"Rotundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Africa, having given them a knowledge of the earth from the Fortunate Islands to Serica, and from the Baltic to the sources of the Nile, the comparison of the phenomena of the various zones taught them the rotundity of the earth, and gave birth to a new theory. Having remarked that all the operations of nature during the annual period were reducible to two principal ones, that of producing and that of destroying; that on the greater part of the globe ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... an elderly man, inclined to rotundity, was introduced, and, taking his position before the fireplace, opened the proceedings with an expression of regret as to the circumstances which ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... moment, as though doubtful of the exact purport of his words. Then, suspicion of covert sarcasm being clearly inadmissible, Sir Abel spoke again in his largest platform manner, although the tones of his voice, like his person, were shrunken, docked of the fulness of their former rotundity and unction. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... modus operandi is understood, and the facts have been known some thirty, some a hundred, some several thousand years. Among advanced thinkers psychic science is no more a debatable question than the rotundity of the earth ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and noble savages which ought to have sprung up ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... peripatater,' he said, with a chuckling smile. I noticed as he reached the earth that he walked with a peculiar, rolling motion of the body. He certainly was stout. There were no angles about him anywhere, nothing but rotundity. Withal, and despite the curious, rotary gait, there was a suggestion of quickness and of well-balanced lightness about all his movements. His hands and feet I thought quite remarkably small. There was a short section ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... But, nowadays, what sort of a plank should we want, my friend! I, in particular." And the Seigneur de Bracieux cast a proud glance over his colossal rotundity, with a loud laugh. "And do you mean seriously to say you are not tired of Belle-Isle also a little, and that you would not prefer the comforts of your dwelling—of your espiscopal palace, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... when she went to bed; and the two Gaudrons—the husband, like some heavy animal and almost bursting his brown jacket at the slightest movement, the wife, an enormous woman, whose figure indicated evident signs of an approaching maternity and whose stiff violet colored skirt still more increased her rotundity. Coupeau explained that they were not to wait for My-Boots; his comrade would join the party on the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... set out to row a boat across a pond was observed to pursue a very devious course. On being hailed and asked what the matter was, he replied that it was the rotundity of the earth that bothered him; he kept sliding off. So it is the rotundity of my subject that bothers me. But I do mean to stay on one hemisphere of it if ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... and thought executed fires, Vaunt couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all shaking thunder Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!"—Beauties of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Derby, Dr. Butter accompanied us to see the manufactory of china there. I admired the ingenuity and delicate art with which a man fashioned clay into a cup, a saucer, or a tea-pot, while a boy turned round a wheel to give the mass rotundity. I thought this as excellent in its species of power, as making good verses in its species. Yet I had no respect for this potter. Neither, indeed, has a man of any extent of thinking for a mere verse-maker, in whose numbers, however perfect, there is no poetry, no mind. The china ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... and La Rochefoucauld, and pious Lally, and Lafayette, whom Mirabeau calls Grandison Cromwell, and the Viscount Mirabeau, called Barrel Mirabeau, on account of his rotundity, and the quantity of strong liquor he contains. Among the clergy is the Abbe Maury, who does not want for audacity, and the Cure Gregoire who shall be a bishop, and Talleyrand-Pericord, his reverence of Autun, with sardonic grimness, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... was not improved by this shower. It had caused his hairy coat to cling to his form, producing a drowned-rat aspect which was not becoming; but a short run and some vigorous shakes soon restored his rotundity. ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... of a colleague! That the colleague happened to be a hunchback only made the incident more ludicrous. But Haydn had rather a partiality for the drum—a satisfying instrument, as Mr George Meredith says, because of its rotundity—and, as we shall learn when we come to his visits to London, he could handle the instrument well enough to astonish the members of Salomon's orchestra. According to Pohl, the particular instrument upon which he performed on the occasion of the Hainburg ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... coast of Africa: That if any one should sail due westwards, as proposed by the admiral, it would certainly be impossible to return again to Spain; because whoever should sail beyond the hemisphere which was known to Ptolemy, would then go downwards upon the rotundity of the globe, and then it would be impossible to sail up again on their return, which would necessarily be to climb up hill, and which no ship could accomplish even with the stiffest gale. Although the admiral gave perfectly valid answers to all these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... reputation among the simple animals of the city, who never had penetrated the secret. He explained, besides, that there were many more he could perform if his figure were more slim and his movements as active as they had been some years ago, before time, by increasing his rotundity, had lessened the ease of his motions; but that if Bruin would undertake to learn them, his fortune was as good as made: for he, Herr Schwein, would not only teach him all he knew, but would reward him with half the profits derived from his performance, when he should ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... without a struggle, and I pulled them up without a pang, comforting myself with the remaining ones, which throve on their companions' graves, and waxed fat and full and crimson-hearted, in their soft, brown beds. So delighted was I with their luxuriant rotundity, that I made an internal resolve that henceforth I would always plant beets. True, I cannot abide beets. Their fragrance and their flavor are alike nauseating; but they come up, and a beet that will come up is better than a cedar of Lebanon that won't. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape as those that overhang our village street; and as for the redoubtable English oak, there is a certain John Bullism in its figure, a compact rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much smaller than that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean to doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and cultivation, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... swollen out with crinoline? And yet I remember, that, though sa roe etait blanche, et son costume etait tres pittoresque, it was sans s'e carter cependant assez des usages recus pour que l'on put y trouver de l'affectation; and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "on" would very readily "y trouver de l'affectation." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... philosophy of China than did the steam-driven machinery mentioned by Hero of Alexandria constitute the first century B.C. the 'age of steam.' Similarly, to take another example, the idea of the earth's rotundity, though conceived centuries before Ptolemy in the second century, did not become established before the sixteenth century. It was, in fact, from the I ching that the Chinese derived their dualistic (not their monistic) conception of ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of middle height, he was slightly inclined to rotundity, with hair almost white, a stubbly grey beard, and a pair of keen eyes rather prominently set in a bony but not unpleasant countenance. He had a peculiar habit of stroking his left ear when puzzled, and was not without those little eccentricities which run hand in hand ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... The peevish mouth and the fallen eye of the plaice, the helpless rotundity of the sunfish, the mournful gape and rolling glance of the goldfish, the furious and ineffective mien of the barndoor fowl, the wild grotesqueness of the babyroussa and the wart-hog, the crafty solemn eye of the parrot,—if such things as these do ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he had as few outward failings as could be desired. For one of no extreme views, he could count an extraordinary number of adherents. Without being particularly agreeable or instructive, he possessed a rather imposing readiness and rotundity of speech, and had a knack of turning his arm-chair into a pulpit somewhat oftener than was quite in good taste. However, I suppose the best of us will talk "shop" when we see a fair opening. He had a large wife and several small children. No one admired him ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... vegetables, are hardly to be found, the nest of the chaffinch has not that elegant finished appearance, nor is it so beautifully studded with lichens, as in a more rural district; and the wren is obliged to construct its house with straws and dry grasses, which do not give it that rotundity and compactness so remarkable in the edifices of that little architect. Again, the regular nest of the house- martin is hemispheric; but where a rafter, or a joist, or a cornice, may happen to stand in the way, the nest is so contrived as to conform ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... rotundity of outline characterizes this type. He is round in every direction. Fat rolls away from his elbows, wrists, knees and ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... purple handkerchief, and put it back into his outside breast pocket with the corners sticking out like attentive ears. He crossed his legs and set on his knee an ankle clothed in a purple silk stocking. On account of his rotundity he was compelled to hold the ankle in place in the firm clutch of his hand. He settled his purple ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... quite in keeping with this vivacity. Rather short, and inclining—but as yet only inclining—to rotundity of figure, with a peculiarly soft and clear complexion, Mrs. Damerel made a gallant battle against the hostile years. Her bright eye, her moist lips, the admirable smoothness of brow and cheek and throat, bore witness to sound health; as did the rows of teeth, incontestably ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... green spaces to boot, but Rye and its hillock are one; every inch is given over to red brick and grey stone. They are true cities of the plain. Between them are three miles of flat meadow, where, among thousands of sheep, stands the grey rotundity of Camber Castle. All this land is polder, as the Dutch call it, yet not reclaimed from the sea by any feat of engineering, as about the Helder, but presented by Neptune as a free and not too welcome gift to these ancient boroughs—possibly to equalise ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... with pity, and glanced for a moment at his neighbor's red face, his short, thick neck, his "corporation," as Chenet called it to himself, that hung down between two flaccid, fat legs, and his apoplectic rotundity of the old, flabby official, and, lifting the white Panama hat which he wore, from his head, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... as I imagine, all the delight of felicitation in my countenance that she had expected, her own fell, in a disappointed pause, into as much of length as its circular form would admit of; it recovered, however, in another minute its full merry rotundity, by conjecturing, as I have reason to think, that the niggardliness of my admiration was occasioned by my doubt of her assertions; for, looking at me with an expression that demanded my attention, she poked her head under the arm of a tall grenadier, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... though in some way beyond our ken? If Tommy's mother had not taught him, there is at least an even chance that he would have tried to grow red before he grew big. But he laid her lesson to heart, and day by day, week by week, his rotundity expanded, while ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... gravel, consisting of rolled oval pebbles, on the average about six inches long by four wide—awkward building materials, yet used in ingenious alternation with the bricks in all the lowland Italian fortresses. Besides this universal rotundity, the qualities of stones which rendered them valuable to the lapidary were forced on the painter's attention by the familiar arts of inlaying and mosaic. Hence, in looking at a pebble, his mind was divided between its roundness and its veins; and Leonardo covers ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... that from 1849 to 1857, arguments on the roundness or flatness of the earth did itinerate. I have {89} no doubt they did much good: for very few persons have any distinct idea of the evidence for the rotundity of the earth. The Blackburn Standard and Preston Guardian (Dec. 12 and 16, 1849) unite in stating that the lecturer ran away from his second lecture at Burnley, having been rather too hard pressed at the end of his first lecture to explain why the large hull of a ship ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... But it was natural for him to think so, for he was the only man of his trade in a town of six thousand people. He was a portly person who took a broad view of life, and it was his habit to remark, when folk commented on his rotundity, "I am big. I don't deny it. But I can't help myself—God A'mighty made me big, big in body, big in brain, big in appetite, big in desire to break every established law and accepted custom; but I am prevented from giving rein to my impulses by ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... powder; shade lightly over this, but not quite to the edge, with a little of my second yellow, and finish off by a light tint of crimson (crimson lake in cake.) The petals are deep and few, and require a great deal of cupping; to assist in producing this rotundity of petal use the head of the ivory pin, commencing to roll from the bottom to about half-way up the petal. Make a foundation of white wax, rather large and cone-shaped; colour it the same as petals; place the latter on singly, and press them forward to meet at the point and conceal the foundation. ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... do not desire eloquence or rotundity," I reply. "Furthermore, I avoid them." The vast majority of Spanish purists are convinced that the only possible rhetoric is the rhetoric of the major key. This, for example, is the rhetoric of Castelar and Costa, the rhetoric which Ricardo Leon and Salvador Rueda manipulate today, as ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... infinite and immovable body inveigled along its course? I will explain it to you. It is by the power of friction; that is to say, the two wheels, or paddles turning diametrically, or at the same moment, on their axioms, and repressing by the rotundity of their motion the action of the menstruum in which the machine floats,—water being, in a philosophical sense, a powerful non-conductor,—it is clear, that in proportion as is the revulsion so is the progression; and as is the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... the royal audience was at length obtained. Ferdinand assembled learned astronomers and cosmographers to hold a conference with Columbus. They assailed him with citations from the Bible. One objection advanced was, that should a ship ever succeed in reaching India, she could never come back, for the rotundity of the globe would present a mountain, up which it would be impossible to sail. Finally, after five years, the junta condemned the scheme as vain ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, and recipiency ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... exclaimed Verkimier, with a look of surprise which was greatly intensified by the rotundity of the blue spectacles. "Vell, I don't feel to vant ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... certain flutter of spirits, to see, for the first time in my life, the sun to the northward, and moving through the heavens from right to left, instead of from left to right. No one doubts that the earth is round; yet these conspicuous and actual proofs of its rotundity always amuse the fancy, and frequently interest the judgment, almost as much as if they were unexpected. The gradual rise, night after night, of new stars and new constellations, belongs to a still higher order of curiosity; for it not merely places well-known objects in strange positions, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... stolen out at daybreak, and, by an unexpected stroke of fortune, the molasses pail was hanging on a nail by the shed door. The remains of a battered old bushel basket lay on the wood-pile: bottom it had none, nor handles; rotundity of side had long since disappeared, and none but its maker would have known it for a basket. Tom caught it up in his flight, and, seizing the first crooked stick that offered, he slung the dear familiar burden over his shoulder and started off ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... characterise the French, They have no traits so bold as the English, nor so minute as the Germans. I know them chiefly by their teeth and their laugh. The Italians I discover by the nose, small eyes, and projecting chin. The English by their foreheads and eyebrows. The Dutch by the rotundity of their heads and the weakness of the hair. The Germans by the angles and wrinkles round the eyes and in the cheeks. The Russians by the snub nose and their light-coloured ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... to digest the enormous dinner they had eaten. These now trudged manfully forward, smoking their pipes with outrageous vigor, so as to raise the awful cloud that has been mentioned, but marching exceedingly slow, being short of leg, and of great rotundity in the belt. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half-dozen little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... please your majesty, the ladies are privileged to give credence to many wild tales which we plain matter-of-fact men can not admit. Every step I take, confutes this visionary idea of the earth's rotundity. Would not the blood run into my head, if I were standing upside down! Were I not fearful of offending your majesty, I would quote what the great ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... half, and resigned when he was thirty-three, despite the seventy-five gold per month his Chinese employers were paying him. Then it was that he put up his own sign: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. Also, better fed, there was about his less meagre figure a foreshadowing of the melon-seed rotundity that was to attach to ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Japanese in recent times, they have shown that their intellectual capacity is not deficient. No distinct conception of a universe enters into their cosmology. They picture to themselves many floating worlds, yet they deduce the idea of rotundity from the course of the sun, and they imagine that the "Ainu world'' rests on the back of a fish whose movements cause earthquakes. It is scarcely possible to doubt that this fancy is derived from the Japanese, who used to hold an identical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... aversion to it when discoloured with mud[1]; and the eagerness with which he precipitates himself into the tanks and streams attests his exquisite enjoyment of the fresh coolness, which to him is the chief attraction. In crossing deep rivers, although his rotundity and buoyancy enable him to swim with a less immersion than other quadrupeds, he generally prefers to sink till no part of his huge body is visible except the tip of his trunk, through which he breathes, moving beneath ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... to the opposition of the fathers to the doctrine of the rotundity of the earth, and says that, "thanks to some of them, you may find the approach to any kind of philosophy, however improved, entirely closed up." He charges that some of these divines are "afraid lest perhaps a ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... who on occasion of quarrels, pelted one another with them. A traveller was once killed with some of these balls during the night, although a friend of the Jenoun." In a former period, I imagine the action of water produced these specimens of stony rotundity, for they were embedded in a deep wady. On leaving this valley, I had also something else to relieve me from the gloom of this day's march. On mounting a small ridge of rock, abrupt, and full of sharp stones, I was pitched off in a summerset style from the back of the camel, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... don't know me.— Well, I'll jog your memory. Count." And the little rotundity began to ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... theoretical science except in one line, but who pursued that one practical line until he achieved a wonderful result. This man was Christopher Columbus. It is not necessary here to tell the trite story of his accomplishment. Suffice it that his practical demonstration of the rotundity of the earth is regarded by most modern writers as marking an epoch in history. With the year of his voyage the epoch of the Middle Ages is usually regarded as coming to an end. It must not be supposed that any very sudden change came over the aspect ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... trick—has no other fiddle been substituted for the broken Straduarius? No!—'tis his own well-known fiddle, outside and in—the same delicate proportions, the same elegant neck, and the same swelling rotundity of contour that might have made it a model for the Praxiteles of violins. He placed the instrument against his shoulder and seized the bow. But all of a sudden he paused—a cold perspiration bedewed his face—his limbs could scarcely ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... jointure over the ears of its slightly lighter hair with the brown of his own. There was a monogram of silk on his shirt-sleeve, of gold on his bill-folder, and of diamonds on the black band across the slight rotundity of his waistcoat. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... the deft manoeuvring. At any rate, he walked beside his big cousin with the air of a successful aide-de- camp. But Monkey, too, seemed flushed with victory, rolling along—her rotundity ever suggested rolling rather than the taking of actual steps—as if she ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... near great towns. On work-days still wearing the same old hat—I wonder what material it was originally?—tough leather probably—its fibres soaked with mortar, its shine replaced by lime, its shape dented by bricks, its rotundity flattened by timber, stuck about with cow's hair—for a milker leans his head against the animal—sodden with rain, and still the same old hat. The same old hat, that Teniers might have introduced, a regular daub of a hat: pity it is that it will never be painted. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies |
