"Adaptation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the musical scale to numbers, whereby harmony results from vibrations in equal times, and discord from the reverse, led Pythagoras to apply the word "harmony" to the visible creation, meaning by it the just adaptation of parts to each other. This is the idea which Dryden expresses in the beginning of his song ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... dollar, to know for what work they are most suited. They know only when it is too late that they are bound by chains, crucifying themselves daily at tasks they hate, and for which they have no natural adaptation." ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... scandalous immorality everywhere prevalent to the insufficiency of religious instruction, and to the low character of the clergy, the result mainly of their ignorance and poverty. His Letter to a Young Clergyman is little more than a didactic adaptation of that portion of Eachard's work which deals with the character and education of the clergy. The Essay on the Fates of Clergymen is another study from the Contempt, while the fragment of the tract which he had begun, Concerning that Universal Hatred which prevails against ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... possibility of obtaining an absolute ground for the philosophy which should include all things human and divine. He passed onward before the inestimable gift he seemed to have won could be set forth in the symbols of the world. To see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular adaptation through which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express the truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such colored mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man has found out the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... adaptation for the purposes in question of the carbon process invented by Poitevin. We shall describe ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... lapidaries had engraved the name of the later Phoenician owner. In spite of not being an artistic people producing works of originality, this people, the great mariners and merchants of antiquity, had in an eminent degree the genius of assimilation or adaptation, and manufactured cylinders, cones, spheroids, scarabs and signets of all kinds, at first for themselves, and afterwards as an article of sale to the people ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... though colorless life; but his "hard shell" theology, his long years of monkish seclusion in the training schools, engendering gloomy views as to the final misery of the majority of human beings, his poverty and lack of adaptation, banished all cheerfulness from his demeanor, and when I recall his sad, solemn face, made so largely by his views in regard to the horrors awaiting the most of us in the next world, I find myself repeating the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe in the "Minister's Wooing," when she was thinking ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... sermon on the 'Lesson of the Life of Saul,' where he contrasts early promise and final failure; and in that other not less remarkable presentation of the vision of Saint Peter. His treatment of Bible narratives is not a translation into the modern manner, nor is it an adaptation, but a poetical rendering, in which the flavor of the original is not lost though the lesson is made contemporary. And while he did not transcribe nature upon his pages, his sermons are not lacking in decoration. He used figures of speech and drew freely on history and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... they were not supplied, by publications of the kind proposed, with matter adapted to their circumstances, to their capacities, and their various turns of fancy; matter accessible to them by its conciseness and perspicuity, attractive by its variety and lightness, and useful by its easy adaptation to the familiar intercourse of life, and its fitness to enter into the conversation of rational society. Men whose time and labour are chiefly engrossed by the common occupations of life, have little leisure to read, none for what is called study. In books they do not search for deep learning, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... human history for three hundred years, a melodramatic, incredible fiction; and what cannot now be found anywhere else recorded, a dream; accidental coincidence he speaks of as detected dishonesty; imaginary resemblance, as guilty adaptation; a style suitable to the subject, as plagiarism; occasional inspiration he calls a lie; translation, a forgery; and the whole, if not a "magnificent mystification," then, in Procurator-Fiscal phrase, a "wilful falsehood, fraud, and imposition." But all this, without proof—and ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... write for six voices, two of which should be bass, in order that the fundamental themes should be sustained with dignity and continuity. But what he had principally in view, what in fact he had been called on to initiate, was that novel adaptation of melody and science to verbal phrase and sense, whereby music should be made an art interpretative of religious sentiment, powerful to clothe each shade of meaning in the text with appropriate and beautiful sound, instead of remaining a merely artificial and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... morning at the designated hour, came the little note promised me by Mr. Gryce. It was put in my hand with many sly winks by the landlady herself, who developed at this crisis quite an adaptation for, if not absolute love of intrigue and mystery. Glancing over it—it was unsealed—and finding it entirely unintelligible, I took it for granted it was all right and put it by till chance, or if that failed, strategy, should give me an opportunity to communicate with Mrs. Blake. An ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... from his hideout, Tyler," Bentley explained, "and won't hesitate to send them into danger since it can't touch him. And he watches every move they make, too. He's made some television adaptation of his own. I'll wager, if he so desires, he can see us sitting here right now, even perhaps hear what we say. I can fancy hearing ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... interest in a mere translation; while the English reader, unacquainted with Greek, will naturally prefer the harmonious versification and polished brilliancy of Pope's translation; with which, as a happy adaptation of the Homeric story to the spirit of English poetry, I have not the presumption to enter into competition. But, admirable as it is, Pope's Iliad can hardly be said to be Homer's Iliad; and there may be some who, having lost the familiarity with the original language which they ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... the International System of Units (SI, or metric system) as their official system of weights and measures. Although use of the metric system has been sanctioned by law in the US since 1866, it has been slow in displacing the American adaptation of the British Imperial System known as the US Customary System. The US is the only industrialized nation that does not mainly use the metric system in its commercial and standards activities, but there is increasing acceptance in science, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the mixed sciences which teaches the laws and phenomena of the universal system. It is practical when it treats of the magnitudes, periods, and distances of the heavenly bodies; and physical when it investigates the causes. In the first division the more useful adaptation nautical ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... It's my grand adaptation of the phonograph to the marine service. You store up profanity in it for use at sea. You know that sailors don't fly around worth a cent unless you swear at them—so the mate that can do the best job of swearing is the most valuable man. In great emergencies his talent saves the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... because it keeps clear of all political questions, and manifests itself, not as a government, in which character it is peculiarly uncompromising and despotic, but as a religion, in which aspect it has a wonderful power of adaptation to the habits and tastes of the people. The Propaganda rules Roman Catholic America very much in the spirit of its own institutions; and one of the most remarkable social phenomena of that country is the absolute subserviency which the political ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... this work consist, in part, of its entire originality, of its more than usual adaptation to the wants of our High Schools and Academies, and of the systematic arrangement of its selections for declamation and for elocutionary practice. Those in Part Second were prepared by Prof. WM. RUSSELL, the eminent elocutionist, expressly for this work. The publishers feel assured ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... established the convenience of an oracle whose answer "no" can always be foreseen; and the fitness of the child mind for saying "no," as well as the perfect adaptation of the single word vocabulary to ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... preserved as coal for the races destined to inhabit this planet. This vegetal growth is a flora that knows not bloom or seed, but is propagated by root and spores, a flora most primitive in type, but which will in time evolve through the law of mutation and adaptation into a diversified and useful vegetal kingdom for the races yet to come ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... manner, with much point and pleasantry; and nothing is more usual at public festivals, than that the air played to accompany a particular health or toast, is made the vehicle of compliment, of wit, and sometimes of satire. [Every one must remember instances of this festive custom, in which the adaptation of the tune to the toast was remarkably felicitous. Old Neil Gow, and his son Nathaniel, were ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the essential riddles in the adaptation of such human beings as ourselves to that greater civilized state of which I dream. It is the gist of my story. It is one of the two essential riddles that confront our kind. The servitude of sex and the servitude of labor are the twin conditions upon which human society rests ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... model for constructing the Roman capitals in a standard form will be found in the beautiful adaptation by Mr. A. R. Ross, 1 and 2, from an alphabet of capitals drawn by Sebastian Serlio, an Italian architect, engraver and painter of the sixteenth century, who devised some of the most refined variants of the classic Roman letter. Serlio's original ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... all, and in 'Felix Randal' and some and handsome is as truly an eye-rhyme as the love and prove which he despised and abjured; and it is more distressing, because the old-fashioned conventional eye-rhymes are accepted as such without speech- adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagree- able and vulgar or even comic quality. He ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... feelings; and at that age, I can unhesitatingly declare, my mind was deeply tinctured with a romance not derived from books, nor from conversation, but arising, as I verily believe, out of the singular adaptation to each other of my natural taste and the scenery amidst which it began to develop itself. Our abode was changed to another part of the city before this period arrived; but the bishop's garden was still our ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... she had imagined seemed a miracle, and she was encouraged to think some miraculous thing had happened when the priest asked her to tell him exactly what her window was like. She had often told him before but he had never listened to her. But now he recognised her window as an adaptation of Fra Angelico's picture, and he told her how the saint had wandered from monastery to monastery painting pictures on the walls. More he could not tell her, but he promised to procure a small biography of the saint. She received the book a few days after, and as she turned over the leaves she ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... various purposes to which it is applied, have rendered Sheffield the greatest laboratory in the world of this valuable material. Of the total quantity of cast-steel manufactured in England, not less than five-sixths are produced there; and the facilities for experiment and adaptation on the spot have enabled the Sheffield steel-makers to keep the lead in the manufacture, and surpass all others in the perfection to which they have carried this important branch of our national industry. It is indeed a remarkable fact that this very ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... gradually did so adapt himself, and in the course of the autumn this adaptation took a form which at first amused Mrs. Colesworthy and myself, and afterward enlisted our hearty sympathy. He became attached to Miss Budworth, the librarian of our town library. He frequently went there for books, and as she was a very intelligent ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... constructively, as well as virtually, as much an enemy of Ireland as England is. The Firm, comprising Great Britain and all its colonies and dependencies throughout the world, is known as John Bull & Co., and the distinctive sign of the house, in all its ramifications, is the Union Jack or some adaptation of the red cross of St. George to local predilections. As in ordinary mercantile transactions, a debt incurred by any branch of the establishment involves the responsibility of the whole, and can be levied for in London or Hokitika. This is the true state of the case, and any individual ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... suppressed feeling. She was about twenty-three, a girl with a fine outline of features, beautiful dark eyes, and a clear brown skin, who would have been very handsome if she had looked better fed and less hardworked. Her Sunday dress showed wear and adaptation, but she was altogether ladylike, and even the fringe that had startled Aunt Ada only consisted of little wavy curls on the temples, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spirit for you," Bill spoke absently. "He has bucked his way into the heart of a virgin country, and he's breaking sod with a mule and a cow. That's adaptation to environment with a ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... is not likely that any society at any time will suffer from a plethora of heretical opinions. Least of all is this likely in a modern civilized society, where the conditions of life are in constant rapid change, and demand, for successful adaptation, an equally rapid change in intellectual outlook. There should be an attempt, therefore, to encourage, rather than discourage, the expression of new beliefs and the dissemination of knowledge tending to support ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... bring it to the full light of an historical incident, it will be seen in the perusal of this narrative, have successively, and by most curious process of development, risen into view through a series of accidental discoveries, which have all combined, with singular coincidence and adaptation, to furnish an unquestionable chapter of Maryland history, altogether worthy of recital for its intrinsic interest, and still more worthy of preservation for the elements it supplies towards a correct estimate of the troubles which beset the career and formed the character ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... medium, so essentially necessary to give confidence in all the transactions of life, to secure to industry its just and adequate rewards, and to reestablish the public prosperity. In deciding upon the adaptation of any such measure to the end proposed, as well as its conformity to the Constitution, I shall resort to the fathers of the great republican school for advice and instruction, to be drawn from their sage views of our system of government and the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... at least with higher intellectual qualities, than belonged to either of these great men. But it was the wonderful conformity of their characters to the exigencies of their situation, the perfect adaptation of the means to the end, that constituted the secret of their success; that enabled Gasca so gloriously to crush revolution, and Washington still more gloriously to ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... state their position. They have no intention whatever of writing a new book. Their aim is to adapt old books to new needs. {48} Adaptation, not invention, is their aim. Four times in their short Preface they refer us to "the ancient Fathers" ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... important of these creations is the infinitesimal word "as"—or rather, it is a case of adaptation. Yesterday "as des carreaux" (to give the full form) stood simply for ace of diamonds. To-day all France, with that swift assimilation which has ever been one of its many mysteries, knows its new meaning and applies it. And ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... observe, in conclusion, that Dr. Rimbault is better read in Jack Wilson than Ben Jonson, or we should never have seen Mr. Shakspeare's 'Rime' at the 'Mitre,' in Fleet Street, seriously referred to as a genuine composition. It is a mere clumsy adaptation, from Ben's interesting epigram 'Inviting a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... the first or the last witness to the apostolic assurance: "the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous availeth much." It is not indeed insinuated, that importunity in soliciting favours is invariably successful. Unquestionably, many considerations of propriety, necessity, and adaptation, must be understood to enter into the account. The spirit of dictation must not blend with that of earnestness, nor must we deem ourselves qualified to determine the time, the manner, or the proportion of divine communications; ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... of man, the most that can be said is this: The old ideas about race as something hard and fast for all time are distinctly on the decline. Plasticity, or, in other words, the power of adaptation to environment, has to be admitted to a greater share in the moulding of mind, and even of body, than ever before. But how plasticity is related to race we do not yet know. It may be that use-inheritance somehow incorporates its effects in the offspring ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... not creations of human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces which men unconsciously set in operation, or they are like the instinctive ways of animals, which are developed out of experience, which reach a final form of maximum adaptation to an interest, which are handed down by tradition and admit of no exception or variation, yet change to meet new conditions, still within the same limited methods, and without rational reflection or purpose. From this ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... rate which seemed unaccountable to our hero, for he had not sufficiently realised the fact that in addition to the unusual physical strength of Van der Kemp as well as that of Moses, to say nothing of his own, the beautiful fish-like adaptation of the canoe to the water, the great length and leverage of the bow paddle, and the weight of themselves as well as the cargo, gave this canoe considerable advantage over ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... from lower to nobler forms which is the basis of their own philosophy, and to the conception of which the idea of the soul and of love are essential! Evolution presupposes possible perfecting, and the conscious adaptation of means to ends in order to attain it. And both the ideal itself and the endeavour to reach it are incomprehensible without desire, which is love, and whose seat is in the interior self, the living soul—the maker of the outward form!" He was roused from his melancholy now, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... in imitation, but they are greater perhaps in their powers of adaptation. They have so far shown a peculiar faculty for fitting to Japanese requirements and conditions the machinery, science, industry, &c., necessary to their proper development. Japan is without doubt now keenly alive, marshalling all her industrial forces in the direction of seeking ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... "To look up at the sky, and behold the wondrous works of God, must make a man bow his head and heart in silence. I have thought and studied, and worked for years, and I know so little—all I can do is to adore when I behold this unfailing regularity, this miraculous balance and perfect adaptation. The majesty of it all humbles me ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller—some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in. Thus he hoped to find in the historic recital examples which might support the moral truths of which he was conscious. Few ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... conservative heredity, this palingenetic form of gastrulation which they have from their earliest common ancestors. But this is not the case with the great majority of the animals. With these the original embryonic process has been gradually more or less altered in the course of millions of years by adaptation to new conditions of development. Both the segmentation of the ovum and the subsequent gastrulation have in this way been considerably changed. In fact, these variations have become so great in the course of time that the segmentation was not rightly ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... followed Mr. Payne's adaptation of the text as he makes sense, whilst the Arabic does not. I suppose that the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... question to ask oneself of this adaptation from the French is "Is it funny enough?" With so much being offered by the newsboy outside the Vaudeville that is not at all funny, it would be pleasant to find inside the doors a little relief ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... communicated by the engine, requires to adapt itself to the altering forms of the vessel, as the engine and intermediate shaft are rigidly connected, although the paddle shaft requires to be capable of such an adaptation. Even if this objection existed, however, it could easily be met by making the crank pin of the ball and socket fashion, which would permit the position of the intermediate shaft, relatively with that of the cylinder, to be slightly ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... be abundantly elucidated in the proper place. For the present, it is sufficient to refer to the junction, in a composite Ministry of hostile statesman, as one of the singular results flowing from that necessity of adaptation to circumstances which was rendered unavoidable by the ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... number among his genuine works. The poem of the "Court of Love," which was likewise long erroneously attributed to him, may be the original work of an English author; but in any case its main contents are a mere adaptation of a peculiar outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions common to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... incorruptibility, are fitted to serve as money in, a degree unapproached by other kinds of merchandise. In short, the economists, instead of replying to the economic question put to them, have set themselves to the examination of a question of art. They have laid great stress on the mechanical adaptation of gold and silver for the purpose of money; but not one of them has seen or understood the economic reason which gave to the precious metals ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... German hymns, one is struck by their adaptation to the seasons and occurrences of ordinary life. Obviously, too, the writer's religion was not a Sunday matter only, it had its place in week-days as well. In these hymns there is little gloom, a healthy human cheerfulness pervades ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... always, is on Christian living, in the assurance that out of that living will come Christian thinking. Each in his own way, but each with the same purpose and the same result, has preached the gospel of life. The form of that life has varied, but the variation has been occasioned by the need of adaptation to the general type of church life, as illustrated on every hand. Plymouth has simply shown its ability to ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... have been in all ages, and in all there will be, sharp and slender heads made purposely and peculiarly for creeping into the crevices of our nature. While we contemplate the magnificence of the universe, and mensurate the fitness and adaptation of one part to another, the small philosopher hangs upon a hair or creeps within a wrinkle, and cries out shrilly from his elevation that we are blind and superficial. He discovers a wart, he pries into a pore; and he calls ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, and strengthening one another, until they have become indissolubly woven together by ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... kingdom of Whitefriars, with all its frowzy and questionable population, has been admirably drawn by Scott in his fine novel of "The Fortunes of Nigel," recently so pleasantly recalled to our remembrance by Mr. Andrew Halliday's dexterous dramatic adaptation. Sir Walter chooses a den of Alsatia as a sanctuary for young Nigel, after his duel with Dalgarno. At one stroke of Scott's pen, the foggy, crowded streets eastward of the Temple rise before us, and are thronged with shaggy, uncombed ruffians, with greasy shoulder-belts, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... when they fall out of it. They can be replaced in the social machine much as a lost or broken part can in an engine. And just as the part of an engine which has become useless where it is, can have no possible usefulness elsewhere, so we are unable to imagine them as capable of adaptation to any other place than that which they have filled here. Perhaps that is what we mean by hell—incapacity to adapt oneself to ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and Indian Oceans, the influence of which we shall feel during our voyage; and by knowing where to search for them, and where to avoid them, we can generally make them serviceable to our object. What I would especially point out to you, my lads, is the beautiful adaptation of all the works of the Creator to the great object of the whole. The air and water are kept in motion for the benefit of man and all living beings. Order everywhere reigns supreme. Science shows us that storms are regulated by exact laws, and it is only through our ignorance ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... the salvation of classical study now hangs, is to make it a teaching by the ear. But, says Professor Price: "A Greek or Latin sentence is a nut with a strong shell concealing the kernel—a puzzle, demanding reflection, adaptation of means to end, and labour for its solution, and the educational value resides in the shell and in the puzzle". As this strain of remark is not new, there is nothing new to be said in answer to it. Such puzzling efforts ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... more intelligent than we even now, and capable of changing overnight, capable of infinite adaptation to circumstance; you live as readily on Pluto as on Mercury or Earth. Any place is a home-world to you. You can adapt yourselves to any condition. And—most dangerous to them—you can do it instantly. You are their most deadly enemies, and they realize it. ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... all remove the last doubt as to the unqualified necessity of this phase of evolution, let us suppose that the contrary has happened, that the adaptation of the social institutions to the modified form of labour is not effected. At any rate the mind can imagine such a possibility; and I hold it to be superfluous, at this point in the demonstration, to ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... The adaptation of flowers for cross-fertilisation is a subject which has interested me for the last thirty-seven years, and I have collected a large mass of observations, but these are now rendered superfluous by the many excellent works which have been lately published. In the year 1857 I wrote a short paper ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... problem lies in the necessity for such an adaptation, and this difficulty requires us to make a clean sweep of prejudices, traditions and prudery. It is this which we ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... to Erling's partiality for the axe as an offensive weapon. This preference was in truth—strange though the assertion may appear—owing to the peculiar adaptation of that instrument to the preservation of life as well as the taking ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... canal have, in most cases, been made by invagination of the skin of the scrotum and its fascia. These have been very numerous and various in their adaptation of mechanical appliances, but have all been designed with the same object. Dzondi of Halle, and Jameson of Baltimore, incised lancet-shaped flaps of skin, and endeavoured to fix them by displacement over the ring. Gerdy invaginated ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... of the seventh or eighth century, "of which the MS. text is evidently a late West Saxon transcription differing in many respects from the older one." He considers that The Dream belongs to the age of Caedmon, and that the poetry of Cynewulf was an adaptation of older compositions. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... shall not pretend to say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet must sometimes fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as Dryden is the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... realistic treatment. Ideal work in oil, according to Western canons of art, is still out of their reach. Perhaps they may yet discover for themselves a new gateway to the beautiful, even through oil-painting, by adaptation of the method to the particular needs of the race-genius; but there is yet no sign ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... was acted at the Theatre Francais in the spring of 1840, and proved a failure. It betrays no insufficient sense of dramatic effect, nor lack of the means for producing it, but decided clumsiness in the adaptation of these means to that end. The plot and personages recall those of Indiana, with the important differences that the beau role of the piece falls to the husband, and that the scene is transported ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... delighted the colonel more than to be told that no such man as he could walk in high success the streets of any other country in the world; for that would only have been a logical assurance to him of the correct adaptation of his labours to the prevailing taste, and of his being strictly and peculiarly a national ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... of coffee into Paris by Thevenot in 1657—How Soliman Aga established the custom of coffee drinking at the court of Louis XIV—Opening of the first coffee houses—How the French adaptation of the Oriental coffee house first appeared in the real French cafe of Francois Procope—Important part played by the coffee houses in the development of French literature and the stage—Their association with the Revolution and the founding of the Republic—Quaint ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... elegance and dignity attested, spite of her fallen condition, the purity of her descent. She was accomplished—possessed of that fine perception and sensitiveness, and that ready power of self-adaptation to the peculiarities and moods of others, which we term tact—and was, moreover, gifted with a certain natural grace, and manners the most winning imaginable. In short, she was a fascinating companion; and when the melancholy circumstances of her own ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the statues that adorned their fronts; the painter was still touching the external frescoes; and the scaffold of the architect was not in every instance withdrawn. Everywhere was the hum of art and artists. The Byzantine style of many of these buildings was novel to me in its modern adaptation, yet very effective. The delicate detail of ornament contrasted admirably with the broad fronts and noble facades which they adorned. A church with two very lofty towers of white marble, with their ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the well-known tendency of the human mind to blend numbers of different incidents into one story. An episode of one experience, having been transferred to an earlier one, becomes rationalized in adaptation to its different environment. This process of psychological transference is the explanation of the reference to Elephantine as the source of the d'd', and has no relation to actuality. The naive efforts ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... were other larger, more absorbing things on which the mind dwelt. There was the grey cold sea outside Dover and Portsmouth and Cork, where the great grey ships of war rocked and swung with the tides, where the sailors sang, in doggerel English, that bitter- sounding adaptation, "Germania rules t'e waves," where the flag of a World-Power floated for the world to see. And in oven-like cities of India there were men who looked out at the white sun-glare, the heat-baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened ...
— When William Came • Saki
... to be able to contribute to the entertainment of Gimlet Butte," she said, as she swept in. For this young woman was possessed of Western adaptation. It gave her no conscientious qualms to exchange conversation fraternal with these ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... prevented the use of side-wheels for full freights, an adjustable stern-wheel was tried. This could be raised or lowered in adaptation to ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... churches and those who attend them. Later on, my attention was called to the curious fact that his discourse was merely a translation into modern American of portions of the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew; a free adaptation of those ancient words to present day practices and conditions. But I had no idea of this while I listened; I was shocked by what seemed to me a furious tirade, and the guests of the hotel were even more shocked—I think they would have taken ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... assumed that labor, out of its own necessities, would adapt itself automatically to the new requirements of the machine, and to the shifts of business interest. When it was discovered that there were limitations to labor's voluntary adaptation under the conditions laid down, intelligent business in America decided that the responsibility for realizing labor's adaptation or "labor's cooeperation" as they call it, must be assumed by the management ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... presents itself to our minds at this time is whether our modern world has not been unconsciously incorporating these ideas into its living beliefs—that is, those beliefs which reveal themselves in actual living and doing, in daily purpose, in the adaptation of means to ends, in the deeds which the world honors, and in the achievements which it crowns with glory. There are many persons who would not have the frankness of Nietzsche to say that might makes right, and that a moral sense is the great obstacle to progress, and that in "vigorous eras ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... beautiful girl than the sorceress (Nereid in Romaic), restores the youth to his true shape. Mr. Child regarded the tale as "one of the numerous wild growths" from Beauty and the Beast. It would be more correct to say that Beauty and the Beast is a late, courtly, French adaptation and amplification of the original popular "wild growth" which first appears (in literary form) as Cupid and Psyche, in Apuleius. Except for the metamorphosis, however, there is little analogy in this case. The friendly act of the Fairy Queen is without ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... evergreen family, as well worthy of attention; for almost from the first, according to geologists, this family records on the rocky tablets of the earth its appearance, large and varied development, and its adaptation to each change in climate and condition of the globe's surface during the countless ages of preparation. Surely, therefore, he who is evolving a home on one acre of the earth's area cannot neglect a genus of trees that has been so signally honored. Evergreens will ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... thousands of square miles. The slow oscillations of the crust of the earth, producing great changes in the distribution of land and water, have often obliged the living matter of the coral-builders to shift the locality of its operations; and, by variation and adaptation to these modifications of condition, its forms have as often changed. The work it has done in the past is, for the most part, swept away, but fragments remain; and, if there were no other evidence, suffice to prove the general ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... opinion of atheists does not undermine ethics. But he thinks that the belief in a good governor of the universe is a powerful support to the practice of virtue. He is a thorough optimist, and is perfectly satisfied with the admirable adaptation of means to ends, whereby it is the function of one animal to be food for another. He makes no attempt to reconcile the red claws and teeth of nature with the beneficence of its powerful artist. "In the main all things are kindly and well disposed." The atheist might have said that he preferred ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... generally decided by the law of battle, but in the case of birds, apparently, by the charms of their song, by their beauty or their power of courtship, as in the dancing rock-thrush of Guiana. The most vigorous and healthy males, implying perfect adaptation, must generally gain the victory in their contests. This kind of selection, however, is less rigorous than the other; it does not require the death of the less successful, but gives to them fewer descendants. ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... movements, and their power of assimilation is one of their most remarkable gifts. As M. Leroy-Beaulieu shows by many illustrations, they are apt in most Western nations even to exaggerate the national characteristics, though they usually combine with them a certain flexibility of adaptation and a certain cosmopolitanism of view which ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... May-Day Customs Mrs. Ewing showed her ready ability to take up any subject of interest that came under her notice—botany, horticulture, archaeology, folk-lore, or whatever it might be. The same readiness was shown in her adaptation of the various versions of the Mumming Play, ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... requirement were inconsistent with his natural powers, but as opposed by their tendency. It is not as if obedience were foreign to his nature, but because it is repugnant to his will. But when the sinner is renewed, the requirement of the duty takes effect. The result upon the man proclaims the adaptation of the claim to his state; and the nature of that claim shows that he is prepared for the exercise which it urges. The law of God demands of all what all ought to give, but what man, in consequence of sin, because he is unwilling, ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... not know of a more striking instance in the animal kingdom of adaptation of structure to habit than is afforded by the hairy armadillo—Dasypus villosus. He appears to us, roughly speaking, to resemble an ant-eater saddled with a dish cover; yet this creature, with the ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... gloom, we perceive the movement of those great and heroic passions in which Fiction finds delineations everlastingly new, and are brought in contact with characters sufficiently familiar for interest, sufficiently remote for adaptation to romance, and above all, so frequently obscured by contradictory evidence, that we lend ourselves willingly to any one who seeks to help our judgment of the individual by tests taken from the general knowledge ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crenata shows very good adaptation to this region. Although my trees of this species are young, very vigorous growth indicates some value here. Unfortunately, the nuts have a bad after-taste when eaten raw thus limiting its commercial possibilities. I have noticed this undesirable characteristic ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... however, were not in evidence from the first. They were a matter of growth, of adaptation to needs as those needs were realized. The evolution of the club in that sense is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of White's, which can claim the proud honour of being the oldest among London clubs. It was established as a Chocolate-house about 1698, and as such was a ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... have seen how indistinctness of individual distances becomes necessary in order to express the adaptation of the eye to one or other of them; we have now to examine that kind of indistinctness which is dependent on real retirement of the object even when the focus of the eye is fully concentrated upon it. The first kind of indecision is that which belongs to all objects which ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the stirring meetings of the week he never once forgot Hal. His silence was merely an adaptation of the policy he was urging upon his colleagues. If I leave her alone till Friday she will get piqued," was his thought, ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... wish to thank Mrs. Margaret Deland for permission to use "The Christmas Silence;" Mrs. Etta Austin McDonald for her adaptation of Coppee's "Sabot of Little Wolff" from "The Child Life Fifth Reader;" Josephine Preston Peabody for "The Song of a Shepherd-Boy at Bethlehem;" Mrs. William Sharp for "The Children of Wind and the Clan of Peace," by Fiona Macleod; Nora Archibald Smith and the editors of the ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... the conquering Normans, which was even then making fast progress in England, it is a triumph of a kind that subsequent events have revealed as characteristically Anglo-Saxon, and it called into force the powers of adaptation and of colonization which have brought into being so ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... was active, and various in its powers," said he. "Her heart had a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite buoyancy, which (had she possessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her troubles) would have borne her upward triumphantly for twenty years to come. Her beauty would not have waned—or scarcely so, and surely not beyond ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he traveled as an agent, chiefly in Indiana and Wisconsin, introducing the books of the Eclectic Series. He gradually became Mr. Smith's trusted assistant, particularly in the direction of the work of agents and in the selection of new books, and their adaptation to the demands of the field. He married Miss Amanda Landrum, who was also a skilled teacher in the Cincinnati schools. Mrs. Wilson was responsible for a revision of the McGuffey First Reader made in 1863. She also at that time corrected the plates of the higher numbers of the series. For many ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... life; for the hardest and at the same time the most significant battles of the 19th century were fought with axes and plows in the winning of the West. The frontier called for men with large capacity for adaptation—men with flexible and dynamic natures. Especially did it require men who could break with the past, forget traditions, and easily discard inherited political and social ideas. The key to the character of the pioneer ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... made, it was recognized that creation, in its various parts, displays intention and design, the adaptation of means to secure proposed ends. This suggested a reasoning and voluntary agency, like that of man, in the government of the world; and from a continual reference to human habits and acts, Greek philosophy passed through ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... alluring theories are accepted as more than illusions or half-truths. Dr. Flint scarcely avails himself of them even for his foundations or his skeleton framework. His critical faculty, stronger than his gift of adaptation, levels obstructions and marks the earth with ruin. He is more anxious to expose the strange unreason of former writers, the inadequacy of their knowledge, their want of aptitude in induction, than their services in ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Church to-day calls into its assemblies fully one-third of the millions of the world. They are held by its tenets, guided by its ideals, thrilled by its hopes, and set to its works of charity and mercy. The highest philanthropy is but a scientific renewal and adaptation of work which has had its start, primarily, in the Christian Church. Wealth is its vicegerent, and from the adherents to the Church fall largely the contributions to ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... part of an ancient house so full of interest as the garret region. It has all the mystery of the dungeon cellars with a far more striking variety of form, and a bewildering curiosity of adaptation, the peculiarities of roof shapes and the consequent complexities of their relations and junctures being so much greater than those of foundation plans. Then the sense of lofty loneliness in the deeps of air, and at the same ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Europeans. This version was sent to me some years ago, by Mr. Barnet Phillips, Brooklyn, New York, and I give it here for its curiosity. If the proper names, Jim Orpus and Dicey, had not been given, we might not feel absolutely certain that the story was borrowed. It is a good example of adaptation from the heroic age of Greece to the servile ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... Athens; or, the Man-Hater."[7] One scans the dramatis personae of "Timon" in vain for the character of Chloe, until one recalls that the eighteenth century had no liking for Shakespeare undefiled. The version used by the Theatre Royal was, of course, the adaptation by Thomas Shadwell, in which Chloe appears chiefly in Acts II and III as the maid and confidant of the courtesan Melissa. Both parts were added by Og. The role of Cleon was taken by Quin, later an interpreter of Mrs. Haywood's ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... fusibility, it requires a most intense heat. Of all the metals, it is the widest diffused and most abundant; and few stones or mineral bodies are without an admixture of it. It possesses the valuable property of being welded by hammering; and hence its adaptation to the numerous ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... and rondeaux, it produced odes, elegies, sonnets, and satires. It condemned the common language and familiar style of VILLON and MAROT as vulgar, and sought nobility, elevation, and distinction. To this end it renewed its vocabulary by wholesale borrowing and adaptation from the Latin, much enriching the language, though giving color to the charge of Boileau that RONSARD'S muse "en franais ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... watchfulness. Many of the anti-slavery people turned their attention to India, and were supported by gentlemen of influence, military and mercantile, in efforts to rouse public interest in the resources of India, and the adaptation of these resources to English requirements, rendering the importation of commodities produced by slave labour unnecessary. George Thompson, Esq., who had been returned for the Tower Hamlets, one of the largest and most influential constituencies in the kingdom, a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Instead of mortar, all that is required is a stream of water from a hose to freeze the ice-blocks together, and as ice can be easily chipped into any shape, the most fantastic pinnacles and ornaments can be contrived. Our ice-palace was usually built in what I may call a free adaptation of the Canado-Moresque style. A very necessary feature in the ice-palace was the large stove for thawing the brass instruments of the band. A moment's consideration will show that in the intense cold of a Canadian winter, the moisture that ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... arguments made use of by supporters of the older view is that drawn from the study of adaptation. Animals and plants are as a rule remarkably well adapted to living the life which their surroundings impose upon them, and in some cases this adaptation is exceedingly striking. Especially is this so in the many instances ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... of sacraments from a certain adaptation to the virtues and to the defects and penal effects resulting from sin. They say that Baptism corresponds to Faith, and is ordained as a remedy against original sin; Extreme Unction, to Hope, being ordained against venial sin; the Eucharist, to Charity, being ordained against the penal ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... But his adaptation was checked by a look from his mother, and he relapsed into gloom. "It's a horrid, atrocious shame!" he said. "I can't help it, and Hilda needn't speak to me again if she doesn't want to; but I cannot tell a lie, and I am NOT glad that Mrs. Grahame has ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... was responsible for this new departure; and his son Recceswinth, who followed him upon the throne, was the first to administer the revised code, which is known as the Lex Visigothorum. Although the document is but an adaptation of the Roman law to the special needs of the country from the standpoint of Christianity, it shows at the same time the strong influence of the social traditions of the Goths, and especially with reference to its ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... said, and will reiterate, that for this particular kind of manufacture—the restoration and adaptation of old goods, and the strengthening of tints in carpet warps—the yellows and reds of the Magic or Diamond dyes of commerce are effective and reliable. Indeed, for new goods cardinal dye is all that could be asked, but when it comes to the use of dyes for the weaving of textiles and artistic fabrics, ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... interval he had gradually adapted himself to the new order of things; but the months of adaptation had been a time of such darkness and confusion that, from the vantage-ground of his recovered lucidity, he could not yet distinguish the stages by which he had worked his way out; and even now his ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... examined one hundred and seventy-two manuscripts submitted to them, several of which are large treatises, and a number marked by distinguished merit. They selected four, as in their judgment superior to the rest. Of these four, each was found to have its peculiar excellencies and adaptation to usefulness—this in one walk, and that in another. Literary merit, thoroughness of discussion, and a spiritual and practical character, each and all necessary, in their measure, to render a composition 'THE BEST' in the sense of the original offer ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... The adaptation of the soil to this function is dependent to a great extent on its mechanical texture, and on this considerable light is frequently thrown by ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... cause as a badly prepared bed, or the accidental presence of a hard body concealed in the straw, or to a heavy fall when the movements of the patient have not been sufficiently controlled by an effective apparatus and its skillful adaptation, but it is quite as liable to be caused by the violent resistance and the consequent powerful muscular contraction by the frightened patient. The simple fact of the overarching of the vertebral column, with excessive pressure against it from ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... of the adaptation clinic. Kerk told me who you were. I'm sorry you're here. Now come along, ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... acorn as a substitute for chestnuts by the Cypriotes, the large species when roasted black makes excellent coffee without any admixture of the real berry. All the varieties can be used for this purpose, but that already named is preferred as superior in flavour. The English poor are not clever in adaptation, and are known to be strong in prejudices respecting articles of diet, but it appears strange that the use of the acorn has been entirely neglected as an aid to the bulk of pure coffee, which would effect a considerable saving in ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... dress, is exemplified every day by our friends the Quakers, who adorn their beautiful brown Saxony coats with little inside velvet collars and fancy silk buttons, and even the severe order of sporting costume adopted by our friend Mr. Sponge is not devoid of capability in the way of tasteful adaptation. This Mr. Sponge chiefly showed in promoting a resemblance between his neck-cloths and waistcoats. Thus, if he wore a cream-coloured cravat, he would have a buff-coloured waistcoat, if a striped waistcoat, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... circumstances are stronger than men, even though the latter be Russian czars. In one respect Peter set himself against circumstance, and built Russia a capital in a locality seemingly lacking in all natural adaptation for a city. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... must not be overlooked in studying the style of Louis XVI, for it appeared in much of the decoration of the time. The beautiful little boudoir of the Marquise de Serilly is a charming example of its adaptation. The problem of bad proportion is also most interestingly overcome. The room was too high for its size, so it was divided into four arched openings separated by carved pilasters, and the walls covered with paintings. The ceiling was darker than the walls, which made it seem lower, ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... character, evidently underwent sweeping alterations so as to bring it into conformity with Japanese customs and traditions. Each of the revisions recorded above must be assumed to have extended this adaptation. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... evening, it is said, Scotch music was frequently given for her Majesty's delectation, and that among the songs were some of the satires and parodies poured forth on the unfortunate Lord Provost and bailies, who had robbed the town of the full glory of the Queen's arrival. The cleverest of these was an adaptation of an old Jacobite ditty, itself a cutting satire which a hundred years before had taunted the Georgian general, Sir John Cope, with the excess of caution that led him to shun an engagement, withdraw his forces over night, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... respecting the signification of the word Annwn, which has been increased by the very frequent mistake of writing it Anwn, which means, unknown, strange, and is applied to the people who dwell in the antipodes of the speaker; while Annwn is an adaptation of annwfn, a bottomless or immeasurable pit, voidless {295} space, and also Hell. Thus we find, that when Pwyl, or Reason, drives these dogs off their track, the owner comes up, and, reproving him, declares that he is a crowned king, lord of Annwn and Pendaran, i.e. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... whatsoever. I must know the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to persevere. I must see all the aids and all the obstacles. I must see the means of correcting the plan, where correctives would be wanted. I must see the things: I must see the men. Without a concurrence and adaptation of these to the design, the very best speculative projects might become not only useless but mischievous. Plans must be made for men. People at a distance must judge ill of men. They do not always answer to their reputation when you approach them. Nay, the ...
— Burke • John Morley
... communication, new industrial energy, and a quick accumulation of wealth, as well as the social changes which followed hard on these economical changes, all pointed forward to political progress, to an adaptation of our institutions to the varied conditions of the time. The nation was quivering with a new sense of life; and it faced eagerly questions of religion, of philanthropy, of education, of trade, as one after another they presented themselves before it. Above all it clung to the young minister ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... sacrificed, property destroyed, commercial disaster, and social derangement, has given a rare opportunity for the testing of our national character, and of our ability to meet and overcome the most tremendous difficulties and dangers. Perhaps the versatility of American genius and its ready adaptation to the new circumstances, are even more wonderful than any other exhibition made by our people in this great national crisis. There has never been any good reason to doubt the capacity of any portion of American citizens for warlike occupations, nor their possession of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... also a fine instance of the way men in the North conquer local conditions and wring comfort out of bleakness and desolation by the clever adaptation of means to ends. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... when he first domesticated an animal or plant, whether it would flourish and multiply when transported to other countries, therefore he could not have been thus influenced in his choice. We see that the close adaptation of the reindeer and camel to extremely cold and hot countries has not prevented their domestication. Still less {406} could man have foreseen whether his animals and plants would vary in succeeding generations and thus give birth ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... held in his own ungrateful country, since he could neither read nor write. These accomplishments, it appeared, were not, however, absolutely indispensable in Polynesia. It has been found that when a savage is transferred to Europe, he readily acquires the habits of civilized life. By a similar adaptation of things to circumstances, this European had identified himself with the savages. He had adopted their manners, their customs, and their costume. When he thought of his own country, it was only to wonder why he ever submitted to the constraint of a coat, or ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... their originality they reflect not only Mr. Stockton himself, but the race from which they and their author spring. In fact, they seem to me about the most genuinely American things in American fiction. After all, when one comes to think of it, Mrs. Lecks and Captain Horn merely illustrate that ready adaptation of Anglo-Saxon pluck and businesslike common sense to savage and unusual circumstances which has been the real secret of the colonization of the North American Continent. Captain Horn's discovery and ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... here correctly defined as the enemy, while the excise claimed by the birds is head-money for his extirpation. An adaptation of this instructive couplet to gardening for the guidance of those of us who do not farm, but garden in a small way, would naturally enlarge the allowance of the cut-worm. From the more limited demesne the crow and the grakle are generally excluded. What is their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the dwindling or disappearance of one kind of plant, an allied kind was eaten. In the lapse of the many generations arising before the next upheaval, the sensible or insensible alterations thus produced in each species would become organized—there would be a more or less complete adaptation to the new conditions. The next upheaval would superinduce further organic changes, implying wider divergences from the primary forms; and so repeatedly. But now let it be observed that the revolution ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... although the street had been graded, the houses retained their airy elevation, and were accessible only by successive flights of wooden steps to the front door, which still gave perilously upon the street, sixty feet below. I now painfully appreciated Enriquez's adaptation of the time-honored joke about the second floor. An invincible smell of garlic almost took my remaining breath away as the door was opened to me by a swarthy Mexican woman, whose loose camisa seemed to be slipping from her unstable bust, and was held on only ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... it; and as long as he is the same Percival Fotheringham, the rest is as nothing. I was unjust at the first moment. Jane has a better nature, which he can develop. There is a sense of religion to work on—a power of adaptation to those she is with, and if what she has seen in Italy has shocked her and made her turn to him, he may be the making of her. She is clever enough; and when she finds that nothing but truth and honesty will succeed with him, she ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... little touches of perfect taste and adaptation which could sometimes make Leslie Goldthwaite almost beautiful, and was there ever a girl of fifteen who would not like to be beautiful if she could? This wish, and the thought and effort it would induce, were likely to be her great temptation. Passably pretty girls, ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... adaptation of pueblo architecture to the country in which it is found has been commented on. Ordinarily such adaptation would imply two things—origin within the country, and a long period of time for development—but ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... aspect of real life. In the new Tragedy it becomes an organ of art which aids in making the poetry prominent. The modern poet no longer finds the Chorus in nature; he must needs create and introduce it poetically; that is, he must resolve on such an adaptation of his story as will admit of its retrocession to those primitive times and to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... and lower rapids. Though Long Iram is rather distant—five days' travel down-stream, and, if the river is high, perhaps two months may be consumed in returning—still its influence was evidenced by the several umbrellas I saw, all black, an adaptation from the high-class Malays and an unusual sight in these parts. The kapala of this large kampong resembled a Malay raja, in that he always carried an umbrella when he walked and looked pale because the sun was not allowed to shine upon him. Two days ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... very frank confession: "Home would I ride and lose all that wealth, if I deemed that by the losing thereof I should never die; but every brave and true man will fain have his hand on wealth till that last day." Here, again, we see an adaptation of the story of the poem to modern conceptions of nobility. It remains to be said that the ernes move Sigurd to take the gold for the gladdening of the world, and they assure him that a son of the Volsung had nought ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... the reader may know I do not presume to offer the little tale which follows as an "adaptation" of Andersen's famous story. I offer it plainly as a story which children have liked, and which grew out of my early memories of Andersen's "The Little ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... secondary geological formations. The actual state of any society was scarcely cared for, except in illustration of a principle, and the great forces which must unite to form the best possible society, were the only subjects of investigation. It may be taken as a great proof of the wonderful facility of adaptation of the female mind, that women joined in these conversations as readily as men, and frequently with far more brilliancy, in spite of the range of reading which it must require to obtain even a superficial knowledge of the subjects of discourse. Fanny Lewald is one of these prodigies. She has studied ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of my article was to show that a reduction of one's dietary was a matter of training, of gradual adaptation, but also—and this is the important fact-of gradual strengthening. My theory is that the two-meal plan is possible owing to the immense economy in digestive energy that is effected through giving the stomach ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... transport worldly effects, that the question naturally arises, What would be the probable per centage a Chinese underwriter would demand as premium to insure in such a bottom? Indeed, I must do the memory of the patriarch Noah the justice to believe, that his craft was put together with a better adaptation to the principles of flotation than this, or it would never have lived through that gale of forty days and forty nights, logged in ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... quality by a critical inspection of the general contour of the body, its relative size, the adaptation of its parts to each other, the color and grain of the skin, the relative harmony of the features, the relative brightness of the eyes, the color and texture of the hair, the movements of the body, the tone of the voice, and the rapidity of mental process. To determine ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... dignity of a "fine" art (Illustrations 19, 20). In so doing, however, he should never forget, and the layman also should ever remember, that the supreme architectural excellence is fitness, appropriateness, the perfect adaptation of means to ends, and the adequate expression of both means and ends. These two aims, the one abstract and universal, the other concrete and individual, can always be combined, just as in every human countenance are combined a type, which ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... cotton looped gracefully about their necks. A few of the younger ones wore a sort of rude outside trouser of leather called "chaps," and each of them carried a revolver slung at the hip. They were superb examples of adaptation to environment, alert, bold, and graceful ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... case, I claim for the antislavery movement with which this society is identified, that, looking back over its whole course, and considering the men connected with it in the mass, it has been marked by sound judgment, unerring foresight, the most sagacious adaptation of means to ends, the strictest self-discipline, the most thorough research, and an amount of patient and manly argument addressed to the conscience and intellect of the nation, such as no other cause of the kind, in England or this country, has ever offered. I claim, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... "selections" has deservedly gained the leaf a reputation that must place it in the front rank of American tobacco. The vast quantity grown in the state is an evidence not only of the good quality of Kentucky tobacco, but of the adaptation of the soil and of the method of cultivation in use. As a cut tobacco, Kentucky-leaf is held in the highest esteem, the exportation of the leaf to all parts of Europe gaining for it a reputation hardly equaled by any Southern tobacco. The system of cultivation is similar to that pursued by the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the great masses of our pupils, and that it is entirely adequate to the results required of it as such. He dwells especially on the disciplinary value of the analytical method as applied to the elucidation of English syntax, and the striking adaptation of English constructions to the exact methods of logical analysis. This Monograph discusses English teaching in the entire range of its disciplinary uses from primary school to high ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... have found out something for yourself, when you have ground of your own to stand on, then you may not only without danger, but with benefit, go to the work of other men to see the range of possible point of view and expression, to see the scope of technical material and individual adaptation; and so broaden your own mental view and sympathy, possibly reform or educate your taste, and perhaps get some hints which will help you in the solving ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... judgment—as far as it went. Swanhaven Lodge was not half the size of Windygates; but it had been inhabited for two centuries when the foundations of Windygates were first laid—and it possessed the advantages, without inheriting the drawbacks, of its age. There is in an old house a friendly adaptation to the human character, as there is in an old hat a friendly adaptation to the human head. The visitor who left Swanhaven quitted it with something like a sense of leaving home. Among the few houses not our own which take a strong hold on ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... from some adaptation of the sentiment to customs worn out of use, to opinions not universally prevalent, or to any accidental or minute particularity, which cannot be supplied by common understanding, or common observation, it is the duty of a ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... forward. The French are firing three or four to one, which has been my experience at every point I have touched upon the Allied front. Thanks to the extraordinary zeal of the French workers, especially of the French women, and to the clever adaptation of machinery by their engineers, their supplies are abundant. Even now they turn out more shells a day than we do. That, however, excludes our supply for the Fleet. But it is one of the miracles of the war that the French, with their coal and iron in the hands of the enemy, have been ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forceful, strong, and poetic is their appeal. But if it is to be assumed that they were written by a man of thirty or thirty-five, strong, vigorous, aggressive, fortunate, and successful, the appeal seems out of harmony, and lacks that delicate adaptation of speech to surroundings which is characteristic ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson |
