"Inverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a mere abstraction? We remark, first, that in all ages, and especially in primitive philosophy, words such as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted an extraordinary influence over the minds of men. The meagreness or negativeness of their content has been in an inverse ratio to their power. They have become the forms under which all things were comprehended. There was a need or instinct in the human soul which they satisfied; they were not ideas, but gods, and to this new mythology the men of a later ...
— The Republic • Plato
... fall to sleep at once, but drop off successively: first the sight, then the smell, the taste, the hearing and lastly the touch. The sleep ended, they awake in an inverse order, touch, hearing, taste, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... "The automatic flow of thought is often singularly favored by the fact of listening to a weak continuous discourse, with just enough ideas in it to keep the (conscious) mind busy. The induced current of thought is often rapid and brilliant in inverse ratio to the force ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... a slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the correlation between height and weight would be perfect. Suppose the impossible, that the shortest man was the heaviest, the tallest the lightest, and that the whole order needed to be exactly reversed; then we should say that the correlation was perfectly inverse or negative. Suppose the shift from height order to weight order mixed the men indiscriminately, so that you could not tell anything from a man's position in the height order as to what his position would be in the weight order; then we ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... them in the inverse order of rank—a small matter, though Willett had been promoted to his bar a year ahead of Harris. Otherwise, it was with a fair field and no favor the old-time rivals of cadet days stood for the first time in the presence ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... of purpose. The smallness of General Grant's staff throughout the civil war forms the best model for future imitation. So of tents, officers furniture, etc., etc. In real war these should all be discarded, and an army is efficient for action and motion exactly in the inverse ratio of its impedimenta. Tents should be omitted altogether, save one to a regiment for an office, and a few for the division hospital. Officers should be content with a tent fly, improvising poles and shelter out of bushes. The tents d'abri, or shelter-tent, carried ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... may be remarked in general, although the rule is liable to exceptions, that the dimensions of a crater are in an inverse ratio to the elevation of the mountain. Daubeney, op. Cit., p. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... will be found summed up in an apologetic folio which the Bollandists published. In looking through it the reader will specially be struck by this instructive fact, that the bitterness and violence of the controversy were always in the inverse ratio of the importance of the points at issue. This much also must any fair mind allow: the Society of Jesus, since the days of Pascal and the "Provincial Letters," has been regarded as a synonym for dishonesty and fraud. From any such charge the student of the "Acta Sanctorum" must regard ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... following conclusions: (1) The temple was restored after the departure of the Persians; (2) it was injured by fire B.C. 406; (3) it was repaired and continued in use; (4) it was seen and described by Pausanias I. 24.3 in a lost passage. Let us take up these points in inverse order. The passage of Pausanias reads in our texts:—[Greek: Lelectai de moi kai proteron (17.1), s Athenaiois perissoteron ti e tois allois es ta theia esti spoudes, prtoi men gar Athenan eponomasan Erganen prtoi d'aclous Ermas... omou de sphisin en t na Spoudain daimn estin.] Drpfeld ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... funeral. The wit is evidence of its lack. Mark Twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same possibilities. But its quantity has a serious effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good formula to adopt here. Comedy has its part, but wit never. Strauss is at his best in these lower rooms, but his comedy reminds us more of the physical fun of Lever rather than "comedy in the Meredithian sense" as Mason suggests. Meredith ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... et Domino! but the boy hits shrewdly hard. Nevertheless I have repaid him in inverse kind, and set him an imposition, to learn me one of Phaedrus his fables, Sir Richard, if you do not think ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... but this was neither my turn of mind nor the inclination of my heart. The facility with which I forget past evils, however recent they may be, is astonishing. The remembrance of them becomes feeble, and, sooner or later, effaced, in the inverse proportion to the greater degree of fear with which the approach of them inspires me. My cruel imagination, incessantly tormented by the apprehension of evils still at a distance, diverts my attention, and prevents me from recollecting those which ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... is properly a work of partnership, to which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary soil with infinite labour and over ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the animal to see by, and in the Lampyridae it would seem that the degree of luminosity is related to the development of the vision. In that family, according to the Rev. H.S. Gorham, the eyes are developed, as a rule, in inverse proportion to the luminosity. Where there is an ample supply of this kind of light the eyes are small, but where the light is insignificant the eyes are large by way of compensation. And moreover, where both eyes and light are small, then the antennae are large ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Of the inverse variation between activity and genesis we have examples in the contrast between the fertility of birds and the fertility of mammals. Comparing the large with the large and the small with the small, we see that creatures which continually ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... places the green world round? How came the inspiration for that classic paysage, such as Ingres would have loved, from the sage-brush, and cactus? "Well," she told herself, "Moore wrote 'Lalla Rookh' in a back room in London, among the chimney-pots and soot. Maybe the proportion is inverse. But, Mr. Harold Vickers of Ash Fork, Arizona, your little book is, to say the least, well worth ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... must be Rats like us, Who let the cat out of the bag. Yet still these Tyros in the cause Deserve, I own, no small applause; And they're by us received and treated With all due honors—only seated In the inverse scale of their reward, The merely promised next my Lord; Small pensions then, and so on, down, Rat after rat, they graduate Thro' job, red ribbon and silk gown, To Chancellorship and Marquisate. This ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... facts are to be found in connection with an observation, the correlative and inverse of the foregoing, on the ordinary aerobian bacteria. If we examine below the microscope a drop of liquid full of these organisms under a coverslip, we very soon observe a cessation of motion in all the bacteria which lie in the central portion of the liquid, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... restore the original rose or violet out of the ashes settling from its combustion—that is now rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of each successive handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, have, in the inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been unlinked, and hunted back through all their doubles; and, as the chorus of the Athenian stage unwove ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... of remark that in India the spirit of combination is always in the inverse ratio to the rank of the class; weakest in the highest, and strongest in the lowest class. All infringements upon the rules of the class are punished by fines. Every fine furnishes a feast at which every member sits and enjoys himself. Payment is enforced by excommunication—no one of the caste ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... special cases, it is advisable to emphasise a character by the ironical expedient of inverse proportion. Tartufe is so emphasised throughout the first two acts of the play that bears his name. Although he is withheld from the stage until the second scene of the third act, so much is said about him that we are made to feel fully his sinister dominance over the household of Orgon; ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really a part, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of "degradation," such as that by which an offending priest or bishop may be deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders," yet, one by one, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind some such inverted rite, like those ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... things; that, therefore, it is a mere chance whether or not organs which are of importance to organisms are likewise of importance as guides to classification; and, in point of fact, that the general tendency in this matter is towards an inverse instead of a direct proportion. More often than not, the greater the value of a structure for the purpose of indicating natural affinities, the less is its value to the creatures ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... is rougher than hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus justly to be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kitchen, and allowed him to analyze his soups. The result of this analysis was remarkable, for he found that M. Soyer's dearest soup was the least nutritive, whilst his cheapest soup was the most so: a proportion which held through all the soups analyzed; their nutritive qualities being in an inverse ratio to their prices. In his calculation the chemist takes a child of four stones weight, as the average of persons who required food relief, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... is no occasion for the best to be so plentiful: a little of it will go a great way. And as our best moments are so few, how could any man write six hundred religious poems, and produce quality in proportion to quantity save in an inverse ratio? ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... a general rule, all parts of the musket are assembled in the inverse order in which they are dismounted. Before replacing screws, oil them slightly with good sperm oil, as inferior oil is converted into a gum, which clogs the operation of the parts. Screws should not be turned in so hard as to make ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... said dryly, "that undertakers' assistants are jovial young men. A man's sense of humor seems to be in inverse proportion to the gravity ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it will be seen, is in inverse ratio to the quality of the educational service. If we take the three Irish Boards of National, Intermediate, and Technical Education, the total cost of administration and inspection is L120,000 per annum; the similar charge on Scotland is exactly half that sum, and yet Scotland prides ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... of the potter's wheel, and in the willow pattern on old china, and the basket capitals or mouldings of Byzantine architecture, the influence of the basketmaker's art is clearly traceable. Essentially a primitive craft, its relative importance is in inverse ratio to the industrial ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... open polar atmosphere? No! A shock told me that the Nautilus had struck the bottom of the iceberg, still very thick, judging from the deadened sound. We had in deed "struck," to use a sea expression, but in an inverse sense, and at a thousand feet deep. This would give three thousand feet of ice above us; one thousand being above the water-mark. The iceberg was then higher than at its borders—not a very reassuring fact. Several times that day the Nautilus ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... influence upon the fertility of marriages. In southern regions more children are born, fewer in northern. The number of children is in inverse proportion to the amount of food in a country and in a season. In Belgium, the higher the price of bread the greater the number of children, and the greater the number ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Charleston is reported at $8.00—about the same as New York; at Wilmington, North Carolina, $10.25. Not impossibly, river transportation had in these last some cheapening effect, not readily ascertainable now. In sugar, the scale is seen to ascend in an inverse direction. At Boston, unblockaded, it is quoted at $18.75 the hundredweight, itself not a low rate; at New York, blockaded, $21.50; at Philadelphia, with a longer journey, $22.50; at Baltimore, $26.50; at Savannah, $20. In the last named place, nearness to the Florida line, with the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... will be an infinite number of other formul, not empirically distinguishable from it in the past, but diverging from it more and more in the future. Hence, even assuming that there are persistent laws, we shall have no reason for assuming that the law of the inverse square will hold in future; it may be some other hitherto indistinguishable law that will hold. We cannot say that every law which has held hitherto must hold in the future, because past facts which obey ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... anomaly in human nature, it would seem as if, in many cases, the apprehension of danger is in the inverse proportion of the amount of evil to be dreaded, or of the probability of its happening. Thus, the good people at Saint Peter and Saint Paul, who have but very little more reason to expect the intrusion of enemies, than if they dwelt in the regions of the North Pole, exhibit a remarkable degree ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... them; those fairy-like fabrics which Englishmen alone know how thoroughly to enjoy, varying in size from Lord Yarborough's superb Falcon, to the tiny craft whose owner is probably proud of her in inverse ratio to her tonnage. All is not gold that glitters, and the fair admirers of the graceful frigate and corvette would have been somewhat horrified, could they have witnessed the various scenes taking place within the dark recesses ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... defined as "a warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all that exists," as "the sport of sensibility and, as it were, the playful, teasing fondness of a mother for a child" ... as "a sort of inverse sublimity exalting into our affections what is below us,... warm and all-embracing as ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... theology, and which educated men of the present day have by no means universally outgrown. Save for some such old associations as these, why should it be supposed that matter becomes "spriritualized" as it diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should matter be pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density or ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with "grossness" than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen? Obviously such fancies are purely of mythologic parentage. Now the luminiferous ether, upon which our authors make such extensive demands, may be physically "ethereal" ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... regard myself in the light of a Parliamentary prophet. Having in that capacity chanted my incantations and calculated the number of square feet of Irish linen in one of Mr. Gladstone's collars to be in inverse ratio to the dimensions of his Mid-Lothian majority, and having by abstruse computations discovered the hitherto unknown quantity of Sir William Harcourt's chins, I can safely predict that there will be another General Election within the space of thirteen months, and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... times. In other words, the ratio of r^3 to T^2 for every planet is the same. Or, again, the length of a planet's year depends on the 3/2th power of its distance from the sun. Or, once more, the speed of each planet in its orbit is as the inverse square-root of its distance from the sun. The product of the distance into the square of the speed is the same for ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... law providing for an inverse ratio of popular representation came into effect: four-fifths of the population were limited to one-tenth of the number of aldermen, while one-fifth of it were granted nine-tenths of aldermen in the city government. The law seemed to tell the Jews: "True, in a given city you ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... speculation in land which was ingenious in its simplicity; instead of erecting new buildings in the immediate vicinity of the last houses of the town, they bought up adjacent pieces of land, and began to build on the outskirts of these. This inverse order of construction raised the value of building sites with extraordinary rapidity, and, after having completed the outer ring, they built in the middle of the town on these highly valuable sites, instead of continually ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... the species which grow in hot springs have been reserved in order to make their comparison more easy. I shall begin in an inverse order, with those of the springs of Pugha in Tibet, which attain a temperature of 174 degrees. Two Confervae only occur in the specimens which have been preserved, viz., an Oscillatoria allied to that which I have called O. interrupta, and a true Conferva extremely delicate ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... should have once been white; shoes that loaded their steps like lead; and they moved slowly, with bent heads, rough, long-unshaven faces, eyes too hollow, horny hands too lean—wild, half-fed creatures, worse off than the flocks they drove, by all the degrees of the inverse ratio between man, who needs man's help, and beast, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... effected through the agency of light. Animals, on the contrary, derive their nourishment either directly or indirectly from plants. They get rid of the superfluous hydrogen and carbon, and accumulate nitrogen. The relations of plants and animals to the atmosphere are therefore inverse. The plant withdraws water and carbonic acid from the atmosphere, the animal contributes both to it. Respiration—that is, the absorption of oxygen and the exhalation of carbonic acid—is the specially animal ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... which are the subject-matter of that science? When Astronomy was young "the morning stars sang together for joy," and the planets were guided in their courses by celestial hands. Now, the harmony of the stars has resolved itself into gravitation according to the inverse squares of the distances, and the orbits of the planets are deducible from the laws of the forces which allow a schoolboy's stone to break a window. The lightning was the angel of the Lord; but it has pleased Providence, in these modern times, that science ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... Commentary to have; and, therefore, it was impossible for it to be obedient. That to the Latin it would have been impossible, as is said, is evident by such an argument as this: each thing which proceeds by an inverse order is laborious, and consequently is bitter, and not sweet; even as to sleep by day and to wake by night, and to go backwards and not forwards. For the subject to command the sovereign, is to proceed in the inverse ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... of a wire depends upon its material, its cross-section, its length, and its temperature. Conductivity of a copper wire, for example, increases in direct ratio to its weight, in inverse ratio to its length, and its conductivity falls as the temperature rises. Resistance is the reciprocal of conductivity and the properties, conductivity and resistance, are more often expressed in terms of resistance. ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... number of letters carried than on the distance which they are conveyed, (the cost being frequently greater for distances of a few miles, than for distances of hundreds of miles,) the charge, if varied in proportion to the cost, ought to increase in the inverse ratio of the number of letters conveyed," but it would be impossible to carry such a rule into practice, and therefore the committee were of opinion, that "the easiest practicable approach to a fair system, would be to charge a medium rate ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... is drawn on the piece of tile, the performer in placing it on the ground to be trodden upon, puts his thumb on the drawing, and thereby gets an inverse print of it on the ball of his thumb. The tile is powdered and the hand held palm upwards over it. When turning the assistant's hand palm downwards, the conjuror does so with his fingers at the back of the assistant's hand and the thumb on the clean palm, leaving the imprint of the Swastika upon ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... standard, and, as all action implies time, so are we compelled to regard these mineral masses as a measure of the time which has elapsed during their accumulation. The amount of the time which they represent is, of course, in the inverse proportion of the intensity of the forces which have been in operation. If, in the ancient world, mud and sand accumulated on sea-bottoms at tenfold their present rate, it is clear that a bed of mud or sand ten feet thick would have ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... twofold relation to attention: on the one hand, facile attention shows the reign of habit. The solid acquisitions are those with which attention is at home, and which are therefore more or less habitual. But, on the other hand, it is equally true that attention is in inverse ratio to habit. We need to attend least to these functions which are most habitual, and we have to attend most to those which are novel and only half acquired. We get new acquisitions mainly, indeed, by strained ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... turvy &c adj.; culbuter^; transpose, put the cart before the horse, turn the tables. Adj. inverted &c v.; wrong side out, wrong side up; inside out, upside down; bottom upwards, keel upwards; supine, on one's head, topsy-turvy, sens dessus dessous [Fr.]. inverse; reverse &c (contrary) 14; opposite &c 237. top heavy. Adv. inversely &c adj.; hirdy-girdy^; heels ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... glimmering; all over impends An immeasurable infinite flower of the dark that dilates and descends, That exults and expands in its breathless and blind efflorescence of heart As it broadens and bows to the wave-ward, and breathes not, and hearkens apart. As a beaker inverse at a feast on Olympus, exhausted of wine, But inlaid as with rose from the lips of Dione that left it divine: From the lips everliving of laughter and love everlasting, that leave In the cleft of his heart who shall kiss them a snake to corrode it and cleave. So glimmers the gloom into glory, ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the general public on the various arts is in inverse ratio to their real utility. They are even valued directly according to their uselessness. This might be expected. The most useful arts are the worst paid, for the number of workmen is regulated by the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... precaution. I will go beyond this, and say that religions have very frequently exercised a decidedly demoralizing influence. One may say generally that duties towards God and duties towards humanity are in inverse ratio. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Thereupon Erasmus' men, to whom news of Yule's evacuation was a complete surprise, filed down the mountain, and approached, not without caution. There was soon no room for doubt; Dundee had fallen, and Erasmus' prize was large in inverse proportion to the share he had taken in capturing it. No sooner was the absence of the British soldiers established beyond a doubt, than the burghers made haste to sack the camp and town. In a short time every tent, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... because more widely spread, are the large family of mosquitoes. The anopheles, small, grey and quietly persistent, carries the malaria that has laid our army low. Culex, larger and more noisy, trumpets his presence in the night watches: but the mischief he causes is in inverse ratio to the noise he makes. Stegomyia, host of the spirium of yellow fever, is also here, but happily not yet infected; not yet, but it may be only a question of time before yellow fever is brought along the railways or caravan routes from the Congo or the rivers of the West Coast, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... thought that it would win the peoples of Continental Europe to its side by a show of hesitation to make war upon a weak state, the sequel proved that it had gravely misunderstood the conditions under which international respect is produced. Hatred of England rose in inverse ratio to the evidence of the justness of her cause. When the Boers were victorious, or seemed to be most capable of defying the efforts of the largest fighting force that Great Britain had ever put into ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood, woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and richest self-development. Thus one may be inclined to abandon the word antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spencerian terms. This principle has immense consequences—most notably that as life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... creed, and proselytize victoriously; hungerings to see self reflected in another convinced. In such efforts lie dangers as vulgar as the minds that make them, and love the excitement of them. But genuine love is far beyond such grovelling delights; and the peril of such a relation is in inverse proportion to the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Carter's were very strict. Not that the moral sentiment of the place was particularly high, but it had been noticed that the amounts of labor and whisky were in inverse proportion. The more whisky, the less labor. It was a pure question of political economy. The foreman had often stated that he would prosecute to the fullest extent of the law the first man caught bringing whisky into camp. The foreman did not attempt, perhaps, ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... and sometimes a canary bird, ventures to utter a timid note. When it is finished, the gentlemen hurry to their occupation, and the quiet ladies mount the stairs, some to the first, some to the second, and some to the third stories, in an inverse proportion to the number of dollars paid, and ensconce themselves in their respective chambers. As to what they do there it is not very easy to say, but I believe they clear-starch a little, and iron a little, and sit in a rocking-chair, and sew a great deal. I always ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... teacher of music wins much greater consideration, if he himself plays concertos and composes pretty things, and if he can calculate and give vent to his genius in double and triple fugues, and in inverse and retrograde canons. You cannot even accompany your pupils with the violin or flute, which is certainly ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... commit suicide occupy a separate part of the village, but that their condition differs in no wise from that of the others. In the next world human shades hunt and live in the shades of buffalo and other animals that have here died. There, too, there are four seasons, but they come in an inverse order to the terrestrial seasons. During the four nights that the ghost is supposed to linger near his former dwelling, those who disliked or feared the deceased, and do not wish a visit from the shade, scorch with red coals a pair of moccasins which they leave at the door of ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... concentration of thought upon his business, he was ever looking to something beyond it, and to change of place and pursuit as the means of improving his fortunes. This at last, as has been seen, led him off to the West in the ardent hope of becoming in time a wealthy farmer. In an inverse ratio to the hopeful elevation of spirits with which Parker set out upon his journey was the sorrowful depression experienced by his wife. But Rachel kept meekly and patiently her feelings to herself. ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... inverse of his master's. To Thorpe it had suddenly become a very little thing in contrast to the great, sweet elemental truth that the dream girl had enunciated. To Collins the affair was miles vaster than the widest scope of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... presence of alkali. We have, therefore, in bicarbonate of soda a salt which behaves as an acid to phenolphthalein and as an alkali to litmus. Another extremely sensitive indicator is the coal-tar dyestuff known as "Congo red"; the colour changes produced by it are exactly the inverse of those produced in the case of litmus, that is, it gives a blue colour with acids and ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... having proceeded some way in it, was so overpowered by nervous agitation at its anticipated result, that he was unable to go on, and requested a friend to finish it for him, when it came out, exactly establishing the inverse square as the true measure of the moon's gravitation, and thus furnishing the key to the whole system." Hence proceeded Newton's immortal ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... proficiency. Most of them are, of course, oviparous, and it is quite the rule for them to deposit their eggs by hundreds of thousands, by millions even. Everybody knows, since Darwin taught us, that the average number of offspring of any given species of animal or plant bears an inverse proportion to the liability of that species to juvenile fatalities. When, therefore, we find a fish or a lobster or other pelagic creature depositing innumerable eggs, we may feel perfectly sure that the vast majority of the eggs themselves, or the callow creatures that come out ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... that action is in inverse proportion to power; and therefore the deeply-thinking mind will find a much greater difficulty in drawing out its capabilities on short notice, and arranging them in the most effective position, than a mind of mere cleverness, of merely acquired, and not assimilated knowledge. This difficulty, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... transposition, and transposition itself only one of the means of obtaining laughter. There is a host of others, and the source of laughter must be sought for much further back. Moreover, without going so far, we see that while the transposition from solemn to trivial, from better to worse, is comic, the inverse transposition ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... theoretically most advantageous, the layer situated next to the bore must be in a state of compression, and the amount of compression relative to the tension in the external layer is measured by the inverse ratio of the radii of these layers. It is further evident that the internal stresses will obey a definite but very simple law, namely, there will be in the hollow cylinder a layer whose radius is sqrt(R ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... experience with copper assays, shows the loss of copper on ores of varying produce. The figures in the fourth column show how rapidly the proportion of copper lost increases as the percentage of copper in the ore falls below 30 per cent. For material with more than 30 per cent. the proportion lost is in inverse ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... years?' On the other hand, if (declining to state any odious circumstantialities,) she were to reply,—'No matter, children, for my precise years, which are disagreeable remembrances; I confess generally to being a lady of a certain age,'—here, in the inverse order, given the valuation of the age, we should yet be at a loss for the absolute years numerically: would a 'certain age,' mean that 'mamma' was a million, be the same more or less, or perhaps not much above ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... physician, renowned alike for his social wit and professional wisdom, who prescribed "a rush of blood to the boots" to all professional patients and head-workers—men who, happening to possess brains, are prone to forget that they have bodies. In no way can this inverse apoplexy be more healthfully or pleasantly induced than by a jolly game of cricket. That the sport is adapted to American tastes and needs we are convinced, and that it may find a habitat throughout the length and breadth of our land ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... that which becomes unconscious (as it were the burden to be divided) is equal to the sum of all the representations with the exception of the strongest (hence b c), and is divided among the individual representations in the inverse ratio of their strength, consequently in such a way that the strongest (the one which most actively and successfully resists arrest) has the least, and the weakest the most, of it to bear. It may thus come to pass that a representation is entirely driven out of consciousness ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... smoke? Excuse me. When he will smoke depends upon the precocity of his individual generation; and that increases in a direct ratio with time itself, in this country. Thus, to state the matter in an approximate inverse arithmetical progression, and dating the birth of "young America" about the year 1825,—previously to which reigned the dark ages of oldfogydom, so called,—we find as follows: —From 1825 to 1835, young gentlemen learned to smoke when from 25 to 20 years of age; from 1835 to 1845, young gents, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the rear, that they were gaining rapidly upon us. I could understand the reason for this, as with the narrowing expanse of Omean as the waters rose toward the apex of its dome, the rapidity of its rise would increase in inverse ratio to the ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... atrocity in it. I think there is an immense quantity of nonsense about, regarding this thing. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents. The drunkards ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... contrary, perverse; petulant, peevish, cynical, surly, unamiable, inaffable, crabbed, crusty, captious, fractious, churlish, vixenish, querulous, fretful, choleric, touchy, waspish, morose, sullen, ill-natured, irascible acrimonious, irritable; inverse, interchanged. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The fact that they are ruled, governed, and owned they must acknowledge and confess as a favour of heaven! On the other hand, there are those rulers themselves whose greatness is in inverse proportion to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Mr. Southey will scarcely, we think, deny that his success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree in which his undertakings have required a logical head. His poems, taken in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. His official Odes indeed, among which the Vision ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the value of old scientific periodicals is, other things being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the obvious reason that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a series is drained off into the standard works with which the intelligent practitioner is supposed to be familiar. But no extended record of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... rather vanity, and an exaggerated notion of their own importance, which we find in the masses, generally in inverse proportion to real merit, is especially strong in criminals. In the cell occupied by La Gala, the following notice was found in his handwriting: "March 24th. On this date La Gala learnt to knit." Another criminal, Crocco, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... body approaches to the earth the greater is the leverage (if we may use the expression) which is afforded by the protuberance at the equator. The efficiency of a given force will, therefore, on this account alone, increase in the inverse proportion of the distance. The actual intensity of the force itself augments in the inverse square of the distance, and hence the capacity of the attracting body for producing precession will, for a double reason, increase when the distance decreases. Suppose, for example, that the disturbing body ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... of the Melbury family was of that kind which evinces some shyness in showing strong emotion among each other: a trait frequent in rural households, and one which stands in curiously inverse relation to most of the peculiarities distinguishing villagers from the people of towns. Thus hiding their warmer feelings under commonplace talk all round, Grace's reception produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But that more was felt than was ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little; but when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those very deeds ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bells, that of the Kremlin of Moscow, for example, which weighs 201,216 kilogrammes. One detail in conclusion: "La Savoyarde" sounds in counter C. This had been desired and foreseen. The number of vibrations, that is to say, the timbre of a bell, is in inverse ratio of its diameter or of the cubic root of its weight, so that in calculating the diameters and in designing "La Savoyarde" the timbre was calculated at the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... institution in question stands so close to the main thoroughfare that the most fastidious may visit it with ease. Here I found some twenty Arabs assembled for evening school. They were of all ages, from seven to fifteen, and their clothing was in an inverse ratio to their dirt—very little of the former, and a great deal of the latter. They moved about with their bare feet in the most feline way, like the veritable Bedouin himself. There they were, however, over greasy slates and grimy ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... remedies, or she can let him die without remedies because she doesn't believe in the reality of disease. She is quite willing to legislate for his stomach, his mind, his soul, her teachableness, it goes without saying, being generally in inverse proportion to her knowledge; for the arrogance of science is humility compared with the pride ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... arrangement which met with Laurence Stanninghame's unfeigned approval. He did not want to talk—especially in a clattering, dusty railway carriage. At intervals the passengers foregathered for meals at some wayside buffet or accommodation house,—meals whose quality was in inverse ratio to the exuberance of the prices charged therefor,—then each would return to his own box and smoke and read and sleep away the little matter of seven ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... copies "cured and perfect of their limbs," and those which are original in their edition "absolute in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them"? Alas, we have read too many theatrical announcements, have been taught too often that the value of the promise was in an inverse ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, too easily to believe that! Nay, we have seen numberless processions of healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the lusty shouts of drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by stepdame Nature with two heads, was brought to ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... larger skull circumference than either the middle or upper classes (1.8414, 1.7905, and 1.8051 feet, respectively), and the Ainu (1.8579) exceed the Japanese. From these facts it might almost appear that brain size and civilizational development are in inverse ratio. Were the Japanese brain larger, then, than that of the European, it might plausibly be argued that they are therefore inferior in brain power. This would be in accord with certain of De Quatrefages's investigations. He has shown ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... by Mr. Otis in debate," says Dr. Magoon, "was often keen but never malignant, as in John Randolph. The attacks of the latter were often fierce and virulent, not unfrequently in an inverse proportion to ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... the number of vibrations is independent of the width, proportional to the thickness, and very nearly inverse ratio of the square of the length, provided the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... long cry, she disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah's flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the sight, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... everything on which human happiness, on the largest scale, depends"—an abstract proposition which cannot be too carefully studied in connection with the present state of public morality in China, and the general welfare of the people. Dr Legge, however, whose logical are apparently in an inverse ratio to his linguistic powers, rushes wildly into the concrete, and declares that every falsehood told in China may be traced to the example of Confucius himself. He acknowledges that "many sayings might be quoted from him, in which 'sincerity' is ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... the University of Cambridge accorded the honour of an honorary degree in 1893, has written but one opera, 'Mefistofele,' but his influence upon modern Italian music must be measured in inverse ratio to his productive power. When 'Mefistofele' was originally produced in 1868, Verdi's genius was still in the chrysalis stage, and the novelty and force of Boito's music made 'Mefistofele,' even in its fall—for the first performance was a complete failure—a rallying point for the Italian ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... vary; this is the only one you will find without exception: That in this world the salary or reward is always in the inverse ratio of the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... of the Loire carries barks almost as far as Croisic. If they want to lie by a little, or to refresh the crew, they come to Pirial along the coast; from Pirial they find another inverse current, which carries them to the Isle-Dumal, two leagues and ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... filtering does not decrease in inverse ratio to the rate, but at a much slower rate. This is especially true with rates of more than 5,000,000 or ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... perhaps a good place in which to make answer to the suggestion that the domesticability of the animal species is in inverse proportion to their native courage and independence of mind. The reader will see how fallacious is this common notion if he will consider the quality of the supremely domesticated creature, the dog. There is ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... by which a body can act where it is not, how explain in detail the way by which it can reach out and pull in toward itself another separated body, and exert this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space? The law of inverse squares may tell us very accurately the manner in which the results are accomplished, for our Creator is a God of order. But there is no materialistic theory of the why of gravitation that is worth employing the time of sensible, truth-loving people. And we can rest assured that there ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... of lepers in any country bears an inverse ratio to the laws executed for the care and isolation of infected persons. The disease appears to spread more rapidly in damp and cold, or warm and moist, climates than in temperate countries. It is not now regarded as contagious. The leprosy of the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... for a girl is in inverse proportion to a widow's influence over a man. It is true that the second wife is usually better treated than the first, and that the new occupant of a man's heart reaps the benefit of her predecessor's training. But it is not until spinsterhood is fully confirmed by grey hair ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about to dawn. The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to say, You have been just here, just thus, before!—a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed over him afterwards many times, as ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... to think that the circulation of a book is generally in inverse proportion to its intrinsic merit. J. D. Beresford's novels are, to me, much better than those of the late Charles Garvice, yet I make a guess that Garvice's circulation was many times greater than Beresford's. Still I cannot argue that the reverse is true—that ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... result of this wear and tear and repair of the muscular tissue is that the activity of the mind decreases in inverse proportion to that of the body; and during a hard course of training the rowing man is generally rather sleepy and unintellectual. This matters all the less that studies are forbidden—not a very difficult rule to enforce—during the latter part of the time. But training once over, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... unsanguineous animal." Equally efficacious might be the modern definition of the same creature as a "terrestrial, air-breathing, gastropodous mollusk." The degree of efficiency of such prescriptions is naturally in inverse proportion to the patient's mental culture. An average Southern negro, for example, affected with indigestion, might derive some therapeutic advantage from snail diet, but would be more likely to be benefited by the mental stimulus ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... you all come in with spirits attuned, ready to wait patiently and observe silently. The law of these materializations seems to be this: the forces of the psychic are proportional to the harmoniousness of the circle and in inverse proportion to the light. Accepting this law as proved by our illustrious fellow-experimenters abroad, are you ready to try again along the lines they ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... books which form the Zendavesta. and written by a Magus for popular use; what it contains, therefore, cannot be attributed to Zoroaster. It is remarkable that Gibbon should fall into this error, for Hyde himself does not ascribe the Sadder to Zoroaster; he remarks that it is written inverse, while Zoroaster always wrote in prose. Hyde, i. p. 27. Whatever may be the case as to the latter assertion, for which there appears little foundation, it is unquestionable that the Sadder is of much later date. The Abbe Foucher ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... on an inverse ratio to one's good appearance, we should have been very wealthy indeed. We felt as if it would take us a week to get rested and lost little time in getting to bed when the party broke up. We imagine most of the residents of Vernal were Mormons. It is part of their creed to give "the stranger ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... the whole atmosphere of the sacred art comes another in the inverse sense, which, being an essential trait, must be described, though to do so is not quite easy. Titian becomes more and more merely sensuous in his conception of the beauty of women. He betrays in his loss of serenity that he is less than heretofore impervious to the stings ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... ever been ready to discuss matters in the inverse ratio of their importance, so that the more closely a question is felt to touch the hearts of all of us, the more incumbent it is considered upon prudent people to profess that it does not exist, to frown it down, to tell it to hold ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... in domestic matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... "crieth out in the street," exclaiming "No cure no pay,"—we know not; certain we are, that such is not the old Tory practice. On the contrary, the healing, with Tory doctors, has ever been in an inverse ratio to the reward. Like the faculty at large, the Tories have flourished on the sickness of the patient. They have, with Falstaff, "turned diseases to commodity;" their only concern being to keep out the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... interests of England were indeed particularly anti-Catholic; although it is not, perhaps, easy to give any distinct reason why they should be so, since theological disputes in general could scarce be considered as interesting to them. But zeal, amongst the lower orders at least, is often in an inverse ratio to knowledge; and sailors were not probably the less earnest and devoted Protestants, that they did not understand the controversy between the Churches. As for the merchants, they were almost necessarily inimical to the gentry of Lancashire and Cheshire; many of whom still ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... neckcloth of Sir Bingo, but they were not much attended to; for it had not escaped the observation of the quicksighted gentry at the Well, that the Baronet's feelings towards the noble Earl were in the inverse ratio of those displayed by Lady Binks, and that, though ashamed to testify, or perhaps incapable of feeling, any anxious degree of jealousy, his temper had been for some time considerably upon the fret; a circumstance concerning which his ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in order inverse; again is the island—Litany of the Saints repeated for us, but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to receive us;—each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow, then vapory gray, then ghostly blue, but always ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... immaterially. The reason of this is, because the act of knowledge extends to things outside the knower: for we know things even that are external to us. Now by matter the form of a thing is determined to some one thing. Wherefore it is clear that knowledge is in inverse ratio of materiality. And consequently things that are not receptive of forms save materially, have no power of knowledge whatever—such as plants, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 12). But the more immaterially ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and birds moreover differs in the form of the trajectory in space; in the inclination of the plane in which the wings beat; in the role of each of the two alternating (and in an inverse sense) movements that the wings execute; as also in the facility with which the air is decomposed during these different movements. As the wings of a fly are adorned with a brilliant array of colors, we can follow the trajectory or ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... life; (2) his adventure in the mountain; (3) his return to the village. Three compositions would be better than a single one on the whole story, because too great condensation usually detracts from the value, and because the excellence of a school composition is usually in inverse proportion to its length. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... little masterpiece of translation. Mr. Morris has, therefore, consented to allow his versions of the Romances to be combined into one volume in a form not unworthy of their excellence but more accessible to those lovers of books whose purses have a habit of varying in inverse proportion to the amount of their love. He has honoured me by asking me to introduce them to that wider public to which they now make ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... Everything the ladies did, the plaid waistcoat and whiskers did, by way of expressing unity of sentiment and congeniality of soul; and Miss J'mima Ivins, and Miss J'mima Ivins's friend, grew lively and talkative, as Mr. Samuel Wilkins, and Miss J'mima Ivins's friend's young man, grew morose and surly in inverse proportion. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens |
