"Accretion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the decline of vigor of a nature which for so long a time had seemed impregnable. Age, which had been kept back by the presence of the beloved object, arrived with that cortege of pains and inconveniences, which grows by geometrical accretion. Athos had no longer his son to induce him to walk firmly, with head erect, as a good example; he had no longer, in those brilliant eyes of the young man, an ever-ardent focus at which to kindle anew the fire of ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... expect to, or hope to accomplish," said Elihu Burritt, "has been and will be by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap—particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact. And if ever I was actuated by ambition, its highest and warmest aspiration reached no further than the hope to set before the young men of my country an example ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... which could be sailed over with impunity twenty years ago, and which is now dangerous: it resembles, in fact, the other reef at the entrance of the Gulf, where tile soundings have changed, in late years, from 7-7 1/2 fathoms to 3-3 1/2. Geologists differ as to the cause—elevation or accretion by ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... young cubs just aware of their teeth, but of the challenge that was Nan. Here she was, all beauty, all wisdom, in the natal gifts of her, telling him, with every breath, she loved him and only him. And yet, his knowledge of life was quick to answer, it was the accretion of long hungers, the sum of all desires since she was little and consigned to Aunt Anne's delicate frigidities for nurture and, as the event proved, for penury. She had no conception of a love as irresistible as hers was now abounding. In a year or two, youth would meet ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of genius. Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion, built up his ocular demonstrations in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur, or in those of the most airy and delicious beauty, so minutely and distinctly, yet so rapidly, that the attention which was yielded to him was chained till it stood among his wonderful creations, till he himself ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... material which reaches the earth as dust must be immensely in excess of the minute quantity which arrives in the form of lumps. Hundreds or thousands of tons per annum must be received; and the accretion must, one would think, in the course of ages be able to exert some influence on the period of the earth's rotation—the length of the day. It is too small, however, to have been yet certainly detected. Possibly, it is ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... take a step forward, and turn from local to personal attachments of tradition. There is a whole class of traditions attached to personages about whose historical existence there can be but little doubt, and just because of the accretion of tradition round them their historical existence has oftentimes been denied. The most famous example in our history is of course King Arthur, and so great an authority as Sir John Rhys is obliged to resort to a special argument to account ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... highly valued by the Chinese as medicine. The monkeys and porcupines are hunted for the sake of these stones. A similar substance, also highly valued as a medicine by the Chinese, is sometimes found as an accretion formed about the end of a dart which has been broken off in the flesh of S. HOSEI and has remained there ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... losing its continuity for its broader and perhaps vaguer work. At the same time, specialized bodies with related aims have been partially or wholly absorbed, until, by processes partly of subdivision and partly of accretion, we have a body capable of dealing alike with the general and the special problems of library work. It should not be forgotten, however, that its success in dealing with both kinds of problems is still conditioned by the laws already laid down. The general association, as it grows larger, will ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... the perfection of summer, early June, before the roses have shaken off their sweetness, and Grandon Park is lovely enough to compare with places whose beauty is an accretion of centuries rather than the work of decades. Yet these grand old trees and this bluff, with a strata of rock manifest here and there, are much older than the pretty settlement lying at its base. The quaint house of rough, gray stone, with a tower and a high ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... New Astronomy differs from the old by a whole horizon in the notion of world-production. About the middle of the century the theory began to be advanced that the worlds grew by accretion of matter; that they grew in the very paths which they now occupy; that they began to be with a small aggregation of matter rushing together in the line or orbit which the coming planet was to pursue. The planetary matter was already revolving in this orbit and in the surrounding spaces. It was ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... gold, in great pure masses, mammillary, or botryoidal (like a bunch of grapes) in shape, have assuredly been formed by accretion on some metallic base, from gold salts in solution, probably chloride, but ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ago, unused ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... accumulations of preparatory knowledge. A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies. It involves so much; is indeed a sort of universal absorber, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... attain serenity so that, even in their days of youth, urged on as they are by youthful exuberance, they may be orderly, decorous, and kindly-disposed. We would have them polite, as a matter of course, but we would hope that their politeness may be a part of themselves and not a mere accretion. They will have joy of life, but so does their teacher who is possessed of serenity. Joy is not necessarily boisterous. The strains of music are no less music because they are mellow. We would have our young people think soberly but not solemnly. And when all our people, young and old, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... divided by a very distinct line of demarcation. It is only after the frequent sinuosities of the channel, that the two waters are thrown into each other and fairly blend. The sedimentary condition of the Missouri is so great that drift floating upon its muddy surface, by accretion becomes so heavily laden with earthy matter that it sinks to the bottom. This precipitation of drift has taken place to such an extent, that the bed of the Missouri is in many places completely covered to a great depth by immense fields of logs. Of all the silt thrown into the Mississippi, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that it has been considered as a Roman fabric. The stone composing this isthmus is so compact, that the best mill-stones in the Ionian Islands are made from it; but it is in fact nothing more than gravel and sand cemented by calcareous matter, the accretion of which is supposed to be rapidly advancing at ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... in the stricter sense of a preternatural enlightenment of the mind, it might conceivably be either by way of a real accretion of knowledge—an addition to the contents of the mind—or else by way of manipulating contents already there, as we ourselves do by reminiscence, by rumination, comparison, analysis, inference. Thus we can conceive the mind being consciously controlled in ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. That is to me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of interest; for I have lost myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analysing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... picture, poem, statue, or piece of music—which elicits the sensual, viceful, and unholy desires of our nature—is, and that utterly. The beautiful was created the true, morally as well as physically; vice is a deformment of virtue,—not of form, to which it is a parasitical addition—an accretion which can and must be excised before the beautiful can show itself as it was originally made, morally as well as formally perfect. How we all wish the sensual, indecent, and brutal, away from Hogarth, so that we might show him to the purest ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... Another legend suggests the petrification of a princely family, as a punishment for marrying within the forbidden degrees, but myth grows apace in this haunted land, and every century offers fresh variations of old-world stories, until original form is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... will no doubt continue their demonstrations that the New Testament, like the Old, seldom tells a single story or expounds a single doctrine, and gives us often an accretion and conglomeration of widely discrete and even unrelated traditions and doctrines. But these disintegrations, though technically interesting to scholars, and gratifying or exasperating, as the case may ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... years after the laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474 by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin in the third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 was published the first Horace containing both text and notes, which were those of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... marked with the alphabet (an odd anticipation of the electric telegraph, minus the wires), they would not point to the same letter by an occult sympathy. His arguments are often to the point, though overlaid with a strange accretion of the fabulous. In discussing the question of the blackness of negroes, he may remind benevolent readers of some of Mr. Darwin's recent speculations. He rejects, and on the same grounds which Mr. Darwin declares to be conclusive, the hypothesis ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the further development of the subject. The instances which I have adduced belong to one locality, the West of Scotland, and chiefly the neighbourhood west of Glasgow, but different localities have different methods of formulating the same superstition. By comparison, by separation of the local accretion from the constant element, an approach to the original source and meaning of a superstition may ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... with every birthmark of that slow, inflexible race. He would make love philosophically, Gaunt sneered. A made man. His thoughts and soul, inscrutable as they were, were as much the accretion of generations of culture and reserve as was the chalk in his bones or the glowless courage in his slow blood. It was like coming in contact with summer water to talk to him; but underneath was—what? Did Dode know? Had he taken her in, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Rapp's will so early shut them out? When they finish smoking, one by one, the great revenues of the society will probably fall into the hands of two or three active survivors, and be merged into the small currents of trade, according to the rapid sequence which always follows the accretion of large ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... nothing to do. He was probably the first of his line who had ever passed a day without toil, and perhaps something like an inherited instinct disqualifies such men for a life of pleasant inaction, such as lies in the power of those whose leisure is not a personal accident, but a vast historical accretion which has become part ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... growth of the Intercollegiate Peace Association, like that of most social movements, was slow in the first few years of its existence, but with the gradual accretion of new states it has gained in momentum, and is to-day increasing with such rapidity that only the lack of financial support will prevent it from embracing in its contests within another two years practically every state in the Union. Starting with two states at the Earlham Conference ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... unfoldment, not accretion; it manifests no material growth from molecule to mind, but an impartation of the divine Mind to man 68:30 and the universe. Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal, har- monious being ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... IX.—one of "the latest expansions,"— thoroughly understands the legal and constitutional situation, as between Agamemnon and Achilles. Or rather all the poets who collaborated in Book IX., which "had grown by a process of accretion," [Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... and more dependent on what was to be essentially a tool and nothing more. Each generation became lazier and there's no one alive who can keep this Central System in proper working order." He leaned forward to emphasize his point. "You see, it's very slowly breaking down. There's a steady accretion of inefficiency mutations in the axons and that's why more and more switching mistakes are being made—as in ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... upwards through small vents, which then serve as "blow holes" for the imprisoned fluid beneath. This, rapidly cooling as it is ejected, forms a ring on the surface of the crust, which, growing upwards by accretion, forms a chimney, eventually nearly or quite closed at the top, so as to form a cone. In this case the cone is about eighty feet above the present level of the lake, and fully one hundred yards distant from ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... practices and other similar sexual aberrations. Here, legally, England is closer to Germany than to modern France. No country in the world, it is often said, has preserved by tradition and even maintained by recent accretion such severe penalties against homosexual offences as England. Yet, unlike the Germans, the English do not actively prosecute in these cases and are usually content to leave the law in abeyance, so long as public order and decency are reasonably maintained. English people, like the French ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... parallels to Fisher's ghost, and very hard on psychical science it is that ghostly evidence should be deliberately burked through the prejudices of lawyers. Mr. Suttar, in his 'Australian Stories Retold' (Bathurst, 1887), remarks that the ghost is not a late mythical accretion in Fisher's story. 'I have the authority of a gentleman who was intimately connected with the gentleman who had the charge of the police when the murder was done, that Farley's story did suggest the search ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... reason why he should read novels, as he found Gardiner's history more interesting than any romance. The scientific historians have not revolutionized historical methods, but they have added much. The process of accretion has been going on since, at any rate, the time of Herodotus, and the canons for weighing evidence and the synthesis of materials are better understood now than ever before, for they have been reduced from many models. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Testament, according to their relative historical and ethical value, under the laws which he would himself apply to any other literature in the world—invite him to exclude this as legendary and that as accretion, to distinguish between the original kernel and that which the fancy or the theology of the earliest hearers inevitably added—and you will feel that a complete change has come over the mind. However ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the modest doubts of Locke on this subject. And without considering me as a partisan, you will, I hope, allow me to state some of the reasons which I have heard good physiologists advance in favour of that opinion to which you are so hostile. In the first accretion of the parts of animated beings they appear almost like the crystallised matter, with the simplest kind of life, scarcely sensitive. The gradual operations by which they acquire new organs and new powers, corresponding to these organs, till ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... We have lost it now, whatever it was. Churches like these were then an obvious necessity; kings and princes vied with each other in raising them, and no one questioned their utility. They are now a mere luxury for ecclesiastically minded persons, built by slow accretion, and not by some huge single gift, to please the pride of a county or a city; and this in days when England is a thousandfold richer than she was. They are no longer a part of the essence of life; life has flowed away from their portals, and left them a ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... defend and establish, on the basis of direct observation, the opinion already held by Aristotle; that, in the higher animals at any rate, the formation of the new organism by the process of generation takes place, not suddenly, by simultaneous accretion of rudiments of all, or of the most important, of the organs of the adult; nor by sudden metamorphosis of a formative substance into a miniature of the whole, which subsequently grows; but by epigenesis, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... rank in agreement thereto, neither the lord of an unproducing manor, howsoever broad and ancient, nor he who bears an unremunerate dignity, nor yet the pauper favorite of a king, being esteemed of level excellency with him whose riches are of daily accretion; and hardly should they whose wealth is barren claim and rightly take more honor than the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... of Lords, which consisted at this time of some fifty members, [Footnote: D'Ewes, Journals, 599] had an existence as a royal council quite apart from the House of Commons, and there were still many evidences that it was the original body and the House of Commons a later accretion. In 1601, when Elizabeth appeared in the House of Lords to open her last Parliament, the Commons, who were waiting in their own chamber, did not hear of her presence promptly, and when they hastened to the Lords' chamber the door was closed and they could not obtain admission, so they "returned ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... point of determining prices is at the wholesaler, the accretion by the charges for distribution from that point forward to the consumer's door will not affect the farmer, but will affect the consumer. When competition decreases through shortage the consumer pays the added ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... Reason, falls outside it"; and yet he regards it as the highest reward of the philosopher-saint to converse with the hypostatised Abstraction who transcends all distinctions. The vision of the One is no part of his philosophy, but is a mischievous accretion. For though the "superessential Absolute" may be a logical necessity, we cannot make it, even in the most transcendental manner, an object of sense, without depriving it of its Absoluteness. What is really apprehended is not the Absolute, but a kind of "form of formlessness," an ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... animal, without its comfort or picturesque quality; the very birds that haunted it for food must have felt their own superiority as architects. It was inconceivably dirty, even with its scant capacity for accretion; it was singularly stale, even in its newness and freshness of material. Unspeakably dreary as it was in shadow, the sunlight visited it in a blind, aching, purposeless way, as if despairing of mellowing its outlines or of even tanning it ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... property of the accessory, according to the principle, accessio cedet principali. Accession may take place either in a natural way, such as the growth of fruit or the pregnancy of animals, or in an artificial way. The various methods may be classified as (1) land to land by accretion or alluvion; (2) moveables to land (see FIXTURES); (3) moveables to moveables; (4) moveables added to by the art or industry of man; this may be by specification, as when wine is made out of grapes, or by confusion, or commixture, which is the mixing together ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wild ducks. The City of Santo Domingo is situated on the west bank of the Ozama River, the mouth of which constitutes the city's harbor. Since the town was founded four centuries ago the width of the river here seems to have diminished by fully one-fourth owing to accretion along the shores. A bar across the entrance renders access impracticable for vessels drawing more than fifteen feet of water. This bar has given considerable trouble, for at times it has grown in such manner as to leave a depth of but five feet. It is now kept open by means of jetties and ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... This explanation of the accretion and rising of the land is somewhat opposed to the popular belief that Ceylon was torn from the main land of India[1] by a convulsion, during which the Gulf of Manaar and the narrow channel at Paumbam were formed by the submersion of the adjacent land. The two theories might be reconciled ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang. And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way. On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song. One of the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... have done the same. But no political party can long exist, certainly none can long hold power, while reposing solely upon devotion to a single idea. For one thing, the mere requirements of what Lincoln called "national housekeeping" involves an accretion of policies apparently unconnected with its original doctrine. Thus the Republican Party, relying at first wholly upon the votes of the industrial North, which was generally in favour of a high tariff, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... from the country and empty drays awaiting hire. Warwick was unable to perceive much change in the market-house. Perhaps the surface of the red brick, long unpainted, had scaled off a little more here and there. There might have been a slight accretion of the moss and lichen on the shingled roof. But the tall tower, with its four-faced clock, rose as majestically and uncompromisingly as though the land had never been subjugated. Was it so irreconcilable, Warwick wondered, as still to ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... are the rates of mortality, so efficient the safeguards derived from the selection of lives, the assumption of low rates of interest, and the loading of premiums, that no company, when once well established, has ever met with disaster. On the other hand, there has been a rapid accretion of funds, in some instances to the amount of many millions of dollars. The characteristics of a good company are security and assurance at cost. It should sell, not policies merely, but assurance; and it should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... we shall come to that question in our next chapter), the remaining books of the New Testament have come down to us, unaltered, from the men who first wrote them. There is none of that process of redaction, and accretion, and reconstruction whose traces we have found in many of the Old Testament books. There may be, here and there, a word or two or a verse or two which has been interpolated by some officious copyist, but ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... finding a counterpart in the line of mails vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775 from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was $37,935—little over a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... believed that such an extraordinary system of sound-signs could have been the invention of any one man or even of any one age. Like all our other acquisitions, it must have been the slow growth and accretion of ages; it must have risen step by step from picture-writing through an intermediate condition like that of the Chinese, where each word or thing was represented by a separate sign. The fact that so old and enlightened a people as the Chinese have ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... to pretend that this book is authoritatively informing. It is a series of personal impressions of the Dutch country and the Dutch people, gathered during three visits, together with an accretion of matter, more or less pertinent, drawn from many sources, old and new, to which I hope I have given unity. For trustworthy information upon the more serious side of Dutch life and character I would recommend Mr. Meldrum's Holland and ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... literary arguments which hardly admit of this form of expression—such as the improbability that the Preface or Prologue was not part of the original Gospel, but a later accretion; or, again, from Marcion's treatment of the Synoptic matter in the third Gospel, both points which might be otherwise worth dilating upon. I pass over these, and come at once, without further delay, to the one point which seems to me really to decide the character ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... custom of usurers, however, is to renew the note, adding the interest to the face, if unpaid. The mass of bank paper is renewed each ninety days: Compounded four times a year, whether to the same or to another debtor, the result in accretion is the same. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... to be startled or dazed by novelties, but capable of measuring and assimilating whatever best suited it. On the whole, his nature, while retaining its individuality and poise, was rather a highly receptive than a strongly original one. Its growth was a steady accretion of knowledge, ideas, experiences and aptitudes, without the exhibition of that power which in minds of a rarer order reacts upon impressions with a transforming influence. There is more appearance of freedom, of spontaneousness—paradoxical as this may seem—in his translation of Faust than in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... this second period succeeded finally the third,—that which witnessed the birth and growth of the Egyptian mania. Its natal moment has not been precisely determined; perhaps it was a gradual accretion. Mr. Glyphic's relatives in Brooklyn were one day electrified by the news that the quondam Henry—now Hiero—purposed instant departure for Europe and Egypt. Before starting, however, he built the brick wall round his estate, shutting it out forever from human eyes. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... always directed away from the sun, and it also explains the varying forms of the tails and the extraordinary changes that they undergo. The speed of the particles driven before the light-waves must depend upon their size and weight, the lightest of a given size traveling the most swiftly. By accretion certain particles might grow, thus losing velocity and producing the appearance of bunches in the tail, such as have been observed. The hypothesis also falls in with the researches of Bredichin, who has divided the tails of comets into three principal classes — ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... and the two following days, the requested reinforcements, in number some 1,500 men of all arms, arrived. With this accretion of strength it was now possible to renew the offensive, and General French at once turned his attention to the capture of Grassy Hill (Suffolk Hill on map No. 16), which he had early marked as the key to the Boer stronghold. This height lay at the junction of the ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... town for a short cruise at sea, to-morrow early. I shall remain until Sunday evening. But it is for the best that I cannot see you to-morrow, because I hope to 'interview' you on Wednesday, after your return, with that renovation of genius and accretion of knowledge which will accompany you on your return from Parnassus, after having bathed in the fountain of the Muses. You must bring Mrs. Reeve a faithful copy of the eulogistic speech of the public orator, and I will translate ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... perfectly globular form. This points to a liquid or gaseous condition at one time, and the flattening of the sphere at the poles confirms the impression. We should hardly expect so perfect a rotundity in a body formed by the cool accretion of solid fragments and particles. It is just what we should expect in a fluid body, and the later irregularities of the surface are accounted for by the constant crumpling and wearing of its solid crust. Many would find a confirmation of ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... samples in view one could observe the whole process of formation. The crescentic sweep of the wavelets rolled fragments of shell or coral in the mud, successive revolutions adding to the respective bulks by accretion. As the tide rose each piece was trundled on to the sloping beach, to be rolled and compressed until coated with a mosaic of white shell chips, angularities of silica and micaceous spangles, the finished article being cast aside ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Works of imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual accretion, remains with me; indeed, that is pretty much the whole result I obtain from anything I read. But books of knowledge, of scientific or natural facts, though they sometimes affect me beyond the finest poetry with an awe and delight ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... need of the day, building without any distant design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. As elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past. Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour; and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its day on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is the reef to which I ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... stories concerning Vikramaditya, a monarch who, if he ever lived, seems to have flourished about the beginning of the Christian era. He was celebrated, like Solomon, for his wisdom and his might; and his name became the centre of a vast accretion of legends. Some of these legends were translated into Mongolian late in the Middle Ages, and formed a small collection called after Ardshi-Bordshi, the nominal hero. In the story to which I wish to direct attention, a certain ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... In frantic effort to control his ecstasy, he sped to the garret, and with trembling hands tied the second joint of the day to the tail of the dragon—the first time he had ever broken the law of its accretion. Once broken, that law was henceforth an object of scorn, and the tail grew with frightful rapidity. It was indeed a great dragon. And none of the paltry fields about Rothieden should be honoured with its first flight, but from Bodyfauld should ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... saw fit to give me another education first. The city, as I saw it during that night walk, was no longer the old capital that I had known, the just accretion of the ages, the due admixture of comfort and splendour. The splendour was there, vastly increased. Whole wards had been swept away to make space for new palaces, and new pyramids of the wealthy, and I could not but have an admiration for the skill and the brain which ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Kudrun and the Niebelungen, and Are's story of the queen that burnt her suitors) appears in Hermintrude, Queen of Scotland, who battles and slays her lovers, but is out-witted by the hero (Hamlet), and, abating her arrogance, agrees to wed him. This seems an obvious accretion in the original Hamlet story, and probably owing not to Saxo, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... transformation, partly by natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... to-day, not as he was in a glorified past; not landing at Plymouth Rock, not hanging witches, or beating Quakers, or persecuting Episcopalians, not throwing tea into Boston Harbour, or writing philosophy at Concord, but spending his days in watching the gradual accretion of his already ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... tongue of drift, level with the top of the cairn to leeward, and running about 150 yards to N.E., showing that the prevailing wind here is S.W. Nine months before we had sprinkled some oats on the surface of the snow hoping to get a measurement of the accretion of snow during the winter. Unfortunately we were unable to find the oats again, but other evidence went to show that the snow deposit was very small. A minimum thermometer which was lashed with great ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... to-day and the man of ten thousand years ago. Under his thin skin of morality which he has had polished onto him, he is the same savage that he was ten thousand years ago. Morality is a social fund, an accretion through the painful ages. The new-born child will become a savage unless it is trained, polished, by the abstract morality that ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... to unite itself with that of the female; to fructify it; to produce, by this combination, a new organized being; who, feeble in his origin, not having yet acquired a sufficient quantity of material particles to give him consistence, corroborates himself by degrees; strengthens himself by the daily accretion of analogous matter; is nourished by the modifications appropriate to his existence: matured by the continuation of circumstances calculated to give vigour to his frame; thus he lives, thinks, acts, engenders in his turn other organized beings similar to himself. ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... present to every one, just as the (all-pervading) ether is. Nor, again, can it be maintained that Release is something to be ceremonially purified, and as such depends on an activity. For ceremonial purification (sa/m/skara) results either from the accretion of some excellence or from the removal of some blemish. The former alternative does not apply to Release as it is of the nature of Brahman, to which no excellence can be added; nor, again, does the latter alternative apply, since Release is of the nature of Brahman, which ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... it then that our letters from home are filled with lamentations and that, having just gained a proportionately very large accretion of territory, we see headlines in the papers such as 'The Gallipoli standstill,' whereas it does not seem to occur to anyone to speak about 'The ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... the process of fusion began. Not so the first. What I mean is that not all of the writings of Greek antiquity were known to Jew, Christian and Mohammedan at the beginning of their philosophizing career. And the progress in their philosophical development kept equal step with the successive accretion of Greek philosophical literature, in particular Aristotle's physical, psychological and metaphysical treatises, and their gradual purgation ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... examples that may be compared with the descriptions have come down to us. In LA a word antilum is used, which does not appear to occur anywhere else, and is unknown to our lexicographers. It is possibly a corruption for an(n)ulum, "a ring." Naturally this tale of the gift must be a later accretion to the story, if it had ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... the sand, in shade, and rain, and heat, that baby's finger begins boring its way, with unerring aim, out of the weakest eye. Soft itself, yet with immense wedging power, from the gradual accretion of tiny cells, it pierces the wood, and then rends right and left the tough fibrous coat. Just so may be seen—I have seen—a large flagstone lifted in a night by a crop of tiny soft toadstools which have suddenly blossomed up beneath it. The baby's finger protrudes at last, and curves upward ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... no live law of growth kept unfolding an infinite change! The child knows nothing of growth—desires none—but grows. Within him is the force of a power he can no more resist than the peach can refuse to swell and grow ruddy in the sun. By slow, inappreciable, indivisible accretion and outfolding, he is lifted, floated, drifted on towards the face of the awful mirror in which he must encounter his first foe—must ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... by the fact of growth, scientists have also marveled at the principle that controls the harvest. Rocks enlarge by accretion, but from what a rock is at the beginning, the geologists cannot tell what will be the shape of that rock when all deposits are finally made. As to growth in seed and shrub, like produces like. He who sows wheat reaps wheat, not tares. He who plants a grape receives a purple ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the natural world. We recognize a fundamental distinction between inanimate and living matter, between the inorganic and the organic, between the lifeless mineral on the one hand and the living plant or animal on the other. Within the limitations of its order the dead mineral grows by accretion of substance, and may attain a relatively perfect condition of structure and form as is seen in the crystal. But mineral matter, though acted upon favorably by the forces of nature—light, heat, electric energy and others—can never become a living organism; nor ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... with the idea of Power, and attributed to a potent being just such tricks as a waggish and libidinous savage would like to play if he could. Moreover, I have actually traced (in 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion') some plausible processes of mythical accretion. The early mind was not only religious, in its way, but scientific, in its way. It embraced the idea of Evolution as well as the idea of Creation. To one mood a Maker seemed to exist. But the institution ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... in secluded resting-places of the departed. With the accretion of wealth to the living more care was expended upon the dead, and enduring slabs of slate, with appropriate engravings, took the place of the uncouth fragments of rock. With added riches the taste for display in headstones, as well as ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... that centre outwards, then, without inquiring into collateral appearances, and other proofs with regard to the natural concretion of those substances, we might suppose that these concretions might have proceeded from that central body gradually by accretion, and that the concreting and crystallizing substances might have been supplied from a fluid which had before retained the concreting substance in solution; in like manner as the crystallizations of sugar, which are formed in the solution of that saccharine substance, and are termed candies, are formed ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... time big fortunes are apt to gain by mere accretion what they lose by division; and the owner of great wealth has opportunities for investment undreamed of by the ordinary citizen who must be content with interest at four per cent and no unearned increment on his capital. This fact might ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... not added to by accretion, as in the case of minerals, but by growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in the spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organized in the protoplasm of the body. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... traced back in the Black Book of the Admiralty to the fourteenth century, while the illogical arrangement of the whole points, as in the case of the Additional Fighting Instructions of the eighteenth century, to a gradual growth from precedent to precedent by the accretion of expeditional orders added from time to time by individual admirals. The process of formation may be well studied in Lord Wimbledon's first orders, where Ralegh's special expeditional additions will be found absorbed and ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... the heirs male of the body of the grantee, which is a limitation and a less heirship than is comprised in the enjoyment of an honour in fee simple. Privilege of peerage with all it entails has been a slow growth of accretion; and save for place and precedence and the right of any peer or peeress to be tried in the House of Lords, and the now limited and threatened right of peers to legislate, little of ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... watched this removal with mixed emotions. The two remaining principals were impassive and frozen-faced. Their two Assassins, who had probably bet heavily on Marnark, were chagrined. And Klarnood was looking at Verkan Vall with a considerable accretion of respect. Verkan Vall pulled on his boots and ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... stages of Christian Science are gained through growth, not accretion; idleness is the foe of progress. And scientific growth manifests no weakness, no emasculation, no illusive vision, no dreamy absentness, no insubordination to the laws that be, no loss nor lack [15] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... be equally unadventurous. In the drowsy tranquillity of a text-book, we easily and unintelligently read of dust particles around which icy rain forms, hailstones, in their fall, then increasing by accretion—but in the meteorological journals, we read often of ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... of acquiring these things is not accretion but unfoldment. It is the unfoldment of ideas or concepts. The growth of ideas is similar to that of plants and flowers. The growth of expression follows the growth of the idea, it never precedes it. From the formation of ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... rise out of the sea. The formation of this species of mountain requires not the wearing operations of the earth which we have been considering as the modifier of our alpine regions. This volcanic mountain has a conical shape, perhaps more from the manner of its formation which is accretion, than from the wasting of the surface of the earth. It is not, however, of this particular specie of mountain that I mean to treat, having had no opportunity of examining any of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... flattish hills, had left a spell of thoughtful reticence behind him. The hills never dare to rise into abrupt earnestness; the two broad, bright-faced rivers that hold it in lapse with a calm consciousness into the sleepy, oyster-bedded bay; even the accretion of human life there never has been able to utter itself in the myriad rebellious phases of a great city, but falls gravely into the drilled monotony of its streets. Brick and mortar will not yield themselves there to express any whim in the mind of their owner: the house-fronts turn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... many pure ores have been fused, or it is a full turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in remote climes. It is a blending of primval Keltic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, Italic, and Arab traditions, each adding a beauty, each yielding a charm, bat each accretion rendering ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... been subordinated to one architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect. The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races, organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent personality, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... spiritual ancestry—are maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... have to go through their Karma, still it can never be averted that there is no such thing as Destiny, for it is the latter that initiates all Karma. How does Karma originate, if Destiny form the prime spring of human action? (The answer is) that by this means, an accretion of many virtues is made even in the celestial regions. One's own self is one's friend and one's enemy too, as also the witness of one's good and evil deeds. Good and evil manifest themselves through Karma. Good and evil ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... centrifugal and centripetal forces find expression in the anarchic and radical spirit which breaks down and re-forms existing institutions, and in the conservative spirit which preserves and upbuilds by gradual accretion; they are analogous to igneous and to aqueous action in the formation and upbuilding of the earth itself, and find their prototype again in man and woman: man, the warrior, who prevails by the active exercise of his powers, and woman, "the treasury of the continued race," who conquers by continual ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... superstitious folklore, throughout the whole of Central Burma. Mud volcanoes occur at Minbu, but they are not in any sense mountains, resembling rather the hot springs which are found in many parts of Burma. They are merely craters raised above the level of the surrounding country by the gradual accretion of the soft oily mud, which overflows at frequent intervals whenever a discharge of gas occurs. Spurs of the Chin hills run down the whole length of the Lower Chindwin district, almost to Sagaing, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... being loyally recognized as a blunder,—which it clearly is,—it is forthwith charged upon the Apostle or Evangelist as the case may be. In other words, it is taken for granted that the clause in dispute can have had no place in the sacred autograph. It is henceforth treated as an unauthorized accretion to the text. Quite idle henceforth becomes the appeal to the ninety-nine copies out of a hundred which contain the missing words. I proceed to give an ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... silex are elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... wording of section 107 as it now stands is the result of a process of accretion, resulting from the long controversy over the related problems of fair use and the reproduction (mostly by photocopying) of copyrighted material for educational and scholarly purposes. For example, the reference to fair use—"by reproduction in copies or phonorecords ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... narrated Tanno's unexpected arrival, his quizzical bantering of the persons whom he encountered on the road, my tenants' petition, my agreement with Marcus Martins, the accretion of Hirnio and Murmex to our party, Tanno's insistence on reaching the Salarian Highway through Vediamnum, and all the other trivial factors which had conspired to my undoing; I described the affray in Vediamnum, both as I had seen it and as Tanno and Agathemer had told me of it; similarly ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... esteemed most skilful in such matters, that the red, swelling mossy bog, whereof we have so many large tracts in this island, is not by any means to be fully reduced; but the skirts, which are covered with a green coat, easily may, being not an accretion, or annual growth of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... increase, augmentation, enlargement, extension; dilatation &c. (expansion) 194; increment, accretion; accession &c. 37; development, growth; aggrandizement, aggravation; rise; ascent &c. 305; exaggeration exacerbation; spread &c. (dispersion) 73; flood tide; gain, produce, product, profit. V. increase, augment, add to, enlarge;. dilate &c. (expand) 194; grow, wax, get ahead. gain strength; advance; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... America. The repugnance of the free blacks to emigration from our shores has produced a tardy movement, and thus the African population has been thrown back grain by grain, and not wave by wave. Every one conversant with the state of our colonies, knows how beneficial this languid accretion has been. It moved many of the most enterprising, thrifty, and independent. It established a social nucleus from the best classes of American colored people. Like human growth, it allowed the frame to mature in muscular solidity. It gave immigrants ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... beginning of the history of David according to the simple thread of the old narrative. The first accretion we notice is the legend of the encounter of the shepherd boy with Goliath (xvii. 1-xviii. 5), which is involved in contradiction both with what goes before and with what follows it. According to xvi. 14-23, David, when he first came in contact with Saul, was no raw lad, ignorant of the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... expressions of the hardy little men, and it fills one, as does everything Norman, from the Tyne to the Euphrates, with something of awe. This building, the White Tower, is the Tower itself; the rest is but an accretion, partly designed for defence, but latterly more for habitation. Its name of the "White" Tower is probably original, though we do not actually find the term "La Blaunche Tour" till near the middle of the fourteenth century. The presumption that it is the original name is ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... one never fails to detect the difference. And this precisely is the difference between a native growth of Christian principle and the moral copy of it. The one is natural, the other mechanical. The one is a growth, the other an accretion. Now this, according to modern biology, is the fundamental distinction between the living and the not living, between an organism and a crystal. The living organism grows, the dead crystal increases. The first grows vitally from within, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... ALLUVION. An accretion formed along sea-shores and the banks of rivers by the deposition of the various substances held in solution or washed by the waters. Sea alluvions differ from those of rivers, in that they form a slope ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... gracefully, is not eminently an Anglo-Saxon gift, though there are many individual exceptions to this limitation. Our social life is largely a form, a whirl, a commercial relation, a display, a duty, the result of external accretion, not of internal growth. It is not in any sense a unity, nor an expression of our best intellectual life; this seeks other channels. Men are immersed in business and politics, and prefer the easy, less exacting atmosphere of the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason |
