"Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ignorant charlatans is unworthy of attention or respect— where there's a dim light and a dark cabinet, and a parcel of sentimental gulls gathered together, with their faith and their shudders and their tears all ready, and one and the same fatty degeneration of protoplasm and humbug comes out and materializes himself into anybody you want, grandmother, grandchild, brother-in-law, Witch of Endor, John Milton, Siamese twins, Peter the Great, and all such frantic ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... social heritage much more than the flesh-and-blood natural inheritance, that we find no difficulty in the idea that evolution is going on in mankind. We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to go forward. For although there have been retrogressions in the history of life, continued ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... of a medusa ever having arisen suddenly and de novo from a polyp-bud, if only because both forms are adapted in their structure as a whole, and in every detail to the conditions of their life. A sudden origin, in a natural way, of numerous adaptations is inconceivable. Even the degeneration of a medusoid from a free-swimming animal to a mere brood-sac (gonophore) is not sudden and saltatory, but occurs by imperceptible modifications throughout hundreds of years, as we can learn from the numerous stages ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... one or the other of my boys whom they have met when visiting at the shore. Nearly all of them are sick with leprosy or elephantiasis or tuberculosis, and after the long rainy period they all have colds and coughs and suffer from rheumatism; altogether they present a sad picture of degeneration and misery, and there are few healthy men to ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... murders if you are fond of theology; or Tupper or a dictionary or T. S. Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the heart—just for the world like a pleasant spoken well-meaning gentleman in any, bookstore. But here I am running on as if business men had nothing to do but listen to women talk. You must pardon me, for I was not thinking.—And you must let me thank you again for helping ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... ensure his destruction when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty pugnacity and greed have ceased to ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... the present system of education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new plan? that behind all these petty controversies lie great issues, affecting the fundamental principles of education, which must be pushed to the front unless the degeneration of the race—an inevitable result of the present educational method—is to be ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... by which it was established? How shall this government, instituted by the whole people, agreed to by the whole people, supported by the contributions of the whole people, be confined to the accomplishment of those purposes alone, which the whole people desire? How shall it be preserved from degeneration into a mere government for the benefit of a part only of those who established, and who support it? How shall it be prevented from even injuring a part of its own members, for the aggrandizement of the rest? Its laws must be, (or ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... note of a waning period—that just as the excessive desire to be like all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive desire to be unlike everything else is the note of Romantic degeneration. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... degeneration in the family of Moses may be accounted for by the fact that Moses had married the daughter of a priest who ministered to idols. Yet, the grandson of Moses was not an idolater of ordinary calibre. His sinful conduct was not without a semblance of morality. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... hair seems pretty happy. You are the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. It is he that wants cutting then, not ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... humor, call it "tenant-house rot." Or, as a legislative report puts it: "Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary. Here youth is ugly with loathsome disease, and the deformities which follow physical degeneration." ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... us all, doesn't it?" said Griffin apprehensively. "I'm not so sure about myself, now you mention it. Doris Leighton may be one ahead of me in this business. Fatty degeneration of the soul is a new ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... such a woman had sat on a chair near the master, or on the famous couch in Desplein's surgery, on which he slept. Bianchon knew the mysteries of that temperament, a compound of the lion and the bull, which at last expanded and enlarged beyond measure the great man's torso, and caused his death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the eccentricities of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice, the hopes of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... Morley's is absolutely useless—mere rot. It has already cost me not only its price but also two candles for an all-night seance and an entire degeneration of my most sad and sober resolutions. Money I needed for shoes, solemnity I needed for my reputation—all have gone to the winds in this nightmare of love, laughter, boyishness, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... of the degeneration which came to the Indians about a fort through their association with the soldiers. That such degeneration did result is true, but it came about in spite of the efforts of the officers. On the other hand, ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... all right if you don't go too far with 'em. We were just in time to prevent them from becoming tools of degeneration in our village." ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... for the first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from those of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... which have adopted a sessile life. In the shell-fish, on the other hand, the principle of armour-plating has its greatest development. It is assuredly a long and obscure way that leads from the ancestral type of animal we have been describing to the headless and shapeless mussel or oyster. Such a degeneration is, however, precisely what we should expect to find in the circumstances. Indeed, the larva, of many of the headless Molluscs have a mouth and eyes, and there is a very common type of larva—the trochosphere—in the Mollusc world ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... campaign, have been more than compensated by five years of peace, and by the horses that were left by the allied troops. An annual supply is also drawn from Mecklenburg and the adjacent countries. Importations of this kind are regarded as indispensable, to prevent a degeneration in the stock. A Frenchman can scarcely be brought to believe it possible; that we in England can preserve our fine breed of horses without having recourse to similar expedients; and if at last, by dint of repeated asseverations, you succeed ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... the common and into a tree-shaded lane. Emily tried to believe that this at length was really the country; there were no houses in view, meadows lay on either hand, the leafage was thick. But it was not mere prejudice which saw in every object a struggle with hard conditions, a degeneration into coarseness, a blight. The quality of the earth was probably poor to begin with; the herbage seemed of gross fibre; one would not risk dipping a finger in the stream which trickled by the roadside, it suggested an impure source. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... in which the "Man in the Moon" was supposed to fly, genie-like, with Punch over the land which at one time he ruled with his wit; and the "Dreary Hunchback," as he was apostrophised, was caustically besought to awake and stem the tide of his supposed degeneration. It is hardly surprising that this poem, clever as it is, was not reprinted in the posthumous collection of the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... can see at present into the as yet unopened germs of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported; and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays and converts, above all, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... agree with you, sir," said Erskine, "and I think Lennard will too. There has never been an instance in history in which democracy did not spell degeneration. It's a pity, but I suppose it's inevitable. As far as my reading has taken me, it seems to be the dry-rot of nations. Halloa, what's that? Torpedo gunboat, I think! Ah, there's the moon. Now, sir, if you'll just ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... of studying probabilities are great helps against such attackers; but, on the other hand, the man who drinks a glass of wine when he feels low will beat the hypnotist, who will doubtless harm him by causing degeneration. ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... degeneration is to be partly explained by this, that the place where they found themselves was apt to tempt them to lewdness. For there are springs whose waters have various effects upon those who partake of them. One kind of water ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... closest resemblance to the attacks of paralytics, are affected in general paralysis. He thinks, moreover, that as destruction of these cortical spots causes disturbance of motion, resembling the symptoms pathognomonic of grey degeneration of the posterior columns observed in general paralysis, there is an added reason for ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... memory behind him when he disappeared from England, perhaps just in time before complete degeneration set in as in France and Germany, Italy and Spain. Shakespeare, whenever he introduces him, does so in a kindly spirit, and represents him as a consoler of the afflicted and a refuge to the troubled spirit. By Spenser also he ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the whole of "Degeneration" was made clear to me. How could any man as sane, as normal, as superbly health-loving and health-bestowing keep from writing such a book! I never met any one who so impressed me with his knowledge. Not pedantry, ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... look forward to reading with much pleasure. I have, however, read the first, and am much disappointed with it. It seems to me the weakest and most inconclusive thing he has yet written. At p. 17 he states his theory as to degeneration of eyes, and again, on p. 18, of anthers and filaments; but in both cases he fails to prove it, and apparently does not see that his panmixia, or "cessation of selection," cannot possibly produce continuous degeneration culminating ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... are normal in appearance, but many show signs of degeneration. This is common in the insane, but less frequent and pronounced in neurasthenics. An abnormal shape of the head or curvature of the skull, a high, arched palate, peculiarly-shaped ears, unusually large hands and feet, irregular teeth from narrow ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... contrariness, her want of dignity, and all those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger." The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of Ivanhoe; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators—their wisdom none will so much as hear, how much ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the want of exercise, the excessive consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death. This is the moral which it is, we contend, the duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is subservient to the digestive functions. It cannot be superseded ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Under-grounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks—that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called—I ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... average, after about thirty years of age, the elasticity of the body to rise to the strain of emergency diminishes, and, when forty years is reached, a man, medically speaking, reaches his acme. After that, degeneration of the fabric of the body slowly and maybe imperceptibly sets in. As the difficulties of exploration in cold regions approximate to the limit of human endurance and often enough exceed it, it is obvious that the above ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... rapidly gain entrance to the blood stream and multiply freely in it, and by means of their toxins cause symptoms of general poisoning. A widespread toxic action is indicated by the lesions found—cloudy swelling, which may be followed by fatty degeneration, in internal organs, capillary haemorrhages, &c. In septicaemia in the human subject, often due to streptococci, the process is similar, but the organisms are found especially in the capillaries of the internal organs ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... English playhouses,' and collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from the plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... possess a special vulnerability. The peroneal element is of course somewhat the more exposed, as lying posterior; but it seems unreasonable to assume that so large a proportion of the injuries can implicate the posterior segment of the nerve as to make the startling difference in the incidence of degeneration explicable. In this relation we may bear in mind that the muscles supplied by this nerve suffer most in the degeneration subsequent to anterior polio-myelitis, and again that in cerebral hemiplegia or spinal-cord injuries they are ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... hard to please, but she was not thinking of herself as she sat by her front window in the chilly November twilight. Instead, she was musing on the degeneration of hired men, and reflecting that it was high time the wheat was thrashed, the house banked, and sundry ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... as degenerative, and places among the signs of degeneration, deviations from the average normal, whether physical or mental. This plan has been quite generally followed. The nomenclature seems to me unfortunate and hardly justified by the facts. I can think of no more potent objection to such inclusive use of the term degenerate, than the fact that ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the degeneration and disappearance of the glandular tissues of the uterus, and secondarily to similar changes in the ovaries and other glands. This is followed by an atrophy of all ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard, nothing is held in solution, all ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... headiness, our worldliness, threaten to eat us up like a cancer? did our hardness, our irreligiousness, and our passion for the genteel point to a fugitive, superficial race? was our literature threatened with the artistic degeneration,—running all to art and not at all to power? were our communities invaded by a dry rot of culture? were we fast becoming a delicate, indoor, genteel race? were our women sinking deeper and deeper into the "incredible sloughs of fashion and all kinds of dyspeptic depletion,"—the antidote ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... years, been detected in the most contemptible tricks. It is a thousand pities that it should be so, but if the Court of Arches were to give up its secrets, it would be found that tippling and moral degeneration were by no means confined to psychics. At the same time, a psychic is so peculiarly sensitive that I think he or she would always be well advised to be a life ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the mind trained in modern scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena, and the bizarre ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... another case a smooth apple affected a rough-coated kind. Another instance has been given (11/146. 'Transact. Hort. Soc.' volume 5 pages 65 and 68. See also Prof. Hildebrand with a coloured figure in 'Bot. Zeitung' May 15, 1868 page 327. Puvis also has collected 'De La Degeneration' 1837 page 36) several other instances; but it is not in all cases possible to distinguish between the direct action of foreign pollen and bud-variations.) of two very different apple-trees growing close to each other, which bore fruit resembling each other, but only ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... 'I'm Mrs. Harnish, who are you?' And I'll say, 'I'm Elam Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just meander ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the planet. The mythos is no doubt a parallel to that of Aeneas. Rome was founded when the Sun in his orbit had entered the sign Aries, and Mars was the god most honored by the Romans. In time, with the degeneration of human races and their worship, to the rural mind, the subjects of the mythos became actual personalities, endowed with every human passion and godlike attribute, the former characterizing the discordant influence of the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... be a Philistine, and to say what everybody thinks is to be a genius. Every healthy eye sees Purkinje's Figures when the conditions are present; but only a rare eye perceives them consciously. That is the eye of genius, but the Philistines cry, "Disease! Degeneration!" ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... spirit. Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born anew" (John 3: 7, R. V.). By no process of evolution, however prolonged, can the natural man be developed into the spiritual man; by no process of degeneration can the spiritual man deteriorate into the natural man. These two are from a totally different stock and origin; the one is from beneath, the other is from above. There is but one way through which ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... and, were it not that the practical good sense which never totally deserts the people of the United States is said to be producing a reaction, likely in no long time to lead to the retraction of the error, it might with reason be regarded as the first great downward step in the degeneration of ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything is better than this white-blooded degeneration ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... easy to see that, sooner or later, the Bolshevik degeneration over, Russia will be recomposed; Germany, in spite of all the attempts to break her up and crush her unity, within thirty or forty years will be the most formidable ethnical nucleus of Continental Europe. What will then happen to a Poland which pretends ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... a great deal of injury being done by the use of alcohol in what is supposed by the consumer to be a most moderate quantity, to persons who are not in the least intemperate, and to people supposed to be fairly well. It leads to degeneration of the tissues; it damages the health; it injures the intellect. Short of drunkenness, that is, in those effects of it which stop short of drunkenness, I should say from my experience that alcohol ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the country that our stock came from. It is quite possible, and if so we are indeed to be congratulated upon having morally improved so much since, or the Persians to be condoled with on their sad degeneration. The better classes, however, are very different, as ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... most deadly uninteresting person, and the one who has the greatest temptation not to think at all, is the comfortable and happily married woman—the woman who has a good man between her and the world, who has not the saving privilege of having to work. A sort of fatty degeneration of the conscience sets in that is disastrous to the development ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... assistance of her detachment from European quarrels to such an arrangement, Europe of herself may not prove capable of it. Second, that if Europe does not come to some such arrangement the resulting unrest, militarism, moral and material degeneration, for the reasons above indicated and for others to be indicated presently, will most unfavorably affect the development of America, and expose her to dangers internal and external much greater than those which she would incur by intervention. Third, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "were once gained, that among animals and vegetables there had been, I do not say several species, but even a single one, which had been produced in the course of direct descent from another species; if, for example, it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type." So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—once ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three times as many as suffered in Salem during ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... They are the deep ones. Their naivete is nothing but a disguise. Here we have a case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know the species; it is all too common. Meanwhile we must congratulate ourselves on having ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. But more than this was needed. There were irrelevancies introduced ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... replaced by a fibrous cicatrix. It would appear that portions of muscle transplanted from animals to fill up gaps in human muscle are similarly replaced by fibrous tissue. When a muscle is paralysed from loss of its nerve supply and undergoes complete degeneration, it is not capable of being regenerated, even should the integrity of the nerve be restored, and so its function ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. To my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural cousin. I've seen them both when they didn't think they were being observed, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... behalf of a deep and heart-fretting Hebrew patriotism, which was not the less sincere, because it ran headlong into the unamiable form of rancorous rationality and inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... But, since weakenings and degeneration in these respects have come into the enactments of public power, it is all the more needful for every true and patriotic citizen to be earnest and firm in witnessing for God and his everlasting laws, that the people may be better than the later expressions ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... which of us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... my idiocies. But you think over what I say, just the same. I'm right. We're rotten cotton stuff now in these isles. We've got fatty degeneration of the heart, and in all the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Mutual Friend" the reader is led for a long time to suppose that the character of Mr. Boffin is changing for the worse; and his interest is stimulated keenly when he discovers ultimately that the apparent degeneration ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... emissions, but most painful affections of the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... decidedly present is that comprising many due to syphilis; that in which degenerative changes follow upon haemorrhagic softening, and another in which they succeed to occlusion of vessels and its immediate results. In another, degeneration and atrophy follow, the brain state conditioning acute insanity; and in another they are secondary to brain injury, not to ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... as though I was dancing on a volcano and daring it to explode. The more twistings and turnings there were to the labyrinth, the greater glory it was to get out. Maggie darlin', you have before you a mournful spectacle—the degeneration of Nancy Olden. It isn't that she's lost courage. It's only that she used to be able to think of only one thing, and now—What do you suppose it is, Mag? If you know, don't you dare ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... functions developed and of acquiring more strength (as, for example, the muscles of boxers, the breast of foot racers, the voice of singers, etc.), these same organs, on the contrary, can be atrophied or modified, and their functions be changed in nature. It is in such degradation and such degeneration of human nature that fakirs excel, and it is from such a point of view that they are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... Eighteenth-century ideals were proverbially low. England, then, had not recovered from the frivolities inaugurated after the Restoration. The slackness and unbelief among the clergy, and the looseness of morals in society were notorious, but this degeneration could not have been universal. There are always a few Noahs and their families left to repeople the world with righteousness after a deluge of degeneracy, and Browning is quite right in his portrayal of an ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... heredity, though as yet only partially determined, are already sufficiently ascertained to prove for practical purposes that, in order to promote integration and further progress in human evolution—not disintegration and degeneration—two things are essential and complementary. On the one hand, we must do everything possible in the direction of improving the nutrition, health, conditions of life, and habits of the community; and, on the other hand, we must promote ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character—and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... so vividly the coming degeneration of her dear little house that it hurt her as severely as if it had already been an accomplished fact. She sat down on the stairs and had a long, bitter cry. Susan found her there and enquired with much concern ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... been propagated, but had not yet been passed into law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes, while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not having developed into men. Many theories also were then enjoying vast popularity which have since fallen low in the popular estimation. Prussia was still, in theory, a Power of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... handsome men, the elder representing a fine type of Anglo-Saxon, as the term is used in speaking of our composite white population; while the mulatto's erect form, broad shoulders, clear eyes, fine teeth, and pleasingly moulded features showed nowhere any sign of that degeneration which the pessimist so sadly maintains is the inevitable ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the master. But we civilised men have crucified ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to avenge an outrage committed against their sister. Polygamy and concubinage wove a thread of disaster and complications throughout the whole lives of families and its dire effects are directly traceable in the feuds and degeneration of their descendants. The chief lesson taught by history is danger of violating, physically, mentally, or spiritually the personal integrity of woman. Customs of the country and the cupidity of Laban, forced polygamy ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to a more natural life, after centuries of physical degeneration and suppression of all feeling for nature, could not be understood, nor even taken seriously, in surroundings in which air, sunlight, the very right to live, had been refused or measured out penuriously. The drama remained in manuscript, and did not become known ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... talking in our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he could not swoop into a parlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that dreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow-creatures,—a melancholy, lean degeneration of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intensity of reaction of neurasthenia is a condition of genius. We are too far away from any real knowledge of heredity to advise for or against marriage in the most of cases on this basis, and certainly we must not repeat Lombroso and Nordau's errors and call all variations from stupidity degeneration. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... heretical opinions. Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble hopelessly ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that has ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... centuries of civilization, education, and self-government, all with equal rights in our Senate and representation according to population in our House, with an equal voice in shaping our national destinies—that would, at least in this stage of the world, be humanitarianism run mad, a degeneration and degradation of the homogeneous, continental Republic of our pride too preposterous for the contemplation of serious and intelligent men. Quite as well might Great Britain now invite the swarming ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... degeneration, of coarseness—the coarseness of satiety, and shapeless, battered-out appetite—with an almost savage taste for carnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad of certain women who had drowned, in mere wantonness, their new-born babes. A girl with child was found hanged by her ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... divergence between his broad and sweeping generalization and particular instances which do not quite accord with it. So it was with Boyle's law that the volume of a gas varies in inverse ratio to the pressure to which it is exposed; so it is with the Darwinian theory, inasmuch as deterioration and degeneration play a part which was, perhaps, at first overlooked; and similar instances may be found ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... and yet made an essential element of that teaching, so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and development as is the privilege ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... it all out. 'Cut it out,' that certainly has a surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I'm afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles atrophying from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints have—Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson—this sounds like a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... There is the attitude of condescension, the arrogant tolerance of the proselyte and the parvenu: "So our forefathers used to do, for they were ignorant folk." At times, however, it is with precisely opposite view, mourning the present degeneration from earlier days, "when men were yet skilful rowers in 'kayaks,' or when this or that might still be done ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut away ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... tried it, madame," said the same speaker, who had mourned over the degeneration of finish among the workwomen. "It was the siege that compelled it in the beginning, and then there was no complaining, since it was the will of the good God for all. But there came a time when sickness had been with me long, and I found no work ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay, The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from certain famous artists of history, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient world. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame. In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great man was like; ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... hyperplastic-degeneration exists in some cases and the subjects are in time rendered unserviceable because of the burden of getting about encumbered by the affected extremity. In other animals hyperplasia progresses for a time—until the parts become greatly enlarged and conditions apparently attain ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... to bear windmills must be regarded as the reduced vestiges of masts originally constructed to carry sails; and their adaptive evolution, like that of countless structures in animals, has been accomplished by degeneration. ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... follies that his poor distorted wits conceived from hour to hour. His judgment was gone, his mind unbalanced. All his life Vandover had been sinking slowly lower and lower; this, however, was the beginning of the last plunge. The process of degeneration, though inevitable, had been gradual as long as he indulged generally in all forms of evil; it was only now when a passion for one particular vice absorbed him that he commenced to rush ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris |
