"Geometrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a piece of faded ribbon. Paton was never in the habit of hampering himself with fine-drawn scruples, and he had no hesitation in opening the folded paper and spreading it out on the table. Judging from the glance I gave it, it seemed to be a confused and abstruse mixture of irregular geometrical figures and cramped German chirography. But Paton set to work upon it with as much concentration as if it had been a recipe for the Philosopher's Stone; he reproduced the lines and angles on fresh paper, and labored over the writing with a magnifying-glass and a dictionary. At times ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... showed quite clearly,—and although he was much abused for his conclusions at the time, they have never yet been disproved and never will be—he showed that in consequence of the increase in the number of organic beings in a geometrical ratio, while the means of existence cannot be made to increase in the same ratio, that there must come a time when the number of organic beings will be in excess of the power of production of nutriment, and that thus some check must arise to the further increase of those organic beings. At the ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... through a given area of surface eleven times more matter had to be cooled in the one case than in the other, there would be a vast difference between the times occupied in concentration. But, in virtue of a second factor, the difference would be much greater than that consequent on these geometrical relations. The escape of heat from a cooling mass is effected by conduction, or by convection, or by both. In a solid it is wholly by conduction; in a liquid or gas the chief part is played by convection—by circulating ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... whatever, while my conversation might divert the attention of the blind man. Thus," added he, with extreme volubility, "I would have told him my opinion on the isothermal and orthogonal superficies, causing him to observe that the equations of partial differences, of which the geometrical explanation is summed up in two orthogonal superficies, cannot generally be integral on account of their complication. I should have proved to him that the united superficies are all necessarily isothermal, and together we would have sought what superficies ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Philo is not original in his views concerning numbers, not above nor below the loose thinking of his age. He accepts unquestioningly the potency of seven, because of its marvellous mathematical properties, ratios, etc., its geometrical efficacy, and because of the seven periods of life from infancy to old age, of the seven parts of the body, the seven motions, the seven strings of the lyre, the seven vowels, and the very name, which is connected ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... porticoes, and two ambulatories, the one a little eastward, the other westward from the said cross-aisle, and running parallel therewith. The floor of the whole is paved with marble, but under the cupola and within the rail of the altar with fine porphyry, polished and laid in several geometrical figures. ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... laughed at all abstract theories and at the ingenuous minds which take them seriously. He held that all system was but logical infatuation; that the only pardonable follies were those which were frankly avowed; and that only a pedant could clothe his imagination in geometrical theories. In general, pedantry to his eyes was the least excusable of vices; he understood it to be the pretension of tracing back phenomena to first causes, "as if," said he, "there were any 'first causes,' ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... of the chisel, so common in debased Roman work, was retained as a very general practice by the Greek carvers, and very often with excellent effect. The foliage of the acanthus, although imitated from the antique, quite changed its character, becoming more geometrical and conventional in its form. That which particularly distinguishes Lombard from Byzantine art is its sculpture abounding with grotesque imagery, with illustrations of every-day life, of a fanciful ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... the Ecole de Guerre he produced two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the stars and sun to be earthly, and the moon of the same nature as the sun, but illumined by it. Somewhat more valuable would appear to have been his geometrical science, could we with accuracy attribute to Thales many problems claimed also, and more probably, by Pythagoras and later reasoners. He is asserted to have measured the pyramids by their shadows. He cultivated astronomy and astrology; and Laertius ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... individuals and races, during the constantly-recurrent Struggle for Existence, we see the most powerful and ever-acting means of selection. The struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high geometrical ratio of increase which is common to all organic beings. This high rate of increase is proved by calculation,—by the rapid increase of many animals and plants during a succession of peculiar seasons, or when naturalised in a new country. More individuals are born ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... or geometrical—approach to kinematic synthesis is possible is a relatively recent idea, not yet fully accepted; but it is this idea that is responsible for the intense scholarly interest in the kinematics of mechanisms that has occurred in this country within ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... all make their big mistakes and manage to recover. Very nearly always it is an apparently little mistake that does most damage in the end, something unnoticeable at the time, that grows in geometrical proportion, ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... business, that it will take no ordinary effort to bring my mind properly into the routine: but you will save a "great effort is worthy of you." I say so myself; and butter up my vanity with all the stimulating compliments I can think of. Men of grave, geometrical minds, the sons of "which was to be demonstrated," may cry up reason as much as they please; but I have always found an honest passion, or native instinct, the truest auxiliary in the warfare of this world. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... genuine magnets. Entirely free in gases, but less so in liquids and still less so in solids, they are nevertheless capable of arranging themselves and of becoming polarized in a regular order, special to each kind of atom, in order to produce crystals of geometrical form characteristic of each species. Thus, as Mr. Saigey remarks in "Physique Moderne" (p. 181): "So long as the atmospheres of the molecules do not touch each other, no trace of cohesion manifests itself; but as soon ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... over with beginnings of plans of action, rough drafts of proclamations and manifestos. Most of these were scratched out, as their futility became evident, and the rest of the sheet covered with absent-minded geometrical designs, as the writers sat despondently listening while Minister after Minister proposed chimerical schemes. I took one of these scribbled pages, in the hand writing of Konovalov, which read, "The ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... must be more modest—as I am. Because one book had a sort of success he imagined his struggles were over. He got a hundred pounds for "On Neutral Ground," and at once counted on a continuance of payments in geometrical proportion. I hinted to him that he couldn't keep it up, and he smiled with tolerance, no doubt thinking "He judges me by himself." But I didn't do anything of the kind.—(Toast, please, Dora.)—I'm a stronger man than Reardon; I can keep my ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... profound philosopher, as well as the most incurious observer, is struck with astonishment on inspecting the interior of a bee-hive. He beholds a city in miniature. He sees this city divided into regular streets; and these streets composed of houses constructed on the most exact geometrical principles and the most symmetrical plan; some serving as store-houses for food, others for the habitations of the citizens, and a few, much more extensive than the rest, destined for the palace of their sovereign. He perceives that the substance of which ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... blue; history, black, lettered in red; physics, a deep orange yellow, lettered in white; mathematics was represented in a small way by the cipher and nine digits, lettered in black upon ten plain unpainted blocks, giving in their forms that number of the principal geometrical figures, to which was added a shallow box with a broad lid, perforated by ten holes, corresponding to the blocks in number, size and shape, but large enough for the blocks to easily ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... grave of some great chieftain, with the remaining stones indicating the graves of his relations and friends? Or was it the commemoration of some battle in olden times, or the record of astronomical or geometrical discoveries, or a temple once devoted to serpent-worship, or what? Lavender, who knew absolutely nothing at all about the matter, was probably as well qualified as anybody else to answer these questions, but he forbore. The interest, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... geometry, first published in 1637, six years after Hariot's Algebra first saw the light in print, one is not disposed to accuse the great philosopher of plagiarism because in working out his problems of great novelty in reference to geometrical curves he employed any systems of notation and calculation in algebra (Hariot's among the others) that happened to be before the world. The point or essence of Descartes' work was geometry and not algebra. Therefore, in climbing to his loft, he was perfectly justified in using the ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... then, of course, the distance of this point from Y is the mean side shift of the hatchet; this distance measured from the zero of the scale on the back of the instrument is the area of the figure in square inches. The scale is read in exactly the same manner as a geometrical scale on a drawing, the whole numbers being read to the right of the zero and the decimals to the left. The instrument does not profess to give results nearer than one-tenth of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... Kalaun, with the Barkukiya and the mosque of Barkuk in the cemetery of Kait Bey, are instances of the second and more matured style of the period. The simple plain ashlar masonry still predominates, but the wall surface is broken up with sunk panels, sometimes with geometrical patterns in them. The principal characteristics of this second period are the magnificent portals, rising sometimes, as in the mosque of sultan Hasan, to 80 or 90 ft., with elaborate stalactite vaulting at the top, and the deep stalactite cornices which crown the summit ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... huge porch attached to the south transept that an approach to anything of this kind is found. But very beautiful work of other sorts may be seen at Dol. The smaller porch is a gem of early work, and the range of windows in the north aisle presents some of the most delicate triumphs of geometrical tracery, too delicate in truth to last, as all are more or less broken. The flat east end gives the church an English look, and the flat east end with an apsidal chapel beyond it especially suggests Wells. Within, the church has a great effect ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... granular, or granitic and porphyritic rocks; and it is always a point of more interest to me (and I think will ultimately be to you), to consider the causes which force a given mineral to take any one of these three general forms, than what the peculiar geometrical limitations are, belonging to its own crystals. [Footnote: Note iv.] It is more interesting to me, for instance, to try and find out why the red oxide of copper, usually crystallizing in cubes or octahedrons, makes itself exquisitely, out of its cubes, into this red silk ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... pilfering from the sugar-bowl. Practical familiarity with the properties of lines, angles, circles, spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and the conic sections will be acquired, which will give a life and reality to the geometrical studies which will occupy them in their school career. Dancing and singing will relieve the tedium of sitting, shake off the surplus energy, give rest to the body, and power, time, and tune to the voice. Models of houses, stores, workshops, kitchens, farms, and factories, which later on they ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... turn of the argument, to prevent the vessel of the state from being hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr. Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the Essay) "let the principles of Mr. Godwin's ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the air of reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... with the neat geometrical pattern of little scars, perpendicular on the forehead, horizontal on the cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he chewed a mouthful of coffee-beans and hide. It may have been a pious ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... decreasing. Fluctuations there may be; but permanent increase, except in restricted localities, is almost impossible. For example, our own observation must convince us that birds do not go on increasing every year in a geometrical ratio, as they would do, were there not some powerful check to their natural increase. Very few birds produce less than two young ones each year, while many have six, eight, or ten; four will certainly be below the average; and if we suppose that each pair produce young only four ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... individuals after a brief period of incubation fall sick with the disease; being bitten by other mosquitoes they serve to transmit the disease through the "intermediate host" to still others. Thus the epidemic extends, at first slowly from house to house, then more rapidly, as by geometrical progression. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... flower designs is generally modern. The old-time patterns are for the most part simple geometrical figures, which are decorative and emblematic rather than imitative. Shafts of light and shadow alternating or dovetailed represent life, its joys and sorrows. The world is conceived of as rectangular and flat, and is represented ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... dispell the illusion. It was suggested that, at the moment of the appearance of the phenomenon, the child be requested to fixate the end of the father's index finger which was revolved, in the air, to form various geometrical figures. This had the desired effect. Clearly we have here a case of the object altering its apparent size without altering its distance. Under normal conditions a change in size is followed by a corresponding change ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... The obstacles to be surmounted made every movement slow, and while a vast, complicated military organization may be reliable for weeks, to make it work for months requires qualities of greatness which increase in geometrical ratio according to the extension of time. Twice Napoleon bared his inmost thought, once to Metternich in Dresden, once to Jomini at a dinner company in Vilna. The first season he intended to seize Minsk and Smolensk, winter there, and organize his conquests. If this should not ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Lady Derl; "he said he found you in the geometrical center of nowhere, surrounded by ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... in the least awe-struck, or humbled by its size and grandeur. I have not often felt thus when looking on architecture, but have felt, at all events, at first, intense exultation at the beauty of it; that, and a certain kind of satisfaction in looking on the geometrical tracery of the windows, on the sweeping of the huge arches, were, I think, my ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... shining points. This dome we understand to be the complement or completing part of a correspondent dome on the other side of the world. It follows that we are in the heart of a hollow sphere of loveliest blue, spangled with light. Now the sphere is the one perfect geometrical form. Over and round us then we have the one perfect shape. I do not say it is put there for the purpose of representing God; I say it is there of necessity, because of its nature, and its nature is its relation ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... mother; and, having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead a very small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life, in the central point which it appeared to me, (as it must naturally appear to geometrical animals), that I occupied ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... of knowing divine concerns through images, the method will be apparent. Thus, for instance, the Politicus shadows forth the fabrication in the heavens. But the figures of the five elements, delivered in geometrical proportions in the Timaeus, represent in images the idioms of the gods who preside over the parts of the universe. And the divisions of the essence of the soul in that dialogue shadow forth the total orders ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... have undergone every figure, size and shape of geometrical invention: It has passed through every form in the whole zodiac of Euclid. The large square buckle is the ton of the present day. The ladies also, have adopted the reigning taste: It is difficult to discover ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... cider apples seen here in all stages of growth. Even the blossoms of such trees later on cannot compare with the glory of an orchard, in the old acceptance of the word, having reached maturity in the natural way. Certain portions of rural France are too geometrical. That I ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Geometrical; as that, in a four-sided figure, if the opposite angles are equal, the opposite sides are equal and parallel.—Countless similar uniformities of co-existence are disclosed by Geometry. The co-existent facts do not cause one another, nor are they jointly ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... (may its coming be hastened!) that women are even only as extensively organized as men are today, the organization of men will indeed proceed by leaps and bounds. It will not be by arithmetical, but by geometrical progression, that the union will count their increases, for it is the masses of unskilled, unorganized, ill-paid women and girl workers today, who in so many trades today increase the difficulties of the men tenfold. That dead ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... substituted the cultivation of vegetables for which they found a market on the continent and in England; and the numerous cultivated patches along the mountain sides presented a very pretty appearance from the anchorage—laid out as they were with seemingly geometrical precision. The hardy little horses could be hired very cheaply, and the justly extolled natural beauties of the island in the vicinity of Funchal were fully explored. The greater portion of it is quite inaccessible except on foot, but the ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... Imperial Order of Abnormal Proboscidians, of which I am the High Noble Toby and Surreptitious Treasurer. Two months ago I was the only member. One month ago there were two. To-day we number four Emperors of the Abnormal Proboscis in good standing—doubles every four weeks, see? That's geometrical progression—you know how that piles up. In a year and a half every man in California will have a wart on his Nose. Powerful Order! ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... observe it, for she had kissed away all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; for the ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... between two lofty ranges of porphyry and amygdaloid. The conformation of these mountains was most curious: it looked as if the whole district was the effect of some prodigious crystallization, so geometrical was the outline of each particular hill, sometimes rising cube-like, or pentagonal, but more generally built up into a perfect pyramid, with stairs mounting in equal gradations to the summit. Here and there the cone of the pyramid would be shaven off, leaving it flat-topped like a Babylonian altar ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... each year of re-establishing the boundaries of their fields—the inundation obliterating old landmarks and divisions. The science thus forced upon their attention was cultivated with zeal and success. A single papyrus has been discovered that holds twelve geometrical theorems. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... high and beautiful screen of open tracery in white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the emperor and his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of flowers and foliage, handled with great freedom and spirit. The two cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving except the plain Kalamdan or oblong ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people, and with all their immediate impulses to action. At the commencement of the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratic politicians and economists. The public roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts, disputing on the inalienable sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws of the pure reason, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Jesus our Lord"; and the result of the working comes out,—"Ye shall be made partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust." I suppose it means that if we are willing to go on at an arithmetical progression, God would work in us at a geometrical one; and so, patiently persisting in holiness, and hungering after righteousness, we shall be in heaven before we know where ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... circles, and one remarkable rock that of others; some have only one line of stones in their circumference, and some have two; some circles are adjacent, some contiguous, and some include, and some intersect each other. Sometimes urns are found in or near them. Some are curiously erected on geometrical plans, the chief entrance facing the cardinal points of the heavens; some have avenues leading to them, placed exactly north and south, with detached stones, sometimes in straight lines to the east and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... least attention to mathematical studies. That he should not prosecute them with the diligence usual at Cambridge, was of course to be expected; yet his clearness and acumen would certainly have enabled him to master the principles of geometrical reasoning; nor, in fact, did he so much find a difficulty in apprehending demonstrations, as a want of interest, and a consequent inability to retain them in his memory. A little more practice in the strict logic of geometry, a little more familiarity with the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... granite, a stone which cannot be found within hundreds of miles from the spot, in fact the north of France is the nearest. Each slab is about twenty feet in height and they are fashioned rudely in the form of a temple. It is said that in the design geometrical figures were used, and that some sun cult was practised by those who reared them, for the sun's shadow passes through various points only on Midsummer and on May Day. The Druids are supposed to have used this as the great shrine of their faith, ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... by nature slow, stolid and clumsy. I was bad at being "smart"; I was slow and clumsy at drill; map making and geometrical drawing were physical impossibilities to me; I was incredibly slow and stupid at machinery, mechanism and electricity. The only subject which interested me was military history. In my first term I dropped ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... be obvious, to every child in Spaceland who has touched the threshold of Geometrical Studies, that, if I can bring my eye so that its glance may bisect an angle (A) of the approaching stranger, my view will lie as it were evenly between the two sides that are next to me (viz. CA and AB), so that I shall contemplate the two impartially, and ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... spirit further than I can follow, excites in me a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat, your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but the geometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturb your "philosophic proposition." The point is, I love that in you more than I love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as something apart from our relationship offends ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... keep out of the fray as long as possible, offered no opposition to the passage of his supplies up the Rhine, which might have been seriously impeded by them at Rheinberg. The details of the siege, as of all the Prince's sieges, possess no more interest to the general reader than the working out of a geometrical problem. He was incapable of a flaw in his calculations, but it was impossible for him quite to complete the demonstration before the arrival of de la Chatre. Maurice received with courtesy the Marshal, who arrived on the 18th August, at ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... back to bygone times, while I, not wishing to interrupt her, had taken the poker in my hand and with it was tracing geometrical figures in the peat-ash on the hearthstone. So absorbed was I in my circles and pentagons that I did not notice that Grannie had stopped short in her story, and was taking a lively interest in what I was doing. It was with no little surprise, therefore, that I suddenly ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... represent vultures, and the vulture was a bird of religious significance among some of the Semitic nations. Fragments of soapstone bowls were discovered, some with figures of animals carved on them, some with geometrical patterns, while on one were marks which might possibly belong to some primitive alphabet. There were also whorls somewhat resembling those which occur so profusely in the ruins of Troy, and stone objects which may be phalli, though ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... discern, after the beginning of the Russian campaign, and especially in the last contest in Belgium, signs of a decline in his almost superhuman vigilance and energy. Yet all must admit "that transcendent geometrical faculty," as Sainte-Beuve calls it, "which characterized Napoleon, and which that powerful genius applied to war with the same ease and the same aptitude that Monge [a great French mathematician] applied it to ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... not allowed to have pen and ink without special permission; but paper and pencils were not included under this regulation, so my guard got them for me, together with candles and candlesticks, and I proceeded to kill time by making geometrical calculations. I made the obliging soldier sup with me, and he promised to commend me to one of his comrades who would serve me well. The ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... he said: "I'm glad you've got your garden so wild and natural—nothing clipped and trimmed, no rectangles, circles, or other geometrical figures, from which one deduces at once that one has to do with men of a very low grade of intelligence. To take delight in squares and circles is a bad sign. Who wants to have intercourse with cave-men? No—you've got a very ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... those of mathematical genius as entirely to absorb them. For eighteen centuries the finest spirits of our race drew some of their best means of intellectual discipline from the study of the ellipse. Then came a new era in the history of this curve. Hitherto it had been an abstract form, a geometrical speculation. But Kepler, by some fortunate guess, was led to examine whether the orbits of the planets might not be elliptical, and, lo! it was found that this curve, whose beauty had so fascinated so many men for so many ages, had been deemed by the great Architect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... condemning fault; indeed the ridge of the back, like a straight line, with the outline of the belly exactly parallel, viewed from the side, and a depth and squareness when viewed from behind,—which remind us of a geometrical cube, rather than a vital economy,—may be said to be the indications of excellence in a fat ox. The points of excellence in such an animal are outlined under the subsequent head, as developed in the cutting up ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... the builders proceeded by piercing one block of stone and setting therein upright rods of iron[FN155]; after which they pierced a second block of stone and lowered it upon the first. Then they poured melted lead upon the clamps and set the blocks in geometrical order, till the building was complete. Now the height of each pyramid was an hundred cubits, of the normal measure of the day, and it had four faces, each three hundred cubits long from the base and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... was no fool—he constructed a kaleidoscope that showed an absolute, geometrical symmetry, where in fact there was only confusion. He showed how, by the use of mirrors, things could be made big, small, tall, short, wide, crooked or distorted. He told of how magicians, by the use of Galileo's Tube, could show seven ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... our lonely mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly yet come to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream; the first encroachment of commerce on this land. There was our port, our Ostia. That straight geometrical line against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and what of sublimity there is in history ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the rough bark of the patient forest-trees, are brought to light; the rings of lovely shadow which the creature went on making in the dark, as the oyster its opaline laminations, and its tree-pearls of beautiful knots, where a beneficent disease has broken the geometrical perfection of its structure, gloom out in ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... it, mademoiselle," Phinuit asserted sulkily. "Too much is enough. I've watched him making faces with the top of his head so long I dream of geometrical diagrams laid out in eyebrows—and wake up screaming. And they call ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... middle, vertical lines are slightly inclined to the centre, and horizontal lines bulge a little at the middle. And all this is so fine that exact measurements are necessary to detect the artifice. Greek architects discovered that, to produce a harmonious whole, it is necessary to avoid geometrical lines which would appear stiff, and take account of illusions in perspective. "The aim of the architect," says a Greek writer, "is to invent ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... lait, but flecked with many patches of foam and flat iron-colored rocks and innumerable islets, some no bigger than a billiard-table, but with even the tiniest boasting a tree or two. On the other—westward—was a mounting vista of close-shaven turf, and many copings, like magnified geometrical problems, and a host of stunted growing things—with the staid verdancy of evergreens predominant—and a multitude of candid shafts and slabs and crosses and dwarfed lambs and ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... most ancient edifice of Byzantine architecture, which had been first a church, and then a mosque, and then a church again. The honeycombs and stalactite ornaments in the corners, as well as a marble stone in the floor, adorned with geometrical arabesques, showed its services to Islamism. But the pictures of the Crucifixion, and the figures of the priests, reminded me that I ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... Villa Albani. Over-formal and (as my companion says) too much like a tea-garden; but with beautiful stairs and splendid geometrical lines of immense box- hedge, intersected with high pedestals supporting little antique busts. The light to-day magnificent; the Alban Hills of an intenser broken purple than I had yet seen them—their white towns blooming upon it like vague ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of M. Rapieff, and to one form of M. Reynier's lamp, that is to say, the position of the ends of the carbons, and therefore of the arc, is determined not by clockwork or similar controlling mechanism, but by the locus of the geometrical intersection of the axes of the carbon rods, the positions of which axes being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts''; so that he looks upon "the factory village and the railway'' and "sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider's geometrical web.'' The poet, however, seems hard to convince hereof. Emerson will have it that "Nature loves the gliding train of cars''; "instead of which'' the poet still goes about the country singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... begins on the 26th this year," he explained, "and so far as I can make out I shall romp through it. I am going to take all the subjects in Class One—mathematics, Latin, French, geometrical drawing, and English composition; I'll astonish them in the last subject! Plenty of dash and go, eh, Peggy,— that's the style to fetch 'em! In Class Two you can only take two subjects, so I'm going in for chemistry and physics. ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... of the Oriental Mediterranean made Salonica bristle with cupolas and towers. The Greek temple threw into prominence the gilded bulbs of its roof; the Catholic church made the cross glisten from the peak of its bell-tower; the synagogue of geometrical forms overflowed in a succession of terraces; the Mohammedan minaret formed a colonnade, white, sharp and slender. Modern life had added factory chimneys and the arms of steam-cranes which gave an anachronistic effect to this decoration of an Oriental harbor. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... capitol (a building) stationary (immovable) capital (all meanings except building) stationery (articles) counsel (advice or an adviser) miner (a workman) council (a body of persons) minor (under age) complement (a completing element) angel (a spiritual being) compliment (praise) angle (geometrical) ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... some notion of the difference between Cubism and Futurism than you find your Cubist doing things that are both Cubist and Futurist, or neither Cubist nor Futurist, according as you look at them. You find things made up of geometrical figures to give volume, yet with all the parts many times repeated to give motion. You find things that have neither bulk nor motion but look like nothing so much as a box of Chinese tangrams scattered on a table. Finally, you have assemblages of lines that do not draw anything, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... great white roads upon some of Earth's vast plains, but dismissed the idea as too costly and not the best. "We have a new agent now," he said. "There is electricity. We must use that. And the figures must, of course, be geometrical. Geometry is the same throughout all the worlds that are or have been ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... first called attention to the clear flame of Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony. So Munch, who pins to paper with almost geometrical accuracy his personal adventures in the misty mid-region of Weir. And a masculine soul is his. I can still recall my impressions on seeing one of his early lithographs entitled, Geschrei. As far as America is concerned, Edvard Munch was discovered by Vance Thompson, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... boys had his own room, and there collected his own treasures and trophies, arranged to suit his convenience and taste. Frank's was full of books, maps, machinery, chemical messes, and geometrical drawings, which adorned the walls like intricate cobwebs. A big chair, where he read and studied with his heels higher than his head, a basket of apples for refreshment at all hours of the day or night, and an immense inkstand, in which several pens ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... a look that asked permission, his hat and cane and the odd glove upon the round, shining walnut-table that stood, adorned with mild little religious works, in the geometrical centre of the Convent parlour, and checked the various points off upon the fingers of the gloved hand with the lean, brown, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... services are small that we are privileged to do for the loved one. But if we are allowed to sit at meat with her,—ever a royal condescension,—it is ours at least to pass her the salt, to see that she is never kept waiting a moment for the mustard or the pepper, to cut the bread for her with geometrical precision, and to lean as near her warm shoulder as we dare to pour out for her the ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... the Elysian Fields and the Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call these places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to geography and filling no part of the conventional space in three dimensions. All our waking experience ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... was a queer-looking squiggle. Each was slightly different, and each bore some resemblance to a stick-figure, a geometrical figure or just a childish scrawl. The whole parade reminded Malone of pictures he had ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is made of small husks, and gravel, and slime, most curiously made of these, even so as to be wondered at, but not to be made by man, no more than a king-fisher's nest can, which is made of little fishes' bones, and have such a geometrical interweaving and connection as the like is not to be done by the art of man. This kind of cadis is a choice bait for any float-fish; it is much less than the piper- cadis, and to be so ordered: and these may be so preserved, ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... stadium is supposed to have contained a hundred and twenty-five geometrical paces, or six hundred and twenty-five Roman feet, corresponding to our furlong. Eight stadia make a geometrical, or Italian mile; and twenty, according to Dacier, a French league. It is observed, notwithstanding, by Guilletiere, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... measure of success. Of other men's success, that is, and their aim, not his. For he was, in his own eyes, a humble plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind of sacredness that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase. It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee, what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a shilling to the sight. It was in the air that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... to a degree of refinement and cultivation which we do not usually associate with a rough life, such as was led by the monks of sea-girt Lindisfarne. There are to be seen wonderful initial letters, geometrical and tesselated designs, like the most delicate and intricate mosaics, and above all, beautifully devout representations of the four evangelists, all evidently drawn by the same loving and reverent hand, and the whole colouring as fresh now as if ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... pupil. This speed gives the habit of concentrating attention, one of the most valuable of mental habits. Then cultivate logic. Logic is not the hard matter that is fancied. A young person, especially after a little geometrical training, may soon be taught to perceive where a fallacy exists, and whether an argument is well sustained. It is not, however, sufficient for him to be able to examine sharply and to pull to pieces. He must learn how to build. ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... evenings by taking a course at the "Slodjskolan," the great industrial school of Stockholm. It was an establishment especially devoted to the practice of the sciences, particularly to making experiments in physics and chemistry, and to geometrical constructions which are only taught theoretically in ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... of the lens-shaped formative yelk (b) proceeds quite independently of the nutritive yelk, and in perfect geometrical order. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... had given him a wood-burning outfit at Christmas, and he had done the work himself. It consisted of the royal arms, somewhat out of drawing and not exactly in the center of the frame, and a floral border of daisies, extremely geometrical, because he had drawn them in first with ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... perfection of detail were lavished with Oriental profuseness. If we carefully examine the fret-work upon the walls of the various corridors and apartments, it becomes evident that it represents flowers and geometrical lines, though at a casual glance it has rather a confused appearance. The various spaces are filled with lines from the Koran; the words "There is no conqueror but God" occurring many hundred times ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... a chump," Cub grinned with a shrug of self-commiseration; "but say, let's draw those geometrical lines on our chart and see if we get the same result those radio ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my good looks by giving me the chance to take a ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... dive for something which might be thrown overboard. They wore clouts only, ate taro and yams, and had axes, spears, and knives made of common iron. Their canoes were made without nails, and were ornamented with geometrical lines. They wore the beards of goats and small shells ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... all the world over for its pipes, a branch of manufacture for which it is now as famous as of yore. Partly in this parish and partly in that of Benthall, and only about 300 yards from the station, are the geometrical, mosaic, and encaustic tile works of the Messrs. Maw. They were removed here a few years since from Worcester, the better to command the use of the Broseley clays, since which they have attained to considerable importance, and now rival ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... error of endeavoring to materialize and fix that animula vagula, blandula, that coy and evasive spirit of Art, which is its peculiar characteristic, and gives to its works inspiration, harmony, and poetic sentiment. Ideal Beauty can be hatched from no geometrical eggs. But the line which I refer to, as the expression of most subtile Grace, pretends to be merely a type of that large language of forms with which the most refined intellects of antiquity uttered their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the future. Professor Geddes, in fact, envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and aesthetic perceptions. For the human shell is not merely geometrical and architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities; it holds and expresses all those differences by which we are exalted above the bee or the beaver. It is coloured with our emotions and ideals, and contorted with all the spirals of our history. And all these ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... twenty-five years; and if he could increase his food with greater ease, he would double in less time. But for animals without artificial means, the amount of food for each species must, on an average, be constant, whereas the increase of all organisms tends to be geometrical, and in a vast majority of cases at an enormous ratio. Suppose in a certain spot there are eight pairs of birds, and that only four pairs of them annually (including double hatches) rear only four young, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... Snake, the place of kings. Upon the site where had been the hive of huts wrapped in the green arms of the banana plantation, laboured under the incandescent sun gangs of prisoners under armed guards upon the building of larger huts laid out in streets, broad and geometrical, lined with correct ditches for drainage. Around the outskirts here ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... apprehension Alice turned away from the whispering shadows and went to the Virgin's shrine, where she knelt and tried to pray. The candles sputtered before her, and she shut her eyes tight, which made colored patterns come and go behind the lids, fascinating geometrical figures that changed and faded and grew stronger. And suddenly, inside a widening green circle, she saw a face, the face of a young man with laughing gray eyes, and her heart beat with joy. She loved him, she loved him!—that was her secret and the cause of her ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... They frequently show the greatest skill and cunning in the construction of their webs and the capture of their prey, and naturalists say that the spider has a very well developed brain. They must certainly have a geometrical talent, or they could not arrange their webs with such regularity and scientific accuracy. Some spiders will throw their webs across streams that are ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... concerned Newton, More had little to say. He was preoccupied with the development of a theory which would show that immaterial substance, with space and time as attributes, is as real and as absolute as the Cartesian geometrical and spatial account of matter which he felt was true but ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called The Ecstasy, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... re-mention that though this explanation is made as simple as I possibly can make it, so far as words are concerned, the figures present the result of an exact geometrical investigation. Every dot, for instance, in Fig. 2, has had its place separately ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... the light of prescience, but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all reason and philosophy, are the result of outer impression. The primal language of our minds is in the concrete. Afterwards it becomes the cypher, and even at its highest it is expressed by angles, lines, and geometrical forms—substances and allusive shapes. But now, as the scene shifted by, I had involuntarily thrust forward my hands as did the girl when she passed out into the night, and, in doing so, touched the curtain of my cabin door swinging in towards me. I recovered myself, and a man timidly stepped ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and the Greeks hung geometrical forms over their cradles, so as to strike the eyes of the child with lawful relations. Froebel introduces colored balls for the same purpose, which, considering the psychological and emotional condition of the child, leads ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a faculty of receiving and interpreting more complex thought-forms and mental states. The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, and those of private investigators as well, have shown us that a picture of a complicated geometrical design held in the mind of one person may be carried to and received by the mind of another person, who reproduces the design on paper. In the same way, complicated thoughts have been transmitted ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... when we were perfectly benumbed with fear, and had lost all power of articulation, we saw a locomotive, drawing two carriages, running along an embankment at right angles to our course. A few more revolutions of the wheels, and it will be all over with us, for we seem to be fated to meet with geometrical precision at ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... from a reconnaissance flight with snapshots of a railhead, a busy factory, or an army headquarters. Prints are sent to the "I" people, who, at their leisure, map out in detail the point of interest. No fear of doubtful reports from the glossed surface of geometrical reproduction, for the camera, our most trusted spy, cannot distort the truth. Next a complete plan of the chosen objective, with its surroundings, is given to a bombing squadron; and finally, the pilots concerned, well primed ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... but, as these ate all, or nearly all, houses which would cost 20U or more ducados in this court, they occupy as much space as would a city of two thousand inhabitants here. For the wall, as measured by me, is 2U250 geometrical pasos in circumference, at five tercias for each paso, which makes three quarters of a legua. [53] In all these islands there are none unconverted except the Zambales, as I have said above, and those in the mountains where the mines are, and a few villages behind these same mountains, which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... ridges south-west of Colesberg. A demonstration by the artillery disclosed a strong position, strongly held. Colesberg town lies in a hollow in the midst of a rough square of high, steep kopjes, many of them of that singular geometrical form described in Chapter III. Smaller kopjes project within rifle range from the angles of the square, whilst 2,000 yards west of its western face a tall peak, called Coles Kop, rises abruptly from the encircling plain, and dominates ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... his old home,—in the hipped roof of it, the mullioned casements, the wide window-seats, the high and spacious rooms, the geometrical gardens and broad lawns, in all that was quaint and beautiful at Matocton,—because it would be Patricia's so very soon, the lovely frame of a yet lovelier picture, as the colonel phrased it with a flight ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... there are no better advised than in the last third of the eighteenth century. Their sole expedient is material force, and as material force diminishes in the same degree as the spread of pauperism and the insight of the proletariat increase, English perplexity necessarily grows in geometrical proportion. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Professor Smyth describes the coffer as showing no "symptoms" whatever of grooves, or catchpins or other fastenings or a lid. "More modern accounts," he re-observes, "have been further precise in describing the smooth and geometrical finish of the upper part of the coffer's sides, without any of those grooves, dovetails, or steady-pin-holes which have been found elsewhere in true polished sarcophagi, where the firm fastening of the lid is one of the most essential features of the whole business." Mr. Perring, however, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to the most competent binder, and instruct him to do justice to the volume. Let old English books, as More's "Utopia," have a cover of stamped and blazoned calf. Let the binder clothe an early Rabelais or Marot in the style favoured by Grolier, in leather tooled with geometrical patterns. Let a Moliere or Corneille be bound in the graceful contemporary style of Le Gascon, where the lace-like pattern of the gilding resembles the Venetian point-lace, for which La Fontaine liked to ruin himself. Let a ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang |
