"Rectilinear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great part of Languedoc. They were often fortified with a wall, a palisade, and a moat. Their strong peculiarity, however, the one that has been preserved in spite of all the changes that centuries have brought, was the rectilinear and geometrical manner in which they were laid out. In contrast to the typical mediaeval town that grew up slowly around some abbey, or at the foot of some strong castle that protected it, and in the building of which, if ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Measuring the deflection in question—which is equivalent to the so-called versed sine of the arc traversed—we have a basis for determining the strength of the deflecting force. Newton constructed such a diagram, and, measuring the amount of the moon's departure from a tangential rectilinear course in one minute, determined this to be, by his calculation, thirteen feet. Obviously, then, the force acting upon the moon is one that would cause that body to fall towards the earth to the distance of thirteen feet in the first minute of its fall. Would such ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... dinner was served in summer as early as four o'clock, so as to leave the evening clear for summer amusements. Then the afternoon light rested steadily on the extensive white garden-front and the three ponderous gables of the manor. In the rectilinear beds the stocks glinted like bright, wavy silk, and the scent of the box-hedges was warm and bitter. A servant stationed himself on the steps of the garden porch and rang a large bell as signal that it was ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... The rectilinear lines which are stretched in front of the webs of many Epeirids are useful in taking and sending on to the spider the shock which tells of an approaching enemy. Some spiders, when danger threatens, shake the web so violently as to grow indistinct to the eye, and others, as Pholcus atlanticus, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... resistance by which all their earthly manifestations are disguised—when progressing knowledge of physics had given a due insight into these disturbing causes—when, by an effort of abstraction, it was perceived that all motion would be uniform and rectilinear unless interfered with by external forces—and when the various consequences of this perception had been worked out; then it became possible, by the union of geometry and mechanics, to initiate physical astronomy. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... young apprentice he had studied the steam engine, and had resolved that he would improve it by doing away with the crank. To his mind this was a source of great loss of power, and he believed that, if he could transform the rectilinear motion of the piston rod directly into rotary motion without the intervention of the crank, he would effect ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... it is not by levelling abusive language against those who investigate sophisticated theories, they will either be purged of their absurdities, acquire solidity, or find an establishment to give them perpetuity; that moral obliquities, can never be made rectilinear by the mere application of unintelligible terms, or by the inconsiderate jumble of discrepant properties, however gaudy the assemblage: in short, that the only criterion of truth is, that it ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... bend to either side, not turn to either side, not deviate to either side; go straight; steer for &c (directions) 278. render straight, straighten, rectify; set straight, put straight; unbend, unfold, uncurl &c 248, unravel &c 219, unwrap. Adj. straight; rectilinear, rectilineal^; direct, even, right, true, in a line; unbent, virgate^ &c v.; undeviating, unturned, undistorted, unswerving; straight as an arrow &c (direct) 278; inflexible &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that it is a good thing to stay out of unless you know it all," explained Holmes. "I omitted in the case of Burgess to observe one thing about him. Had I observed that his nose was rectilinear, incurved, and with a lifted base, and that his auricular temporal angle was between 96 and 97 degrees, I should have known at once that he was an impostor. Vide Ottolenghui on 'Ears and Noses I Have Met,' ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... was a dogmatic reasoner, dry, rectilinear, never swerving from his point of view; he spoke but little, but when he did speak, it was in a ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... measured from claimed archipelagic baselines territorial sea: 12 NM exclusive economic zone: 200 NM continental shelf: 200-m depth or to the depth of exploitation; rectilinear ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... may accomplish more than working single; but you cannot yoke Pegasus and a plow- horse—Bellerophon's winged mount peremptorily refuses to be "organized" and turn rectilinear furrows, but plunges through Time and Space in an orbit of its own making—often mistaken by the patient organizers for a lawless comet, its appearance a dire portent. You cannot drive Shakespeare and Charles Hoyt ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... The rectilinear movement has thus become changed into a circular motion of extreme velocity, and it is now pursuing an elliptical orbit round the moon, of which it has become ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... inhabitants may the better enjoy the sea view. They are all of white Maltese stone; a sort of sandstone easy to work, and with which, at small expense, one can indulge various caprices of sculpture and ornamentation. These rectilinear houses stand well, and have an air of grandeur, which they owe to the absence of (visible) roofs, cornices, and attics. They stand out sharply and squarely against the azure of the heavens, which their dazzling whiteness renders only the more intense; but that which chiefly gives them ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... parallelogram of forces is quackery, and is dangerous; for nothing is at rest, or in uniform, or in rectilinear motion, in the universe. Variable motion is an essential property of matter. Laplace's demonstration of the parallelogram of forces is a begging of the question; and the attempts of them all to show that the difference ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... for house and for landscape, for sky-scrapers and all manner of public works; we have the nurseryman, the florist; we have parks, shaded boulevards and riverside and lakeside drives. Under private ownership we have a vast multitude of exactly rectilinear lawns, extremely bare or else very badly planted; and we have hundreds of thousands of beautiful dames and girls who "love flowers." But our home gardens, our home gardeners, either professional or amateur, where are they? Our smaller cities by scores and our towns by ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... reproduction is pinned on a board and placed squarely before a copying camera in a good, even light. The lens used for this purpose must be capable of giving a perfectly sharp picture right up to the edges, and must be of the class called rectilinear, i.e., giving straight lines. The picture is then accurately focused and brought to the required size. A plate is prepared in the dark room by the collodion process, which is then exposed in the camera for the proper time ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... Icebergs to make rectilinear, uniformly-directed Grooves across a Submarine Undulatory Surface. Philosophical Magazine ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... kind of slush.' 'Even so,' I make reply,—'if you will consent to use no politer word.' For humanism, conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... The mountains form a crescent overhanging the north end of the lake, large and deep in the body to the north, and tapering to horns as they stretch southwards down the east and west sides of the lake. Our line of march, about six hundred rectilinear geographical miles, had been nearly due west from Zanzibar. Here you may picture to yourself my bitter disappointment when, after toiling through so many miles of savage life, all the time emaciated by divers sicknesses and weakened by great privations of food and rest, I found, on approaching ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... in all directions; he laughs louder than ever when the ball returns to its starting-point after twists and turns and waverings of every kind. In other words, the mechanism just described is laughable even when rectilinear, it is much more so on becoming circular and when every effort the player makes, by a fatal interaction of cause and effect, merely results in bringing it back to the same spot. Now, a considerable number of light comedies revolve round this idea. An Italian straw hat ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... is popularly known as Perpendicular, but as the horizontal lines are quite as distinct a feature as are the vertical, it would perhaps be more correct to speak of it as Rectilinear. This change in architectural form made its appearance towards the close of the XIVth century, although it was by no means generally introduced at that period, for the old methods and styles were carried on side by side with the new for many years. For example, the eastern ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... make fine holes in the skin in which to introduce the color; in the other long gashes are made. In the latter case prominent scars result; in the former a smooth pattern. But these combined patterns are on the whole the same, instead of rectilinear figures. Schadenburg has the operations commence with a sharpened bamboo on children 10 years of age. Among the wild tribes of the light-colored population tattooing is not less diffused, but the patterns are not alike in the different tribes. Isabelo de los Reyes reports that the Tinguianes, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... a needle hole made by a number 10 needle in a thin sheet of paper and you have the apparatus for lensless photography. It has a correctness such as no image-forming means by lenses can have. It is literally rectigraphic, rectilinear, it needs no focussing, and it takes a wide angle with equal effect. Even pinhole snapshots are possible where the light is abundant, with a ten to ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... German peace plan would not only provide the fullest self determination of all ethnographic categories, but would predicate the political self consciousness (politisches Selbstbewusztsein) of each geographical and entomological unit, subject only to the necessary rectilinear guarantees for the seismographic action of the German empire. The entire Reichstag, especially the professorial section of it, broke into unrestrained applause. It is felt that the new formula is the equivalent of a German ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... intersection being called the vertex or angular point, and the lines legs. Angles are distinguished by the number of degrees they subtend, to 360 deg., or the whole circumference of a circle. Angles are acute, obtuse, right, curvilinear, rectilinear, &c. (all of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... instead of travelling straight down the glass made a semicircular bend; but Fig. 52 shows that this may occur when the track is rectilinear. The apex by thus rising, was in one instance able to surmount a bristle cemented across an inclined glass-plate; but slips of wood only 1/40 of an inch in thickness always caused the radicles to bend rectangularly to one side, so that the ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... his paddle-wheels turned round. On which Symington immediately asked, "Why don't you use the steam-engine?" The model which Symington exhibited, produced rotary motion by the employment of ratchet-wheels. The rectilinear motion of the piston-rod was thus converted into rotary motion. Mr. Miller was pleased with the action of the ratchet-wheel contrivance, and gave Symington an order to make a pair of engines of that construction. They were to be used on a small ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... for the one-direction suspension of pendulum B we substitute a gimbal, or universal joint, permitting movement in all directions, so that the pendulum is able to describe a more or less circular path. The figures obtained by this simple modification are the results of compounded rectilinear ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... experiments. A stone thrown along a sheet of ice will be exposed to but little resistance, and in this case we see that the stone will take a straight course along the frozen surface. A stone similarly cast into empty space would pursue a course absolutely rectilinear. This we demonstrate, not by any attempts at an experiment which would necessarily be futile, but by indirect reasoning. The truth of this principle can never for a moment be doubted by one who has duly weighed the arguments which have been produced ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... had to be steered as well as propelled; and in order to accomplish this it would be necessary to command the direction of the apergy at pleasure. My means of doing this depended on two of the best-established peculiarities of this strange force: its rectilinear direction and its conductibility. We found that it acts through air or in a vacuum in a single straight line, without deflection, and seemingly without diminution. Most solids, and especially metals, according to their electric condition, are ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... slip back in triumph to my studies I elected to stroll spiritlessly into the billiard room where certainly I had no business. There was no one there either, and I felt very lost and desolate under its high ceiling, all alone with the massive English billiard table which seemed, in heavy, rectilinear silence, to disapprove of ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... plan. Interest may be aroused at once in the demonstration lectures by mechanical tricks that show apparent violations of Newton's Laws. These group around the type of experiment which shows a modification of the natural uniform rectilinear motion of any object by some hidden force, most often a concealed magnetic field. The instinctive adherence of every one to Newton's dynamic definition, that acceleration defies the ratio of force to inertia, is made ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... and arched portal of some old feudal castle that it has been called "Rock Castle." Beyond this is another architectural curiosity, denominated "The Grand Portal," which consists of an arched opening in the rocks. The cliff is composed of a vast mass, of a rectilinear shape, projecting out into the lake six hundred feet, and presenting a front of three hundred feet, and rising to a height of two hundred feet. An entrance has been excavated from one side to the other, opening out into large vaulted passages which communicate with the great dome, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... have been as grimly significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography, every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the human rhythms ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... like the announcement of a triumphal entry. "She's going to come! She's going to come at any moment!..." And he would look across the double mountain of the island of Capri, black in the distance, closing the gulf like a promontory, and the coast of Sorrento as rectilinear as a wall. "There she is...." Then he would lovingly follow the course of the little steamboats plowing across the immense blue surface, opening a triangle of foam. In some of these ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever. To be plain, I own myself able to abstract IN ONE SENSE, as when I consider some particular parts or qualities separated from others, with which, though they are united in some object, yet it is possible ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... optical and electrical properties of the radiation are to be explained. I shall not here attempt any such explanation, but shall confine myself to the property which the particles have of possessing a different mode of deviating from the rectilinear path as they pass from one medium to another. This deviation depends in some way on one or more attributes of the particles. Let us suppose that it depends on a single attribute, which, with a terminology derived from the undulatory theory of ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... hurled out in an arbitrary direction. In order to measure the acceleration we let the body drop alongside of a vertical measure set solidly on the ground; on this scale we read at every moment the figure that indicates the height, the only co-ordinate that is of importance in this rectilinear movement. Now we ask what would we be able to see if the measure were not bound solidly to the earth, if it, let us suppose, moved down or up with the place where it is located and where we are ourselves. If in this case the ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... ornament is rare, and consists mainly of (a) incised dots, dashes, or lines, in simple rectilinear patterns (chevrons, zigzags, lozenges), often enhanced by a white chalky filling (V, Figs 5- 8); (b) ridges or bosses modelled in the clay surface, or adhering to it. The forms are plump and globular, often round-bottomed or standing on short feet. Rims are absent ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... of a hammer was, on this occasion, distinctly heard; and I entertained some alarm that a march-dike, long meditated by the two proprietors whose estates were divided by my favourite brook, was about to be drawn up the glen, in order to substitute its rectilinear deformity for the graceful winding of the natural boundary. [Note: I deem it fitting that the reader should be apprised that this limitary boundary between the conterminous heritable property of his honour the Laird of Gandercleugh, and his honour the Laird of Gusedub, was to have been ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... as she thought how long it would take to count the number of the little hands, some trembling, some bold, that had slipped into the rectilinear mouth of the letter-box some little missive that was either the foretaste or the postscript ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... device was a plan to do away with the crank, and transform the rectilinear motion of the piston into rotary motion. He figured it out that this would save two-fifths of the steam, and so stated in his application for a patent, a copy of which is before ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... follows. Once in the eddy, nothing but rotary motion can go on. All who have been in it know the feel of its swirl—they know thenceforward that thinking unreturning on itself is but one part of reason, and that rectilinear mentality, in philosophy at any rate, will never do. Though each one may report in different words of his rotational experience, the experience itself is almost childishly simple, and whosoever has been there ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... edge of the nebula about Maia, and stringing together seven stars, met in its advance, like beads on a rosary. The largest of these is apparently the occasion of a slight deviation from its otherwise rectilinear course. A second similar but shorter streak runs, likewise east and west, through ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: Delambre, Hist. d'Astr. Anc., tom. 1, p. 184.] They could calculate eclipses of the moon, and use them for the correction of their lunar tables. They understood spherical trigonometry, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... balance, be applied as connections between millions of pairs of particles as before, with the lines of resultant moment of momentum all similarly directed. We now have a model elastic solid which will have the property that the direction of vibration in waves of rectilinear vibrations propagated through it shall turn round the line of propagation of the waves, just as Faraday's observation proves to be done by the line of vibration of light in a dense medium between ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... moderately well fired, and having a polished surface, usually of a darkish colour. On this surface were often incised ornamental designs, varying both in type and in the skill with which they were engraved. As a rule the schemes were rectilinear, more rarely they were carried out in curves. Sardinia furnishes some fine examples of rectilinear work, while the best of the curved designs are found in Malta, where elaborate conventional and ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... deep, in the form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which, when the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the roofs and steeples of a Gothic city, or the vessels of a crowded haven under a press of canvas. The very mud in the road, where the ice had melted, was crystallized with deep rectilinear fissures, and the crystalline masses in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the disposition of their needles. Around the roots of the stubble and flower-stalks, the frost was gathered into the form of irregular conical shells, or fairy rings. In some ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... oldest of these texts show us Chaldaean writing in its earliest stage. Analogy would lead us to think that these figures must at one time have been more directly imitative. However that may have been, the image must have been very imperfect from the day that the rectilinear trace came into general use. Figures must then have rapidly degenerated into conventional signs. Those who used them could no longer pretend to actually represent the objects they wished to denote. They must have been content to suggest their ideas by means of a character whose ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... with more suddenness of energy and purpose than the other) to arrive at a particular imaginary point in the sky, arresting each other's progress as they meet in their endeavour, this simplest empathic action of an irregular and by no means rectilinear triangle, goes on repeating itself, like the parabola of a steadily spirting fountain: for ever accomplishing itself anew and for ever accompanied by the same effect on the feelings ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee |
