a character ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... pianists of the German school, writes as follows in 1861 in a letter to a friend: "In Gounod I hail a real composer. I have heard his 'Faust' both at Leipsic and Dresden, and am charmed with that refined, piquant music. Critics may rave if they like against the mutilation of Goethe's masterpiece; the opera is sure to attract, for it is a fresh, interesting work, with a copious flow of melody and ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... cleanness was given To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven— By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires— To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes—to be cindered by fires— To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation. But who ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... imposed upon by that ponderous miscreant, Mr. Frank Lawler, of the Lick House. I left my room a moment ago, and the first man I met on the stairs was Gov. Stanford, alive and well, and as free from mutilation as you or I. I was speechless. Before I reached the street, I actually met Gov. Low also, with his own head on his own shoulders, his limbs intact, his inner mechanism in its proper place, and his cheeks blooming ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... reply; but he looked intently at the boat-steerer for half a minute. The idea was new to him; and the more he thought on the subject, the greater was the confidence it gave him in the result. Daggett, he well knew, would not consent to the mutilation of his schooner, wreck as it was, so long as the most remote hope existed of getting her again into the water. The tenacity with which this man clung to property was like that which is imputed to the life of the cat; and it was idle to expect any concessions from ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... who appeared to have had children, on both of whom all the fingers were perfect. Several instances were afterwards observed of women with child, and of others that were evidently wives, who had not lost the two joints, and of children from whom they had been cut. Whatever be the occasion of this mutilation, it is performed on females only; and considering the imperfection of their instruments, must be a very painful operation. Nothing has been seen in the possession of these people that is at all calculated for performing such an amputation, except a shell fixed to a short stick, ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... their entirety. Their words occasionally utter what their looks invariably express. We read their thoughts by the light of their smiles. Not to see and hear these men is not to know them, and criticism without personal knowledge is in their case mutilation. Those who did know them listen in despair to the half-hearted praise and clumsy disparagement of critical strangers, and are apt to exclaim, as did the younger Pitt, when some extraneous person was expressing wonder at the enormous reputation of Fox, 'Ah! you ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the "return to Nature" and the "new gospel of health," which are destined to free humanity from the destructive influences of alcoholism, red meat overeating, the dope and tobacco habit, and of drug poisoning, vaccination, surgical mutilation, vivisection and a thousand other abuses practiced in the ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... all the men and women he saw. According to Piper certain rites belong to this strange custom. The young men retire from the tribe to solitary places, there to mourn and abstain from animal food for many days previous to their being subjected to this mutilation. The tooth is not drawn but knocked out by an old man, or coradje, with a wooden chisel, struck forcibly and so as to break it. It would be very difficult to account for a custom so general and also so absurd, otherwise ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... buried with his wife. In this case the two elder wives of this old man had each relinquished an eye, and no doubt the time was soon approaching when the youngest would also show her conjugal fidelity and love by similar mutilation, unless the old heathen should happen to die shortly and she become espoused to some other, rejoicing in the possession of a full complement of eyes—a consummation devoutly ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... temptation; till stubbornness becomes flexible, and perverseness regular. Custom and reason have, indeed, set some bounds to scholastick penalties. The schoolmaster inflicts no capital punishments; nor enforces his edicts by either death or mutilation. The civil law has wisely determined, that a master who strikes at a scholar's eye shall be considered as criminal. But punishments, however severe, that produce no lasting evil, may be just and reasonable, because they may be necessary. Such have been the punishments used by the respondent. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... brings along with it. Surely the dualists were right? It was unregenerate, a thing, if made by God, yet wholly fallen away from Him and given over to evil, this fleshly envelope wherein the human soul is seated, and which, even in the womb, may be infected by disease or rendered hideous by mutilation? Then, as the languor of his long vigil overcame him, he passed into an ecstatic contemplation of the state of that same soul after death, clothed with a garment of incorruptible and enduring beauty, dwelling in clear, luminous spaces, worshipping among the ranks ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... few possessions caught up at random, they had got into the carriages without even asking whither they were bound, urged by their anxiety to flee, to flee desperately from horror and death, from unspeakable mutilation and Sadic outrage—from things that seemed no longer possible in the world, but which, it seems, were lying dormant in pietistic German brains, and had suddenly belched forth upon their land and ours, like a belated manifestation of original barbarism. They no longer ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... such killing will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrent punishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent will neither be death, nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the life by imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but good scientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a memory. Yet even the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort of mutilation ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... wearing his hat while a religious procession was passing, singing blasphemous songs, speaking blasphemous words, and making blasphemous gestures. There was much popular excitement at the time on account of the mutilation of a crucifix standing on a bridge in the town, but La Barre was not shown to have been concerned in this outrage. The judges at Abbeville appear to have laid themselves open to the accusation of personal hostility to him. The young man, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... injured by mutilation. He here also alludes to his military character: "Nor could I sit idle and sigh with such as mourn to hear the drum; for if the age be not quiet enough to be taught virtue a pleasant way, the next may be at leisure; nor could I (like men that have civilly slept till they are ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... with my hands empty and my mind fairly made up. Everything depended on a new theory, which I was about to test, a mere Chinese theory concerning eunuchs—that their mutilation makes them bestial, but also downtrodden and quite spiritless and peculiarly weak. That is why the old Empress could thrash them to death whenever they displeased her, without their daring to raise their hands or make one single struggle. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... been able to understand why that powerful rifle was thus baffled, unless there had been some error in the charge of powder. This rhinoceros had no ears, they had been bitten off close to the head by another of the same species, while fighting; this mutilation is by ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... shame to the grossest folly, cruelty, and poltroonery. If any other profession in the world had been stained by those vices and by false witness, forgery, swindling, torture, compulsion of men's families to attend their executions, digging up and mutilation of dead enemies, all of which is only added to the devastation proper to its own business, as the military profession has been within recent memory in England, France, and the United States of America (to mention no other countries), ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... a good deal of ferocity and savagism, and it was not at all confined to people acknowledged to be barbarians. I remember an instance where I came very near being a party to a scheme, the brutality of which would have made the mutilation of the dead Mahdi commendable in comparison; but fortunately my better nature and second thought overcame my passions, and I was spared the perpetration of the awful crime, the remembrance of which, had it been committed, would undoubtedly ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... grief! 'like the dog which returns to his vomit.' Therefore, we pronounce you to be a rotten limb, and, as such, to be lopped off from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power, praying it at the same time to relax its sentence and to spare you death and the mutilation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... I saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn red, I heard the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to their death, or to mutilation worse than death. The picture is before me yet, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the attempts to destroy the child are unsuccessful, resulting only in horrid mutilation of its tender form; when such a child is born, what terrible evidences may it bear in its crippled and misshapen body of the cruel outrage perpetrated upon it! That such cases do occur is certain from the following narrative, which we might confirm by ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Luh (Kei-toku-den-to-roku), published by Tao Yuen (Do-gen) A.D. 1004, gives a detailed narrative concerning this incident as stated here, but earlier historians tell us a different story about the mutilation of Shang Kwang's arm. Compare Suh Kas San Chwen (Zoku-ko-so-den) and ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... cause for other accusations calculated to keep up this hatred; such as the desecration of the consecrated host, the mutilation of the crucifix. Tradition informs us of a miracle which took place in Paris in 1290, in the Rue des Jardins, when a Jew dared to mutilate and boil a consecrated host. This miracle was commemorated by the erection of a chapel on the spot, which was afterwards replaced by the church and ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... learned things too late, George?" cried Arthur, in his impetuous way, gathering words and emotion as he went on. "Whose life is not a disappointment? Who carries his heart entire to the grave without a mutilation? I never knew anybody who was happy quite: or who has not had to ransom himself out of the hands of Fate with the payment of some dearest treasure or other. Lucky if we are left alone afterwards, when we have paid our fine, and if the tyrant ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... all other penalties, save death and mutilation, lay within the power of ecclesiastical judges. They inflicted it so frequently that in the early days of the Holy Inquisition, the Fathers of the Council of Narbonne said that stones and mortar would become ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... 'Coleridge and Opium-Eating,' and may be accepted as De Quincey's supplementary and final deliverance on Coleridge. The beautiful apostrophe to the name of Coleridge, which we have given as a kind of motto to the essay, was found attached to one of the sheets; and, in spite of much mutilation and mixing of the pages with those of other articles, as we originally found them, it was for the most part so clearly written and carefully punctuated, that there can be no doubt, when put together, we had it before us very much as De Quincey meant to publish it had he found ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... from the peculiarities of society, the only real tie acknowledged by these people is that which connects male kinsmen. The Hajj, after speaking big, had the weakness to let the murderer depart alive: this measure, like peace-policy in general, is the best and surest way to encourage bloodshed and mutilation. But a few months before, an Eesa Bedouin enticed out of the gates a boy about fifteen, and slaughtered him for the sake of wearing the feather. His relations were directed to receive the Diyat or blood fine, and the wretch was allowed to ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... century during the life of the abbot Thomasse Daniel. This edifice is extremely remarkable from the sculptures which cover the whole front, and chiefly represent pointed windows. On the first floor, we find a room with two fire places, on one we may still distinguish in spite of mutilation, the armorial bearings of the Daniel family. The wainscot is even more curious than the sculptures which ornament the front of the house. At one of the corners of this building there is a small turret, of stone, its form is polygonal; its ornaments ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... after his removal to Princeton, have been most shamefully mutilated by relic-hunters and curiosity-mongers; innumerable pieces having been chipped off the edges of the slabs, until even the inscriptions have been encroached upon. To prevent, if possible, further mutilation, the following unique and elaborate, but eloquent notice, enclosed in an iron frame, has been placed over the graves of these reverend fathers. It was written by Professor, now ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... parties appeared before the Gold Commissioner to record their claims. The news went abroad immediately. In five minutes the first stampeders were hitting the trail. At the end of half an hour the town was afoot. To prevent mistakes on their property,—jumping, moving of stakes, and mutilation of notices,—Vance and Del, after promptly recording, started to return. But with the government seal attached to their holdings, they took it leisurely, the stampeders sliding past them in a steady stream. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... can never be assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation; Ireland is a unit. It is true that within the bosom of a nation there is room for diversities of the treatment of government and of administration, but a unit Ireland is and Ireland must remain.... ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... that it was carried four or five miles into the woods, and there interred. A further examination of the testimony will show that these eight witnesses concur but in one single point,—that Tecumseh was killed in the battle of the Thames. As to the nature of his wounds, the mutilation of his body, the time when, the spot where, and by whose hands, he fell, these various statements are wholly irreconcilable with each other, and leave the main question involved in additional doubt ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... most severely felt, and be the greatest detriment to her personal charms; and the man was condemned to receive a bastinado of one thousand blows. But if it was proved that force had been used against a free woman, he was doomed to a cruel mutilation. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... of horse-flesh at these religious festivals was considered the most direct proof of paganism in the following times, and was punished by death or mutilation by Saint Olaf. It was a ceremony apparently commemorative of ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... whitewashed brick. Imagine the floor so crammed with machinery for economy of space as to allow bare room for the workers to writhe about among the flying arms and jaws of steel, a false motion meaning death or mutilation. Imagine the air space above filled, instead of air, with a mixture of stenches of oil and filth, unwashed human bodies, and foul clothing. Conceive a perpetual clang and clash of machinery like the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... of which found advocates in Greek philosophy and even in the early Church, have no countenance in scripture. Evil does not reside in the flesh, as the Greeks held, but in the will which uses the flesh for its base ends. Not mutilation but transformation, not suppression but consecration is the Christian ideal. The natural is the basis of the spiritual. Man is the Temple of God, every part of which is sacred. Christ claims to be King ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... it. The existence of this double standard seems to drive the poor girls half frantic. They bellow raucously for its abrogation, and demand that the frivolous male be visited with even more idiotic penalties than those which now visit the aberrant female; some even advocate gravely his mutilation by surgery, that he may be forced into rectitude by a physical disability ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... keep the timber of their houses secure, their furniture, their silver, their gold, their worthless papers—all that cheap trash which gives them control over the people. Think, it's not for their own selves, for their persons, that they protect themselves thus, using murder and the mutilation of souls as a means—it's not for themselves they do it, but for the sake of their possessions. They do not guard themselves from ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... works of art, but in theory may apply under contract and other principles. Moral rights may include the right of an author to have his or her name on a work, the right of attribution, and the right to object to distortion or mutilation—the right of integrity. ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... fact grew rather too old himself, and too cunning, and getting about with disreputable companions—that gross old villain Kauc, the crow, for one—it is just possible that some inkling of the hereditary mutilation in store for him was insinuated (for his own purposes) ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... household pots and pans, and with a supply of food. The man was dead, but he still needed the same things he used in ordinary life. By a fortunate chance we have even recovered bodies accidentally desiccated and preserved intact in the dry soil. These bodies do not show any trace of mutilation, mummification, or any other preparation for the grave except probably washing. The dead body was simply laid on a mat in the grave, covered with a cloth and a mat or a skin, and then with clean gravel. But with it was placed all those things which the man might ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... William the Conqueror and Lanfranc, in order that the clergy should not be mixed up in ordinary law matters, and should be excluded strictly from the common courts. No penalty involving bloodshed could be inflicted in the Church courts, and all the savage barbarities of mutilation, common enough as punishments in the King's court, were forbidden. Henry II., apart from his strong desire for centralisation in government, wanted these Church courts abolished, because every clerk who offended ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... marriage are a man over-stimulated sexually by mystery and ignorance, and a woman abnormally undersexed by the course of self-repression and self-mutilation which have been taught her from her earliest childhood as necessities of modesty, purity and virtue. And then out of the carefully cultivated repugnance of the woman and the savage, exulting, unrelenting passion of the man are produced children, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... who had been forced to witness the mutilation of his brother,—whose arms had been held and whose eyelids were drawn up by the cruel fingers of a soldier ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... character, there will be large difference of opinion. "The sturdy vagabond," who by the earlier statute was condemned on his second offence to lose the whole or a part of his right ear, was condemned by the amended Act, if found a third time offending, with the mark upon him of his mutilation, "to suffer pains and execution of death, as a felon and as an enemy of the commonwealth." So the letter stands. For an able-bodied man to be caught a third time begging was held a crime deserving death, and the sentence was intended, on fit occasions, to be executed. The poor man's advantages, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... proclamation offering them, as compensation for mutilation and death, the words of posterity about their having been in the battle before Moscow, they cried "Vive l'Empereur!" just as they had cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at the sight of the portrait of the boy piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy stick, and just as they would have cried "Vive ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... corrected by the courteous but firm interposition of the librarian, instructing the delinquent how to treat a book in hand. Others are wilful and unpardonable offences against property rights and public morals, even if not made penal offences by law. One of these is book mutilation, very widely practiced, but rarely detected until the mischief is done, and the culprit gone. I have found whole pages torn out of translations, in the volumes of Bohn's Classical Library, doubtless by students wanting ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the Bastille. This ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... one of those few ruins that leave no problem to solve. Here we have a grey antiquity without any mutilation of form, and merely spoliated of its benches. The patron saint of Naples was, they say, imprisoned here. A little chapel ascertains the spot, but he does no miracles on this arena. When we come to temples, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... axial organs is not unfrequently the result of some injury or mutilation, thus Duval Jouve alludes to the frequency with which branched stems are produced in the various species of Equisetum, as a consequence of injuries to the main stem, but this is rather to be considered as a multiplication of parts than as ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... of St. Albans, and certain barons, by which the Abbot agrees to hire, and the barons to let, certain men-at-arms for the security of the Abbey, and for scouring the forests. Savage capital punishments—impalement, mutilation, hanging alive in chains—were inflicted on the marauders, who duly acknowledged these attentions by yet more atrocious severities upon the wayfarers who had the ill luck to ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... formerly. Chiefly this transformation consisted of opening up windows, thus making practically a new facade. It was not wholly a happy thought, and the spirit of economy of Louis XVIII, no less, perhaps, than other motives, arrested this mutilation and the architect was ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... so since the eagle had not been damaged by its fall,—but he knew it was needful to impress strongly on Lady the fact of her punishment. This for her own sake as much as for his; since a housedog is worthless until it learns that each and every indoor object must be respected and held sacred from mutilation. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... compound narrative, that is narrative having reference to two sets of phenomena—one the obvious surface events, the other the larger and wider, but less obvious, sociological condition. A better example could hardly be given than Grote's account of the mutilation of the Hermae. The fact of the mutilation is told in the briefest way in a few lines, but the social condition which overarched it, and made the disfiguring of a number of half-statues "one of the most extraordinary ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... contention, with the facts that no one was discovered up stairs but the assassinated Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, and that there were no means of egress without the notice of the party ascending. The wild disorder of the room; the corpse thrust, with the head downward, up the chimney; the frightful mutilation of the body of the old lady; these considerations, with those just mentioned, and others which I need not mention, have sufficed to paralyze the powers, by putting completely at fault the boasted acumen, of the government ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is only through the intervention of the United States troops that some of the barbarous ceremonies of the North American Indians are suppressed. The episode of the "Ghost-dance" is fresh in every mind. Instances of self-mutilation, although illustrating this subject, will be discussed at length in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... already seen that in New Zealand heaven and earth were regarded as real persons, of bodily parts and passions, united in a secular embrace. We shall apply the same explanation to the Greek myth of Gaea and of the mutilation of Cronus. In India, Dyaus (heaven) answers to the Greek Uranus and the Maori Rangi, while Prithivi (earth) is the Greek Gaea, the Maori Papa. In the Veda, heaven and earth are constantly styled "parents";(1) but this we might regard as a mere metaphorical expression, still common in poetry. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... in the most detached way of his blindness and the coming ceremony. Never once, even on the first occasion when I met her—in the hospital corridor—after my return from London, did her attitude vary from that of any kind-hearted Englishwoman who deplores the mutilation of a gallant social acquaintance. Sometimes I wanted to shake her, though I could scarcely tell why. I certainly would not have had her weep on my shoulder over Boyce's misfortune; nor would I have cared for her to exhibit a vindictive callousness. She behaved with ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... I witnessed the high character of this elephant was connected with a regrettable incident which caused the death of one man and the mutilation of two others, who would probably have been killed had not Moolah Bux been present. The description of this day's experience will explain the necessity of a staunch shikar elephant when tiger-shooting, as the position may be one that would render it impossible to approach on foot when a ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... find many of the phenomena which have been characteristic of later periods of Irish political agitation, already flourishing. Boycotting existed in fact, though the name was not yet invented; also nocturnal raids for arms, the sacking of lonely farmhouses, the intimidation of witnesses and the mutilation of cattle. Again, we see all through the history of Irish secret societies that their organization has been so splendid that the ordinary law has been powerless against them; for witnesses will not give evidence and juries will not convict if they know that to do so will mean certain ruin ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... said Daniel, exhibiting his maimed hand; 'a reckon a served 'em out time o' t' Ameriky war.' And he began the story Sylvia knew so well; for her father never made a new acquaintance but what he told him of his self-mutilation to escape the press-gang. It had been done, as he would himself have owned, to spite himself as well as them; for it had obliged him to leave a sea-life, to which, in comparison, all life spent on shore ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... writes thus: "The account in Mercurius Rusticus, which has given vogue to the common story is wholly untrue." He further adds: "Some fanatic soldier may, indeed, according to the story, have broken off the head of Queen Elizabeth, mistaking her for our Lady. But no general mutilation or desecration took place at this time. And at Exeter, one form of mutilation, which specially affected the west front, was not the work of enemies but of devotees. For ages the country folk who came into the city loved to carry home a Peter stone for the healing ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... humane in principle, and it was generally encouraged by the Church. For in her eyes the criminal was guilty of an act of which it was necessary that he should repent; this made her desire, not his destruction, but his conversion. She tried, therefore, to save his life, and to put an end to revenge, mutilation, and servitude; and for all this the alternative was compensation. This purpose was served by the right of asylum. The Church surrendered the fugitive only on condition that his life and person should be spared in consideration of a lawful fine, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton |
