"Ill-defined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Addison was very modest in his monograph. He stated that the first case of the malady had been reported by his great predecessor at Guy's Hospital, London, Richard Bright, the describer of Bright's Disease. Then he talks about the "curious facts" he had "stumbled upon" and refers to an "ill-defined impression" that these suprarenal bodies, in common with the spleen and other organs, "in some way or other minister to the elaboration of the blood." In the preface to his work he had spoken more confidently of the fact that Nature, as an experimenter and a vivisector, can beat ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... specks:—the pole of a chariot, a dangling rag of linen, the corner of a wall, or a golden necklace on the bosom of a god. The glass balls on the roofs of the temples beamed like great diamonds here and there. But ill-defined ruins, piles of black earth, and gardens formed deeper masses in the gloom, and below Malqua fishermen's nets stretched from one house to another like gigantic bats spreading their wings. The grinding of the hydraulic wheels ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he wanted to keep them from becoming serious ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... tell you, being an Irishwoman, that it was because she was Irish, and, therefore, capable of a sort of intellectual bull; but, unluckily, though ingenious, this is not true. The sort of ability or abilities, to which we give the ill-defined name of "cleverness," is entirely distinct from common sense, judgment, discretion; so distinct as to be almost their opposite. I think a clever woman requires quite an unusual portion of the above ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... glass, comes into focus. If the button is not in the field, rest the thumbs and index fingers, using both hands, on the edge of the watch-glass, pressing lightly but steadily, and give the glass a slow, short, sweeping motion; the button will perhaps appear as an ill-defined blackness, because not quite in focus. Bring this into the centre of the field. Raise or lower the microscope until the button appears with sharp outlines. If the scale does not cover the button, rotate the eye-piece; this will bring the scale into a new position. Since ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... nebulae. When he first decided to study the spectra of nebulae, he selected for observation those objects known as planetary nebulae—small, round, or slightly oval discs, generally without central condensation, and looking like ill-defined planets. The colour of their light, which often is blue tinted with green, is remarkable, since this is a colour very rare among single stars. The spectrum was found to be totally different to that of any star, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... problem, by the reward of fame and the pleasure of achievement, but such persons are rare. The average man (and woman), in my experience, loses interest in anything that does not directly benefit him or in which his personal competitive feeling is not aroused. Interest becomes vague and ill-defined the farther the matter concerned is from the direct personal good of the individual, and proportionately it becomes difficult ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... gone over the entire ground from the point of view of a geologist. He ranges over a wide field, and appeals in support to writers of acknowledged ability in all branches of learning. Yet the impression we gather from his writings is that of ill-defined, but far-reaching antiquity, one necessary to account for the great climatic and geographical changes which he shows us have taken place since the Glacial Age. But he tells us that any term of years he could suggest ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... to halt in expectation of the coming of something unusual. The decreasing portion of sun becomes more and more narrow, until at length it is reduced to a crescent-shaped strip of exceeding fineness. Strange, ill-defined, flickering shadows (known as "Shadow Bands") may at this moment be seen chasing each other across any white expanse such as a wall, a building, or a sheet stretched upon the ground. The western side of the sky has now assumed an appearance dark ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... remaining in the possession of the proprietor, who was a picture-dealer, and his collection of dusky chefs-d'oeuvre covered the walls of the passages and staircases with dark canvas, over whose varnished surface ill-defined figures and ill-discerned faces seemed to flit, as with some trepidation I ran past them. The house must have been a curious as well as a very large one; but I never saw more of it than our own apartments, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... on the rather level roadway that led up to Pinnacle Point, but there were sidetrips down ill-defined paths to the little creeks. Landy sometimes went along to advise as to road gaits. The Gillis dogs were constant companions. In fact, since the night of Davy's arrival they waited around until he made ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... in the way. He had a keener eye than the majority of young men, and occasionally exercised the old man's privilege of saying outright things which, despite theory, are better left unsaid. Moreover, the situation was ill-defined, and an ill-defined situation does not improve in the keeping. Sir John said sharp things—too sharp even for Millicent—and, in addition to the original grudge begotten of his quarrel with Jack and its result, the girl nourished an ever-present ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the coming of dawn, at first a colourless dawn, clear and spacious, before which the mists whirl and fade, and there opens to our eyes not the narrow passage, the definite end we had imagined, but the rocky, ill-defined path we follow high amidst this limitless prospect of space and time. At first the dawn is cold—there is, at times, a quality of terror almost in the cold clearness of the morning twilight; but insensibly its coldness passes, the sky is touched with fire, and presently, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... family; its subject is a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in A Simple Story, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... she was mistaken. The one whom she thought she had seen existed no longer, never had existed. It was a spectre seen in the limbo of another world, in the darkness of a half light. And she continued to walk, retaining of this ill-defined meeting an impression of coldness, of vague embarrassment, and ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... paid for it was considered exorbitant by those who were opposed to the purchase in 1803, yet the possibilities of the country, then so vague and ill-defined, so amply justified the prophetic faith of its advocates that a century later many millions of dollars in excess of the purchase money were spent in commemorating the transfer of a tract of land without which ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... slip from his tongue; he hesitated. For the last two days he had been living in a dream, among a rapid succession of strange, ill-defined events which left behind them no precise memory, as a man starts, half-awakened, from a slumber peopled with fantastic visions. It was true, doubtless, he believed he had seen Honore lying upon a cannon, dead, but he would not have cared to swear to it; what use is there in ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... fabrics were evidently produced by the chilling of the air from its own expansion caused by the upward deflection of the wind against the slopes of the mountain. They steadily increased on the north rim of the cone, forming at length a thick, opaque, ill-defined embankment from the icy meshes of which snow-flowers began to fall, alternating with hail. The sky speedily darkened, and just as I had completed my last observation and boxed my instruments ready for the descent, the storm began in serious earnest. ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... home with a sigh of relief. He would no longer approach Marian with doubtful and ill-defined intentions, which he believed chiefly accounted for the clever girl's coldness ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... purposes, situated at Viney and Blakeney Hill, and at Ruerdean Woodside. It also bears fresh testimony to the satisfactory working of the Act of 1 & 2 Vict., c. 43, for regulating the opening and working of mines and quarries, the litigation to which they had formerly given rise under the ill-defined and objectionable customs which had so long prevailed having almost entirely ceased. The actual amount annually paid to the Crown during the last six years was stated to be 4,281 pounds 17s. 4d., besides the profit made ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... which have puzzled the sons of men, none had such an attraction for the learned Professor von Baumgarten as those which relate to psychology and the ill-defined relations between mind and matter. A celebrated anatomist, a profound chemist, and one of the first physiologists in Europe, it was a relief for him to turn from these subjects and to bring his varied knowledge to bear upon the study of the soul ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is not a vague effort after righteousness—an ill-defined, pointless struggle for an ill-defined, pointless end. Religion is no dishevelled mass of aspiration, prayer, and faith. There is no more mystery in Religion as to its processes than in Biology. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... words is bound up with the images they evoke, and is quite independent of their real significance. Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, &c., whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not suffice to precisely fix it. Yet it is certain that a truly magical power is attached to those short syllables, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... possible to approach a clearer understanding of the proper meaning to attach to the generally ill-defined and hazy term miracle.[27] Matthew Arnold's fantastic illustration of the idea of miracle by supposing a pen changed to a pen-wiper may fit some miracles, especially those of the Catholic hagiology, but, if applied ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... hydrolysis of the non-cellulose derivatives to soluble products. Apart from its exceptional inconvenience, rendering it quite impracticable in laboratories which are concerned with the valuation of cellulosic raw materials for industrial purposes, the attack of the reagent is complex and ill-defined. This criticism we would make general by pointing out that such processes quite ignore the specific characteristics of the non-cellulose components of the compound celluloses. The second division of the plan of our work was to define these constituents by bringing together all that had ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... power of accumulating and disbursing ideas, and in the extent and variety of his knowledge, he exceeded Lamb, and also most of his other contemporaries; but the mind of Lamb was quite as original, and more compact. The two friends were very dissimilar, the one wandering amongst lofty, ill-defined objects, whilst the other "clung to the realities of life." It is fortunately not necessary to enter into any comparative estimate of these two remarkable persons. Each had his positive qualities and peculiarities, by ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... yet been investigated, the substance of this germ has a peculiar chemical composition, consisting of at fewest four elementary bodies, viz., carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, united into the ill-defined compound known as protein, and associated with much water, and very generally, if not always, with sulphur and phosphorus in minute proportions. Moreover, up to the present time, protein is known only as a product and constituent of living matter. Again, a true germ is either ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not far to go. Athens was compactly built, all quarters close together. Yet before he reached home and bed, he was fighting back an ill-defined but terrible thought. "Glaucon! They think I am Glaucon. If I chose to betray the Cyprian—" Further than that he would not suffer the thought to go. He lay sleepless, fighting against it. The dark was full of the harpies of uncanny suggestion. He arose unrefreshed, to proffer every ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... apply the methods which we use in finding the distance of a star to the discovery of the distance of the nebulae. These flimsy bodies are usually too ill-defined to admit of being measured with the precision and delicacy required for the determination of distance. The measurements necessary for this purpose can only be made from one star-like point to another similar point. If we could choose a star ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... three genera Anthoceros, Dendroceros and Notothylas, and stands in [v.04 p.0650] many respects in an isolated position among the Bryophyta. Three species of Anthoceros occur in Britain, growing on the damp soil of fields, ditches, &c. The dark green thallus has an ill-defined midrib, and is composed of parenchymatous cells. In each assimilating cell there is usually a single large chloroplast. The apical region, which has a single initial cell, is protected by mucilage secreted by the mucilage ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in February over the region of the Great Lakes, the White Nile rushes northward, sweeping before it the stagnant sheets of water left by the inundation of the previous year. On the left, the Bahr el-Ghazal brings it the overflow of the ill-defined basin stretching between Darfur and the Congo; and the Sobat pours in on the right a tribute from the rivers which furrow the southern slopes of the Abyssinian mountains. The first swell passes Khartum ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... dark-hued, voluptuous Venus of the South. The two soils naturally breed the one cold statues, the other passionate life, but these two different phases are in themselves identical, Thor's hammer, and the various wonderful exploits of the Northern gods and goddesses, their dim, ill-defined notions of creation, of time and space, and of future worlds, are but natural growths from the nature of the North. Their gods, like their men, are all action, and to raise their actions above those of the human race, they naturally invest them with peculiar supernatural physical endowments, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... comments.—The cusps of RAM-UCR no. 381, a left M1, are sharp and the wear-facets resulting from occlusion with the lower dentition are small. The paraconule is a low, ill-defined cusp on the anterior margin of the crown; a metaconule is not present. A smooth stylar shelf is present labial to the metacone. The crown was supported by three roots. There are no ...
— Records of the Fossil Mammal Sinclairella, Family Apatemyidae, From the Chadronian and Orellan • William A. Clemens
... wind. After that morning, in which one had been a little point on an immense plane, with the gale not only above one, as it commonly is, but all around one as it is at sea; and after having steeped one's mind in the peculiar loneliness which haunts a stretch of ill-defined and wasted shore, the narrow, varied, and unordered streets of the port enhance the creations of man and emphasise ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... blood was up, instead of intrenching themselves and waiting developments, pushed northward and eastward inland in search of fresh enemies to tackle with the bayonet. The ground is so broken and ill-defined that it was very difficult to select a position to intrench, especially as, after the troops imagined they had cleared a section, they were continually being sniped from all sides. Therefore, they ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... covered with boulders of rock or with hard incrustations of lime, but at this particular point there had been a drip from the distant roof, which had left a patch of soft mud. In the very centre of this there was a huge mark—an ill-defined blotch, deep, broad and irregular, as if a great boulder had fallen upon it. No loose stone lay near, however, nor was there anything to account for the impression. It was far too large to be caused by any possible animal, and besides, there was only the one, and the patch of mud was of ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of December 1791, the ill-defined disease under which he had for some time laboured, ended in his dissolution; and subsequent examination showed that inflammation of the brain had taken place. He felt that he was dying—"The taste of death," he said to his sister-in-law, "is already on my tongue—I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... transport allotted to the brigade consisted of bullocks instead of mules—a mistake which was to leave the men without food for over twenty-four hours. Darkness soon closed in upon the column, and when the comparatively easy road across the Jam plain gave place to an ill-defined track running up a deep ravine, sometimes on one side of a mountain stream, sometimes on the other, sometimes in its very bed, even the native guides, men of the district, familiar with its every rock and stone, were ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle
... on the usual basis of trade and colonisation. At its head was Sieur de Monts, Pierre du Guast, the governor of Pons, a Calvinist and a friend of the King. After much deliberation it was decided to venture south of Canada and explore that ill-defined region, called "La Cadie" in the royal commission given to De Monts as the King's lieutenant in Canada and adjacent countries, the first record we have of that Acadia where French and English were to contend during a century ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... natural feelings, and won no small favour and approbation in the eyes of the Duke and his fair daughter. The evening, which had begun with two of the party so inauspiciously, passed over lightly and gaily; and after supper, Wilton rose to retire to rest, with a sigh, perhaps, from some ill-defined emotions, but with a recollection of two or three happy hours to be added to the treasury of such sweet things which memory stores for us ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... weapon into his breast." The Resident is also considered as the protector of the people from the injustice and oppression of the chiefs. This oppression, though not carried on in the way of open force, which the ill-defined nature of their authority would not support, is scarcely less grievous to the sufferer. Expounders of the law, and deeply versed in the chicanery of it, they are ever lying in wait to take advantage of the necessitous and ignorant, till they have stripped them of their property, their family, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... number[493]—second ballotings were required. With the issues so confused, the results could hardly prove of large significance. The lines which separate party groups to-day in France are not infrequently both ill-defined and shifting, with the consequence that it is not possible to express party strength by exact numbers, as may be done in the case of the parties of Great Britain or of the United States. A deputy may even belong to two groups at one time. The composition of ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... door of the inner room, and Schalken thought he saw a shadowy and ill-defined form gliding into that apartment. He drew his sword, and, raising the candle so as to throw its light with increased distinctness upon the objects in the room, he entered the chamber into which the shadow had glided. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his finger he almost forgot for the moment what its significance was. It scarcely reminded him just then of the girl with the tearful eyes, usually so present with him. Her face seemed to be receding from his memory; the whole story of his life seemed to grow dim and ill-defined. His mind was curiously elate with a sense of achievement, a certainty that he was near the goal, that ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... slightly wider than body; tip of snout rounded, slightly truncate; canthus rounded; tympanum small, less than one half diameter of eye; tympanum having posterior margin ill-defined, separated from eye by distance about equal to diameter of tympanum; diameter of eye slightly less than distance from eye to nostril; width of eyelid about two thirds interorbital width; paratoid gland indistinct; lumbar glands high, separated from insertion of leg by about one ...
— A New Species of Frog (Genus Tomodactylus) from Western Mexico • Robert G. Webb
... flying machine, was overlooked. When the machine was considered as a method of transport, the vertical screw type, or helicopter, became at once ridiculous. It had, nevertheless, many advocates who had some vague and ill-defined notion of subsequent motion through the air after the weight ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... from a suspicion that the land which had been given them in usufruct was to be resumed. Possibly the proceedings of the commission may have done something to justify this fear, for the limits of this land possessed by corporate bodies had probably become very ill-defined in the course of years. But, although a corporate was stronger than an individual interest and rested on some public guarantee, the complaints of these townships, composed as they were of burgesses, were merely part of the civic question, and ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... raised his hat, a huge, white, loose, shapeless felt, in keeping with his ill-defined attire, and made an awkward bow which at once included the old lady and the Dictator, on whom the blue eyes beamed for ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... behind him. Only an occasional butte reared its head above the sea of low foothills that stretched away into the bad lands to the southward. The sides of the valley flattened and became ill-defined. Low ridges and sage-topped foothills broke up its continuity, so that the little creek that started so bravely from the mountains ended nowhere, its waters being sucked in by the parched and thirsting alkali soil long before it reached ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... interfering, even if interference could have prevailed. The two had fallen in love with one another, and, the man not being visibly bad, the marriage had come about; was there more to say? And yet Rainham's ill-defined uneasiness still questioned and explored. A hundred little episodes in his friendship with the brilliant young painter, dismissed as of no import at the time, returned to him—instances, as it seemed now to his morbid imagination, in which that character, so frank and so enigmatic, rang scarcely ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... always write in the sense of Mr. McLennan, who introduced totemism to science. Thus, to speak of 'sex-totems,' or to call the protecting animal of each individual a 'totem,' is, I fear, to bring in confusion, and to justify Mr. Max Muller's hard opinion that 'totemism' is ill-defined. For myself, I use the term in the strict sense which I have given, and in ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... of effusion into the joint, and when this has subsided under rest it may be possible to feel ill-defined cords, or tufts, or nodular masses, and to grasp between the fingers those in the supra-patellar pouch. There is little wasting of muscles, and it is exceptional to have signs of disease of the articular surfaces ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... became notorious in England a few years ago for a "little war," in which we inflicted a very heavy chastisement on the Malays for the assassination of Mr. Birch, the British Resident. It has on its south and southeast Sungei Ujong, Jelabu, and Pahang; but its boundaries in these directions are ill-defined. The Strait of Malacca bounds it on the west, and its coast-line is about a hundred and twenty miles long. From its slightly vague interior boundary to the coast, it is supposed to preserve a tolerably uniform depth of from fifty to sixty miles. Klang ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... former abortive disturbance. The doctrine of asylum as applied to this case is not sanctioned by the best precedents, and when allowed tends to encourage sedition and strife. Under no circumstances can the representatives of this Government be permitted, under the ill-defined fiction of extraterritoriality, to interrupt the administration of criminal justice in the countries to which they are accredited. A temperate demand having been made by the Chilean Government for the correction of this conduct in the instance mentioned, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... drew back when Eliph' mentioned his occupation. She did not consider a book agent any less worthy than another man, but she had been obliged to miss the last payment on Sir Walter Scott, and she had an ill-defined feeling of guilt. To miss a payment was almost as hideous in her eyes as to neglect to put a dime in the contribution plate each Sunday would have been. Her first thought was that Eliph' had come to rudely ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... a craving, and for what? A lingering longing, dark and ill-defined, A something wanting, but I know it not, A missing link it is not mine to find, A flaming fire that scorches up the mind And goads me ever onward—onward where? I pray—I gasp for light—for I am blind, The light that never, ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... Oblivion. Upon its brink the Student paused, and gazed into the dark waters with a steadfast look. They were limpid waters dark with shadows only. And as he gazed, he beheld, far down in their silent depths, dim and ill-defined outlines, wavering to and fro, like the folds of a white garment in the twilight. Then more distinct and permanent shapes arose,—shapes familiar to his mind, yet forgotten and remembered again, as the fragments of a dream; till at length, far, far below him he beheld the great ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... individual and remains a self-determining person. It is the loss of this self-determined individuality alone that renders man completely impersonal. When individual spontaneity is feebly manifested, we speak of an ill-defined or a "passive" personality. Personality is, in short, from the objective point of view, a self-determining individual with a unique nature and a definite status in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... formed by a chain of mountains running nearly south from this line to Cape St Romanus, otherwise Cape St Mary, but much nearer the east coast than the west. The island is divided into a great number of kingdoms, but so confusedly and ill-defined, that it were endless to enumerate them. It is very populous, the inhabitants having many cities and towns of different extent and grandeur[4]. The country is fertile and well watered, and everywhere diversified with mountains, vallies, rivers, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... made in permeable rocks below the ground-water surface fill to its level and are known as wells. Where valleys cut this surface permanent streams are formed, the water either oozing forth along ill-defined areas or issuing at definite points called springs, where it is concentrated by the structure of the rocks. A level tract where the ground-water surface coincides with the surface of the ground is a ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... were to be identified with illusion, there would be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth of illusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and the trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subject is a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the general combination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination it is seen that ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... inhibition, in every individual in the same way, must be called hereditary. Different as are the teeth from the germs of teeth in the newly-born, so different are the man's concepts, clear, sharply defined by words, from the child's ill-defined, obscure concepts, which arise quite independently of all language (of ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... (D. S. H. 8605, Path. 568) had an ill-defined attack of mental disease and was in D. S. H. at 29. Thereafter, lived in Gloucester Almshouse, but at 51 became excited and was returned to D. S. H. where she died at 59. Possibly hallucinated: someone called her mother (single woman). Delusion: the spirit ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... later, to talk of "ce triste livre," and to declare, in the true romantic spirit, that "Bad maxims are worse than bad acts." There have always been, and always will be, people who experience a sort of malaise, an ill-defined discomfort, as though they sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This is particularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Our virtues are often only our vices in disguise," ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... why the love of God does not appear to all men in the sacrifice of his Son is, that it is often viewed, not as it is in itself, but through the distorting medium of false analogies, or of a vague and ill-defined phraseology. Hence it is that the melancholy spectacle is everywhere presented of men, of rational and immortal beings, living and dying in a determined opposition to a doctrine which they have not taken the pains to understand, and ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... enemy? He has left his dead everywhere, and we have seen rows of prisoners. Yonder again there is one, drab, ill-defined and smoky, outlined against the dirty sky. But the bulk seem to have dispersed afar. A few shells come to us here and there blunderingly, and we ridicule them. We are saved, we are quiet, we are alone, in this desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... she could not understand. An affectation of politeness, strange enough between friends, was suddenly succeeded by an ill-dissembled anger, a cold, stinging tone, in presence of which Claire was as perplexed as by a difficult problem. Sometimes, too, a singular presentiment, the ill-defined intuition of a great misfortune, was mingled with her uneasiness; for all women have in some degree a kind of second sight, and, even in the most innocent, ignorance of evil is suddenly illumined by visions of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... phase that their organic connections with life are widest and most profound. As such they appear in the Eleusinia; and in all mythology they furnish the only possible key for the interpretation of its mystic symbolism, its hieroglyphic records, and its ill-defined traditions. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense within her—too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind—that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that ten months before covered a life as fevered as it was unclean, only the Police barracks remained in repair, since life had passed the rest by and forgotten it. The ill-defined streets, incorporated as a part of the plan of the original village only because the helter-skelter builders knew no other plan for a village, were more ill-defined than ever because less used. Where nothing but pedestrians passed, where the "Mayor" was merely proprietor of the leading dance-hall, ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... Bairds, partly because his wife was a sister of Forster's, partly because of frays that had arisen between his herdsmen and those of the Bairds, for his cattle wandered far and wide on the mountain slopes to the south, and sometimes passed the ill-defined line, beyond which the Bairds regarded the country as their own. Jedburgh was but ten miles away, Hawick but six or seven, and any stay after the sun rose would speedily have brought strong bodies of men from these towns, as well as from his still nearer neighbours, ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... lower Euphrates, who seem to have belonged to three different types. The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Armenian, Hebrew and Phoenician. Side by side with these the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, whom we provisionally call Sumerians, who came, it is said, from some northern country, and brought with them a curious system of writing which, adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the air suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... us, wonderful partitions of empires and kingdoms; those loose and ill-defined rules of succession in Germany, France, England, and elsewhere; productive of revolution at the death of every sovereign, and often during every reign, showed the Popes that hereditary rights ought to be clear and fixed, and confined ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... degrees 7 minutes 10 seconds South and longitude 4 degrees 29 minutes 12 seconds West of Sydney. On this I found a greyish kind of slate; but on Magnetical Island I discovered no local attraction affecting the needle, so as to warrant the name bestowed by Cook. It is a high piece of land, with an ill-defined peak in the centre, 1770 ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... considerable size, swarming with trout, many of which it was my luck to first explore and cast a fly into. Most of this lovely country, as said before, was part of the Apache Indian Reservation, on which no one was allowed to trespass; but the boundary line was ill-defined and it was difficult to keep our cattle out of the forbidden territory. Indeed, we did not try ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... the radical division of neuroses and psychoses was accepted as a dogma; on the one side, one described epilepsies, hysterias, neurasthenias; on the other, one studied manias, melancholias, paranoias, dementias, without preoccupying oneself in the least with the connections those very ill-defined disorders might have the ones with the others. This division was accentuated by the organization of the studies and the treatment of the patients. The houses that received the neurotic patients and the insane were absolutely distinct. ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... collapse under the overpowering grasp of a single Dictator or Despot, whose centralized system in the main, still survives; having also seen how the nucleus of China proper was encompassed on three sides by Tibetans, Tartars, Tunguses, Coreans, and by various ill-defined tribes to the south; let us see if there is any evidence whatever to show, or even to suggest to us, whence the orthodox Chinese originally came, and who ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... once on the way home that day Mr Dunning confessed to himself that he did not look forward with his usual cheerfulness to a solitary evening. It seemed to him that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped in between him and his fellow-men—had taken him in charge, as it were. He wanted to sit close up to his neighbours in the train and in the tram, but as luck would have it both train and car were markedly empty. The conductor George was ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... sun the day had become excessively warm, and there was not a breath of wind to cool the stifling atmosphere. The trail was ill-defined and rough, winding through bare glacial bowlders that were thick-strewn on the ridges; and the difficulty of following it, together with the heat, made the work seem doubly hard, as we trudged with heavy packs to the shores of a little lake which nestled in a notch between the bills a mile and ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... the greater difference between species? That this does habitually happen, we must infer from most of the innumerable species throughout nature presenting well-marked differences; whereas varieties, the supposed prototypes and parents of future well-marked species, present slight and ill-defined differences. Mere chance, as we may call it, might cause one variety to differ in some character from its parents, and the offspring of this variety again to differ from its parent in the very same character and in a greater degree; but this alone ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... of this incident to complete that separation he is effecting in the hitherto unanalysed, ill-defined, popular notions, and received and unquestioned axioms of practice—that separation of the instinctive military heroism, and the principle of the so-called heroic greatness, from the true principles of heroism and nobility, the true principle of subjection and sovereignty in the individual human ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Then he remembered Cecily, and his own purpose in coming into the garden. He hurriedly made a tour of the walks and shrubbery, ostentatiously calling her, yet seeing, as in a dream, only the beautiful eyes of the stranger still before him, and conscious of an ill-defined remorse and disloyalty he had never known before. But Cecily was not there; and again he experienced the old sensation ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that I was odious. From her point of view—No. That is an abuse of language. There are mental states in which a woman has no point of view at all. She wanders over an ill-defined circular area of vision. That is why, in such conditions, you can never pin a woman down with a shaft of logic and compel her surrender, as you can compel that of a mere man. We went on arguing, and after a time I really did not know what I was arguing about. I advanced and tried ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... Solidarity is the basis of society. Cardinal Della Rovere and Raffaelle were two powers equally revered. You have sucked the milk of the Revolution in your academy and your political ideas may be influenced by it; but as you advance in life you will find that crude and ill-defined principles of liberty are powerless to create the happiness of the people. Before considering, as a Lenoncourt, what an aristocracy ought to be, my common-sense as a woman of the people tells me that ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... their venomous nature is yet far from being extinct. This, added to the ill-defined species of fascination which they are supposed to exercise, has caused them here, as elsewhere, to be held in great abhorrence. I have heard persons who ought to have known better, exclaim on the danger of gazing upon one of the harmless reptiles. The idea ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... to some invisible and grisly visitors: the footsteps of the stranger emitted such an awful and supernatural sound, when trampling on the skulls which strewed his path, that it was impossible for the coldest imagination not to labor under some crude and ill-defined apprehension. Verily, the weird sisters could not have chosen a fitter abode. Nevertheless, the French, supported by their mercurial temperament, were not deterred from forming an establishment on that sepulchral island, which, they thought, afforded ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... of the territory thus ceded by France were ill-defined, and, in fact, unknown. The French negotiator who conferred with Monroe and Livingston, declared a large portion of the country transferred to be no better known at the time "than when Columbus landed ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... and saw; and getting no other answer, began to tremble between passion and a natural, though ill-defined, misgiving, which the silent gaze of so large a party—for we all looked at him compassionately—was well calculated to produce. "Mad?" he cried. "No, but some one is, Sir," he continued, turning to La Font with a gesture in which appeal and impatience were curiously ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... Progress was their sustaining faith, although, occupied by the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague and ill-defined. The word itself is seldom pronounced in their writings. The idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in the midst of which it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity, Illumination (lumieres). It has not yet entered upon an independent life of its own and received ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... they stood among the foremost great powers of the day. It is not easy in imagination to thrust back the present leading empires of the earth into the contracted spheres of their not remote past. But to feel how a little confederacy of seven provinces loosely tied together by an ill-defined treaty could hold so prominent and often so controlling a place in the European system of the seventeenth century, we must remember that there was then no Germany, no Russia, no Italy, no United States of America, scarcely even a Great Britain in the sense which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for the whole evidential value of what follows, such as it is, depends upon that fact. She would not, by preference, sleep in a room immediately after a death had taken place in it, but solely for the reason of certain ill-defined physical theories which she would have summed up under the expression that "it was but right that the air should be changed." Her views on human nature and its component parts were undoubtedly practical and common-sense. To put it brutally, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... which an effete nation could no longer ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was not all. The religious feeling of the day was extremely inclined to mysticism, in which aesthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstasy of Nirvana. This religious side of mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh or Breton ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... would stand. This was the Master-Attendant of the port. A master-attendant is a superior sort of harbor-master; a person, out in the East, of some consequence in his sphere; a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of the port, and possessed of vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes. This particular Master-Attendant was reported to consider it miserably inadequate, on the ground that it did not include the power of life and death. This was a jocular exaggeration. Captain Eliott was fairly ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... name of an object which would be familiar only to brewers and bakers, probably suffered from the discontinuance of family brewing and baking. It would no longer be familiar, and may possibly have felt the blurring effect of the ill-defined BALM, which word also seems rarely used. In the South of England few persons now ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... done in the case of a threatened invasion of the soil of a neighboring friendly state. But this remedy is of such a violent nature, the odium and inconvenience occasioned thereby are so great, and the lawful limits of official action in such a resort are so ill-defined, that the executive is most unlikely to make use of it, except in rare and extreme cases. The eagerness of the average American citizen of the Territories for getting upon Indian lands amounts to a ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... adoration of this woman, yes, he was happy, very happy: to bless life, to excite envy, to arouse jealousy, to appear simply ridiculous if he complained of destiny; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, discontented without knowing why, consumed by intangible, feverish instincts, ill-defined desires for Parisian curiosities, having dreamed in his youth of results very inferior to those he had realized, yet finding when he analyzed the realities that he enjoyed, that the promises of his dreams were more intoxicating ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... tyrannical enactments, and to the arbitrary exercise of authority by the King and his High Church prelates, was fast merging into, what it soon became, an open revolt against the crown, and all religion which did not square with the very peculiar and ill-defined tenets of the rebellious party. In 1641 the Queen's confessor was sent to the Tower, and a resolution was passed by both houses never to consent to the toleration of the Catholic worship in Ireland, or in any other part of his Majesty's dominions. The country party had determined to possess themselves ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... polar circle. We observed the same constellation very high when we were at the island of St Thomas; and remarked that the moon, after rain, produces a rainbow similar to that occasioned by the sun during the day, except that the colours were dim and ill-defined. On leaving the straits of Gibraltar, I did not observe any sensible change on the ebb and flow of the sea; but when we approached Rio Grande, which is eleven degrees to the north of the equinoctial, we observed a considerable tide at the mouth of that river, and the rise in some places was much ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... girl's expression puzzled him. The old pride was all gone, and she gave him the impression of one who is conquered and defenceless, and who is ready to yield anything, everything to the victor. And this ill-defined impression was singularly true, for she was in a passion of self-sacrifice. She felt that one who had been so generous and self-forgetful had a right to all that a true man could ask, and that it would be base in her to refuse. The greater the sacrifice the more ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... point of honour, one's regard for the good opinion of an aunt and one's concern for the health of a pet cat. All these things may enrich, but they may also impede and limit the aristocratic scheme. I thought for a time I would call this ill-defined and miscellaneous wilderness of limitation the Personal Life. But at last I have decided to divide this vast territory of difficulties into two subdivisions and make one of these Indulgence, meaning thereby pleasurable indulgence of sense or feeling, and the other a great ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Mississippi. Uncertain in that moment which way to turn, and conscious of a strange lassitude, I made no struggle to reach land, but permitted myself to be borne downward in the grip of the water. Suddenly something drifted against my body, a black, ill-defined object, tossing about on the swell of the waves, and instinctively I grasped at it, recognizing instantly the shell of our wrecked boat. It was all awash, a great hole stove in its side well forward, ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... through future time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep but ill-defined sensations? ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... advocates of non-violent direct action without analyzing its meaning and implications. Others have rejected it on the basis of judgments just as superficial. Much confusion has crept into the discussion of the principle and into its application because of the constant use of ill-defined terms and partially formulated ideas. It is the purpose of the present study to analyze the positions of both the friends and opponents of non-violent direct action within the pacifist movement in the hope of clarifying thought ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... ill-defined and full of difficulties. Mr. Goschen, before he left England on his mission, came to Dilke to 'bewail the unwillingness of Gladstone and of Lord Granville to make up their minds how far they were going in the direction of coercion of Turkey.' On ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... to catch that man!" he cried to Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon, and dashed off, firing several shots at the retreating form. Away they went through the brush and along an ill-defined trail, but Totterly, for it was really he, had a fair lead, and had recognized his pursuer, and now he did his best to get away. Coming to a curve in the road, he cut into some timber, and by this means threw Deck completely off the scent ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... formed and vanished. The inchoate sounds of the device hummed like distant voices, but without the added suggestion of the picture, they meant nothing. My own face flashed and dissolved and then, finally, I had it. There was a picture of myself sitting in an ill-defined room; that was all. I released the ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... one such idea, and that always the same in whatever context the expression may occur, and by whatever author it may be used. But ordinary language, in which documents are written, fluctuates: each word expresses a complex and ill-defined idea; its meanings are manifold, relative, and variable; the same word may stand for several different things, and is used in different senses by the same author according to the context; lastly, the meaning of a word varies from author to author, and is modified in the ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... he drew from, his pocket a letter, and handed it to Edith. With a flushed face and a rapidly throbbing heart Edith took the letter. It seemed like that for which she had been so long waiting, but at the same time there was a certain ill-defined apprehension on her mind of disappointment. Had that letter come through any other channel, it would have excited nothing but unmingled joy; but the channel was suspicions, and Edith did not yet believe that he had really been to Plympton Terrace. She suspected some new ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... sand-fly fever. Besides these there was a skin disease which we called Basra sore—a very indolent ulcer which is not painful, but tends to spread over the legs and arms, leaving a flexible, bluish scar when it eventually heals. There was also an ill-defined syndrome, termed variously Mesopotamitis or acute debility, or the Fear of God. Officially one described it as the effects of heat. But of all these the most ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... constructed on the same principle. One, the stick-dam, consists of interlaced stick and pole work below, with an embankment of earth raised with the same material upon the upper or water face. This is usually found in brooks or large streams with ill-defined banks. The other, the solid-bank dam, is not so common nor so interesting, and is usually found on those parts of the same stream where the banks are well defined, the channel deep, and the current ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... had been impressed by her wild beauty, and the contrast of all her looks and ways with those of the girls around her. Presently a sense of some ill-defined personal element, which half attracted and half repelled those who looked upon her, and especially those on whom she looked, began to make itself obvious to him, as he soon found it was painfully sensible ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... may notice that, from the state of physical science at the period when Van Helmont, Paracelsus, and others began to penetrate into its recesses, it was an unknown, obscure, and ill-defined region, and did not permit those who laboured in it to give that precise and accurate account of their discoveries which the progress of reasoning experimentally and from analysis has enabled the late discoverers to do with success. Natural magic—a phrase ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... more profound than the words and gestures of the public play. I had the certitude that this mother, refused in her heart to give her son up after all. It was more than Rachel's inconsolable mourning, it was something deeper, more inaccessible in its frightful tranquillity. Lost in the ill-defined mass of the high-backed chair, her white, inclined profile suggested the contemplation of something in her lap, as though a ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... features were not degraded by false piety. There alone were to be seen clear expressions and clean faces; there, above all, was not that horrible grimace of the working man of the Catholic clubs—that hideous creature in a blouse, whose breath belies the ill-defined unction ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... and nodules bore, instead of the deep Liassic grey, an olivaceous tint, I might have almost supposed I had fallen on a continuation of some of the Eathie beds. I laid open a nodule with a blow of the hammer, and my heart leaped up when I saw that it enclosed an organism. A dark, ill-defined, bituminous mass occupied the centre; but I could distinguish what seemed to be spines and small ichthyic bones projecting from its edges; and when I subjected them to the scrutiny of the glass, unlike those mere chance resemblances which sometimes deceive ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... It contains a large body of persons whose religious life consists simply of a succession of sensations not far removed from one's enjoyment of music and poetry; and another large body, to whom it furnishes refuge and consolation of a vague and ill-defined sort in times of sorrow and disappointment. To these persons the church prayers and hymns are not trumpet-calls to the battle-field, but soothing melodies, which give additional zest to home comforts and luxuries, and make the sharper demands of a life of ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the humble-bees never exceeds a certain limit, their laws are ill-defined and ill-obeyed, primitive cannibalism and infanticide reappear at intervals, the architecture is shapeless and entails much waste of material; but the cardinal difference between the two cities is that the one is permanent, and the other ephemeral. For, indeed, that of the humble-bee will ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history. ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... well Thorpe lived up to his reputation at the outset,—how good a first impression of force and virility he would manage to convey,—for the first impression possessed the power of transmuting the present rather ill-defined enthusiasm into loyalty or dissatisfaction. But Tim himself believed in Thorpe blindly. So ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... indeed, that Plume, an officer and a gentleman, should have bethought him of the "austere vestal" as a companion witness to Blakely's supposed iniquity; but, between these two natures,—one strong, one weak,—there had sprung up the strange sympathy that is born of a common, deep-rooted, yet ill-defined antipathy—one for which neither she nor he could yet give good reason, and of which each was secretly ashamed. Each, for reasons of her or his own, cordially disliked the Bugologist, and each could not but ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... self-government is enjoyed through the village communes and their public assemblies, but the imperial power as represented by the police and military is felt in all parts, while governors of departments have wide and ill-defined powers which admit of abuse. The great builders of the empire, the beginnings of which are to be sought in the 9th century, have been Ivan the Great, who in the 15th century drove out the Mongols and established his capital as Moscow; Ivan the Terrible, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... remained the only one of which a prediction of the return had been confirmed, until the orbit of the small, ill-defined comet found by Pons in 1819 was computed by Encke, and found to have a period of 3 1/3 years. It was predicted to return in 1822, and was recognised by him as identical with many previous comets. This comet, called after Encke, has showed in each of its returns an inexplicable reduction of mean ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... advantages more than an offset to an ill-defined objection to the dress because it has been associated with women who are alien to our Protestant faith? This is a minor matter, however, and one that can be ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... of the administration of justice he writes with much less reserve in his journals. The system was bad. The jurisdiction of the Privy Council, who tried a considerable number of causes, was ill-defined. The judges since the time of Charles I. were removable magistrates, entirely in the dependence of the Crown. Even the ordinary Lords of Session were not always trained lawyers—Lauder's father-in-law, for example, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... world, also, the subtle influences which form and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And here especially where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so ill-defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural life. Few things are less understood than the conditions of the spiritual life. The distressing incompetence of which most of us are conscious ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... feelings of old people who have been wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... that war, in all its forms, was the law of the feudal world. War formed the chief occupation of the restless aristocracy who held the land and exercised the governmental control. The inveterate habits of a military race, the discord provoked by ill-defined rights or by self-interest and covetousness, all led to constant bloody struggles in which each lord had for his enemies all those about him. An enterprising vassal was likely to make war at least ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... was neither bright nor fresh; the night having been hazy, there had been no terrestrial radiation, and the earth was dusty and parched; while the sun rose through a murky yellowish atmosphere with ill-defined orb. Thick clouds of smoke pressed upon the plains, and the faint easterly wind wafted large flakes of grass ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... than of severe analysis or of protracted and patient investigation. In the warm praises of the philosopher, no less than in the glowing inspirations of the poet, it often stands before us as a vague and ill-defined something which all men are required to worship, but which no man is bound to understand. It would seem, indeed, as if it were a mighty something not to be clearly seen, but only to be deeply felt. And felt it has been, too, by the ignorant as well as by the learned, by the simple as ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed, threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the sunshine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however, it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace, such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected afterwards, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... different right down to its essential relationships from the human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom, and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... springbuck alone that manifests this feeling. When oxen are taken into a country of high grass, they are much more ready to be startled; their sense of danger is increased by the increased power of concealment afforded to an enemy by such cover, and they will often start off in terror at the ill-defined outlines of each other. The springbuck, possessing this feeling in an intense degree, and being eminently gregarious, becomes uneasy as the grass of the Kalahari becomes tall. The vegetation being more sparse ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... reputation of trembling a little in sympathy with any considerable shock of earthquake that came to move that portion of the round globe from her sleep. Of this they knew as little, no doubt, as they did of the ill-defined line of demarcation between experiences that are objective, capable of being weighed and measured, and those that are subjective, taking place—though with convincing authority—only in the sphere ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... Cimmerian blackness had fallen. The waves came savagely, ill-defined masses let loose from a viewless limbo to work their harm. Sometimes they caught the dull gray flash of breaking waters, but more often everything was hidden. The roar of the wind and ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... shadowy recollections, such as old Brahmin moonshine would have ascribed to a state of previous existence. How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene nor the speakers nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... fatigued, irresolute, weak, exhausted, feeble, languid, wearied, faded, half-hearted, listless, worn, faint-hearted, ill-defined, purposeless, worn down, faltering, indistinct, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... species different from Ustilago maydis on the male florets of maize from the same locality. In addition to this, we learn that in 1870 one form made its appearance on rice. It was described as constituting in some of the infested grains a whitish, gummy, interlaced, ill-defined, thread-like mycelium, growing at the expense of the tissues of the affected organs, and at last becoming converted into a more or less coherent mass of spores, of a dirty green colour, on the exterior of the deformed grains. Beneath the outer ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... and then we came up to Kimberley. From this place we have only fifty or sixty miles to go over, and then we come to the border of this province, and of British Bechuanaland. Farther north, we get to that ill-defined sphere, called the sphere of influence, that extended the power of Britain in South Africa, as far as the Zambesi.... Now that we have our railway up to Kimberley, we have the British South African Company to take it in ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... a great vogue, and among whom it carries with it certain well-marked consequences that are often deprecated. The peculiar habits of the class in this respect are commonly set down to some kind of an ill-defined moral deficiency with which this class is credited, or to a morally deleterious influence which their occupation is supposed to exert, in some unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The state of the case for the men who work in the composition and press rooms of the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... conveyance, and we soon left behind the blue-coated coolies still shouting the merits of their tiny gray donkeys with their tinkling bells, and began a journey on foot across the dusty plain. Road there was none: merely an ill-defined track presented itself, along which all the ministers and secretaries of the great nations of the world walked, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... or made any attempt to seize him, he would then shoot the leader, and thus strike terror into the others. But while he was thus arranging all the details in his mind, he was startled at seeing a whole group of savages leap from the side of the ill-defined path, which they were now traveling, and they speedily surrounded the captor ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... permanent, and the tenure itself diversified by a varied and intricate rotation. At the same time their authority was held high over their servants of all descriptions; and the only rule prescribed to the Council-General of Bengal, in the exercise of the large and ill-defined powers given to them, was that they were to yield obedience to the orders of the Court of Directors. As to the Court of Directors itself, it was left with very little regulation. The custom of ballot, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... since fathomed the nature of Athanase, and recognized in it that unyielding element of republican convictions to which in his youth a young man is willing to sacrifice everything, carried away by the word "liberty," so ill-defined and so little understood, but which to persons disdained by fate is a banner of revolt; and to such, revolt is vengeance. Athanase would certainly persist in that faith, for his opinions were woven in with his artistic sorrows, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... and another figure, also shapeless, and ill-defined, emerged noiselessly from the gloom. ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... the first to catch the significance of the transition, nor did he possess the executive qualities which would enable him to break down all obstacles and translate ideals into facts. But he alone of the notable statesmen of the world was able to express adequately the ill-defined hopes of the peoples of all nations. He gave utterance to the words which the world had been waiting for, and they carried weight because of his position. Alone of the great powers the United States had no selfish designs to hide behind ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Zachary Taylor, but the Mexicans were defeated. Texas had been declared a part of the American Union in the previous year (December, 1845), and the military occupation by the Americans of Mexican territory—for the boundaries were ill-defined—formed the culminating casus belli. Torn by dissensions at home, and betrayed by the treachery of her own generals—among them the traitorous Paredes—Mexico was in no position to face a war with her powerful neighbour. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... specimen). Carapace circular having juvenal pattern of large spots, some of which have borders darker than their centers and are best described as ocelli; junction of pale margin and ground color of carapace formed by ill-defined, ragged dark border; dorsal surface of forelimbs and hind limbs finely streaked and dotted, larger marks occurring toward insertions of forelimbs; lower border of pale postocular stripe in contact with upper margin of postlabial pale stripe; no stripes on dorsal surface of snout; fine markings ...
— Description of a New Softshell Turtle From the Southeastern United States • Robert G. Webb
... draw the line, for vices and virtues tread somewhat closely on each other's heels. The division between prudence and cowardice is often ill-defined. The love that rushes into poverty that it is not strong enough to endure, has in it an element of the selfishness that makes another sit still in comfort while the path is being made smooth for ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... Spain. Only the eastern margin of this area was at all fully settled; and the population numbered at most 2,000,000, predominantly of British blood. In 1803, by a treaty with Napoleon, the French colony of Louisiana, with vast and ill-defined claims to the territory west of the Mississippi, was purchased from France. Meanwhile the stream of immigrants from the eastern states, and in a less degree from Europe, was pouring over the Alleghany Mountains and occupying the great central plain; and by 1815 ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... administration, their rule compared not unfavourably with the makeshift methods of Byzantine statesmanship. In Imperial Italy we see the strange spectacle of a military despotism tempered by the usurped privileges and jurisdictions of the great proprietors, or by the ill-defined temporal pretensions of the bishops. In Lombard Italy matters were at least no worse. The Lombards were aliens; but so were the Greeks. The Greeks treated the Italians as inferiors. But the Lombards intermarried freely with their subjects, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... pretexts for war and in unfriendly interpretations. The First Consul wished to secure an interval of rest and leisure, to consolidate his conquests at home and abroad. He had not renounced the glorious and ill-defined project of the imperial government which he affected to exercise over Europe. "If England made a new coalition," he wrote to M. Otto, "the only result would be a renewal of the history of ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... Queen. It seemed very probably at that time that the headship of the world might pass to Egypt; which was still a sovereign power, and immensely rich, and highly populated, and a compact kingdom;—whereas the Roman state was everywhere ill-defined, tenebrous, and falling to pieces. At this distance it is hard to see in Egypt anything of strength or morale that would have enable it to settle the world's affairs; as hard, indeed, as it is to see anything ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... I've had 'em fair at eyeholts," this as calmly as if we had not been for ten long days pinning our faith to an ill-defined trace of foot-prints. "Ez I was a-going on to say, they're incamped on t'other bank ruther eenside o' two sights and a horn-blow from this. I saw 'em and counted 'em: seven redskins and the ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... thus far the emergence of Lady Harman from that state of dutiful subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of woman in the past to that limited, ill-defined and quite unsecured freedom which is her present condition. And now we have to give an outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do, which were forming themselves in her mind. She had made a determination of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... This idea is probably of very primitive origin, arising from the association of a group with its habitat, whose food supply they regard as a monopoly.[83] This is true even of migratory hunting tribes. They claim a certain area whose boundaries, however, are often ill-defined and subject to fluctuations, because the lands are not held by permanent occupancy and cultivation. An exceptional case is that of the Shoshone Indians, inhabiting the barren Utah basin and the upper valleys of the Snake and Salmon Rivers, who are accredited with ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... to be safe, once more stole a quick look at the dark girl. The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief to her forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse, which she could not resist, she left her place and went to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... amongst some of the advocates of vegetarianism by the use of the words "carnivorous" and "flesh-eating" in an ill-defined way. Man has never eaten lumps of raw meat and bone, and no one proposes that he should do so to-day. Man did not take to meat-eating until he had acquired the use of fire, and had learnt to cook the meat before he ate it. He thus separated ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... lecturing by the writers of the Gospels. Moreover, in the matter of prayer, especially, he was all at sea. As a child he had spent hours formulating humble, fervent petitions, which did not seem to draw replies. And so there began to form within his mind a concept, faint and ill-defined, of a God very different from that canonically accepted. He tried to believe that there was a Creator back of all things, but that He was inexorable Law. And the lad was convinced that, somehow, he had failed to get into harmony with that infinite Law. But, in that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... comprises the regions hitherto under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Amban of Urga, the Tartar General of Uliasoutai and the Chinese Amban of Kobdo. In view of the fact that there are no detailed maps of Mongolia, and that the boundaries of the administrative divisions of this country are ill-defined, it is hereby agreed that the precise boundaries of Outer Mongolia, as well as the delimitation of the district of Kobdo and the district of Altai, shall be the subject of subsequent negotiations as provided for by Article ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... described as tholeites. Porphyritic structure appears in the diabase-porphyrites, some of which are highly vesicular and contain remains of an abundant fine-grained or partly glassy ground-mass (diabas-mandelstein, amygdaloidal diabase). The somewhat ill-defined spilites are regarded by many as modifications of diabase-porphyrite. In the intersertal and porphyrite diabases, fresh or devitrified glassy base is not infrequent. It is especially conspicuous in some tholeites (hyalo-tholeites) and in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... that neither spoke; they caught their breath and waited in suspense. A shadow, dim, ill-defined, seemed to take partial form in ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... consists of a huge mass of Archaean rocks with a mean height of from 7000 to 7500 ft. above the sea, and is fl00ded in a deep central depression by the waters of Lake Tsana. Above the plateau rise several irregular and generally ill-defined mountain ranges which attain altitudes of from 12,000 to over 15,000 ft. Many of the mountains are of weird and fantastic shape. Characteristic of the country are the enormous fissures which divide ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
