"Transmutation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... By way of illustration he showed me a beautiful little church which had been built by the last slave-trading merchant in Bristol, who had been much disapproved of by his fellow townsmen and had hoped by this transmutation of ill-gotten money into exquisite Gothic architecture to reconcile himself both to God and man. His impulse to build may have been born from his own scruples or from the quickened consciences of his neighbors who saw that the world-old iniquity of enslaving men must at length come to an end. The ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... North, and being carried down into the ocean, were afterwards increased to that amazing height by the snow that fell upon them*. But that all frozen sea-water would thaw into fresh, had either never been asserted, or had met with little credit. This is certain that Captain Cook expected no such transmutation, and therefore was agreeably surprised to find he had one difficulty less to encounter, that of preserving the health of his men so long on salt-provisions, with a scanty allowance of corrupted water, or what he could procure by distillation ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... as the soul's eternal lighthouse gleams, glows, beckons in the blackest night of human anguish. In boyhood, desiring to please his invalid and slowly dying mother, he had purchased and hung up opposite her bed, an illuminated copy of her favorite text; and now, by some subtle transmutation in the conservation of spiritual energy, each golden letter of that Bible text seemed emblazoned on the dusty wall of the court-room: "God is our refuge and strength, a very ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with her sailing-power is another branch of the equipment of a screw-ship, which requires the most earnest, patient, and intelligent consideration. Prepared to endure all the wear and tear of a sail-ship, she should at the same time be ready for transmutation into a steam-ship; namely, when, for any urgent service, her best powers of steaming are required, she should be able to divest herself speedily of yards and top-masts, and, the special service completed, resume all her perfection as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mystery, cannot see the object on the part of religionists and scientists in being arbitrary with regard to a subject which any child of ten will apprehend to be one whereon it is futile to do other than theorize. My own theory, or rather one of my own theories, is that the property of transmutation, i.e., the power of assuming any animal guise, was one of the many properties—including second sight, the property of becoming invisible at will, of divining the presence of water, metals, the advent of death, and of projecting the etherical body—which were bestowed on man at the time of ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... we desire those gentlemen to answer for us how 'Post-Man' or 'Post-Boy' can signify a News-Paper, the Post Man or Post Boy being in all my reading properly and strictly applicable, not to the Paper, but to the Person bringing or carrying the News? Mercury also is, if I understand it, by a Transmutation of Meaning, from a God turned into a Book—From hence our Club thinks they have not fair Play, in being deny'd the Privilege of making an Allegory as well ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... matter obeys God alone, to the effect of formal transmutation, as was shown in the First Part (Q. 65, A. 4; Q. 91, A. 2; Q. 110, A. 2). But the act of the sensitive appetite is accompanied by a formal transmutation of the body, consisting in heat or cold. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... but discerning eye upon them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments—a moral and intellectual chequer-work; ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... there not? And there is no such restlessness as the restlessness of compulsory idleness. That is the main idea that is in the Psalmist's mind. He knows little about retribution, he knows still less about transmutation into a glorious likeness to that which is most glorious and divine. But he conceives a great, dim, lonely land, wherein are prisoned and penned all the lives that have been foamed away vainly on earth, and are now settled into a dreary monotony and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it—when you consider, beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry, no blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an occasional telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an event of public importance, a suitable emotion. Yet the common ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in magic and the transmutation of metals. There was always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder of projection had been cast into the crucible, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of this form; an idea which suggests itself all the more forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical transmutation, one of the greatest works of art in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the same whether they are kept in the Executive Mansion or deposited in the Departments. There is no mysterious power of transmutation in departmental custody, nor is there magic in the undefined and sacred solemnity of Department files. If the presence of these papers in the public offices is a stumbling block in the way of the performance of Senatorial duty, it can be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... scientific meaning of this word "revolution," and how does revolution differ from reform? Revolution means transmutation, and a revolution is, accordingly, accomplished whenever, by whatever means, with or without shock or violence, an entirely new principle is substituted for what is already in effect. A reform, on the other hand, is effected in case the existing situation is maintained in point of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Ulysses into beasts; and what is said of the Arcadians, who, after having drawn lots, swam over a certain lake, after which they were metamorphosed into wolves, and ran about in the forests like other wolves. If during the time of their transmutation they did not eat human flesh, at the end of nine years they repassed the same lake, and resumed ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... productions of Agassiz we have this statement: "As a palaeontologist I have from the beginning stood aloof from this new theory of transmutation, now so widely admitted; its doctrines, in fact, contradict what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... it observed, that the theory of a continuous transmutation of species is not logically bound to furnish a full explanation of all the natural causes which it may suppose to have been at work. The radical distinction between the two theories consists in the one assuming an immediate action of some ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... lovely and hideous; and love and hate. With Circe's wand it can change men into beasts of the field, and to them it can give a monstrous humanity. Life and death are in the right hand and in the left of him who knows its secrets. It confers wealth by the transmutation of metals and ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... irregular, ever-returning cycle. But Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an argument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed, might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of animals. If we find one building differing ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... may ask, some ideal form of discourse in which apperceptive life could be engaged with all its volume and transmuting power, and in which at the same time no misrepresentation should be involved? Transmutation is not erroneous when it is intentional; misrepresentation does not please for being false, but only because truth would be more congenial if it resembled such a fiction. Why should not discourse, then, have nothing but truth in its import and nothing but beauty in its form? With regard ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Causation, is, that we must distinguish in the assemblage of conditions which constitutes the Cause of a phenomenon, two elements: one, the presence of a force; the other, the collocation or position of objects which is required in order that the force may undergo the particular transmutation which constitutes the phenomenon. Now, it might always have been said with acknowledged correctness, that a force and a collocation were both of them necessary to produce any phenomenon. The law of causation is, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... record of the commonplaces of our voyage thereafter. It only remains for me to say that I arrived in England broken in health and bankrupt in fortune. Brande left no money. His formula for the transmutation of metals is unintelligible to me. I can make no use ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... which the universe has been slowly manufacturing for millions of years. Our attitude implies that we want eternity to roll back and begin again, in such wise that we at any rate shall not be disturbed. Though we have a machine for the transmutation of facts into food for our growth, we do not dream of using it. But, we say, he is doing us harm! Where? In our minds. He has robbed us of our peace, our comfort, our happiness, our good temper. Even if he has, ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... of us has succeeded in getting a good sight of what actually takes place. Our purposes are prepared as I have described, and then those purposes—something altogether mental—change on a sudden to material motions. How is the transmutation accomplished? How do we pass from a mental picture to a set of motions in the physical world? What is the bridge connecting the two? The bridge is always down when we direct our gaze upon it, though firm when any ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... Cuvier and others have negatived the theory of Lamarcke as to the transmutation of species. The "nisus formativus" is admitted, but admitted with limits, "quos ultra citraque ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... external conditions; hence we are thus far unable to control it. Nothing that is known will effect the transmutation of one element into another. It is spontaneous and uncontrollable. May not life be spontaneous in ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact that these variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve the individual beyond the standard of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to physics. The old boys with their frog guts and awful offal knew a bit about things like distilling and smelting. But there was no real order to their knowledge, and it was all an unconsidered by-product of their single goal, the whole nonsense of transmutation." ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... if I were to tell you that the Princess and the Baron rode out together daily to inspect the cannon, it is either a piece of politics or scandal, as I turn my phrase. I am the alchemist that makes the transmutation. They have been everywhere together since you left,' she continued, brightening as she saw Otto darken; 'that is a poor snippet of malicious gossip - and they were everywhere cheered - and with that addition all ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the momentum of rivers, and of the power of cataracts, tides, and winds, into vito-magnetic or electrical fluid; the transportation of this fluid to any locality through wire or cable; and its final transmutation into light, heat, or mechanical force sufficient for all work, are already demonstrated ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... nothing of the curious transmutation which the wit of man can work, would be very apt to wonder by what kind of legerdemain Aaron Burr had contrived to shuffle himself down to the bottom of the pack, as an accessory, and turn up poor Blennerhassett ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Philosophers, if e're you made A transmutation it was through mine aid, Ye silver Smiths, your Ure I do refine What mingled lay with Earth I cause to shine, But let me leave these things, my fame aspires To match on high with the Celestial fires; The Sun an Orb of fire was held of old, Our Sages new ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... have left speculations on the origin of species to such dreamers as the author of the 'Vestiges', by whose well-intentioned efforts the Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation in the minds of all sound thinkers. Notwithstanding this silence, however, the transmutation theory, as it has been called, has been a "skeleton in the closet" to many an honest zoologist and botanist who had a soul above the mere naming of dried plants and skins. Surely, has such an one thought, nature ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... like that before. The baby she had looked forward to—the baby she hadn't had—had never been thought of that way either. It was to be something to provide her, Rose, with an occupation; to enable her to interpret her life in new terms; to make an alchemic change in the very substance of it. The transmutation hadn't taken place. She surmised now, dimly, that she ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of fighters did the Carmagnoles ultimately become; but France ran a fearful risk in being obliged to rely on them when the process of their transmutation had ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... dishonest or dishonourable. When he was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five once swallowed a whole bottle of his elixir. Nobody recognised her, for she had become a girl of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... N. change, alteration, mutation, permutation, variation, modification, modulation, inflexion, mood, qualification, innovation, metastasis, deviation, turn, evolution, revolution; diversion; break. transformation, transfiguration; metamorphosis; transmutation; deoxidization[Chem]; transubstantiation; mutagenesis[Genet], transanimation[obs3], transmigration, metempsychosis|; avatar; alterative. conversion &c. (gradual change) 144; revolution &c. (sudden ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... colours into several bodies, and divers other qualities; how it dissolves some, and hardens others; how it can consume almost all, or convert them into ashes and smoak: and last of all, how of those ashes, by the only violence of its action, it forms glass. For this transmutation of ashes into glass, seeming to me to be as admirable as any other operation in Nature, I particularly took ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... comprehension of classical models and the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediaeval fancy; the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... This transmutation of the reproductive energy gives great vitality to those practicing it. They will be filled with great vital force, which will radiate from them and will manifest in what has been called "personal magnetism." The energy thus transmuted may be turned ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... round the corner, than was ever dreamed of by the wisest of those who have grown old among furnaces and crucibles and retorts; wearing their lives away in a search after perpetual youth, and their substance in that which sooner and more surely than "riotous living" impoverisheth a man—the transmutation of the baser metals into gold—you fall a whistling maybe—or beg leave to suggest the word fudge. If so, take my word for it, like a pretty woman with the small-pox, the probability is, you are very much to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... physics point very strongly to such a conclusion, and agrees with Faraday, that, "to decompose the metals, then to reform them, to change them from one to another, and to realize the once absurd notion of transmutation, are the problems now given to the chemist for solution." We consider Professor Crookes to be one of the most eminent scientists now living, and any views he may advance are entitled to serious ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... inconceivable that Congress should for long content itself with an abode which, without being venerable, is simply out of date. The main architectural proportions of the interior are dignified enough. What is wanted is merely the transmutation of stucco into marble, painted pine into oak, and pseudo-Italian arabesques into American frescoes and mosaics. Why should Congress itself be more meanly ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... AEquitas was understood to convey an allusion to the Greek theory, associations which grew out of the Greek notion of [Greek: isotes] began to cluster round it. The language of Cicero renders it more than likely that this was so, and it was the first stage of a transmutation of the conception of Equity, which almost every ethical system which has appeared since those days has more or less helped to ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... conversation. Chymistry was a part of Johnson's amusement. For this love of experimental philosophy, sir John Hawkins thinks an apology necessary. He tells us, with great gravity, that curiosity was the only object in view; not an intention to grow suddenly rich by the philosopher's stone, or the transmutation of metals. To enlarge this circle, Johnson, once more, had recourse to a literary club. This was at the Turk's head, in Gerard street, Soho, on every Tuesday evening through the year. The members were, besides himself, the right honourable Edmund Burke, sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Nugent, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... The old belief that the alchemist at his utmost cunning could recreate rose blooms from their own ashes had sure foundation. I have seen the sun do it every June in countless gardens where, out of this same humus and soft rains, his potency works the transmutation as if in a night. So on July days this father of transmuters melts in his crucible, of which the earth under our feet seems always the very bottom of the bowl, many ingredients, and distils from them this pure gold. Soon after he passes the meridian you may ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who married the other." ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... while the great quantities that were then produced by the chemists—or as we should now-a-days call them alchemists—may be said to have taken them out of the category of the precious metals. This power of transmutation of metals was not universal, but it was so widely possessed that enormous quantities were made. In fact the production of the wished-for metals may be regarded as one of the industrial enterprises of those days ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... talk with the girl that is next one; And, pour passer le temps, with the terminus all but in prospect, Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven. Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion! Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only! Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion, Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light of our knowledge! But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage procession? But ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies—derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... can continue; but almost the only thing we are really conscious of is our own identity, our sharp separation from the mass of phenomena that are not ourselves. And, if an emotion can survive the transmutation of the entire frame, may it not also survive the dissolution ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... booke, and woefull Tragedie, Of the Rhodian feareful oppugnation, To all estates complaining ruthfully Of thine estate, and sudden transmutation: Excusing me if in thy translation Ought be amisse in language or in werke, I me submit with their supportation, To be correct, that ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... heads that water the spiritual fields of his philosophy and the seeds from which they are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but one spiritual garden). His experiments, social and economic, are a part of its cultivation and for the harvest—and its transmutation, he trusts to moments of inspiration—"only what is thought, said, and done at a certain rare ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... insuring and increasing children's fortunes; for insuring masters and mistresses against losses from the carelessness or misconduct of servants; for insuring against thefts and robberies; for extracting silver from lead; for the transmutation of silver into malleable fine metal; for buying and fitting out ships to suppress pirates; for a wheel for perpetual motion, and—with which project, perhaps, we may close our list of specimens—"for ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... proud and independent French citizens feared that even the latter alternative meant the eventual transmutation of their tongue, religion and nationality into those of their southern neighbor. Seeking a way of salvation, they built six huge space-ships that would hold thirty thousand people, most of whom would be in deep freeze until they reached their destination. The six vessels then set off into ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... Ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the Hymn of Pan and The Indian Serenade. The Cloud is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... geology to-day is that species seem to come in suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species take their places apparently by substitution, not by transmutation." ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... a chymical term expressive of the highest powers of transmutation, and sometimes used for any ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... hopes are in the direction of proving that bodies called simple were really compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as we are masters of the laws influencing their combinations,"—when he comes forward and says that he has tried experiments at transmutation, and means, if his life is spared, to try them again,—how can we be surprised at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a gold-factory and is glutting the mints of Europe with bullion ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... becoming a practical one. The curious thing is that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative, unmilitant, unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in type, should have become, by a mysterious transmutation, the religion of active, inventive, conquering nations. I have no doubt that the essence of Christianity lies in a contemplative simplicity, and that it is in strong opposition to what is commonly called civilisation. It aims at improving society through the ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ungratefully rejoice with Sophocles at being "set free from service to a band of madmen," that ripening of his nature which comes most fruitfully of a generous exercise of its powers will have instinctively taught him that secret of the transmutation of the passions which is one of the most precious rewards of experience. It is quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion for first editions, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... is the view to which we are most inclined—first, because we think a transmutation of species, from a lower to a higher type, has not been satisfactorily proved; and second, because of the strong impression we entertain, that the universe, subject to certain cyclical and determinate mutations, was made complete ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... following Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call, in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk furniture—too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed—too much of its upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost—and taste. An enlargement from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... upon the development hypothesis, lately narrated to me by a friend, one of the disputants was described as arguing that as, in all our experience, we know no such phenomenon as transmutation of species, it is unphilosophical to assume that transmutation of species ever takes place. Had I been present I think that, passing over his assertion, which is open to criticism, I should have replied that, as ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... our own enlightened age still study its maxims. A society exists to-day the object of which is to further the knowledge of alchemical science. A common misapprehension is current to the effect that the object of the alchemists was the transmutation of the baser metals into gold, but in reality they were divided into two groups, those who sought eagerly the secret of manufacturing the precious metals, and those who dreamed of a higher aim, the transmutation of the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... was most probably due to the fact that he was a man, though Madge averred that they would have had another quarter of a mile of gurgling brook, and at least two west winds sighing through their redwoods, had Walt properly devoted his energies to song-transmutation and left Wolf alone to exercise a natural taste ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... The passions of the sensitive appetite may either be venial sins in themselves, or incline the soul to mortal sin. And since the sensitive appetite has a bodily organ, it follows that on account of some bodily transmutation a man becomes apt to commit some particular sin. Hence it may happen that certain sins may become more insistent, through certain bodily transmutations occurring at certain fixed times. Now all bodily effects, of themselves, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... not without a hope, not to say a certainty, of verifying the golden visions of the alchymists. Dr. Girtanner, of Gottingen, not long ago adventured the following prophecy: "In the nineteenth century the transmutation of metals will be generally known and practised. Every chemist and every artist will make gold; kitchen utensils will be of silver, and even gold, which will contribute more than anything else to prolong life, poisoned at present by the oxides of copper, lead, and iron, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... proved. [Footnote: When heated air imparts its motion to another gas or vapour, the transference of heat is accompanied by a change of vibrating period. The Dynamic Radiation of vapours is rendered possible by this transmutation of vibrations.] ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of Chivalry is gone,' and could not but go, having now produced the still more indomitable Age of Hunger. Altars enough, of the Dubois-Rohan sort, changing to the Gobel-and-Talleyrand sort, are faring by rapid transmutation to, shall we say, the right Proprietor of them? French Game and French Game-Preservers did alight on the Cliffs of Dover, with cries of distress. Who will say that the end of much is not come? A set of mortals ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... told me at Riga that you would like me to give you the secret by which I transmuted iron into copper; I never did so, but now I shall teach you how to make a much more marvellous transmutation. I should point out to you, however, that you are not at present in a suitable place for the operation, although all the materials are easily procurable. The operation necessitates my presence for the construction of a furnace, and for the great ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... converted into a mass of solid gold, which proved, on assay, to be of the purest quality. Every one was questioned as to what he had cast into the furnace, when there appeared no reason to suppose the transmutation could have been effected by such an accidental mixture of metals. At length it was remarked, that a dervish, accompanying the barber's son, had cast in a lump of ore, and immediately disappeared. Upon this the sultan summoned the youth to ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... based on concept and history; it was the philosophy of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in their own strength. Now at last I knew Nietzsche. I knew the rightness of the books, the relation of high thinking to high-conduct, the transmutation of midnight thought into action in the high place on the poop of a coal- carrier in the year nineteen-thirteen, my woman beside me, my ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed servitors under me, the beasts beneath me and beneath the heel of me. God! ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Alchimy, its Original and Antiquity, the Vessels and Instruments belonging thereunto. Secondly, of the Philosophers Stone, what is meant by it, and whether by means thereof true Gold can be produced? And in general, whether there be any such thing, as a true and real Transmutation of one Mettal into another? Where are delivered the several Processes of the reputed Adepti, Raymund Lulle, Azoth, Arnold de Villanova, Paracelsus, Sendivogius, &c. but all exploded as fals and deceitful. Thirdly, {113} of the decisions in Law ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... she felt slowly coming into her, like a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still, watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that transmutation of the dead matter below it, into something shining ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the pious frauds of more recent adepts. The Greeks were inattentive either to the use or to the abuse of chemistry. In that immense register, where Pliny has deposited the discoveries, the arts, and the errors of mankind, there is not the least mention of the transmutation of metals; and the persecution of Diocletian is the first authentic event in the history of alchemy. The conquest of Egypt by the Arabs diffused that vain science over the globe. Congenial to the avarice ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... towards a better state. Mere ignorance, arising from the imperfection of our perceptive powers, of the mode in which we shall pass into that better state, or of its precise relation to our present existence, cannot cancel an assurance, otherwise valid, of our general destiny. A transmutation of humanity, such as we can conceive to be brought about by the gradual prevalence of higher motives of action, and the gradual elimination thereby of what is base and brutish, is surely no more incredible than the actual development of humanity, as it is now, out ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... stone of travertine or tufa hewn out for domestic buildings within the same period. The construction of St. Peter's itself involved more destruction of classical monuments than all the appropriations of previous and subsequent Vandals put together. Much has been lost on account of this extraordinary transmutation and reconsecration, whose loss we can never cease to deplore; but we must not forget at the same time that much has been conserved which would otherwise have wasted away under the slow ravages of time, been consigned to the lime-kiln, or disappeared ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... consumption of the time employed, but probably it proved of use to him when he had to discuss in the "Origin of Species" the principles of a natural classification. From September, 1854, and during the four ensuing years, Darwin devoted himself to observing and experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species, and in arranging a huge pile of notes upon the subject. As early as October, 1838, it had occurred to him as probable, or at least possible, that amid the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on in the animal world, favorable variations ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... of the world centuries ago. Even the most recent and startling scientific discoveries occasionally serve to prove that what we supposed to be the fantastic beliefs of the ancients were really truths of nature that we were not yet able to comprehend! The transmutation of metals is an example. We have already gone far enough in that direction to show that the alchemists of old were not the foolish and superstitious people we supposed them to be. We have given far too little credit to past civilizations and we are coming to understand ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... how such a Spirit of Mercury may be procured, how to be made, and after what manner it is to be prepared to expel Diseases, and change all the kinds of the meaner and baser Metals, as if they were born in a little world, by transmutation and augmentation of their Seed; many expect this with impatience. I answer without concealing any thing, but will truly discover as much as is permitted me by Gods Command, ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... principles more extensively diffused through different lichen species." Dr. L. entered somewhat minutely on the chemical reactions of the better known colorific and coloring principles, and their derivatives, so far at least as these throw any light on the production and transmutation of the red or purple colors extracted from what may be termed par excellence, the dye-lichens. After a few remarks on the chemical constitution of orchil and litmus, as given by Kane, Gelis, Pereira, and others, he discussed the subject of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... weather-beaten farm-house. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a lofty door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated wood that had been brought from beyond the sea. The windows, from the floor to the ceiling of each ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... nature of the machine used in the operation, there are invariably wastes, both of heat required for conversion into power and of the power thus produced. That machine which effects the most complete transmutation of the heat supplied it into mechanical power, which wastes the least amount of heat supplied and of power produced, is the best engine, and constitutes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... with far greater realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts. Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... rhymes to catch the ears of women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. She would not burn the world for him; she would not, though a purer poetry is little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or essence, in honour of him, and so, by love's transmutation, literally be the man she was to marry. She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of women. She said it: she said: "I must be myself to be of any value to you, Willoughby." He was indefatigable in his lectures on the aesthetics of love. Frequently, for an indemnification to her (he had no desire ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with warm eulogy. The opinions and the attachments of Paul Foley were at first those of his family. But be, like Harley, became, merely from the vehemence of his Whiggism, an ally of the Tories, and might, perhaps, like Harley, have been completely metamorphosed into a Tory, if the process of transmutation had not been interrupted by death. Foley's abilities were highly respectable, and had been improved by education. He was so wealthy that it was unnecessary for him to follow the law as a profession; but he had studied ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... helium lies in the clue it has afforded to the constitution of matter and the transmutation of the elements. Radium and other radioactive substances, such as uranium, spontaneously emit negatively charged particles of extremely small mass (electrons), and also positively charged particles of ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... the crudely materialistic theories of the real presence which were then prevalent. He protested against the statement that the transmutation of the elements takes place "vere et sensualiter," and that "portiunculae" of the body of Christ lie upon the altar. "The mouth," he said, "receives the sacrament, the inner man the true body ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... sense of the word, alchemy is the pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian era; thence it passed to the Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to western Europe, and its realization was a leading aim of chemical workers down to the time of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a Brahmin, and the Chinese gong that was so prominent an object in the hall into a piece of Benares brassware, he could almost have fancied himself as standing on the brink of the sacred river. The marigolds in the garden required no transmutation.... ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... its present ephemeral form in a state of equilibrium with its surroundings. Not only is this struggle manifest among living forms, among birds and beasts and insects in their competition for food and habitat, but—if we may believe the revelations of the science of radio-activity—a process of transmutation, of disintegration of the atoms of one element with simultaneous formation of another element, is taking place in every fragment of inanimate matter, a process which parallels in character the more transitory ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... difficulty proceeds from its not being possible to define a difference, or an equality, of entropy between two bodies chemically different. We are unable, in fact, to pass by any means, reversible or not, from one to the other, so long as the transmutation of matter is regarded as impossible; but it is well understood that it is nevertheless possible to compare the variations of entropy to which these two bodies are ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... novitiate and culture; he yearns for action. His masters tell him that the world is coy, must be approached cautiously, and with something substantial in the hand. The old bird will not be caught with chaff. He does not yet understand the process of accumulation and transmutation. The fate of the Danaides is his, and he draws long with a bottomless bucket. But at last his incompetency can no further be concealed. Then he either submits to the suggestions of despair and oblivion or bravely begins his work. The exhilaration and satisfaction ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... proposed has no relation to other features of the story; it is consequently of value in, and per se, only, and cannot be regarded as valid evidence for the source of the legend as a whole. In the process of transmutation from Ritual to Romance, the kernel, the Grail legend proper, may be said to have formed for itself a shell composed of accretions of widely differing provenance. It is the legitimate task of criticism to analyse such accretions, and to resolve them into ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodeling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has ever since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... introduced the idea of transmutation of species, suggesting that by changes in habitat, climate, and manner of living one species may, in the course of generations, be transformed into ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... am at this moment drawn instinctively only to two among them all—to William Blake and to Paul Verlaine; and this is an indication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy or psychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation of the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low, sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, and bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep and magical, such as have no concern ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of the Book of the Dead consist usually of a string of petitions for sepulchral offerings to be offered in the tombs of the petitioners, and the fundamental idea underlying them is that by their transmutation, which was effected by the words of the priests, the spirits of the offerings became available as the food of the dead. Many prayers contain requests for the things that tend to the comfort and general well-being of the dead, but here and there we ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... rose insensibly—purple, pink, and orange—changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great clefts and veiled the rolling domes and swathed the pinnacles and furrowed the deep passes and put the horizon infinitely far away. The transmutation from conditions in which Nature herself seemed for once to be barbaric, alien, hostile to civilized man, painted with Cheyenne war-paint and girdled with a belt of scalps, to this breaking up of glory into glory, of color into color, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at Milan—his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence! His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style, with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this narrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that larger vision of the opening world, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... to see that letter-head, but aren't you afraid to enter into competition with Mr. Tumulty, who has now, I see, bought the old Shepard mansion and will settle in Washington. How do they do it with the high cost of living what it is? ... The transmutation of brass into ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... of this transmutation led to much fruitful thinking. The boundary between Polotzk and the rest of the world was not, as I had supposed, a physical barrier, like the fence which divided our garden from the street. The world went like ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... extract the strength from those five hundred sweating bodies and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export. His dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to effect the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt, three inches wide and a yard in length, with which he always rode and which, on occasion, could come down on the naked back of a stooping coolie with a report like a pistol-shot. These reports were frequent when Schemmer ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... blind belief in those hidden natural forces and secret virtues of privileged objects, which formed the nucleus of mediaeval scientific research. The field is a fertile one for the imagination and possesses a strange attraction for certain minds. There are men alive in our own time to whom the transmutation of metals does not seem an impossibility, nor the brewing of the elixir of life a matter to be scoffed at as a matter of course. The world is full of people who, in their inmost selves, put faith in the latent qualities of precious stones and amulets, who believe their fortunes, their ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... it is transmutation. Between the ancient and the present sewer there is a revolution. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... city a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors, and, by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple. Virgil in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the esoteric and transcendental utterances which Kelley credited to the spirits, he cleverly introduced sufficient in the way of references to the elixir of life and the transmutation of metals, to keep alive in Dee's breast the hope of ultimately solving the crucial problems of medieval science. All the money Dee could procure was spent on ingredients for magical formulas, and to such lengths did his enthusiasm carry him that before long ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... in the long run that Lincoln's credit and the popular confidence that supported it were as valuable both to his creditors and himself as if the sums which stood over his signature had been gold coin in a solvent bank. But this transmutation was not attained until he had passed through a very furnace of financial embarrassment. Berry proved a worthless partner, and the business a sorry failure. Seeing this, Lincoln and Berry sold out again on credit—to the Trent brothers, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... presents no valid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out of the historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianity arose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by the unconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figures came, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginative collection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literal truths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historical and critical information for entering ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... wonted nourishment by vapours and exhalations, wherewith Heraclitus said, the Stoics proved, Cicero maintained, they were cherished and alimented. There would likewise be in such a world no manner of symbolization, alteration, nor transmutation amongst the elements; for the one will not esteem itself obliged to the other, as having borrowed nothing at all from it. Earth then will not become water, water will not be changed into air, of air ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... shall always be glad of this year with the Corystons. How much longer will this rich, leisurely, aristocratic class with all its still surviving power and privileges exist among us? It is something that obviously is in process of transmutation and decay; though in a country like England the process will be a very slow one. Personally I greatly prefer this landlord stratum to the top stratum of the trading and manufacturing world. There are buried seeds in it, often of rare and splendid kinds, which any crisis ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... any who are likely to apply; and your interest would be strengthened by the opportunity of placing some good friend in Selkirkshire, besides converting the Minstrel of the Clan into a Baron,—a transmutation worthy of so powerful and kind a chief. But if your Grace thinks I ought to drop thoughts of this preferment, I am bound to say, that I think myself as well provided for by my friends and the public as I have the least title to expect, and that I am perfectly contented ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Calmuck's. It only requires to obliterate the root of the nose and to flatten the nostrils. The dog Latin of the Middle Ages had a reason for its creation of the verb denasare. Had Gwynplaine when a child been so worthy of attention that his face had been subjected to transmutation? Why not? Needed there a greater motive than the speculation of his future exhibition? According to all appearance, industrious manipulators of children had worked upon his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious and probably occult science, which was to surgery ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the managers, than any of ours. But this is not merely a money concern. There is another member in the system inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale, and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land and land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate. By this means the spirit of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the Gods. If any one were to form or fashion all things without any regard to the whole—if, for example, he formed a living element of water out of fire, instead of forming many things out of one or one out of many in regular order attaining to a first or second or third birth, the transmutation would have been infinite; but now the ruler of the world ...
— Laws • Plato
... his famous diamonds on his wife's fair bosom, little guessing they were Mr. Harker's tawdry glass mockeries. Capital, Harker, but take care, take care. Remember the duchess who brought her jewels to pledge, and discovered that they were paste already, and that the duke had done the transmutation before her. Beware!" ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... originally a little piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case." Nobody could say at what moment of the history of his development man became consciously intelligent. The whole question was not so much one of a transmutation or transition of species as of the production of forms which became permanent. The Ancon sheep was not produced gradually; it originated in the birth of the original parent of the whole stock, which had been kept up by a ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... to his overseers the value of fertilization; in one case, when looking for a new overseer, he said the man must be, "above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards gold;—in a word one who can bring worn out and gullied Lands into good tilth in the shortest time." Equally emphatic was his urging of constant ploughing and grubbing, and he even invented a deep soil plough, which he used till he found a better one ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... no young lady in all Boston seemed less likely to become a man in the next or any subsequent incarnation. There are Bostonian persons of the female kind who could with readiness be conceived as turning into men without any sea-change or especially startling biological transmutation. But Isabel was not one of them. Small and dainty, she was of the gold-and-white, essentially feminine type. She lived alone with her parents in the solid old-fashioned house on the north side of the Common, almost under the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... indeed shown himself an admirable chemist, and made a fine transmutation of folly into wisdom. But all the later Platonists took the same method of defending our faith when it was attacked by the Christians; and certainly a more judicious one could not be found. Our fables ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... of its pleasant vegetable taste. When about to pass into the chrysalis state, it buries itself in the soil, and is sometimes sought for as food even then. If left undisturbed, it comes forth as a beautiful butterfly: the transmutation was sometimes employed by me with good effect when speaking with the natives, as an illustration of our ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the Son by generation should attain to the possession of the perfection of the nature which is in the Father, in the same way as it is in the Father Himself. But since in men generation is a certain kind of transmutation of one proceeding from potentiality to act, it follows that a man is not equal at first to the father who begets him, but attains to equality by due growth, unless owing to a defect in the principle of generation it should happen ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... study. They may be distinguished as physical, moral, and historical. Few of these arguments, taken separately, can be called altogether new. Their new power has been caused by the simultaneous filling up and completion of all of them; by their transmutation from filmy visions into massive and vast realities; from unauthorised misgivings into the most rigid and compelling of demonstrations: and still more, by the brilliant and sudden annihilation of the most obvious difficulties, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... of this transmutation lies fundamentally in the nature of representation. Representation can never be identical with its object. Helmholtz has made this most clear: "Our visions and representations are effects; objects seen and represented have worked on our nervous system and on our consciousness. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... to the starving and the oppressed?" And he does not see that his passionate desire for justice is at root the quest for beauty, for fullness and harmony of life. His stormy sky shows no rainbow: yet it is there. And so is the stately music, the transmutation of colour into sound. And if his eyes could be opened to one and his ears to the other, there would be more power to his elbow. For beauty is inspiration ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life's treasure house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophizing ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... ART of the poem; and this perhaps, is what at first sight will strike the student most. He chose as a foundation for his work those laments of Bion for Adonis, and of Moschus for Bion, which are the most pathetic products of Greek idyllic poetry; and the transmutation of their material into the substance of highly spiritualized modern thought, reveals the potency of a Prospero's wand. It is a metamorphosis whereby the art of excellent but positive poets has been translated into the sphere of metaphysical ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... liquid state and hardens others; how it can consume almost all bodies, or convert them into ashes and smoke; and finally, how from these ashes, by the mere intensity of its action, it forms glass: for as this transmutation of ashes into glass appeared to me as wonderful as any other in nature, I took a special pleasure in describing it. I was not, however, disposed, from these circumstances, to conclude that this ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... raised many other interesting questions, besides that which we have just dealt with. In radio-active elements, such as uranium for example, the element is breaking down; in what we call radio-activity we have a manifestation of the spontaneous change of elements. What is really taking place is a transmutation of one element into another, from a heavier to a lighter. The element uranium spontaneously becomes radium, and radium passes through a number of other stages until it, in turn, becomes lead. Each descending ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... 'Alchemy, transmutation of metals, and the like have been set aside by true science,' remarked the taller officer. 'Even old Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich, who is ever ready to plead the cause of the ancients, can find nothing to say in favour of it. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, assuming the transmutation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... is carrying delicacy far indeed, it reads to Christian wives a lesson not unworthy of their attention; for, though it is not desirable that their bodies should be turned into handfuls of ashes, even that transmutation were preferable to that infidelity which fixes the brand of shame on the cheeks of their parents, their children, and on those of all who ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... a portion of his history. But he did not tell you that his continued failures in his search after the secret of metallic transmutation nearly killed him. Two years ago he was on the verge of the grave, working every day at his mad pursuit, and every day growing weaker and more emaciated. I saw that if his mind was not relieved in some way he would die. The thought was madness to me, for I loved ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... mention one novelty that Paracelsus (1493-1541) introduced into the theory. Ibn Sina had taught that two principles entered into the constitution of metals. Mercury is the bearer of the metallic property and sulphur has the nature of the combustible and is the cause of the transmutation of metals in fire. The doctrine of the two principles leads to the theory that for the production of gold it was necessary to get from metals the purest possible sulphur and mercury, in order to produce gold by the union of both. Paracelsus now adds to the two principles ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... condition of becoming conscious of anything, yet remains in constant change. Impressions pour in through the senses, enter the Whole that is already present; they drop their content into that Whole by means of the senses, and the miracle of transmutation, entirely ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... system. Before the war they owned labor, land, and subsistence. After the war they still held the land and subsistence. The laborer was hired and the subsistence "advanced" to him while the crop was growing. The fall of the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... hundreds of commonplace Scotch gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and stock breeders then living who knew better. Linnaeus himself knew better before he died. In the last edition of his System of Nature, he began to wonder whether the transmutation of species by variation might not be possible. Then came the great poet who jumped over the facts to the conclusion. Goethe said that all the shapes of creation were cousins; that there must be some common stock from which all the species ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... directed in their quest by a hungrier mind, mark the second great characteristic of early childhood. These are the channels through which the world around comes into the life of the child. The sights and sounds of the physical realm, when carried beyond the portals of the senses, under the marvelous transmutation of God's touch, become ideas. The process, in so far as its secret has been revealed, will not be discussed at this point, but rather the relation of these impressions ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... miracle, M. Renan has indeed got into a sorry plight, and Mr. Rogers, in controverting him, has not greatly helped the matter. By stirring M. Renan's bemuddled pool, Mr. Rogers has only bemuddled it the more. Neither of these excellent writers seems to suspect that transmutation of species, the geologic development of the earth, and other like phenomena do not present features conflicting with ordinary experience. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Darwin would be greatly astonished to be told that ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... very first. Secondly, that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic divines. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... there lived a rich old king, who had abundance of treasures, health, and many children. But he did not wish to die, and, hence, spent his days in studying the lore and arts of the alchemists, who believed they would finally attain to the transmutation of lead into gold, find the universal solvent of all things, the philosophers' stone, the elixir of life, and all the wondrous secrets which men in Europe ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... says, "Professor Mller claims to have found in language an endowment which has no analogies, and no preparations in even the beings nearest to man, and of which, therefore, no process of transmutation could furnish an explanation. Here is the pivot on which his whole ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... infringed, so long as a part of the old articles remain? Those who maintain the affirmative ought at least to mark the boundary between authorized and usurped innovations; between that degree of change which lies within the compass of ALTERATIONS AND FURTHER PROVISIONS, and that which amounts to a TRANSMUTATION of the government. Will it be said that the alterations ought not to have touched the substance of the Confederation? The States would never have appointed a convention with so much solemnity, nor described its objects with so much latitude, if some SUBSTANTIAL reform had not been in contemplation. ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... a part. Thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee; but rather thou shalt be received back into its seminal principle by transmutation. ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... But this is not merely a money concern. There is another member in the system inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale; and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land, and of land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate. By this means ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... law which an able French physician merely pointed out in his studies on the relations between Transmutation and Socialism,[50] and the truth and full importance of which I showed in my Sociologie criminelle (1892)—before I became a militant socialist—and which I again emphasized in my recent controversy with Morselli on the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... profound tranquillity, internal and external, and our annalists find leisure to advert to various circumstances of domestic history. They mention a corporation formed for the transmutation of iron into copper by the method of one Medley an alchemist, of which the learned but credulous sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state, was a principal promoter, and in which both Leicester and Burleigh embarked some capital. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... of popular superstition do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible." This observation has a still greater value when applied to Hawthorne himself. And out of this questioning belief and transmutation of superstition into truth—for such is more exactly his method—proceeds also that quality of value and rarity and awe-enriched significance, with which he irradiates real life until it is sublimed to a delicate cloud-image ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... period this was the favourite slang term of the smashing fraternity for the metal used in their nefarious business, the spoons manufactured by Messrs. Yates and Son being the best material for transmutation into base coin. ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... prosperous-looking gentleman who had just addressed them into that image of threadbare poverty and hunger-pinched dejection? Little aid from theatrical costume: the clothes seemed the same, only to have grown wondrous aged and rusty. The face, the figure, the man,—these had undergone a transmutation beyond the art of the mere stage wardrobe, be it ever so amply stored, to effect. But for the patch over the eye, you could not have recognized Mr. Chapman. There was, indeed, about him, still, an air of dignity; but it was the dignity ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... without mistrust and urged by questions, developed his theories. He believed in the absolute equality of men before God, in the transmutation of souls: and the resurrection of the flesh seemed to him the utmost absurdity. He quite thought that there were future rewards and penalties, but he had too much faith in the goodness of God to suppose that the expiation could be eternal. He allied himself ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... partakes of the one must, in some manner, also become a partaker of the other. The bread, therefore, becomes the medium, the vehicle, the conveyance, that carries to the communicant the body of Christ, and the wine likewise His blood. And this, we repeat, without any gross material transmutation or mixing together. The bread and wine are the earthen vessels that carry the Heavenly treasures of Christ's body and blood, even as the letters and words of the Scriptures convey to the reader or hearer the Holy Spirit. This is the clear, plain, Bible doctrine ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... places), the right-hand one must be the biggest—the Father, the Son to the left, and the Spirit in the middle, the aspersion being made in this order. Boccaccio, in the "Genealogy of the Gods," refers to a similar custom in his day in Florence, evidently the survival, or transmutation, of some heathen rite. After supper the hymn "Es wurde geboren der Himmels Koenig von der unbefleckten Jungfrau Maria" is sung, and then the young people usually play Christmas games. Little houses are made of flour or bran, with a piece of money ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species examined by a Graduate of the University of Cambridge. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... painted, and wore their shirts over the rest of their dress; while coloured pasteboard and ribbons furnished out decorations for others. Those who wanted all these properties, blacked their faces, and turned their jackets inside out; and thus the transmutation of the whole assembly into a set of mad grotesque mummers, was at ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... side of the intellectual movement of the period. This other side showed itself in mystical attempts at reducing nature to law in the light of the traditional problems which had been set, to wit, those of alchemy and astrology: the discovery of the philosopher's stone, of the transmutation of metals, of the elixir of life, and of the correspondences between the planets and terrestrial bodies. Among the most prominent exponents of these investigations may be mentioned Philippus von Hohenheim ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... confidence of those, who having already done much, are easily persuaded that they can do more. When Rowley had completed the orrery, he attempted the perpetual motion; when Boyle had exhausted the secrets of vulgar chymistry, he turned his thoughts to the work of transmutation[l]. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... about leanthropy or transmutation of man into lion, an idea likely to linger on, ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... nature yield to it when we are rendering to our friends the solemn testimony of our love? more forcibly than by giving proof that thoughts cannot, even upon this impulse, assume an outward life without a transmutation and a fall. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... apparently felt no interest in the poets, orators, and historians of antiquity. In the study of Aristotle, and in metaphysical philosophy, they were proficients. Medicine, also, they cultivated with success. They delved in Alchemy in the search for the transmutation of metals. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... twisted cordage three, Denoteth the Scriptural Trinity Of Morals, and Symbols, and History; And the upward and downward motion show That we touch upon matters high and low; And the constant change and transmutation Of action and of contemplation, Downward, the Scripture brought from on high, Upward, exalted again to the sky; Downward, the literal interpretation, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... forces which operate constantly, is originally known to us in the stress or pressure to which muscular exertion in contact with a material body gives rise. Such a force if it could be correctly measured, would record the rate at which Energy was undergoing transmutation, and it is from such experience of pressure that our idea ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... are acquainted with who talks of making gold by the transmutation of one metal, by means of an alcahest[70] into another, is Zozimus the Pomopolite, who lived about the commencement of the fifth century, and who has a treatise express upon it, called, "The divine art of making gold and silver," in manuscript, and is, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... a philosopher from Lower Germany shall come, first to Amsterdam in Holland, and afterwards to London. He will bring with him a world of curiosities, and among them a pretended secret for the transmutation of metals. Under the umbrage of this mighty secret he shall pass upon the world for some time; but at length he shall be detected, and proved to be nothing but an empiric and a cheat, and so forced to sneak ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... now sat down to table, but was so occupied with her grief for the blighted roses that she did not even notice the wonderful transmutation of her china bowl. Perhaps this was all the better; for Marygold was accustomed to take pleasure in looking at the queer figures, and strange trees and houses, that were painted on the circumference of the bowl; and these ornaments were now entirely lost in ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... we ought, but we aren't,' retorted Horatio. 'I found a tadpole in an advanced stage of transmutation, Miss Palliser, and it has almost converted me to Darwinism. Given a single step and you may accept the whole ladder. If from tadpoles frogs, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... gradually transformed. When once the plant has faded away completely, this form will have become fully developed in its place. Birth and death are conceptions which lose their value in the imaginative world, making way for a comprehension of the transmutation of the one ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner |
