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Anomaly   /ənˈɑməli/   Listen
Anomaly

noun
(pl. anomalies)
1.
Deviation from the normal or common order or form or rule.  Synonym: anomalousness.
2.
A person who is unusual.  Synonym: unusual person.
3.
(astronomy) position of a planet as defined by its angular distance from its perihelion (as observed from the sun).



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"Anomaly" Quotes from Famous Books



... atrocious anomaly that the treatment often meted out to insane persons is the very treatment which would deprive some sane persons of their reason? Miners and shepherds who penetrate the mountain fastnesses sometimes become mentally ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... the deep depression under which he laboured at this time, chiefly the result of ill-health. "It was," he said, "an unheard-of anomaly that the Foreign Minister of a great Empire should be responsible also for internal affairs." And yet he himself had arranged that it should be so. The desertion of the Conservative party had, he said, deprived ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... neither a "constitutional republic or democracy," nor has it ever been thus called. Neither is it a "government of the people by the same people"; but it is known and designated as "the Government of the United States." It is an anomaly among governments. Its authority consists solely of certain powers delegated to it, as a common agent, by an association of sovereign and independent States. These powers are to be exercised only for certain ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... monster, and, if it persist, a chicken with its heart on its back, like a hump, may be expected. A curious fact discovered is the duplicity of the heart at the beginning of incubation, two hearts, beating separately, being clearly seen. Another anomaly consists in heads with a frontal swelling, which is filled ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set their house in order after this ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... from? Perhaps it is the simple result of a psychological process which, Konovalov admits, is nothing other than a disease. It is very possible that, in impulsive acts, a psychiatrist would see something analogous to alcoholism, or the symptoms of some other anomaly. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... an anomaly not uncommon in religions, the egg did not always contain the same kind of bird; a lapwing, or a heron, might come out of it,[*] or perhaps, in memory of Horus, one of the beautiful golden sparrow-hawks of Southern Egypt. A Sun-Hawk, hovering in high heaven on outspread wings, at least presented ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... interested at being about to hear from the lips of an intelligent Greek, quite remote from the influence of European opinions, what might seem to him the most astonishing and incomprehensible of all those results which have followed from the action of our political institutions. The anomaly, the only anomaly which had been detected by the vice-consular wisdom, consisted in the fact that Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... wake a response in her. He was powerless to increase her happiness by a hair's breadth. Her nerves would never answer to the inflection of his voice, or the touch of his hand. How could such things be? What anomaly was here? ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... list the bulk of the world will and can only see, if not approbation of, at least indifference to the doctrines such men have professed, and the conduct they have exhibited to the world. It is the frightful anomaly of being a Government divesting itself of all conservative character, which constitutes the danger of our day. As the 'Times,' in one of its spirited articles, says, this very morning, 'that it cares not to see the Monarchy broken in pieces so that ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... truth, a man cannot be a popular lecturer who does not plant himself upon the eternal principles of justice. He must be a democrat, a believer in and an advocate of the equal rights of men. A slavery-loving, slavery-upholding lecturer would be just as much of an anomaly as a slavery-loving and slavery-singing poet. The taint so vitiates the whole aesthetic nature, so poisons the moral sense, so palsies the finer powers, so destroys all true sympathy with universal humanity, that the composition of an acceptable lecture becomes impossible to the man who bears ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... defeated and captured. The king of Ghofan was wounded and made prisoner, and died in the camp of the Ashantee army. Two more provinces were bound to the throne of Kwamina; and we submit that this is an historical anomaly, in that a pagan people subdued an army that emblazoned its banner with the faith ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... by Austria is not alone a geographical and ethnological anomaly: it is a pistol held at the head of Italy. Glance once more at the map, if you please, and you will see what I mean. The Trentino is, you will note, nothing but a prolongation of the valleys of Lombardy ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... morning visitors. The flunkey nature was nowhere completely subdued but in his stomach, and he still divided society into gentry, gentry's flunkeys, and the people who provided for them. A clergyman without a flunkey was an anomaly, belonging to neither of these classes. Mr. Fitchett had an irrepressible tendency to drowsiness under spiritual instruction, and in the recurrent regularity with which he dozed off until he nodded and awaked ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... of those classic souls which by some anomaly, passing by the older lineages and cultures of the East, find birthplace in a bleak untutored village of the West. To this bareness some succumb, and the divine afflatus dies. Still others roam restlessly up and down, searching ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... gentleman remains silent for a few moments. He is deeply impressed with the anomaly of his case, but has not the slightest objection to fasten the responsibility on somebody, never for a moment supposing the law would interpose against the exercise of his very best inclinations. He hopes God will bless him, says it is always his luck; yet he cannot relinquish the idea of somebody ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... bivouac, a place in which families encamp instead of troops, you will see the impossibility of its possessing a graceful, well-ordered, and cultivated society. Then the town is commercial; and no place of mere commerce can well have a reputation for its society. Such an anomaly, I believe, never existed. Whatever may be the usefulness of trade, I fancy few will contend that ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... transforming the political conceptions of the Hungarian nation. Hitherto the forty-three Free Cities had possessed but a single vote in the Diet, as against the sixty-three votes possessed by the Counties. It was now generally admitted that this anomaly could not continue; but inasmuch as civic rights were themselves monopolised by small privileged orders among the townsmen, the problem of constitutional reform carried with it that of a reform of the municipalities. Hungary in short was now ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... measuring out a regular portion of blood at every contraction. John Bell, believing in the Harveian theory, said, "It is awful to think of the unfixed position of the heart;" and Dr. Arnott declared that "the heart, the heart alone, is the ragged anomaly in the laws of fitness in mechanics." The heart was now seen to have a right position; for it should swing loose that its moorings be not endangered; and, as whatever impugns the Creator's unerring wisdom must be wrong, so the presumption is, that whatever vindicates ...
— Theory of Circulation by Respiration - Synopsis of its Principles and History • Emma Willard

... history of plants by no means shows a regular progression from the simple to the complex, but often the contrary. This apparent anomaly is due ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... are anomalous, the Factory being less than the Agricultural. In the instance of 20-33, the anomaly is double, because the sequence of the figures shows that neither of these can be correct; certainly ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. But to what do you attribute the number of satirical women ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... of Languages alone, which I cannot but think a miscarriage. Then the very high marks assigned to Mathematics allow a man to win with no other science, and no other culture, but a middling examination in English. To those that think so highly of foreign languages, this must seem a much greater anomaly than it does to me. I would prefer, however, that such a candidate had traversed a wider field of science, instead of excelling in ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious proof ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... ought neither to admit nor to reject the testimony, but to suspend judgment till it be confirmed or disproved from other sources. Only facts, then, which are contradictory to the laws of Number, Extension, and Universal Causation (since these know no counteraction or anomaly), or to laws nearly as general, are improbable after, as well as before the fact, and only these we should term absolutely impossible, calling other facts improbable only, or, at most, impossible in the circumstances of ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... Lord Kelvin, a look of sudden comprehension overspreading his features. "No doubt it is the internal constitution of the asteroid which is the cause of the anomaly. We must look into that. Let me see? This gentleman's weight is three and one-half times as great as it ought to be. What element is there whose density exceeds the mean density of the earth ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... stood fire.' There can be little doubt that in our own day a cabinet minister without a seat in either House of parliament would be regarded, in Mr. Gladstone's words, as a public inconvenience and a political anomaly, too dark to be tolerated; and he naturally felt it his absolute duty to peep in at every chink and cranny where a seat in parliament could be had. A Peelite, however, had not a good chance at a by-election, and Mr. Gladstone remained out of the House until the general election in the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... mono-patriotism. It is probable that their attitude will change as soon as it is generally realized that personal devotion and loyalty to two causes are not psychologically a self-deception, and that the serving of two masters is not a moral anomaly unless, as in the original adage, one of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... and its price are two different things; and this is the misfortune, the great misfortune of all of us poor, honest folk, who only want justice, and only ask for our own. To solve the social question, therefore we must put a stop to the arbitrariness of prices, and to the anomaly of value (Proudhon's own expressions). And in order to do this we must "constitute" value; i.e., see that every producer shall always, in exchange for his commodity, receive exactly what it costs. Then will private property not only cease ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... Sun, and on axes approximately perpendicular to their orbits. Since he wrote, an exception to this general rule has been discovered in the case of Uranus, and another still more recently in the case of Neptune—judging, at least, from the motions of their respective satellites. This anomaly has been thought to throw considerable doubt on his speculation; and at first sight it does so. But a little reflection shows that the anomaly is not inexplicable, and that Laplace simply went too far in putting down as a certain result of nebular genesis, what ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... truncated where the terminal leaflet had been originally attached. Under some ash-trees growing in a grass- field, 229 petioles were pulled out of worm burrows early in January, and of these 51.5 per cent. had been drawn in by the base, and 48.5 per cent. by the apex. This anomaly was however readily explained as soon as the thick basal part was examined; for in 78 out of 103 petioles, this part had been gnawed by worms, just above the horse-shoe shaped articulation. In most cases there could be no mistake about the gnawing; ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... existing law the child of British parents born in Canton and the child of Chinese parents born in Stepney are equally entitled to boast "Civis Britannicus sum." Lord STANHOPE, regarding this as an objectionable anomaly, brought forward a Bill designed to restrict British nationality to persons of British blood. But, though he did this with the object of enabling the Government to fulfil one of their election pledges, "Britain for the British," he received scant sympathy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various

... old house in which we speak,' pursued her son, 'is an instance of what I say. In my father's earlier time, and in his uncle's time before him, it was a place of business—really a place of business, and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to Rovinghams' the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon them, and in the stewardship of my father's resources, your judgment and watchfulness have been actively exerted, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... aphasia. A set of other accomplishments, such as swimming, riding, fencing, piano-playing, the acquirement of which is physiological, are learned like articulate speech, and nobody calls the person that can not swim an anomaly on that account. The inability to appropriate to one's self these and other co-ordinated muscular movements, this alone is abnormal. But we can not tell in advance in the case of any new-born child whether he will learn to speak or not, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... lectures. There were six chairs, endowed by the (p. 028) city, which were held by students, and the occupant of one of these was entitled to deliver ordinary lectures. Dr Rashdall finds the explanation of this anomaly in an incident in the fourteenth century history of Bologna, when the Tyrant of the City forbade the professors to teach. The student-chairs were rather endowments for the Rectorship or for poor scholars than serious rivals to the ordinary professorships, and the extra-ordinary lectures ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait

... ridicule Socrates, and through him to expose what he considers the corrupt state of education in Athens, he does not disdain to mingle with his low buffoonery the loftiest flights of the imagination—reminding us of the not unlike anomaly of Shakspeare's sublime simile of the "cloud-capp'd towers," in the Tempest. In one part of the play, Strepsi'ades, who has been nearly ruined in fortune by his spendthrift son, goes to Socrates to learn from him the logic that will ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... abandoned. This gatehouse, which is not in the least in the style of the habitation, but gabled and heavily timbered, with quaint cross-beams protruding from surfaces of coarse white stucco, is a very picturesque anomaly in regard to the little gray fortress on the other side of the court. I call this a fortress, but it is a fortress which might easily have been taken, and it must have assumed its present shape at a time when people had ceased to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... numbers after attacks had rapidly occurred several days in succession. That the increase of the eosinophil cells in this instance is directly connected with the attacks, and is not the expression of a permanent constitutional anomaly, is shewn by a case in which v. Noorden found 25% eosinophils during the attack, and a few days later could only observe one example in twelve cover-slip preparations: a diminution therefore ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich

... comes ... when the time of the worship of things shall be past; when the tribal sense of holiday shall have given place to the family sense, and that family shall be mankind; when shall never be seen the anomaly of celebrating in a glorification of little family tables—whose crumbs fall to those without—the birth of him who preached brotherhood; and the mockery of observing with wanton spending the birth of him who had not where to lay ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale

... the fields, unpicked; in the gin-houses, unginned. That in the fields would be plowed under next spring, presenting the strange anomaly of plowing under one crop to raise another of the same kind. But it has been done many times in the ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... indifference. To them the socialist, who had scarcely received a name, was an imaginary being. If he existed, he was only a sort of offspring of the Napoleonic wars—a creature who had not yet fitted into the ordinary course of things. He was an anomaly, a person who howled in beer-houses, and who would presently be regulated, either by the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... urged against trying the novel experiment of creating two Chambers in the same country, each of which would deal with separate classes of the community, but I submit that, in the special circumstances of the case, those objections must be set aside, and that one more anomaly should, for the time being at all events, be added to the many strange institutions which exist in the "Land of Paradox." Whether at some probably remote future period it will be possible to create a Chamber in which Europeans and Egyptians will sit side by side will depend very largely on the conduct ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... further deference to the representations of the Native Congress, in which they were supported by Senators the Hon. W. P. Schreiner, Colonel Stanford, and Mr. Krogh, the Union Government gazetted another Bill in January, 1911, to amend an anomaly which, at that time, was peculiar to the "Free" State: an anomaly under which a Native can neither purchase nor lease land, and native landowners in the "Free" State could only sell their land ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... find traces everywhere of his final malady. But it is exact to say that this wounded genius was, by a singular circumstance, the genius of a robust man. A physiologist would without doubt explain this anomaly by the coexistence of a nervous lesion, light at first, with a muscular, athletic temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in turn those of a hunter ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... studying out my windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I know, won't help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies. So he's still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina and the summer races at Piping Rock. But ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... Theistic Association, chiefly found in Bengal, and the [A]rya Sam[a]j or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Punjab. These forces of new religious feeling are marshalled against caste as a social anomaly and a bar to progress. Mahomedanism in its day was a powerful force arrayed against caste, but its regenerating power has long ago evaporated, for in many districts of India caste ideas are found flourishing among the Mahomedan ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... presence of this great fact, one is led to exclaim: 'How strange!' How monstrous an anomaly! What singular fatality has brought two such irreconcilable opposites together? It is as if two individuals, deadly foes, should by a mysterious chance, encounter each other unexpectedly on some wide, dreary waste of the Arctic solitudes. Whither no other ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Governor of South Australia is peculiarly liable to these calls upon his purse. Every law passed by the Colony has to be ratified at home, so we have a free people at home governing a free people abroad, which is an anomaly, and is daily seen more and ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton

... in the religious prejudices of the people, which could not be violated with safety, one check more upon the caprices of the despot than was found at Rome. Upon the whole, therefore, what affects us on the first reading as a prodigy or anomaly in the frantic outrages of the early Csars—falls within the natural bounds of intelligible human nature, when we state the case considerately. Surrounded by a population which had not only gone through a most vicious and corrupting discipline, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... formative years must necessarily have had in the development of his character. That this exquisite poet, this builder of dreams, should in the common affairs of life have displayed such an effectively practical bent, has always appeared an anomaly; a partial explanation is to be found in the incentive given to his energies by the conditions of his life, and of his father's affairs, at this formative period. To the habitually poor, poverty is a familiar; to the patrician who has had reverses, it may be a foil to his spirit: ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... floods of the Macquarie join the Darling, and in a course much more direct than that through the marshes. Hence the Bogan also, being still less opposed to that of the Darling, finally enters that river without presenting the anomaly of an invisible channel. In like manner, at a much lower point on the Darling, the course of the little stream named Shamrock ponds, so remarkable in this respect, may be understood. This forms a chain of ponds, or a flowing stream, according to the seasons, between the plains on the left bank ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... narrow, but affords room for a deal of strutting and striding about on the part of an overpowering actor in the inevitable belt and boots of the melodramatic highwayman. The play represents certain startling passages in the career of one Claude Duval, formerly a running footman, afterwards—strange anomaly!—a robber on horseback, distinguished for polite ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... shame a system which had received the sanction of centuries of success, which was seemingly Providential in its stability, which had everywhere superseded every other form, which had absorbed into itself the elements of all other systems. Our Government was an anomaly; as such, there were ten chances to one against it. And now, the Englishman who, above all others, is, on both sides of the Atlantic, regarded as the ablest of modern political theorists, has in a series of papers triumphantly vindicated the wisdom of the founders of ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat—to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman. He would rather love and struggle and suffer than stand aloof, thanking ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... enemy—consisting of Jules, Rocco, Miss Spencer, and perhaps others—had been put to flight. But that, he conceived, was not enough; it was very far from being enough. That the criminals, for criminals they decidedly were, should still be at large, he regarded as an absurd anomaly. And there was another point: he had said nothing to the police of all that had occurred. He disdained the police, but he could scarcely fail to perceive that if the police should by accident gain a clue to the real state of the case he might be placed rather ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett

... soon be mended. A few days' knocking about, especially as I fancy we are going to have bad weather, will take the shine out of them, and, once off, take good care not to put it on again. A Boer with clean boots would be an anomaly indeed. Now, I ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty

... Tulliver was brooding over a scheme by which she, and no one else, would avert the result most to be dreaded, and prevent Wakem from entertaining the purpose of bidding for the mill. Imagine a truly respectable and amiable hen, by some portentous anomaly, taking to reflection and inventing combinations by which she might prevail on Hodge not to wring her neck, or send her and her chicks to market; the result could hardly be other than much cackling and fluttering. Mrs. Tulliver, seeing ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... of Order, &c] Disorder — N. disorder; derangement &c 61; irregularity; anomaly &c (unconformity) 83; anarchy, anarchism; want of method; untidiness &c adj.; disunion; discord &c 24. confusion; confusedness &c adj.; mishmash, mix; disarray, jumble, huddle, litter, lumber; cahotage^; farrago; mess, mash, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... misfortune of having married out of the family, and disapproval with the married state in general. Poor souls! How their hard, loving hearts would have been wrung could they but have known the true state of the case! And, strange anomaly, how much deeper would have been their antagonism toward poor, self-sacrificing, loving Marcia! Just because she had dared to think herself fit for David, belonging as she did to her renegade sister Kate. But they did not know, and for this fact David was profoundly thankful. Those were not ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... move about him to be knaves, until he has had opportunity to test their honesty. Young in his knowledge of the people against whom he had been warring for eighteen months, the Intelligence officer was exceedingly puzzled at the strange anomaly presented by the Africander girl he had just left. He could not help feeling that this daughter of a nation which he had led himself, if not to despise, at least to depreciate, had fathomed him in two short interviews, while he had penetrated ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth, of Iceland—tenth to thirteenth centuries. Its case is looked on by students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities. And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... 860 miles of latitude, the glorious river flowed without a tributary. Licked up by the burning sun, and gulped by the exhausting sand of Nubian deserts, supporting all losses by evaporation and absorption, the noble flood shed its annual blessings upon Egypt. An anomaly among rivers; flooding in the driest season; everlasting in sandy deserts; where was its hidden origin? where were the sources ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... executed, they came to the relief of the weak, they conducted the business of the community. In proportion as they ceased to do these things, the burden of their privileges appeared more oppressive, and their existence became an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to do these things." And the Ancien Regime may be defined as the period in which they ceased to do these things—in which they began to play the idlers, and expected to take their old wages without ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley

... rode beside the car and shouted bits of information to them. It was apparent that the chief was well versed in English—had probably lived and been educated in the United States. He was, after all, an anomaly in the company he was with. Janice wondered in what spirit he had become chief with such wild ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long

... only a private, the officer frowned at the anomaly when a lieutenant was present, then smiled in a way that accorded the company parliamentary rights, which he thought ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... military governors of the wide-spreading, newly conquered lands of America. [Footnote: Moses, Spanish Rule in America, 68, 69, 113.] The supremacy of the crown extended to the church as well as to the state. Spain, in the Middle Ages and far into modern times, presented the anomaly of a nation and government most ardently devoted to orthodox Christianity and to the church, and yet jealous and impatient of the powers of the Pope. In 1482 Isabella protested against the use of a papal provision for the appointment of a foreign cardinal to a Castilian ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... done at the Opera-Comique. The poetic character of the part of Orpheus lends itself excellently to such a feminine interpretation. But in resuming the key of the Italian score, it is necessary to go back, at least to a considerable degree, to the instrumentation. By a curious anomaly the beautiful recitative, accompanied by the murmur of brooks and the songs of the birds, is in C major in both scores. The author could not have changed them. On the contrary he modified his instrumentation ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... intention of obeying the rules of common good manners and leaving his farewell card on Lady Auriol. Towards the end of our talk it entered the head of Madame Patou that she would do the same. I pointed out the anomaly of the interval between the two visits. But the head of a Marseillaise is an obstinate one. She dressed, put on her best hat—there is much that is symbolical in a woman's best hat, as doubtless a man of the world like yourself has observed—and took the tram with ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... perfect physical creature in whose strength and nerve and agility her fate lay. Once she raised her eyes to the burning sun and murmured a prayer of thanks to her pagan god that she had not been permitted to destroy this godlike man, and her long lashes were wet with tears. A strange anomaly was La of Opar—a creature of circumstance torn by conflicting emotions. Now the cruel and bloodthirsty creature of a heartless god and again a melting woman filled with compassion and tenderness. Sometimes the incarnation of jealousy and revenge and sometimes a sobbing maiden, ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... proposal, if my information from Mr. Tulkinghorn be correct, as I have no doubt it is. Mr. Tulkinghorn being always correct and exact; still that does not," says Sir Leicester, "that does not lessen the anomaly, which is fraught with strange considerations—startling considerations, as ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... showed that there were secret influences at work with Pompey, and that he was not the man which he had been. He had taken the consulate alone; but a single consul was an anomaly; as soon as order was restored it was understood that he meant to choose a colleague; and Senate and people were watching to see whom he would select as an indication of his future attitude. Half the world expected that he would name Caesar, but half the world was disappointed. He took Metellus ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... government—her allegiance to her two sovereigns, the political and the spiritual—has made her at once the leader and the antagonist of modern progress. With one hand she has enthroned Reason, with the other she has re-established and sustained the pope. Nor will this anomaly in her conduct cease until she bestows a true education on all her children, even on ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... difficult circumstances, Lord Buckingham and Mr. Grenville directed their attention, was to assimilate, as nearly as possible, the Regency Bills in both countries, so as to prevent the occurrence of so great an anomaly as that of having a Regent whose powers should be strictly limited in the one kingdom, and who should, at the same time, be invested with unrestricted powers in the other. The Parliament of Ireland possessed the unquestionable right of deciding the Regency in their ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... in picturing him as engaged in country pursuits. Indeed, Cuthbert Hartington, in a scarlet coat, or toiling through a turnip field in heavy boots with a gun on his shoulder, would have been to them an absurd anomaly. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... ourselves of the facts of history and criticism so as to satisfy ourselves and others who may need such instruction, that sacerdotalism is not only not ethical, but is anti-Christian, and that the greatest anomaly the world presents to-day is that of the clergymen of the Eastern and Western Churches arrogating to themselves the possession of powers which the founder of their religion and his earliest followers not only never exercised, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... much inclined to take account. He insisted on those features, neither few nor unimportant nor hard to see, which proved the continuity of the English Church with the Church Universal. Sharing their sense of anomaly in the Anglican theory and position, he pointed out with his own force and insight that anomaly was not in England only, but everywhere. There was much to regret, there was much to improve, there were many unwelcome and dangerous truths, invidiosi veri, to be told and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... supplemented by practical experience. It cannot be questioned that the military profession requires ability, education, and practical training no less than the legal or any other profession. A Supreme Court of the United States composed of merchants and bankers would be no more of an anomaly than a body of general and staff officers of like composition. The general policy of our government seems to be based upon a recognition of this self-evident principle. We have a national military academy and other military schools inferior to ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... proved beyond a doubt by the observations of arctic explorers, who have seen immense icebergs drifting rapidly northward against a strong current. This apparent anomaly could only be accounted for by the fact that a powerful undercurrent carried them northward; and as at least seven times more of these bergs must have been under than above water, we can easily understand how the ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... designate no otherwise than its egregious errors. As a discipline of the mind, so far as a full appreciation is concerned of the scientific method, it cannot be read without signal advantage. The book is altogether an anomaly; exhibiting the strangest mixture that ever mortal work betrayed of manifold blunder and great intellectual power. The man thinks at times with the strength of a giant. Neither does he fail, as we have already gathered, in the rebellious and destructive propensities for which giants have been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... noticed was an anomaly in state government. It consisted of five members, whose functions were to remain only during the first struggles of the country for independence; but this body had now assumed a permanent right to dictatorial ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... efforts seemed against the enormous coagulation of dullness, of folly, of slackness, of ignorance, of confusion that confronted him! He might have the strength or the ingenuity to make some small change for the better here or there—to rearrange some detail, to abolish some anomaly, to insist upon some obvious reform; but the heart of the appalling organism remained untouched. England lumbered on, impervious and self-satisfied, in her old intolerable course. He threw himself across the path of the monster with rigid purpose and set ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... millions and millions are regarded and treated as beyond the pale and actually "untouchable." From time to time a few enlightened Hindus recognize the absurdity of posturing as the champions of democratic ideals so long as this monstrous anomaly subsists, but, whilst professing in theory to repudiate it, the Indian National Congress has during the whole course of its existence taken no effective step towards removing it. Nor is the Congress any more representative of the toiling masses that are not "unclean." No measures have been more ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... reasons for the remotest possible permission of this glaring anomaly—this government of anti-reforming reformers—this hospital of sick guides for the healthy, supported by involuntary contributions: first, sheer necessity (which is ludicrous); and second, a facilitation ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt

... intelligence of England—one might say of the civilised world—had been convinced by the power of reason that the maintenance in a Roman Catholic country, and at the expense of a Roman Catholic population, of a Protestant ecclesiastical establishment was an indefensible anomaly. The walls fell at the first blast which sounded attack, because the foundations had been argumentatively sapped and undermined for more than a generation. With the cause of Home Rule it is far otherwise. Its sudden progress has been characterised by a singular absence of systematic ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... from the fire; Osmond was in a deep chair, leaning back and looking at her. Her head was erect, as usual, but her eyes were bent on his. What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was an anomaly in this that arrested her. Then she perceived that they had arrived at a desultory pause in their exchange of ideas and were musing, face to face, with the freedom of old friends who sometimes exchange ideas without uttering them. There was nothing to shock in this; they were old friends ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... architectural pile may rejoice in some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they were the collected charms of literature, do not make a work of art. The styles are mixed,—a certain sign, according to Lessing, of corruption of taste. Novels present the anomaly of being fiction, but not poetry,—of being fruits of imagination, but of imagination improvising its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of ideas. Sources of history, guides of philosophical ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... vocabulary was taken principally from the Bible, which he called "the Lord's word." Sunday was not Sunday with him, but "the Lord's day;" and he never went to church in his life, but always to "service." Like most of his class, however, he seemed to be influenced by that extraordinary anomaly which characterizes the saints—that is to say, as great a reverence for the name of the devil as for that of God himself; for in his whole life and conversation he was never known to pronounce it as we have written it. Satan—the enemy—the destroyer, were the ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... a psychologist. His inquiry was limited for the moment to the opportunity that the following three days might yield, as the Colonel and his wife were going on to another house. It fixed itself largely of course upon the Colonel too—this gentleman was such a rare anomaly. Moreover it had to go on very quickly. Lyon was too scrupulous to ask other people what they thought of the business—he was too afraid of exposing the woman he once had loved. It was probable also that light would come to him from the talk ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... when it was believed that the animals were formed at the dugs of their dams. The labors of Hunter, Home, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire de Blainville and other observers, have long since removed from science this inadmissible anomaly; some years ago, M. Owen, having the fortunate opportunity of examining the uterus of a female Kanguroo, that died in bringing forth, and of dissecting the embryo it contained has developped several ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various

... wonder of wonders, the riddle that none could read, the anomaly in Merleville society was Janet, or Mrs Nasmyth, as she was generally called. In refusing one of the many invitations which she had shared with the minister and Graeme, she had thought fit to give society in general a piece of her mind. She was, she said, the minister's ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... kinds has been pronounced by Mrs. Butler—herself in her own good day a rarely accomplished reader and a fine tragic actress—"a monstrous anomaly."{*} ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... could not be restrained.[37] Ultimately Virginians and Americans came to believe the rhetoric of the Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence when they read the words "all men are created equal" to mean "all persons". If it is something of an anomaly that the men who wrote these words were slaveholders, it is no anomaly that these words came to be accepted as "self-evident truths" when later generations applied these truths to the rights of man, regardless ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... a most informal table, spread according to no rules that for many generations at least have been known in the refined world; an anomaly in the eyes of certainly one of the company. Yet the board had a character of its own, very far removed from vulgarity, and suiting remarkably well with the condition and demeanour of those who presided over it—a comfortable, well-to-do, substantial ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... happy and suspected nothing. She could not understand how with his melancholy nature and his constant assertion that he had but a little talent and much industry for all his stock in trade, he could believe in his own future as he did. It was an anomaly, a contradiction of terms, a weak point in the low level of his unimaginative, dogged strength. She thought often of the poor book he had written. She had heard that talent was stirred to music by a great ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... contented to think and plan, without any definite intention of ever putting their plans into execution. The former type, the impulsive individual, is not difficult to understand, his behavior fits in so well with the primitive trial-and-error sort of activity; but the mere thinker seems an anomaly, in view of the general psychological principle that ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... mostly in the ancient English collection of Hakluyt, and in that by Astley, we have deemed it improper to exclude them from our pages, where they may be considered in some measure as an episode. Indeed, in every extensively comprehensive plan, some degree of anomaly is unavoidable. The following apology or reason given by the editor of Astley's collection for inserting them in that valuable work, may serve us likewise on the present occasion; though surely no excuse can be needed, in a national collection like ours, for recording the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... work I have often keenly felt the contrast between such toil and that for which Lanier's genius fitted him. To find that the poet spent many laborious days in such uninspiring labor was as great an anomaly as it would be to see a fountain spring from a bed of sawdust and 'shake its loosened silver ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... ears, and which fight with their teeth—for instance the Cereopithecus ruber— draw back their ears when irritated just like dogs; and they then have a very spiteful appearance. Other kinds, as the Inuus ecaudatus, apparently do not thus act. Again, other kinds—and this is a great anomaly in comparison with most other animals—retract their ears, show their teeth, and jabber, when they are pleased by being caressed. I observed this in two or three species of Macacus, and in the Cynopithecus niger. This expression, owing to our ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... break that which is bent, nor quench that which is dimly burning; but neither shall He himself be broken or quenched." But this explanation is opposed by the circumstance, that we must make up our minds to admit a double anomaly. The territories of the two verbs [Hebrew: rcC] and [Hebrew: rvC] are everywhere else kept distinct, and the former everywhere else means "to break," and not "to be broken." In the only passage, Eccl. xii. 6, brought forward in support of this irregularity, [Hebrew: rvC] "to run," ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have said, is excepted: but in this case every one feels it to be an exception—an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to its customs and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary special expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in estimating their weight, ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill

... power of making three kinds of bees from one kind of eggs, which would be virtually constituting a third sex, an anomaly not often found. The drones being males, and workers imperfect females with generative organs undeveloped, renders the anomaly of the third sex unnecessary. On the other side it might be said in reply: That if food and treatment would create or produce organs of generation ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... earlier reports, combated this idea, and pointed out that the young men in the church would grow restive as they saw all the offices out of their reach unless they took the test oath, and that they "would present an anomaly in human nature if they should fail to be strongly influenced against going into a relation which thus subjects them to political ostracism, and fixes on them the stigma of moral turpitude." How wide this influence was is seen in the political statistics of the times. When the Utah ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... precluded from taking part in organised forms of Christian service. Do not so fatally misunderstand me as to suppose that I am merely beating a drum to get recruits for societies. What I want to impress upon every Christian person listening to me now is simply this, the anomaly of the fact, if it be a fact, that you are a dumb Christian. You can all speak, if you will; you all have people with whom your speech is weighty and powerful. There are doors open before each of you. Ask yourselves, have you gone in at the open doors? or is it true about ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... bents! They have copied from England a certain love of sport, without the English climate or the calm of country and garrison life, to make these sports logical and necessary. As the young American millionaire thinks he must go on increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of a man working through a summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing in a train to some suburban club, and appearing a half-hour later on the polo field. Next to wealth, sport has become the ambition of the wealthy ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... still a contested point. Many ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native negro tribe. D'Eichthal objects, that "a pretended negro people, pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly which nothing can explain. It would force us to attribute to the black race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to its nature. To cite only one striking example, let me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... in a vague anxiety, but the father went along, enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville ballad ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... been an omnibus conductor in the Strand, and you may marry a duke's daughter; you may have been an oyster-girl in New York, and you may entertain royalties. It is impossible to exaggerate an age of anomaly and hyperbole. There never was an age when people were so voracious of amusement, and so tired of it, both in one. It is a perpetual carnival and a permanent yawn. If you can do anything to amuse us you are safe—till we get used to you—and then you ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... are not brought up, but dragged up. However facetious this remark may seem, there is much truth in it; and that children, reared in the reeking dens of squalor and poverty, live at all, is an apparent anomaly in the course of things, that, at first sight, would seem to set the laws of sanitary provision at defiance, and make it appear a perfect waste of time to insist on pure air and exercise as indispensable ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... of the criticisms above enumerated has been to get rid of the supposed anomaly of finding burnt brick and pottery at depths and places which would give them claim to an antiquity far exceeding that of the Roman domination in Egypt. For until the time of the Romans, it is said, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... insoluble matter passed into solution, the hypothesis suggested itself that metarabin was soluble in arabin, although insoluble in cold water. If this hypothesis were correct, it would explain the apparent anomaly of Ghattis giving solutions of higher viscosity than gum arabics, although they leave insoluble matter behind. The increase in viscosity would be due to the thickening of the arabic acid by the metarabin. Moreover, the solutions yielded ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... between the sources of the Yadkin and the Roanoke, in a south-easterly direction some two hundred miles, almost to the sea-coast below Wilmington. In the divide between the first and second systems, which is also the great watershed between the Atlantic slope and the Mississippi Valley, a singular anomaly is presented, for it is formed not by the lofty Smoky range, but by the Blue Ridge—not, therefore, at the crest of the great slope which the surface of the State presents, but on a line lower down. On the western flank of this lower range the beautiful ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore



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