"Fluidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to undertake it. I submit that the library would be extremely unlikely to move in the matter, simply from the lack of the tendency that we are discussing. That tendency gives a flexibility, almost a fluidity, which under a pressure of this kind, yields and ensures an outlet for desirable energy along a line ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... the rising sun striking the white crests of the lifted waves had suffused the whole ocean with a pinkish opal color: the darker parts of each wave seemed broken into facets instead of curves, and glittered sharply. The sea seemed to have lost its fluidity, and become vitreous; so much so, that it was difficult to believe that the waves which splintered across the Excelsior's bow did not fall upon her deck with the ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... relating this Experiment, which I have several times try'd, but the Reason why the Phaenomena mention'd have not been taken notice of, may be, that unless Lead be brought to a much higher degree of Fusion or Fluidity than is usual, or than is indeed requisite to make it melt, the Phaenomena I mention'd will scarce at all disclose themselves; And we have also observ'd that this successive appearing and vanishing of vivid Colours, ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... versed in old and ancient music; he knew all the old scales, eight in number, and used them in his compositions with compelling charm. The influence of the old Gregorian chant has given his music a certain fluidity, free rhythm, a refinement, richness and ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... there was no room in such a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity of labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place offering to employers the hire of their toil. Yet we feel sure that, in actual fact, wherever the population increased, there must have grown up in the process of time a number ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... Miller, a century later, more aptly described as the Testimony of the Rocks. From a consideration of all these things, Buffon at length arrived at his succession of the Epochs, or Seven Ages of Nature, namely: (1) the Age of fluidity, or incandescence, when the earth and planets assumed their shape; (2) the Age of cooling, or consolidation, when the rocky interior of the earth and the great vitrescible masses at its surface were formed; (3) the Age when the waters covered the face of the earth; ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... features which I have indicated as pointing to a former fluidity of the earth may be explained here. We shall see in the course of this work that the mountain chains and other great irregularities of the earth's surface appear at a late stage in its development. Even as we ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... footstep went down some fifteen inches through the volcanic ashes. I descended by the eastern side, and was soon at the base of the great cone. I made my way by tortuous walking round the erupted masses of lava, and also by portions of the lava streams, which, on losing their original fluidity, had become piled up and contorted into ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... sceptical protest is a simple one. It is an appeal to human experience. I maintain that this modern tendency to talk dogmatically and vaguely about "the evasive fluidity of life" is nothing more than a crafty pathological retreat from the formidable challenge of life. It is indeed a kind of mental drug or spiritual opiate by the use of which many unheroic souls hide ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system. But it was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society. Women as well as men became the preachers of the new sect. Lollardry had its own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from hand to hand; scurrilous ballads which revived ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... the breaking point. In the course of M. Tresca's own experiments, however, he has found it necessary to consider, at the end of the period of alteration of elasticity, a third state, geometrically defined and describable as a period of fluidity, corresponding to the possibility of a continuous deformation under the constant action of the same strain. This particular condition is only realized with very malleable or plastic bodies; and it may even be regarded as characteristic of such bodies, since its absence is noticeable in all non-malleable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... formally decided in the last or neutral sense. It is not so. This illegitimate union of three contradictories fritters character away, breaks it up into discordant parts, and dissolves into mercurial fluidity that leavening sincerity and free and cheerful boldness, which come of harmonious principles of faith and action, and without which men can never walk as confident lovers of justice ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... from an invisible which is not a perfect fluid, then the argument deduced by Sir William Thomson in favour of the eternity of ordinary matter disappears, since this eternity depends upon the perfect fluidity of the invisible. In fine, if we suppose the material universe to be composed of a series of vortex-rings developed from an invisible universe which is not a perfect fluid, it will be ephemeral, just as the smoke-ring which we develop from air, or that which we develop from water, is ephemeral, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... easily evaporates, and in case of the accident of even a moderate elevation of temperature, it would be expelled from the joint entirely. Mr. Girard proposes, therefore, to employ the water to act, first, by its pressure, to lift the Journal to be lubricated; and secondly, by its fluidity, to form a liquid bed or cushion between the journal and its box, on which the journal may rest in its revolution, without touching the metal of the box ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... (in respect of vegetables and animals), and that attribute of the mind which is called patience of the capacity to bear. The properties of water are coolness, taste, moisture, liquidity, softness, agreeableness, tongue, fluidity, capacity to be congealed, and power to melt many earthly products.[1105] The properties of fire are irresistible energy, inflammability, heat, capacity to soften, light, sorrow, disease, speed, fury, and invariably upward motion. The properties ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the discovery of types and the mathematical deduction of secondary forms by Hauey.—In Geology, the verification and results of Newton's theory, the exact form of the earth, the depression of the poles, the expansion of the equator,[3103] the cause and the law of the tides, the primitive fluidity of the planet, the constancy of its internal heat, and then, with Buffon, Desmarets, Hutton and Werner, the aqueous or igneous origin of rocks, the stratifications of the earth, the structure of beds of fossils, the prolonged and repeated submersion of continents, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... furthermore, that these aggregations of matter have been developed from an original nebulous condition. The facts indicate that the natural history of the sun, as well as that of its attendant spheres, exhibits three momentous stages: First, that of vapour; second, that of igneous fluidity; third, that in which the sphere is so far congealed that it becomes dark. Neither of these states is sharply separated from the other; a mass may be partly nebulous and partly fluid; even when it has been converted into fluid, or possibly into the solid state, it may ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... ground, of course. Such a poet finds the rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... bases.—Albemarle Island; fluid lavas, their composition.—Craters of tuff; inclination of their exterior diverging strata, and structure of their interior converging strata.—James Island, segment of a small basaltic crater; fluidity and composition of its lava-streams, and of its ejected fragments.—Concluding remarks on the craters of tuff, and on the breached condition of their southern sides.— Mineralogical composition of the rocks of the archipelago.—Elevation ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... was completely habituated to. He did it through the year at intervals of from three to six months; during the busy summer season among the Swiss pensions he had done it once every fortnight, or oftener. His nature was full of adaptability, receptivity, fluidity; he made friends everywhere he went, and snatched up acquaintances ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... to meet for instance in the Antigone with a passage which might pass muster as an extract from the Iphigenia in Aulis. In metrical effects the style of the lesser English poet is an exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the same comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of short unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into soft overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solid harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain. But in King ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... two factors are omnipresent and complementary. Except for purposes of analysis they are two inseparable aspects of every human society. Where form predominates, social status results. Where function predominates fluidity, flexibility and dynamism are the outcome. Rapid change occurs on the home front at the same time that ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... and modulating the tone, in the expressive, melancholy manner of shading it off, Chopin was entirely himself. He had quite an individual way of attacking the keyboard, a supple, mellow touch, sonorous effects of a vaporous fluidity of which ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Alpine-glows, and peach-blooms and opalescent fires, gleams and subtle suggestions that thrill moment by moment, and disappear as soon as seen, only to be followed by equally beautiful, enchanting and surprising effects, and with it all, is a mobility, a fluidity, a rippling, flowing, waving, tossing series of effects that belong only to enchanted water—water kissed into glory by the sun and moon, lured into softest beauty by the glamour of the stars, and etheralized by the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... fundamental mistake of physical principles. About the time that India tea was introduced to Europe, a grievous error crept into the practice of medical professors; they falsely imagined that health could not be more promoted than by increasing the fluidity of the blood. This opinion once established, it is no wonder that mankind, with one accord, adopted the infusion of India tea, which was then a novelty to Europe, as the best means of obtaining the above effect. By the advice of Bentikoe ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... Water is one of the greatest moving powers that man can employ to supply his defects in the most necessary arts, either through the smallness or weakness of his body. But the waters which, notwithstanding their fluidity, are such ponderous bodies, do nevertheless rise above our heads, and remain a long while hanging there. Do you see those clouds that fly, as it were, on the wings of the winds? If they should fall, on a sudden, in watery ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship; all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear in such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that preceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of her tones, and the lambent fluidity of her transitions, if I may be allowed the phrase, were made by her art quite subservient to the expression, and owed their chief value to the share they bore in producing it. Possibly there was a little too much of the dramatic in her singing, but it ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... to be stored human energy, as a coal measure is stored solar energy; and moneyed capital, under the stress of modern life, has developed at once extreme fluidity, and an equivalent compressibility. Thus a small number of men can control it in enormous masses, and so it comes to pass that, in a community like the United States, a few men, or even, in certain emergencies, a single man, may become ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... desirable to consider the means of thinning the blood, when it has been deprived, by too profuse transpiration in hot, dry winds, of its aqueous particles, and rendered thick and viscid. Water would easily supply this want of fluidity if it were capable of mingling with the blood when in this state; acid matter cannot be ultimately combined with the blood when the body is in this state. In order to find a menstruum by which water may be rendered capable ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... school; not that he had ever been to school, but he knew in advance, instinctively, that it wouldn't suit him. Accordingly, he sought the wettest possible places and played all day with superhuman energy. He finally found Hop Yet's box of blueing under a tree, in a very moist and attractive state of fluidity, and just before dinner improved the last shining hour by painting himself a brilliant hue and appearing at dinner in such a fiendish guise that he frightened ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.[25] It deals with solids and geometrical figures, and its instrument is logic. But according to Bergson it has an inherent incapacity to deal with life.[26] When we contrast the rigidity and superficiality of intellect with the fluidity, sympathy and intimacy of intuition, we see at once wherein {119} lies the true creative power of man. Development, when carried too exclusively along the lines of intellect, means loss of will-power; and we have seen how, not individuals alone, but ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... perpetual travels. They were cod, performing their evolutions all as parts of a single body, stretched full length in the same direction, exactly parallel, offering the effect of gray streaks, unceasingly agitated by a quick motion that gave a look of fluidity to the mass of dumb lives. Sometimes, with a sudden quick movement of the tail, all turned round at the same time, showing the sheen of their silvered sides; and the same movement was repeated throughout the entire shoal ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... converging light on Elena's sincerity and depth of soul. Again one may note Turgenev's method for rehabilitating Shubin in our eyes; Shubin is simply made to criticise Stahov; the thing is done in a few seemingly careless lines, but these lines lay bare Shubin's strength and weakness, the fluidity of his nature. The reader who does not see the art which underlies almost every line of On the Eve is merely paying the highest tribute to that art; as often the clear waters of a pool conceal its surprising depth. ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... vigorous woodcut. From four superimposed woodblocks, with almost no linework, he was able to capture the full-blooded forms of Rubens. By keeping his means simple Jackson asserted the importance of his cutting and printing, the expressiveness of his drawing, and the fluidity of his tones. Obviously such a procedure required major decisions as to what to omit and what to stress; in other words it required interpretive abilities of a ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... and manner, if we think first of the romance-poetry and then of Chaucer's divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible, and justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his "gold dew-drops of speech." Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... this treatment of unusual value, though great care should, of course, be taken to avoid any movements that are in any way exhausting or violent. When the blood is in a thick or viscous condition the use of the hot water adds to its fluidity, and it can then be forced more easily through the capillaries, thus greatly lessening the blood pressure. It is well known that a low blood pressure is conducive to endurance and to general health. And when these ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... opium group, fulness of the sinuses and veins of the brain, with effusion of serum into the ventricles and beneath the membranes. In the belladonna group, nil. In the alcohol group, signs of inflammation, congestion of brain and membranes, fluidity of blood, long-continued ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... while they permit it to retain, so to speak, its perfect homogeneity. On the other hand, its own undulations are so rapid that so far as they are concerned the conditions become very different, and its fluidity has, one might say, no longer the time to come in. Hence its ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... milk is best served as a beverage. But as children grow up, the fluidity of milk makes them feel as if it were not food enough and it is generally better to use it freely in the kitchen first, and then, if there is any surplus, put it on the table as a beverage or serve it thus to those who need an extra supply—the half-grown boys, ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... insufficient, and he encouraged his students to experiment themselves, free of charge, in the college laboratory. As a student of twenty years he, with his brother, Ernest Henry Weber, Professor of Anatomy at Leipsic, had written a book on the 'Wave Theory and Fluidity,' which brought its authors a considerable reputation. Acoustics was a favourite science of his, and he published numerous papers upon it in Poggendorff's ANNALEN, Schweigger's JAHRBUCHER FUR CHEMIE UND PHYSIC, and the musical ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... life appears; at another it disappears. With heat enough the earth would melt like a snowball in a furnace, with still more it would become a vapor and float away like a cloud. More or less heat only makes the difference between the fluidity of water and the solidity of the rocks that it beats against, or of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... vinous, acetous, and putrefactive, is the natural decomposition of animal and vegetable matters, to which a certain degree of fluidity is necessary; for where vegetable and animal substances are dry, as sugar and glue for instance, and are kept so, no fermentation ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... Ogilvie here; he is and shall remain a minor neoclassic theorist. At the very least, however, it can be said that his methods are reasonably various and that, while his general critical assumptions are not unique, his control is strong. The fluidity with which he moves from one related position to another indicates a mind well informed by the critical tenets of his own time. If he does not surprise, he is nevertheless an interesting and worthy exemplar of the psychological tradition in later eighteenth-century criticism; and his historicism ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... substance, the counterpart of the visible body, within which it resides, and to which it imparts life, strength, and the power of assimilating food.[261:2] Archaeus was regarded as the creative spirit, which, working upon the raw material of water or fluidity, by means of a ferment promotes the various actions which result in the development and nutrition of the physical organism. As life and all vital action depended upon archaeus, any disturbance of this spirit ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... food is reduced to a state of fluidity, the pyloric orifice of the stomach is unclosed, and it is thrust onwards through the alimentary canal, receiving in the duodenum the secretions of the liver and pancreas, after which it yields to the lacteals its nutrient portion, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... the officer entered his drawing-room, Bouchereau, who had not shut his eyes the whole night, experienced all the sensations of the criminal to whom sentence of death is read. But the first words spoken restored fluidity to his blood, for a moment frozen in his veins. The Captain made the most explicit and formal apology, and retired after shaking the hand of his old friend, who, overjoyed at his escape, did not show himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... as in steel making or ordinary iron puddling. The high heat of the metal is sufficient to preserve its fluidity during its transit from the converter to the baller; and the cinder from the blow is kept in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... times." Hearn seldom pinned down to the paper his dreams, though he had a gift of suggestion, of spiritual overtones, in a key of transcendentalism, that, in certain pages, far outshines Loti or Maupassant. Disciple of Herbert Spencer—he was forced because of his feminine fluidity to lean on a strong, positive brain—hater of social conventions, despiser of Christianity, a proselyte to a dozen creeds, from the black magic of Voodooism to Japanese Shintoism, he never quite rid himself of the spiritual ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... not hold for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms which it needs to-day—reforms which will free its economic life from the credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the marketing of its products—will follow the way of all agricultural communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Ease, fluidity, grace, imagination, energy, earnestness, mark his work. No wonder is it that Franklin said, "Others can rule, many can fight, but only Paine can write for us the English tongue." And Jefferson, himself a great writer, was constantly, for many years, sending to Paine manuscript ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... least considerable, think that the tides produced by the Sun upon her seas, or globe in its state of pristine fluidity, must have been strong enough to seize and fix her, as the Earth did for the Moon, thus obliging her to present always the same face to the Sun. Certain telescopic observations would even seem to confirm this theoretical deduction from ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... they have been excited or awakened from without, through its planetry position with reference to a luminous central body. Compression, when considered as a consequence of centrifugal force acting on a rotating mass, explains the earlier condition of fluidity of our planet. During the solidification of this fluid, which is commonly conjectured to have been gaseous and primordially heated to a very high temperature, an enormous quantity of latent heat must have been liberated. If the process of solidification began as Fourier ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Messrs. Simpson and Maule, of Kennington, but he would not advise the use of varnish so made. It is apt to dry up in round spots, and which sometimes print from the negative. He also adds, that one ounce of the collodio-amber varnish as recommended by him will, with care, from its great fluidity and ready-flowing qualities, effectually varnish upwards of thirty glass negatives of the quarter plate size: thus the real expense is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... advantage. In all casting, the first process is to make the mould; and plaster is the substance which is almost always employed for the purpose. The property which it possesses of remaining for a short time in a state of fluidity, renders it admirably adapted to this object, and adhesion, even to an original of plaster, is effectually prevented by oiling the surface on which it is poured. The mould formed round the subject which is ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... surface from that first plunge into the underworld he discovered that he was a good actor and demonstrated the plasticity of his nature. He was himself astonished at his own fluidity. Once having mastered the language and conquered numerous fastidious qualms, he found that he could flow into any nook of working-class life and fit it so snugly as to feel comfortably at home. As he said, in the preface to his second book, The Toiler, he endeavoured really to know the working ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... and fruit cooler, Lake Como; as at first it did seem; but a tropical dining table, its surface a slab of light blue St. Pons marble in a state of fluidity. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... with complete effect,—"Turn ye, turn ye—why will ye die?" The marvel truly is that we are already so dead, so immured and petrified in our hard self-satisfaction, when we might so easily develop the freedom, fluidity, and delicacy of fine response to these tenuous intimations of our own spirituality and high destiny. Here we live, as some writer has aptly said, on top of a gold mine, and the tragedy is that we are ignorant ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt |
