"Disproportionately" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surmounted by what is termed "an architrave cornice," with the mutiles; while the frieze, with its rich triglyphs and metopes is altogether omitted. The Corinthian order of the upper story is altogether more worthy of admiration, notwithstanding that some objection has been raised to the "disproportionately slender columns, when contrasted with the massive shafts beneath them." Here, too, the entire frieze, with its emblematical embellishments of the British crown, surrounded with laurel, and alternate leaves of the rose, the thistle and shamrock, is sure to attract ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... the Passenger-pigeon. His eye, with its red circle, the shape of his head, and his motions on alighting and taking flight, quickly suggest the resemblance; though in grace and speed, when on the wing, he is far inferior. His tail seems disproportionately long, like that of the Red Thrush, and his flight among the trees is very still, contrasting strongly with the honest clatter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... narrow as they are, each of them is parted by a circular mullion or central pillar. You will better understand how high they must be, when told that, in the southern tower, the space of the upper row is divided into three distinct tiers; and still the windows do not appear disproportionately short. They also are double, and the interior arches are pointed; but the arches, within which they are placed, are circular. In this circumstance lies the principal anomaly in the front of the cathedral; but there is no appearance of any disparity ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... you," said Ford with disproportionately sudden choler; "but I don't propose to alter my habits for a ridiculous school-boy whom I have dismissed." The unjust and boyish petulance of his speech instantly flashed upon him, and he felt ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... taste the Greek and Latin writers, has thus put it in my power to collect on my own shelves, for my actual use, almost all the best books in spite of my small income. Somewhat too I am indebted to the ostentation of expense among the rich, which has occasioned these cheap editions to become so disproportionately cheap. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... render it certain that the Megalosaur was in the highest degree destructive and carnivorous in its habits. So far as is known, the skin was not furnished with any armour of scales or bony plates; and the fore-limbs are so disproportionately small as compared with the hind-limbs, that this huge Reptile—like the equally huge Iguanodon—may be conjectured to have commonly supported itself on its ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... part to point out that I had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed friendliness. He came to me during my final ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his or her surviving relatives. These images or Penates, as we may call them, are carved of wood, about a foot high, and represent the deceased person in a standing, sitting, or crouching attitude, but commonly with the hands folded in front. The head is disproportionately large, the nose long and projecting, the mouth wide and well furnished with teeth; the eyes are formed of large green or blue beads with black dots to indicate the pupils. Sometimes the male figures ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... of Aurelia Koslow, a German fraulein, or rather a half-breed between German and Russian. She is eighteen years of age, and has been sent to Brussels to finish her education; she is of middle size, stiffly made, body long, legs short, bust much developed but not compactly moulded, waist disproportionately compressed by an inhumanly braced corset, dress carefully arranged, large feet tortured into small bottines, head small, hair smoothed, braided, oiled, and gummed to perfection; very low forehead, very diminutive and vindictive grey eyes, somewhat ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... unreasoned impulse. No; it would be deliberate, deliberate, deliberate. She would have to live up to that decision, whatever it was, for many months to come, perhaps for years. Perhaps,—who could say?—perhaps it might affect her character permanently. In a crisis little forces are important, disproportionately so. And then it was, and thus it was, that Rosella took her resolve. She raised the iron flap once more, and saying aloud and with a ring of defiance in her voice: "Deliberately, deliberately; I don't care," loosed her hold upon ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... extreme Alimentive. The neck and lower part of the head are covered with rolls of fat. This gives the head the effect of spreading outward from the crown as it goes down to the neck, thus giving the neck a short, disproportionately ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... drew an argument for the general inferiority of the French poetry. The French drama, he argued, was confessedly exalted amongst the French themselves beyond any other section of their literature. But why? Why was this? If the drama had prospered disproportionately under public favour, what caused that favour? It was, said Voltaire, the social nature of the French, with their consequent interest in whatever assumed the attire of conversation or dialogue; and, secondly, it was the peculiar strength of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Amazons and other swampy localities of South and Central America. Boys will like to know the origin of their name. Stilts are called zancos in Spanish, and these flies, a species of mosquito, are called sancudos—more properly spelled zancudos—on account of their very long, slender legs and disproportionately small bodies, which remind one of a very small boy on very high stilts. Flies on stilts is a funny idea, but not more funny than the appearance of these troublesome ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... bitterns have grown smaller and more graceful, with shorter legs and necks, to suit our diminishing rivers and our changed landscape. Quoskh is also, undoubtedly, much smaller than he once was; but still his legs and neck are disproportionately long, when one thinks of the waters he wades and the nest he builds; and the tracks he leaves in the mud are startlingly like those fossilized footprints of giant birds that one finds in the rocks of the Pliocene era, deep under the earth's surface, ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... table, in an angle between two windows, a pale-faced thread-bare secretary was performing for a yearly pittance the duties for which my Lord the Seneschal was rewarded by emoluments disproportionately large. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... heart were thicker than those of a healthy heart, but thin when compared with its whole volume; whence it follows, that the cavities were enlarged. That of the left ventricle was disproportionately larger than the others, but no difference of size could be ascertained between the auricles. When a cavity of the heart is situated in the course of the circulation immediately behind a contracted orifice, it seems ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... of the Calendar, we read, in roman capitals, the following impressive annotation: DEUM TIME, PAUPERES SUSTINE, MEMENTO FINIS. On the reverse of the ensuing leaf, is a large head of Christ, highly coloured: but with the lower part of the face disproportionately short: not unlike a figure of a similar kind, in the Duke of Devonshire's Missal, described on a former occasion.[176] The crucifixon, on the next leaf but one, is full of spirit and effect. Then commence the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of forty or thereabouts, with a yellow face, very long and disproportionately large for the frail, sickly body it surmounted, and dressed in an unpretending black gown. She wore a sad, submissive look. Her grey eyes bespoke a contrite and fearful heart, the cheeks were pendulous and the loose chin ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... time. Sometimes we have only the heel mark: sometimes only the toe. In this case we have more than the mark of the whole foot. How do I account for it? Simply enough. The Colonel's foot slipped sideways. The mark is, you see, exactly the same in length as the others, but disproportionately broad. At the heel and toe it is smudged, and on the inside where the weight was thrown, it is heavier than on the outside. The thing is easy enough to understand. You ought to have been able to deduce ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... solemnities to come. Sometimes it is stained yellow, purple, red, green, or striped with various colors; sometimes it is crowned with paste-work, representing, in a most primitive way, a hen,—her body being the egg, and her pastry-head adorned with a disproportionately tall feather. These eggs are exposed for sale at the corners of the streets and bought by everybody, and every sort of ingenious device is resorted to, to attract customers and render them attractive. This custom is probably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... shoulder of the servant—a very ferret of a man in black, with a parson's bands and neckcloth, a coal-black full-bottomed wig, and under this a white face, rather drawn and haggard, and thin lips perpetually agrin to flaunt two rows of yellow teeth disproportionately large. After him, and the more remarkable by contrast, came a tall, black-faced fellow, very brave in buff-colored cloth, with a fortune in lace at wrist and throat, and a heavily ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... an identical test, there will not only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy; it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison between them in skill and industry in the art of building ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... only on the southern Crimean coast; precipitation disproportionately distributed, highest in west and north, lesser in east and southeast; winters vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold farther inland; summers are warm across the greater part of the country, hot ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... materially from the supple and undulating beauty which had so captivated Claude de Buxieres. The imprisonment of a tight corset caused undue development of the bust at the expense of her neck and throat, which seemed disproportionately short and thick. Her cheeks had lost their gracious curves and her double chin was more pronounced. All that remained of her former attractions were the caressing glance of her eye, tresses still golden and abundant, especially ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... at work cutting out these pieces. She moves through the leaf like the hand of the tailor through a piece of cloth. When the pattern is detached, she rolls it up, and, embracing it with her legs, flies home with it, often appearing to have a bundle disproportionately large. Each cell is made up of a dozen or more pieces: the larger ones, those that form its walls, like the walls of a paper bag, are oblong, and are turned down at one end, so as to form the bottom; not one thickness of leaf merely, but three or four thicknesses, each ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... modern discovery is gradually putting the Bible out of date. A feeling, if not a judgment, has in some quarters arisen, that in view of the vastness of creation, the Scriptures ascribe to this globe and its concerns a share of its Maker's interest disproportionately great. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... more irresistibly ludicrous than its aspect as it slowly raised its small wondering eyes to mine. It was so much taller in its haunches than its shoulders—its fore legs were so disproportionately small—that in walking, its hind feet invariably took precedence. It was perpetually pitching forward over its pointed, inoffensive nose, and recovering itself always, after these involuntary somersaults, with the gravest astonishment. To add to its preposterous appearance, ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... among the curiosities of nature. They are characterised by the disproportionately large beak. In some species this is nearly a foot in length. The beak has on the upper mandible an excrescence which in some species is nearly as large as the bill itself. The nesting habits are not less curious than the structure of hornbills. The eggs are laid ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... types of the Negrito stock, and they lead us to the lowest men of all, the Akkas of the West Congo region. It is difficult for us to realize how utterly degenerate and apelike these pygmies are. The jaws are disproportionately large as compared with the cranium or brain-case, and project to a degree which brings the skull very close to that of the higher apes; while in mental respects, in the absence of dwellings, and in many other ways they prove to be the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... strong hint from the Queen and Council that he was less active than he might have been; he certainly tried hard to persuade the accused to recant and escape condemnation; in several cases where he had hopes he deferred handing them over to the secular arm. But protestants were very disproportionately numerous in his diocese; if the accepted principle were sound at all, he of all men was most bound to strictness with the persistently recalcitrant, and that fact of itself sufficed to encourage heresy-hunters. Moreover in London, it must also be ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... female than with the male countenance and figure. But I at least found this discrepancy in the appearance of the sexes greatly more marked on the west than on the eastern coast; and saw only too much reason to conclude that it was owing in great part to the disproportionately large share of crushing labour laid, in the district, in accordance with the practice of a barbarous time, on the weaker frame of the female. There is, however, a style of female loveliness occasionally though rarely exemplified in the Highlands, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom always greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their own accumulated savings or peculia. Slave prices in fact, whether in ancient Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately to the advantage which the owners could derive from the ownership. "This shows that an element of speculation enters into the valuation of the slave, or that there is a hypervaluation of the slave. This is the central phenomenon ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... railroad; whether the increase in such traffic will greatly decrease rail traffic and hence the revenue of the railroad; whether the amount of taxes paid by the railroads of the State, part of which is devoted to the upkeep of public highways used by motor carriers, is disproportionately higher than the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... common fowl; its hooked bill is white, like that of the goat-sucker, and furnished at the base with stiff hairs, directed forwards. The plumage is of a sombre brownish grey, mixed with black stripes and large white spots. Their eyes are incapable of bearing the light of day, and their wings are disproportionately large, measuring no less than four and a-half feet from tip to tip. The birds quit the cavern only at nightfall, to feed on fruits. A most horrible noise is made by them in the dark recesses of the cavern, and the clamour increases ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... some vital phase of the subject; it should not be merely something attractive attached to the article to catch the reader's notice. In his effort to make the beginning attractive, an inexperienced writer is inclined to linger over it until it becomes disproportionately long. Its length, however, should be proportionate to the importance of that phase of the subject which it presents. As a vital part of the article, the introduction must be so skillfully connected with what follows that a reader is not ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... entertained against anything that passed under the name of enthusiasm. It is not merely that the age was, upon the whole, formal and prosaic, and that in general society serenity and moderation stood disproportionately high in the list of virtues. No doubt zeal was unpopular; but, whatever was the case in the more careless language of conversation, zeal is not what the graver writers of the day usually meant when they inveighed against enthusiasts. They are often ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... ensemble was businesslike and solid even my untrained eye could see. Many of the deck fittings seemed disproportionately substantial. The anchor-chain looked contemptuous of its charge; the binnacle with its compass was of a size and prominence almost comically impressive, and was, moreover the only piece of brass which ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... accordance with these orders, Colonel Anstruther marched from Lydenburg, a town about 180 miles from Pretoria, on the 5th December, with the headquarters and two companies of the 94th Regiment, being a total of 264 men, three women, and two children, and the disproportionately large train of thirty-four ox-waggons, or an ox-waggon capable of carrying five thousand pounds' weight to every eight persons. And here I may remark that it is this enormous amount of baggage, without which it appears to be impossible to move the smallest body of men, that renders infantry ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... yards, and then reared his majestic form dripping from the lake. He stood upon the 'point.' I never saw so grand an animal; it seemed as though no single ball could kill him, and although his head and carcass were enormous, still his length of leg appeared disproportionately great. With quick, springy paces he advanced directly for his favourite tree and began his process of rubbing, perfectly unaware of the hidden foes ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... has not come on us on account of any presumptuous transgression of God's law so much as simply out of some combination of unfortunate circumstances in which we may have only done our duty, but have not done it in the most serpent-like way. And when we are made to suffer unjustly or disproportionately all our days for our error of judgment or our want of the wisdom of this world, or what not, we are sorely tempted to be bitter and proud and resentful and unforgiving, and to go back from duty and endurance and danger altogether. But we must not. We must rather say to ourselves, Now and ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... memories. The houses in Eden Village were not crowded; for the first quarter of a mile they passed hardly more than a dozen. After that, although they became more neighborly, each held itself well aloof. Then came a small church with a disproportionately tall spire, a watering trough, the Town Hall, and "Prout's Store, Zenas Prout 2nd, Proprietor." Here the gray sidled up to the ancient hitching-post. The boy tossed the reins over the dashboard and jumped out. "You don't need to hold him," he said reassuringly. ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of one of the leading magazines in the country. The welcome they met exceeded even his anticipations. By the very next mail, he received a note from his friend, enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen's inexperience of such matters seemed disproportionately large. "Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder, indeed," wrote the editor. "If she can keep on writing such verse as this, she will make a name for herself. Send us some more: we'll pay ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... other hand, it does destroy self-respect; it does leave men psychically disturbed, and for that reason it affects consciousness of the presence of God disproportionately quickly as compared with other sins, and produces the feeling of loss of spiritual power. There are, in fact, abundant reasons for desiring deliverance, though there is no ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant puddles: it was so even in Peking ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... plays a double game. All sweetness and light to Storm when she's with him, and immense pride in him as an employe—the pride a small, dull comet might feel in attracting attention to itself by trailing a disproportionately brilliant tail across the sky. All specious promises and excuses to Caspian when she's with him and not with Peter. Caspian, you remember, used to be a protege of hers when he was a rising young socialist, and she was the widow of a quaint genius who'd made a fortune in some weird ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... before building his villa, but not about farming his property, which he should set about at once. Let him wait until his thirty-sixth year and then build, provided his whole property is under cultivation. So build that neither the villa be disproportionately small in comparison with the farm nor the farm in comparison with the villa. It behooves a slave-owner to have a well-built country house, containing a wine-cellar, a place for storing olive-oil, and casks in such numbers that he may look forward with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... from him and towards the figure-head, as though he were about to address to it his devotions; he was seen to heave a deep breath; and raised his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... military class resembled, to a greater or less extent, the monarch himself, in that those parts of their skulls which our phrenologists had designated as the bumps of destructiveness, combativeness and so on were enormously and disproportionately developed. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... a rising moon, and over all things a great quietude, a deep, deep silence. Air, close and heavy, without a breath to wake the slumbering trees; an oppressive stillness, in which small sounds magnified themselves, and seemed disproportionately loud. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... northern waters. Only the other day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service on the North Sea, and in his opinion it would be years before those waters could again be fished, owing to the immense numbers of still active mines which would render such an attempt disproportionately hazardous. From this point of view, if from no other more disinterested angle, we owe a great and continuous debt to the splendid people of Britain's oldest colony. It was among these white fishermen that I came out to ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... where he now had to keep quiet. His rosy cheeks became pale, he grew up puny, serious, like a little man, with eyes which stared at things in wonder. He was five by now, and his head by a singular phenomenon had become disproportionately large, in such wise as to make his father say, 'He has a great man's nut!' But the child's intelligence seemed, on the contrary, to decrease in proportion as his skull became larger. Very gentle and timid, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... to be looked for. These formidable difficulties confront us even in attempting to work out from abundant material a brief chapter in the phylogenetic history of some small and clearly limited group, and they become disproportionately greater, when we extend our view over vast periods of time and undertake to determine the mutual relationships of classes and types. If the evidence were complete and available, we should hardly be able to unravel its infinite complexity, or to find ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... which had beset the quartermaster and commissary departments were also encountered by the surgeons. Hospital accommodations were scanty, the quantity of medicines available was very limited, the number of wounded men disproportionately large, and, when sickness was added to the wounds, the small number of surgeons available at the front were not able to give the individual attention and scientific treatment which forms a part of our admirable medical system in time of peace. There ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... Palamow jungle. He was in the habit of employing the aboriginal tribes to work for him, and on one occasion a party of his men found in the jungle a man and woman in a state of starvation, and brought them in. They were both very short in stature, with disproportionately long arms, which in the man were covered with a reddish-brown hair. They looked almost more like baboons than human beings, and their language was unintelligible, except that words here and there resembled those in one of the Kolarian dialects. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... need to pray. In this day of activity there is great danger, not of doing too much, but of praying too little for so much work. These two—work and prayer, action and contemplation—are twin-sisters. Each pines without the other. We are ever tempted to cultivate one or the other disproportionately. Let us imitate Him who sought the mountain-top as His refreshment after toil, but never left duties undone or sufferers unrelieved in pain. Let us imitate Him who turned from the joys of contemplation to the joys of service without ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... process may be comparatively few in number and therefore unlikely to be jaded by the truisms of these pages, a few words in explanation may not be resented. The seed of the durian is roughly cordate, about an inch and a quarter long. In the form of a disproportionately stout and blundering worm the sprout of my seed issued from the soil, peered vaguely into daylight, groped hesitatingly and arched over to bury its apex in the soil, and from this point the delicately white primal ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... thought sometimes that it was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature. He is small for his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea of amusement, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... he was tall, but disproportionately stout for his height. His face was broad, and his loose double chin gave it a flabby appearance. A pallid complexion and black-grey hair, brushed straightly down where he was not bald, produced an impression of sanctimoniousness which was increased ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... whose long beard and hair, partially gray, gave him the appearance of advanced age: nevertheless there was something peculiarly striking in the aspect of the man. His forehead was singularly high and massive; but the back of the head was disproportionately small, as if the intellect too much preponderated over all the animal qualities for strength in character and success in life. The eyes were soft, dark, and brilliant, but dreamlike and vague; the features in youth must have been regular ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... labor (and the extreme cheapness of many products caused thereby), comes about very suddenly; if, moreover, it coincides with a prolonged period of increased demand for labor, then these products, which have become disproportionately cheaper, are taken into the body of products that are regularly considered in a community as necessities ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... admission to Paaker's plot of ground through the wall which surrounded it, was disproportionately, almost ostentatiously, high and decorated with various paintings. On the right hand and on the left, two cedar-trunks were erected as masts to carry standards; he had had them felled for the purpose on Lebanon, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... round which Irish questions rotate is nowhere seen more clearly than in this connection. When complaint is made that a disproportionately small number of Catholics hold high appointments in the public offices in Ireland, the reply is made that the number of members of that Church with high educational qualifications is small; when demands are made for facilities for higher education, the reluctance of English ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... Don't talk grandly about your two parlors when you mean two halves of one. Have wide doors, by all means, not only between rooms but into main hall,—four, six, or eight feet, if the rooms are so wide and high that they shall not be disproportionately large. Then, if you must have the whole broadside of sliding or folding doors, let the two rooms thus connected be of different styles but equal richness,—different, that they shall not seem one room cut in two,—peers, that one shall not ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... voluminous and highly developed large intestine fulfils no useful purpose, and on account of its breeding a very copious and varied bacterial flora, could with advantage be dispensed with. He also has said that man, who could support himself on food easily digestible, has a small intestine which is disproportionately fully developed. Instead of having between 18 and 21 feet of small intestine, man might do with one-third of that length. According to him, there is a disharmony of our food and our digestive system. Referring to such views, and ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... tunic of the same color, belted tightly to the waist, reached the seat—apparently a box—upon which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left forearm appeared to rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his right hand, which seemed disproportionately long. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... preposterous in forming so enormous an entrance for a poor diminutive man to walk through—and walk he must, unless carried through on men's shoulders; for neither elephant, horse, nor bullock could ascend over the flight of steps. In all these places the staircases, on the contrary, are as disproportionately small; they look as if they were made for rats to crawl through, while the gateways seem as if they were made for ships to sail under.[12] One of the most interesting sights was the immense swarms ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... less spherical; while, again, it is made slightly oval in cross-section; but in every case the corners should be well curved and rounded off, so that there is no one part which is liable to become heated disproportionately with the rest of the casting; in fact, in the whole cylinder casting there should be no sudden change, but a uniformity in the thickness of the metal employed. This point should be carefully remembered, although it applies more particularly to those parts of the casting subjected ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... town in Western Con-naught, seven miles from the nearest railway station. It possesses a single street, straggling and very dirty, a police barrack, a chapel, which seems disproportionately large, and seven shops. One of the shops is also the post office. Another belongs to John Conerney, the butcher. The remaining five are public houses, doing their chief business in whisky and porter, but selling, as side lines, farm seeds, spades, rakes, hoes, ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... limes, leading from the highway through the graveyard where, beneath a twilight of shade, many generations of the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. Along the venerable aisles of the nave and in the transept, are effigies and memorial tablets disclosed in the dim religious light. The chancel is disproportionately spacious and has high stained-glass windows at the sides and end. In front of the altar, beneath slabs of gray stone, are the graves of Shakespeare and his family. The widow, who survived him seven years, lies nearest the wall, and on the other side Susanna and her husband, Dr. Hall. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... concealed by his scowling and bushy eyebrows, are of a quick gray, stern, and penetrating in their general expression, yet, when narrowly observed, putting on an air of vacancy, if not stupidity, that furnishes a perfect blind to the lurking meaning within. His nose is large, yet not disproportionately so; his head well made, though a phrenologist might object to a strong animal preponderance in the rear; his mouth bold and finely curved, is rigid however in its compression, and the lips, at times almost woven together, are largely indicative of ferocity; ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... he compares the thousands paid for a single hour of a prima donna's song or a playwright's wit with his own yearly wage laboriously earned. What supreme worth does art possess that it should be valued so disproportionately? ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... as in the case of the floods the year before, and in the prairie-fire the year before that, when so many people were made homeless, and also when fifty men had been injured in one railway accident. On these occasions he gave disproportionately ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... exercises she permitted. So he gave himself up to gymnastics with enthusiasm, expending his youthful vigour against his drill professor, and the Japanese who taught him jiu-jitsu. The boy's strength became quite remarkable. But his pale face, disproportionately long arms, and reputation for austerity, had made him the mark, from the very first days of his diplomatic career, for the gossips, ballad makers, and ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... five grey eggs with green speckles. Then came the little birds, big-headed, with disproportionately large yellow mouths, their bodies covered with down. They chirruped plaintively, stretching their long necks out from the nest, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... of these birds is slow, unsteady, and affords but little amusement to the sportsman. From the disproportionately small, convex, thin-quilled, wing,—so thin, that a vacant space, half as broad as a quill appears between each,—the flight may be said to be a sort of fluttering more than any thing else: the bird giving two or three ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... towered a clear head and shoulders in stature above the natives; it had a comparatively small head with a flat receding forehead, very wide nostrils, a long, enormously muscular body, immensely wide across its massive shoulders, disproportionately short legs, and huge arms so long that even when the brute stood upright its clenched fists reached to within a foot of the ground. As it started to wade ashore its advance was momentarily checked by a terrific volley of stones, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... existed in the central islands of the Pacific Ocean a singular breed of pigs. These are described by the Rev. D. Tyerman and G. Bennett[156] as of small size, hump-backed, with a disproportionately long head, with short ears turned backwards, with a bushy tail not more than two inches in length, placed as if it grew from the back. Within half a century after the introduction into these islands of European and Chinese pigs, the native breed, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... I have finished the "Lehrjahre." It is very calm and wise. It is full of Goethe, and therefore leaves behind in its impression that almost indefinite want which his character leaves, a want apparently readily designated. Yet to say his intellect was disproportionately developed leaves us in doubt whether a pure natural growth of the moral nature would have harmonized with his peculiar manifestation of intellect. He is to me as a blind God, made wise by laborious experience, not perpetual sight. ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... tongue. The purity of his speech, his cultivated manners, his reticence, served to stimulate their curiosity the more. Such as observed him closely were struck by an incongruity between his demeanor, which had the ease and grace of a patrician, and certain points of his person. Thus his arms were disproportionately long; and when, to steady himself against the motion of the vessel, he took hold of anything near by, the size of his hands and their evident power compelled remark; so the wonder who and what he was mixed continually with a wish to know the particulars ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Ministry of Defense and Public Service over the past five years has focused on subordinating the defense apparatus to civilian control and restoring the LDF's cohesion; the restructuring has considerably improved capabilities and professionalism, but the LDF is disproportionately large for a small, poor country; the government has outlined a reduction to a planned 1,500-man strength, but these plans have met with vociferous resistance from the political opposition and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... it all was that, in his presence, Woloda always seemed ashamed of my innocent behaviour, and still more so of my youthfulness. As for Prince Nechludoff, he was in no way handsome, since neither his small grey eyes, his low, projecting forehead, nor his disproportionately long hands and feet could be called good features. The only good points about him were his unusually tall stature, his delicate colouring, and his splendid teeth. Nevertheless, his face was of such an original, energetic character ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... why she was so disproportionately grateful, for I only gave her five shillings over the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... suddenly determined to get up and look at himself in the glass. He lighted his candle. When he saw his face reflected in the mirror he scarcely recognized it. He seemed to see before him a man whom he did not know. His eyes looked disproportionately large, and he was ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... she was so very miserable, and, as it seemed to me, so disproportionately excited, that, inconsistent in me as the task would have been, I would gladly have explained away her difficulties, and restored to her mind its wonted confidence and serenity, had I possessed sufficient knowledge for the purpose. I really ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... rear wall was what I recognized as tropical vegetation, mainly by its wild luxuriance. In the center of the rear wall was what seemed to be a giant stone lizard, standing on its hind legs. The one foreleg that showed was disproportionately short. The body, too, was more attenuated than that of any lizard. The thing was headless and the statue, idol or whatever it was, stood on a pedestal, and before that again, seemed to be a slab of stone. Then my ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to the last, are the Ateles, or Spider monkeys. These derive their generic name from their singular spider-like appearance— caused by their disproportionately long and slender limbs, and the great length of their tails. None equal them in the prehensile power of the caudal appendage; and it is of them that that curious story is related— the story of the Monkeys' Bridge—where ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... kept at the bottom of a well, for the world cannot stand much of it. Perhaps it is judicious in the critic sometimes to be a little more amiable than the truth, in order to encourage the beginner and the manager who has given him a chance, and also sometimes to insist disproportionately upon defects, so as to stir up a too complacent dramatist of reputation. Moreover, whilst the point is immaterial to the audience, the critic's expression of a judgment upon a particular piece must vary with the author, since, for instance, to censure without ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... of the builders of Kaffir kraals, to say nothing of the lairs of the Australian blacks. The poorest huts were definitely planned and securely built. The shape was oblong, the walls low, the roof high pitched and disproportionately large, though not so much so as in some of the South Sea Islands. The framework was of the durable totara-wood, the lining of reeds, the outside of dried rushes. At the end turned to the sunshine was a kind of verandah, on to which opened the solitary ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... to him here; he seemed to read in their faces that he failed to strike in them responsive chords. He was drawn to them: the conviction grew upon him that he did not reach them, and it troubled him, as he thought, disproportionately. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ambiguous ambiguity. But the use of the word "Survival" should have sufficed to indicate that the real point of application of the force by which Nature modifies species and raises the average in any quality, lies not in selective breeding, but in the disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the average. And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to produce a permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist not only in breeding the desirable but in either killing the undesirable, or ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... sharp outlines of her body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were transparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of colour in her cheeks, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... in the future will be smaller, but their average quality will be disproportionately better. The incompetent directors, dramatists, and other squabblers, who until now were parasites on the theater, will find in movie-making a place more suited to their capabilities. The many mediocre ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... materials furnished by nature on the spot for the purpose of constructing a secure and imposing fortress; without any further regard to the rules or pedantries of architecture. Attached to the main building, which ascended to the height of five stories—and yet did not seem disproportionately high from the extent of its range, were several smaller dependencies—some of which appeared to be framed of wood. The purists of our days, who are so anxious to brush away all the wooden patchwork and little tributary ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... and teeming upper-deck, thirty feet below. Seen thus from above, the grey, sloping shields of the turrets, each with its great twin guns, looked like gigantic mythical tortoises with two heads and disproportionately long necks. It was the dinner hour, and men were moving about, walking up and down, or sitting about in little groups smoking. Some were playing cards in places sheltered from the wind and spray; near the blacksmith's forge a man was stooping patiently over ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... and ejaculations from the circle of wondering ladies, while Miss Bonkowski, a frowzy-headed lady in soiled shirt waist and shabby skirt, with a small waist and shoulders disproportionately broad; and with, moreover, a dab of paint upon each high-boned cheek,—nothing daunted by previous failures, leaned forward and putting a somewhat soiled finger beneath the child's pretty chin, ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists assert, but still to a notable extent, in ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... a man's recollection of an interval of time is, as we all know, mainly derived from the number of impressions that his memory has received while it was passing, it follows that, so far as this cause alone is concerned, the earlier part of his day's journey will always seem to have been disproportionately long compared to the latter. It is remarkable, on taking a long half-day's walk, and subsequently returning, after resting some hours, how long a time the earlier part of the return journey seems to occupy, and how rapidly different ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... are distorted and displaced in accordance with the altered shape of the thoracic and abdominal cavities. The twisting of the spine causes the patient to lose in stature, and the limbs appear to be disproportionately long. In advanced cases the pelvis becomes obliquely contracted—a deformity known as ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... rejection, for example, of certain evidence in the Titanic inquiry because it might amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption and checking of a Labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivial points—irritate quite disproportionately. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... little cultivated in this country, but which lends itself excellently to delicate artistic handling, and the creation of that subtle influence which Hamsun's countrymen call stemning, poorly rendered by the English "atmosphere." The epilogue is disproportionately long; the portion written as by another hand is all too recognizably in the style of the rest. And with all his chivalrous sacrifice and violent end, Glahn is at best a quixotic hero. Men, as men, would think him rather a fool, and women, as women, might flush at the thought ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... plunging and rolling heavily, was a small steamer. She was stumpy, high bowed, low waisted, with a short black funnel. Her bridge and single deck-house were disproportionately high. She was shabby and rusty. She looked insignificant. She was swept frequently with showers of white spray. On her bow and on her funnel could be seen the white letters and numbers which proclaimed her proper business. She was ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... smiling. He made no reply, and the smile died from her face, suddenly, as though some one had blown out a light. She returned to her work, or pretended to. But her aspect had left him inwardly shaken. The eyes, disproportionately large and brilliant, were of an emphasis almost ghastly, the usually clear complexion was flecked and cloudy, the mouth dry-lipped. She looked much older than she had done a fortnight before. And the fact was the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... came into the room they saw that everything was really ready. Ustenka was rearranging the cushions along the wall. On the table, which was covered by a disproportionately small cloth, was a decanter of chikhir and some dried fish. The room smelt of dough and grapes. Some half dozen girls in smart tunics, with their heads not covered as usual with kerchiefs, were huddled together in a corner behind the oven, whispering, ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wife, Kedlanga, not excepted. Kedlanga was well formed, her bosom full, her stomach somewhat projecting, the thighs poor, the legs slender, the feet small. The men appeared to have a greater disposition to stoutness than the women. Some of the children had disproportionately large stomachs. Both men and women wore copper rings on the legs, the wrists, and the upper arms. On festivals they decorate themselves with iron rings, with which some reminiscence appears to be connected, to judge by the fact that they will ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... one in his position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The brushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings of each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their mournful souls, the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... who think right along the lines of the essence of our human natures, which is superstition. The worst of it is I've brought it about. I told the meeting about a stupid argument about the building of the church which Billy and Dy had. Billy wants the tree for a ridge pole, because the church is disproportionately long. Well, I told the folks because I thought they wouldn't hear of the tree being cut. But Mrs. Day rounded on me, and the meeting followed her like a flock of sheep. Still, I wasn't done by ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... and indignity. His small eyes, set in red fat, stared with uncomprehending protest; his fat busy hands were not agile enough to defend him. He felt unsuccessful and foolish, and very near the ground. He wished quite disproportionately to be at home with ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... that on her head being much longer than that on the rest of her body, while her features might be described as very human-looking for a monkey, or very monkeyfied for a human being. But I noticed that her arms were disproportionately long, as compared with those of a woman; and a further glance revealed that her feet had a distinct resemblance to hands, her great toes looking very much ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money and more of it. The Farmers' ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... once recognised by the length of the pistil, which is (including the ovarium) fully one-third longer than that of the mid-styled, and more than thrice as long as that of the short-styled form. It is so disproportionately long, that it projects in the bud through the folded petals. It stands out considerably beyond the mid-length stamens; its terminal portion depends a little, but the stigma itself is slightly upturned. The globular stigma is considerably larger ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... he was a curious animal. His broad, strong body was covered with a brown fur as dense, as thick, and as soft as a wolf's; the ears were pricked and pointed, the muzzle sharp, the eyes slant and beady. The breast was disproportionately broad, the forelegs short and apparently very powerful. Around his neck was ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... comparatively small number came from Williams, Carter, and Johns. Instead of having some three or four members as apparently designed in the original contract, some of the families numbered six, eight, and even twelve; and the number of women and children was disproportionately large. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Jim laughed disproportionately. He thought her wonderfully witty. And he and the help ate so much that Annie opened her eyes. She had thought there would be enough left for supper. But ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... be modified. A sounder conclusion and, in fact, the only one that could be reached through the results established above, would be this: Achievement in those activities represented in "Who's Who in America" is acquired disproportionately by stocks predominantly Teutonic in comparison ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the Government up to 1912 pursued a consistent policy, framed for some years ahead and embodied in an Army Act. The underlying principle of these Army Acts (1893, 1899, 1905, 1911) was to maintain a fairly constant ratio between the peace strength and the population. But the war strength was disproportionately increased by the Caprivi Army Act of 1893, which reduced the period of compulsory service from three years to two. The hardly-veiled intention of the German War Staff was to increase its war resources as rapidly as was consistent with ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... their emotions with little or no restraint; and I am informed by Dr. J. Crichton Browne, that nothing is more characteristic of simple melancholia, even in the male sex, than a tendency to weep on the slightest occasions, or from no cause. They also weep disproportionately on the occurrence of any real cause of grief. The length of time during which some patients weep is astonishing, as well as the amount of tears which they shed. One melancholic girl wept for a whole ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... been said in the second chapter and some of the topics introduced are such that they could well have been dealt with in a more relevant manner in connection with similar discussions in the preceding chapters. The extent of this chapter is also disproportionately small, as it contains only 34 sutras, whereas the average number of sutras in other chapters is between ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... highest natures; and the man who in the best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the generator would be burning at their proper degree of illumination, those beyond would give lower and lower candle-power, successively, until the last lamp, or group, would be giving only about two-thirds the light of the first two. In other words, a very slight drop in voltage means a disproportionately great loss in illumination. Hence, by using a primitive system of distribution, such as that shown by Fig. 1, the initial voltage would have to be so high, in order to obtain the proper candle-power at the end of the circuit, that the lamps nearest the generator would be dangerously ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... they are sufficiently ripened to fall down; thus, though only one drupe is put forth each season, yet the produce of three or four years, the aggregate weight of which must be considerable, burdens the stem at one time. This great weight, suspended at the top of the lofty and almost disproportionately slender stem, causes the tree to rock gracefully with the slightest breeze; the agitated leaves creating a pleasing noise, somewhat similar to that of a distant waterfall. Some French writers have enthusiastically alluded ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately short of the long reach. His ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... convicts, in various stages of restraint, all prevented from leaving the island, and forced to remain and seek employment there; so that as soon as the demand for labour falls off, or the supply of it becomes disproportionately large, it is the free ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... speech, and especially in the fine line and phrase, so justly but disproportionately prized in the present day. I give an ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... one volume in the earlier range depends very disproportionately for its interest on the preliminary matter in the form of a Preface or Dedication. In Prefaces, Dedications, Epistles, 1874, the writer drew attention to this point, and furnished a considerable series of such prolegomena in illustration of the fact. But there are cases, of course, where the ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... who proved to be a short, broad-shouldered, thick-set man, in a coarse coat such as the Szeklers wear, high boots, and a large hat. His arms were disproportionately long for his short body, his beard was either very closely cut or sadly in need of the razor, and his legs were planted widely apart as he confronted the travellers in a challenging attitude. Perhaps he wished to invite Manasseh ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... natural to expect, the States which have been least favored in past appropriations should insist on being redressed in those hereafter to be made, at the expense of the States which have so largely and disproportionately participated, we have, as matters now stand, but little security that the attempt would do more than change the inequality from one ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... and hung alongside his fellows in this room. And George moved from one to another till he came to the last. It was himself. He was represented in very perfectly cut clothes, with slightly crooked elbows, and race-glasses slung across him. His head, disproportionately large, was surmounted by a black billycock hat with a very flat brim. The artist had thought long and carefully over the face. The lips and cheeks and chin were moulded so as to convey a feeling of the unimaginative joy of life, but to their shape and complexion was imparted ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... things. She has a most modern and efficient interest in education; and here are gathered what faint, faint beginnings or premonitions of such things as Art Canada can boast (except the French-Canadians, who, it is complained, produce disproportionately much literature, and waste their time on their own unprofitable songs). Most of those few who have begun to paint the landscape of Canada centre there, and a handful of people who know about books. In these things, as in all, this city is properly and cheerfully to the front. It can ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... art of healing has no more right to employ the time of the ignorant student disproportionately in the pleasant and seductive paths of laboratory experimentation—because some of these may one day lead to pathology or therapeutics—than a guardian has to invest the money of his ward in stocks or securities of equally uncertain prospective ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... are rarely tall. Like all degenerates, they are under medium height. Imbeciles and idiots are remarkably undersized. The span of the arms, which in normal persons about equals the height, is often disproportionately wide in criminals. The hands are either ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... the sight of one eye, and others who had unseemly wens on their throats, as large as cocoa nuts. They saw a cripple to-day for the first time, and a female dwarf, whose height scarcely exceeded thirty inches, and whose appearance bespoke her to be between thirty and forty years of age. Her head was disproportionately large to the size of her body; her features, like her voice, were harsh, masculine, and unpleasant in the extreme. It would have been ridiculous to be afraid of such a diminutive thing, but there was an expression in her countenance so peculiarly repulsive, unwomanly, and hideous, that on approaching ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... lacking for aught that was right or reasonable, there was no large amount of capital available. The May custom had always been that the physician should inherit the landed estate; and though this was disproportionately increased by the Doctor's own acquisitions, yet the hold it gave over the town was so important, that he was unwilling it should be broken up at his death, and wished to provide for his other children by charges on the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were there still, but coupled with pathetic signs of some disintegrating and poisonous influence. The face which once, in its pallid austerity, had not been without beauty, had now coarsened, even in emaciation. The features stood out disproportionately; the hair had receded from the temples; something ugly and feverish had been, as it were, laid bare. And composure had been long undermined. The nurse who had just left ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... tender. A lion, ill done, and yet to some degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ. In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely restful against ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... early opportunity of redeeming his pledge, for on the day following the receipt of his letter a short, well-made woman, dressed neatly in black, with dyed hair, greyish-blue eyes, good teeth, a disproportionately large head and a lively and intelligent expression of face, presented herself at the Prefecture of Police and asked for an ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... against odds. Everybody notices that many of the mountain species, like the diapensia, the rose-bay, the Greenland sandwort (called the mountain daisy by the Summit House people, for some inscrutable reason), and the phyllodoce, have blossoms disproportionately large and handsome; as if they realized that, in order to attract their indispensable allies, the insects, to these inhospitable regions, they must offer them some special inducements. Their case is not unlike that ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... restlessly on her pallet. The big, awkward, ill-favoured old man stood with his disproportionately long arms hanging by his sides, staring at her, unaware that his presence half undid the good the leaping flames ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... poor victim who is the admiration of an enchanted audience pays dear for her success. What result can possibly follow on exertions so ill-proportioned to the resources of the delicate sex? The muscles of the body, disproportionately wearied, are forced to their full power of exertion. The nervous forces, intended to feed the fire of passions, and the labor of the brain, are diverted from their course. The failure of desire, the wish for rest, the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... there seems no great inequality, as to strength or endurance, between the sexes. In migratory tribes, as of birds or buffaloes, the males are not observed to slacken or shorten their journeys from any gallant deference to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience that among coursing-dogs and race-horses there is no serious sexual inequality. Aelian says that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she captured a lion, but was proud when she took a lioness, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... one of the secretaries to the Japanese Legation, very small and yellow, with prominent cheek-bones and long, slanting, bloodshot eyes over which the lids blinked incessantly. His body was disproportionately large for his spindle legs, and he turned his toes in as he walked. The skirts of his coat were too wide, there was a multitude of wrinkles in his trousers, his necktie bore visible evidence of an unpractised hand. It was as if a daimio had been taken ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... based on the theory that men, as a whole, are scarcely fit for rights but must be kept to their duties with a strong hand. Neither belief is entirely true. As Mazzini saw, the French Revolution failed because it emphasized the rights so disproportionately in comparison with the duties of man. Conservatism fails, on the other hand, because its conception of duty inevitably ceases before long to be an ethical conception: duty in the mouth of reactionaries usually means ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Austrians early on the 21st. Each side claimed that sanguinary day as a victory; the Garibaldians remained masters of the ground, but the Austrians, in retiring, took with them a large number of prisoners. The losses of the volunteers on this and other occasions when they were engaged were disproportionately heavy. They were spendthrift of their lives, but in war, and especially in mountain warfare, caution is as needful as courage, and in caution they were so deficient that they were always being surprised. General Kuhn's numerically inferior force of tried marksmen, supported ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present that scientific men should assert their right to have their material big. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at the Bond Street College ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... reversions, and there are individuals of this kind among sporting men who are not reached by ordinary social suggestion and stimuli. But granting that what we may call the instinctive interests are disproportionately strong in the sporting class, as compared with, say, the merchant class, yet these instincts are also strongly marked in what may roughly be called the artist class and in spite of a marked psychic disposition for stimuli of the emotional type; and precisely because of this disposition, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Occupation.—Regions given over to agriculture naturally sustain more people than those devoted to grazing, and those which are devoted to manufacturing sustain more than either. In countries in which, as in Great Britain, manufacturing is so disproportionately developed that products must be largely exported, while food must be largely imported, given areas sustain more inhabitants than they do in any agricultural or grazing region and more than they do in any region where grazing and tillage, on the one ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... something new and strange, it for the instant slightly agitates and discomposes the mind. Being unable to classify it with its like, we naturally magnify its intensity, and so tend to ascribe it to a disproportionately large cause. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... large spreading trees with noble limbs, cottages, and cottage gardens, very unlike poor Coombe Prior; Markham's house—a perfect little snuggery covered all over with choice climbing plants, the smart plastered doctor's house, the Morville Arms, looking honest and venerable, the church, with its disproportionately high tower, the parsonage rather hidden behind it; and, on the opposite side of the road, the park-wall and the gate, where old Sarah stood, in an ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Minnows in this state were quite transparent, except the eyes, which were disproportionately large; and they seemed to be perfectly aware that they owed their safety to concealment, as those that I saw immediately buried themselves in the gravel when they were set at ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... rather darker skin of a redder tone. His legs are not so disproportionately short, but in all other respects his body is less well proportioned, graceful, and active than the Kenyah's. His features are less regular and rather coarser and heavier; his expression is serious, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... to view; it was coated and scaly with rust to such an extent, that we were unable to form any idea as to its age or nationality. It would most probably have been a twelve or eighteen-pounder howitzer, for it was about four feet in length, and disproportionately large in girth; but one of the trunnions, and the button at the breech, were broken off, the portion that had lain undermost had entirely disappeared, and the remainder was so honeycombed, that beyond ascertaining that it was a piece of ordnance, we could elicit nothing from this curious ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... oblique upwards and outwards, and the hair coarse, lank and invariably black. The beard appears late in life, and remains generally scanty. The eyebrows are straight and the iris of the eye is black. The nose is generally short, broad and flat. The hands and feet are disproportionately small, and the body early inclines to obesity. The complexion varies from an almost pale-yellow to a dark-brown, without any red or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... just as if any other creature, of four or two legs, would not be stupid after such fierce congestion of the brain. His long ears subject him to a more cruel prejudice than ever color engendered in the circle of humanity but just above him. True, he is rather unsymmetrical in form. His head is disproportionately long and large, quite sufficient in these dimensions to fit a camel. He is generally a hollow-backed, pot-bellied creature, about the size of a yearling calf, with ungainly, sloping haunches, and long, coarse hair. But nearly all these deformities come out of the shameful ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... parish constable; and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not follow from small causes,—that is, disproportionately small,—but from adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder; but ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of old Andra, would be the proper person to carry their request to the elder. "Wee Andra" the young man had been called in his babyhood, to distinguish him from his father, and he still bore the anomalous title though he stood six-feet-four in his moccasins and was disproportionately broad. But in spite of these physical securities, the young giant flatly refused the doubtful honour of approaching his father on the sore subject; so, after much discussion, the delicate task devolved upon Mr. Watson, ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... said that Shelley was too beautiful for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bear this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much as to make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quite disproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by his long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue, and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... so much and so closely, Del, that it is most disproportionately prominent in your mind. You can put out Bunker-Hill Monument with your little finger, if you hold it close enough to your eye. Don't you remember what Mr. Sampson said to-night about somebody whose mind had no perspective in it? that his shoe-ribbon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... make a deep-piled carpet. I do not know whether it is a mango tree at all, for I am no botanist: but anyhow the fruit is rather like that of the mango in external appearance, and in internal still more so, for it has a disproportionately large stone. These stones are cracked, and the kernel taken out. The kernels are spread a short time in the shade to dry; then they are beaten up into a pulp with a wooden pestle, and the pulp put into a basket lined carefully with plantain leaves and placed in the sun, which melts it up into ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of a veritable community, says Plato, is not that this or that member of it should be disproportionately at ease, but that the whole should flourish; though indeed such general welfare might come round again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as a privilege of his individual being after all. The social type he preferred, as we know, was conservative ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... never be mentioned. Of Viola's adventure, to my surprise, her uncle did not make much, but he had heard of that from the fountain-head, unpolluted by Stympson gossip; and, moreover, Lady Diana had been so disproportionately angry as to produce a reaction in him. Viola was his darling, and he had taken her part when he had found that she knew her brother was at hand. He allowed, too, that she might fairly be inspired with ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought, wanted Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in a dull way, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... passing away those superfluous hours between meals when the weather drives a man in-doors. Roused by the furious barking of his chained bulldog, he descried his little favourite approaching, and forthwith presented himself at the doorway, looking disproportionately tall compared with the height of his cottage. The bulldog, meanwhile, unbent from the severity of his official demeanour, and commenced a friendly ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot |
