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adjective
Inverse  adj.  
1.
Opposite in order, relation, or effect; reversed; inverted; reciprocal; opposed to direct.
2.
(Bot.) Inverted; having a position or mode of attachment the reverse of that which is usual.
3.
(Math.) Opposite in nature and effect; said with reference to any two operations, which, when both are performed in succession upon any quantity, reproduce that quantity; as, multiplication is the inverse operation to division. The symbol of an inverse operation is the symbol of the direct operation with -1 as an index. Thus sin-1 x means the arc or angle whose sine is x.
Inverse figures (Geom.), two figures, such that each point of either figure is inverse to a corresponding point in the order figure.
Inverse points (Geom.), two points lying on a line drawn from the center of a fixed circle or sphere, and so related that the product of their distances from the center of the circle or sphere is equal to the square of the radius.
Inverse ratio, or Reciprocal ratio (Math.), the ratio of the reciprocals of two quantities.
Inverse proportion, or Reciprocal proportion, an equality between a direct ratio and a reciprocal ratio.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Inverse" Quotes from Famous Books



... the Loire carries barks almost as far as Croisic. If they want to lie by a little, or to refresh the crew, they come to Pirial along the coast; from Pirial they find another inverse current, which carries them to the Isle-Dumal, two ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... indicated on an inverse ratio to one's good appearance, we should have been very wealthy indeed. We felt as if it would take us a week to get rested and lost little time in getting to bed when the party broke up. We imagine most of the residents ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the last splendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about to dawn. The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to say, You have been just here, just thus, before!—a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed over him afterwards many times, as he came across certain places and ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... provided it possess an initial velocity of 1,200 yards per second; calculations prove that to be sufficient. In proportion as we recede from the earth the action of gravitation diminishes in the inverse ratio of the square of the distance; that is to say, at three times a given distance the action is nine times less. Consequently, the weight of a shot will decrease, and will become reduced to zero at the instant that the attraction of the moon exactly ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... upon the fertility of marriages. In southern regions more children are born, fewer in northern. The number of children is in inverse proportion to the amount of food in a country and in a season. In Belgium, the higher the price of bread the greater the number of children, and the greater the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... activity and concentration of purpose. The smallness of General Grant's staff throughout the civil war forms the best model for future imitation. So of tents, officers furniture, etc., etc. In real war these should all be discarded, and an army is efficient for action and motion exactly in the inverse ratio of its impedimenta. Tents should be omitted altogether, save one to a regiment for an office, and a few for the division hospital. Officers should be content with a tent fly, improvising poles ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... of the young nobles approached the presumably fair peripatetic, and, with courtesy commonly in inverse ratio to the amount of wine he was carrying home, proffered his escort to his gondola. Whenever this happened the figure removed her mask and unclasped her robe, and revealed a sight which for one moment rooted the young man to the earth and in the next sent him scampering to his ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... vampire was actually inhabited by his late brother. Darwin, of course, and some other great naturalists of the West, seemed to believe in the transmigration of souls, but, as far as he understood, they believed in it in an inverse sense; that is to say, if a baby had been born to his mother exactly at the moment of the vampire's death, this baby would indubitably have had a great likeness to a vampire, owing to the decaying atoms of the vampire being so ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... "The number of lepers in any country bears an inverse ratio to the laws executed for the care and isolation of infected persons. The disease appears to spread more rapidly in damp and cold, or warm and moist, climates than in temperate countries. It is not now regarded as contagious. The leprosy of the book ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... professional wisdom, who prescribed "a rush of blood to the boots" to all professional patients and head-workers—men who, happening to possess brains, are prone to forget that they have bodies. In no way can this inverse apoplexy be more healthfully or pleasantly induced than by a jolly game of cricket. That the sport is adapted to American tastes and needs we are convinced, and that it may find a habitat throughout the length and breadth of our land is an end toward which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... with his excellency the Governor, and with Admiral Sir E. Owen. Amidst all the vicissitudes of his perilous life and increasing age, he still maintains the same unabated thirst for travel, and his mental and bodily faculties appear to grow in activity and strength in the inverse ratio of his declining ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... are proportional in intensity to the force of the battery and the length of the wire, whilst an inverse relation is true as regards the length of the conductor with the ordinary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... discountenanced people in their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound in the next, and practising by day a demureness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... something like the words, "my eye, and Betty Martin," did issue from the neckcloth of Sir Bingo, but they were not much attended to; for it had not escaped the observation of the quicksighted gentry at the Well, that the Baronet's feelings towards the noble Earl were in the inverse ratio of those displayed by Lady Binks, and that, though ashamed to testify, or perhaps incapable of feeling, any anxious degree of jealousy, his temper had been for some time considerably upon the fret; a circumstance concerning which his fair moiety did not think it necessary to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... exclude from his plan the incompleted dynasty under which he lived,—he commenced with the House of Stuart, continued with that of Tudor, and finished with the remaining portion from the Roman Invasion to the Accession of Henry VII. But why Tacitus should have decided in favour of the inverse of chronological order is by no means clear. He could not have been actuated by any of the motives which influenced Hume. Rome, with respect to her history, was not in the position that England was, with respect to hers, in the middle of the last century. All the remarkable occurrences during the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little; but when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those very deeds which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... making most elaborate preparations all the while, stretching and retracting her claws, squirming her whalebone body flatter and flatter, her tail assuming majestic proportions, while her ears disappeared in inverse ratio. ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... Coliseum Amphitheatre was but a stroller's barn, as this old Globe of ours had never or hardly ever beheld. Which method also we reckon natural, then and there. Nor perhaps was the respective keeping of these two Oaths far out of due proportion to such respective display in taking them: inverse proportion, namely. For the theatricality of a People goes in a compound-ratio: ratio indeed of their trustfulness, sociability, fervency; but then also of their excitability, of their porosity, not continent; or say, of their ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... himself, would fall a prey to them. No fact of religious experience is more striking than this, that the higher men rise in real goodness—the nearer they come to God, the more keen-eyed and distressed are they to detect evil in themselves. Their sense of sin seems to be in a sort of inverse ratio to their freedom from its power. And we meet with a similar fact in the natural life. The finer and more exalted the sentiment of purity and honor, the more sensitive will one be to the slightest approach to what is impure or dishonorable in one's own character and conduct. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... with due measure, and not excessive; which three things it was impossible for the Latin Commentary to have; and, therefore, it was impossible for it to be obedient. That to the Latin it would have been impossible, as is said, is evident by such an argument as this: each thing which proceeds by an inverse order is laborious, and consequently is bitter, and not sweet; even as to sleep by day and to wake by night, and to go backwards and not forwards. For the subject to command the sovereign, is to proceed in the inverse ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... I answered, with my eye on our subject, "and taking into consideration the lady's face and manner, I should incline to suspect that she was the daughter of a poor parson, with the usual large family in inverse proportion to his means. That she unexpectedly made a good match with a very wealthy manufacturer who had raised himself; and that she was puffed up accordingly with a sense ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... and thought to bribe him with a fete in his honor and a promise, and in the meantime a clerkship where there was no work to speak of and pay in inverse ratio. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... the means of obtaining laughter. There is a host of others, and the source of laughter must be sought for much further back. Moreover, without going so far, we see that while the transposition from solemn to trivial, from better to worse, is comic, the inverse transposition may be ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... he felt himself, as he would have expressed it, "en rapport" with his surroundings; under other circumstances, as at the present time, it very nearly approached the ludicrous. He was small in stature, but his bump of self-esteem was developed in an inverse ratio to his size. He seemed to be making a constant effort to maintain his dignity at the proper level, in which direction he was greatly assisted by a pair of eye-glasses, perched on a very large and decidedly Roman nose. It had been claimed by his college chums that ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... paragraph we have seen that it is now an incontrovertible fact that, in considering the animal scale in a sense the inverse of that of nature, we find that there exists in the groups composing this scale a continuous but irregular modification (degradation) in the organization of animals which they comprise, an increasing simplification in the organization ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... and simplest principles of morality. This, to my mind, is much as if a man of science should make the story of the fall of the apple in Newton's garden an integral part of the doctrine of gravitation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of the inverse squares. ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... ourselves in terms of the Euclidean space in reference to which the attracting mass is at rest. The associate-potential is defined by the modification of substituting the direct distance for the inverse distance in the definition of the potential, and its calculation can easily be made to depend on that of the old-fashioned potential. Thus the calculation of the J's—the coefficients of impetus, as I will call them—does not involve anything very revolutionary in the mathematical ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... the inverse of his master's. To Thorpe it had suddenly become a very little thing in contrast to the great, sweet elemental truth that the dream girl had enunciated. To Collins the affair was miles vaster than the widest scope ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... from the curious fact, that the half of the numbers which compose this progression represents, in inverse order, the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus justly to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate, drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's "Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that "does not flow so far underground." And luxuriously, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... is a shy, delicate emanation shrinking from all human intercourse outside its own small coterie of familiar voices. In Russia, as in every other country, it has had to be sought in the remote Steppes and far-off districts where foreign influences had never penetrated, and by a curious inverse process its harmonies, of course, transmitted orally, were the means of preserving the Byzantine Church tonality long after this "first cause" had accepted chromatic and enharmonic modulations. In the chief Russian cities and more ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same possibilities. But its quantity has a serious effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good formula to adopt here. Comedy has its part, but wit never. Strauss is at his best in these lower rooms, but his comedy reminds us more of the physical fun of Lever rather than "comedy in the Meredithian sense" as Mason suggests. Meredith ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... use; what it contains, therefore, cannot be attributed to Zoroaster. It is remarkable that Gibbon should fall into this error, for Hyde himself does not ascribe the Sadder to Zoroaster; he remarks that it is written inverse, while Zoroaster always wrote in prose. Hyde, i. p. 27. Whatever may be the case as to the latter assertion, for which there appears little foundation, it is unquestionable that the Sadder is of much later date. The Abbe Foucher does not even believe it to be an extract ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... dog seems to follow a law of comparative anatomy, that its bulk shall be in an inverse proportion of that of the lungs. The latter are necessarily capacious; for they need a large supply of arterial blood, in order to answer to their rapid expenditure when the utmost exertion of strength and speed is required. The liver is, therefore, restricted in its size and growth. Nevertheless, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... which are the subject-matter of that science? When Astronomy was young "the morning stars sang together for joy," and the planets were guided in their courses by celestial hands. Now, the harmony of the stars has resolved itself into gravitation according to the inverse squares of the distances, and the orbits of the planets are deducible from the laws of the forces which allow a schoolboy's stone to break a window. The lightning was the angel of the Lord; but it has pleased Providence, ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley

... shortcomings of its teeth! (De Partibus, iii., 14, 674^b.) Other examples of correlation were not susceptible of this explanation in terms of final causes. He lays stress on the fact, in the main true, of the inverse development of horns and front teeth in the upper jaw, exemplified in Ruminants. He explains the fact in this way. Teeth and horns are formed from earthy matter in the body and there is not enough to form both teeth and horns, so "Nature ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... call attention to the fact that, as M. Henri Martin says, by an apparent contradiction, the fall of the Communes declared itself in inverse ratio to the progress of the Tiers Etat. By degrees, as the government became more settled from the great fiefs being absorbed by the Crown, and as parliament and other courts of appeal which emanated from the middle class extended their high judiciary ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... blue-coated soldier boys in the hospitals, the eloquence everywhere acting as an open sesame to the granaries. Now they obtained a little from a rich man, and then a great deal from a poor man—deeds of benevolence are half the time in an inverse ratio to the ability of the benefactors—till they had accumulated nearly five hundred bushels of wheat. This they sent to market, obtained the highest market price for it, and forwarded the proceeds to the Commission. As we held this hard-earned ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... at the following conclusions: (1) The temple was restored after the departure of the Persians; (2) it was injured by fire B.C. 406; (3) it was repaired and continued in use; (4) it was seen and described by Pausanias I. 24.3 in a lost passage. Let us take up these points in inverse order. The passage of Pausanias reads in our texts:—[Greek: Lelectai de moi kai proteron (17.1), s Athenaiois perissoteron ti e tois allois es ta theia esti spoudes, prtoi men gar Athenan eponomasan Erganen prtoi d'aclous Ermas... omou de sphisin en t na Spoudain daimn estin.] ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... rule that the constancy of species is in an inverse ratio to their range. Those which are confined to one or two islands are generally very constant. When they extend to many islands, considerable variability appears; and when they have an extensive range over ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... resumed his calculation with the new value, and having proceeded some way in it, was so overpowered by nervous agitation at its anticipated result, that he was unable to go on, and requested a friend to finish it for him, when it came out, exactly establishing the inverse square as the true measure of the moon's gravitation, and thus furnishing the key to the whole system." Hence proceeded Newton's immortal ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk into poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... conduct around official vehicles. Since the place of honor is on the right, the junior not only walks on the left, but rides there as well. In entering a car, the junior enters first, followed by other members of the party in inverse order of rank, each seating himself so that the senior may take position on the right side. In leaving the car, the senior debarks first. However, if following this general procedure would necessitate any member of the party climbing over another, or in ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... and down, which suggest a very obvious reason why the mind should denominate the objects of sight accordingly high or low. And without this motion of the eye, this turning it up and down in order to discern different objects, doubtless ERECT, INVERSE, and other the like terms relating to the position of tangible objects, would never have been transferred, or in any degree apprehended to belong to the ideas of sight: the mere act of seeing including nothing in it to that purpose; whereas the different situations ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley

... society with all its sufferings and injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... one of the well-known peculiarities of the House of Commons that its attendance is usually in inverse line of proportion to the importance of the subject which it is discussing. On August 28th the House was engaged in debating the question which above all others ought to interest the people of this country—the state, namely, of our Navy. Yet the House was almost ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... chain of life in the inverse order of nature—that is to say, from man downwards—we certainly perceive a sustained but irregular degradation of organism, with an increasing simplicity both in ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing Colombe's Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... with the inherent difficulties, and taking them in the inverse order of arduousness, we see at once how hard it must be to secure unity and self-consistency in the revision of a book so complicated as the Common Prayer. It is like remodelling an old house. We think it a very easy matter, something that can be done in one's head, but the mistake ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... 2 chain,—there will be 7 picots round the folded leaves—1 treble on the folded leaves and repeat from ** to *, therefore the inverse way, ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont

... appreciate more if we were offered less to appreciate. Apropos of this, I have long been struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel. An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside village which is not a—not a great village; she is quite marvellously ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... pull. And how are we to explain the method by which a body can act where it is not, how explain in detail the way by which it can reach out and pull in toward itself another separated body, and exert this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space? The law of inverse squares may tell us very accurately the manner in which the results are accomplished, for our Creator is a God of order. But there is no materialistic theory of the why of gravitation that is worth employing the time of sensible, truth-loving ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... this plot soon gets beyond the author's grasp, nevertheless; she creates individualities, and can do nothing with them but kill them. The defects, however, are those of inexperience, the merits are the author's own. The value of her next book will probably be in inverse ratio to the success of this: should this fail, she may come to something; should this succeed, there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... Those who now rule form an aristocracy in an inverse sense, contrary to the law, and yet more contrary to nature.[3321] For, by a violent inversion, the lower grades in the graduated scale of civilization and culture now are found uppermost, while the superior grades are found at the uniform. The Constitution ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... There is a certain degree and tone of light which tends to disturb the equilibrium of the senses, and to promote dangerously the tenderer moods; added to movement, it drives the emotions to rankness, the reason becoming sleepy and unperceiving in inverse proportion; and this light fell now upon these two from the disc of the moon. All the dancing girls felt the symptoms, but Eustacia most of all. The grass under their feet became trodden away, and the hard beaten surface of the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... oxygen, which is effected through the agency of light. Animals, on the contrary, derive their nourishment either directly or indirectly from plants. They get rid of the superfluous hydrogen and carbon, and accumulate nitrogen. The relations of plants and animals to the atmosphere are therefore inverse. The plant withdraws water and carbonic acid from the atmosphere, the animal contributes both to it. Respiration—that is, the absorption of oxygen and the exhalation of carbonic acid—is the specially animal function of animals, and ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... well understood that the second Volksraad is simply a show institution, devised in 1890. The various schemes for redistribution lead one to the conclusion that the number of members in the First Volksraad were to be in inverse ratio to ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx

... that the planets and their satellites attracted each other with a force varying according to the inverse ratio of the squares of their distances, but rejected the mutual attraction of the molecules of matter, believing that they possessed gravity towards a central point only, to which they were attracted. ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... Don Rafael began to doubt whether his passion had been really returned by the fair Oajaquena. Time and absence, while they rendered more feeble the remembrance of those little incidents that had appeared favourable to him, increased in an inverse ratio the impression of the young Creole's charms—that in fancy now appeared to him only the more glowing and seductive. So much did this impression become augmented, that the young officer began to think ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... news of Yule's evacuation was a complete surprise, filed down the mountain, and approached, not without caution. There was soon no room for doubt; Dundee had fallen, and Erasmus' prize was large in inverse proportion to the share he had taken in capturing it. No sooner was the absence of the British soldiers established beyond a doubt, than the burghers made haste to sack the camp and town. In a short time every tent, except those of the hospitals, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... "As far as humanly possible. The element of error is always present. I've checked and re-checked my calculations. I've augmented the vacuum tubes by installing three super-dimensional inverse power tubes." He clasped the girl's arm. "The street is no place to talk. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... quite the rule for them to deposit their eggs by hundreds of thousands, by millions even. Everybody knows, since Darwin taught us, that the average number of offspring of any given species of animal or plant bears an inverse proportion to the liability of that species to juvenile fatalities. When, therefore, we find a fish or a lobster or other pelagic creature depositing innumerable eggs, we may feel perfectly sure that the vast majority of the eggs themselves, or the callow creatures that come ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... commandant flew into a rage such I have seldom seen. Each land has a temper of its own, an the white man's anger varies in inverse ratio with his nearness to the equator. But furor teutonicus transplanted is the least controllable least dignified, least admirable that there is. And that man's passion was the apex ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... come in with spirits attuned, ready to wait patiently and observe silently. The law of these materializations seems to be this: the forces of the psychic are proportional to the harmoniousness of the circle and in inverse proportion to the light. Accepting this law as proved by our illustrious fellow-experimenters abroad, are you ready to try again along the ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this stunted race, shorn of all the best ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... in the course of a scientific correspondence with Leibnitz, published in 1712, by the Royal Society, under the title, "Commercium Epistolicum de Analysi promota," not only communicated very many remarkable discoveries, but added, that he was in possession of the inverse problem of the tangents, and that he employed two methods which he did not choose to make public, for which reason he concealed them by anagrammatical transposition, so effectual as completely to extinguish the faint glimmer of light which shone through his scanty explanation.[B] The reference is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... of MacDonald's brigade must have been almost hopeless. In the actual event it was one of extreme peril. The attack in his front was weakening every minute, but the far more formidable attack on his right rear grew stronger and nearer in inverse ratio. Both attacks must be met. The moment was critical; the danger near. All depended on MacDonald, and that officer, who by valour and conduct in war had won his way from the rank of a private soldier to the command of a brigade, and will doubtless obtain still higher employment, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... instrument employed on most of the longer cables is the siphon recorder of Lord Kelvin, shown in figure 54, which marks or writes the message on a slip of travelling paper. Essentially it is the inverse of the mirror instrument, and consists of a light coil of wire S suspended in the field between the poles of a strong magnet M. The coil is attached to a fine siphon (T5) filled with ink, and sometimes kept in vibration by an induction coil so as to shake the ink in fine drops upon a slip of moving ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... aeronauts, are deprived of all danger. As they made, as it were a part of the programme of the fete, they had feared being compelled to fulfil their agreements, and had fled at the moment of ascension. Their courage had been in inverse ratio to the square of ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne

... evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... regain the open polar atmosphere? No! A shock told me that the Nautilus had struck the bottom of the iceberg, still very thick, judging from the deadened sound. We had in deed "struck," to use a sea expression, but in an inverse sense, and at a thousand feet deep. This would give three thousand feet of ice above us; one thousand being above the water-mark. The iceberg was then higher than at its borders—not a very reassuring fact. Several times that day the Nautilus tried again, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... ourselves, and if it produce not itself to the view and approbation of others. There is a sort of men whose gold runs in streams underground imperceptibly; others expose it all in plates and branches; so that to the one a liard is worth a crown, and to the others the inverse: the world esteeming its use and value, according to the show. All over-nice solicitude about riches smells of avarice: even the very disposing of it, with a too systematic and artificial liberality, is not worth a painful superintendence and solicitude: he, that will order ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... University of Cambridge accorded the honour of an honorary degree in 1893, has written but one opera, 'Mefistofele,' but his influence upon modern Italian music must be measured in inverse ratio to his productive power. When 'Mefistofele' was originally produced in 1868, Verdi's genius was still in the chrysalis stage, and the novelty and force of Boito's music made 'Mefistofele,' even in its fall—for the first performance was a complete failure—a ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... most impassioned; later, boys, because her wanting sexual warmth leaves him the most vigorous. Mere sexual excitement, a wild, fierce, furious rush of passion, is not only not sexual vigor, but in its inverse ratio; and a genuine insane fervor caused by weakness; just as a like nervous excitability indicates weak nerves instead of strong. Sexual power is deliberate, not wild; cool, not impetuous; while all false excitement ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... in walking home with her in the evening, he used to take pains to go round the two sides of the public square, in order to make the walk as long as possible, he now cut it short by always striking across the center; "so that his love for me," she observes, "must have decreased in the inverse ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides." Who shall say that mathematics are wasted on a woman after that? Now, that is the sum of the science that is taught in half ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... beauteous stirring of people's minds in favour of Rome. The fervent Romanists have always this point in their favour, that they are ready to believe. And they have a desire for the conversion of men which is honest in an exactly inverse ratio to the dishonesty of the means which they employ to produce it. Father Barham was ready to sacrifice anything personal to himself in the good cause,—his time, his health, his money when he had any, and his life. Much ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... Of the inverse variation between activity and genesis we have examples in the contrast between the fertility of birds and the fertility of mammals. Comparing the large with the large and the small with the small, we see ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... of capitalism in some South African bourgeois republic. I can well imagine," he said, looking far away with his bright little eyes through the walls of the dark dining room, "that the working men's republics of Europe may have to have a colonial policy of an inverse kind. Just as now you conquer backward races in order to exploit them, so in the future you may have to conquer the colonists to take from them the means of exploitation. There is only one ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... worthy of remark that in India the spirit of combination is always in the inverse ratio to the rank of the class; weakest in the highest, and strongest in the lowest class. All infringements upon the rules of the class are punished by fines. Every fine furnishes a feast at which every member sits and enjoys himself. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... A Letter signed Philoscriblerus, on the name of Pope. Letter to Mr Theobald, inverse, signed B. M. (Bezaleel Morris) against Mr P—-. Many other little Epigrams about this time in the same papers, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... seen (1)that each half-line contains two, and only two, feet; (2)that each foot contains one, and only one, primary stress; (3)that A is trochaic, Biambic; (4)that C is iambic-trochaic; (5)that D and E consist of the same feet but in inverse order. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... that position; and on the failure of the Mackenzies of Allangrange, he or his representative will become Chief of the Mackenzies. Failing Thomas, or his male heirs, that honour would fall to the heirs male, if any, of each of the eight others mentioned, in the inverse order in which their names are ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... at seeing Proteus violate this duty. In an aesthetic point of view the self-preservation only appears as an interest, and therefore the sacrifice of this interest pleases us. Thus the operation that we perform in the judgments of the second kind is precisely the inverse of that which we perform in those of the first. In the former we oppose the individual, a sensuous and limited being, and his personal will, which can be effected pathologically, to the absolute law of the will in general, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... supremest grace to the ladies, ventured to kiss the fair, smooth hand of his hostess, undeterred by the frosty stare of O'Moy's blue eyes whose approval of all men was in inverse proportion to their approval of his wife—and finally proffered her the armful of early ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... theology, and which educated men of the present day have by no means universally outgrown. Save for some such old associations as these, why should it be supposed that matter becomes "spriritualized" as it diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should matter be pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density or ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with "grossness" than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen? Obviously such fancies are purely of mythologic parentage. Now the luminiferous ether, upon which our authors make such extensive demands, may be ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... density; the quantity of electricity and density of the air being in the same simple ratio. Or, if the quantity was retained the same, whilst the interval and density of the air were varied, then these were found in the inverse simple ratio of each other, the same quantity passing across twice the distance with air ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday

... of their big shells," said the Captain, "you can hear nothing until it is too late, for the reason that the shell travels more quickly than the sound of it. The sounds reach your ears in inverse order—if you are alive." ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett

... atmosphere. You can be on the safe side by checking your speed in advance. You must, of course, be careful to avoid collisions with meteors and asteroids but if you do, they will be of use to you, for by attracting or repelling them you can change your course to suit yourself, and also theirs in inverse ratio to their masses. Jupiter's moons will be like head and stern lines in enabling you to choose the part of the surface on which you wish to land. With apergy it is as essential to have some heavy body on which to work, within range, as to have water about a ship's propellers. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... upon which no one ever steps after the carpenter leaves them,—all for the sake of pleasing the eye. And all this without any real and lasting success,—with a success, indeed, that seems often in an inverse ratio to the effort. If a man have a pig-stye to build, or a log-house in the woods, he may hit upon an agreeable outline; but let him set out freely and with all deliberation to build something that shall be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Otis in debate," says Dr. Magoon, "was often keen but never malignant, as in John Randolph. The attacks of the latter were often fierce and virulent, not unfrequently in an inverse proportion to the necessity ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... in human nature, it would seem as if, in many cases, the apprehension of danger is in the inverse proportion of the amount of evil to be dreaded, or of the probability of its happening. Thus, the good people at Saint Peter and Saint Paul, who have but very little more reason to expect the intrusion of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... unconscious (as it were the burden to be divided) is equal to the sum of all the representations with the exception of the strongest (hence b c), and is divided among the individual representations in the inverse ratio of their strength, consequently in such a way that the strongest (the one which most actively and successfully resists arrest) has the least, and the weakest the most, of it to bear. It may thus come to pass that a representation is entirely driven out of consciousness ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... The law of inverse variation of extension and intension must of course be confined to the inter-relations of a series of terms of which each can be predicated of the other until we arrive at the bottom of the scale. It is not meant to apply to the extension and intension ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... arrangement which met with Laurence Stanninghame's unfeigned approval. He did not want to talk—especially in a clattering, dusty railway carriage. At intervals the passengers foregathered for meals at some wayside buffet or accommodation house,—meals whose quality was in inverse ratio to the exuberance of the prices charged therefor,—then each would return to his own box and smoke and read and sleep away the little matter of ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... constraining Nature to confine itself within the Word,—a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by a word to which they give an inverse power. The smallest atom of their subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that to them it was easy to apply ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... years' regiments sent from the State. It would appear that the 103d Ohio had become pretty well imbued with the spirit characteristic of the headquarters with which it was associated, to claim credit in an inverse ratio to ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger

... less desperate. Unless I could find some method of compensating for my lost ballast, the inverse gravity of my inertron ship would hurl me continuously upward until I shot forth from the last air layer into space. I thought of jumping, and floating down on my inertron belt, but I was already too high for this. The air was too rarefied to permit breathing ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... quartermaster, and to wonder anxiously how things would be at Otradnoe and what he would find there. Thoughts of home grew stronger the nearer he approached it—far stronger, as though this feeling of his was subject to the law by which the force of attraction is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. At the last post station before Otradnoe he gave the driver a three-ruble tip, and on arriving he ran breathlessly, like a boy, up the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... acquaintance of mankind with the supernatural appears the more exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrine on conduct the greater, the further we go back in time and the lower the stage of civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... void, hollow, universal air— What see you?—unpavilioned Heaven is fair, Whether the moon, into her chamber gone, Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep; 260 Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep, Piloted by the many-wandering blast, And the rare stars rush through them dim and fast:— All this is beautiful in every land.— But what see you beside?—a shabby stand 265 Of Hackney coaches—a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... uncertain season were snarling in the chimneys, and drops of rain spat themselves into the fire, revealing plainly that the young man's room was not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue, and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse, the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here. However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old articles exercising ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... compared, either as to quality or quantity, to the grand and immortal achievements which he himself effected in the little institute of Wuerzburg with the scantiest means—a new proof of the maxim enunciated by me, and hitherto never confuted, that "the scientific results of an institute are in inverse proportion to its size." (See "The Aim ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... England were indeed particularly anti-Catholic; although it is not, perhaps, easy to give any distinct reason why they should be so, since theological disputes in general could scarce be considered as interesting to them. But zeal, amongst the lower orders at least, is often in an inverse ratio to knowledge; and sailors were not probably the less earnest and devoted Protestants, that they did not understand the controversy between the Churches. As for the merchants, they were almost necessarily ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... a general rule, all parts of the musket are assembled in the inverse order in which they are dismounted. Before replacing screws, oil them slightly with good sperm oil, as inferior oil is converted into a gum, which clogs the operation of the parts. Screws should not be turned in so hard as to make the parts ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... that many times we don't get the effect we planned on. But ... there's an inverse to that ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond

... near which Morgan finally surrendered, was some six hundred miles. This added to the march from Tennessee through Kentucky would make the whole ride nearly a thousand miles long. Its importance, however, except as a subject for an entertaining story, was in an inverse ratio to its length. Its chief interest to the student of military history is in its bearing on the question of the rational use of cavalry in an army, and the wasteful folly of expeditions which have no definite and tangible military object. [Footnote: For Official Records and ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox



Words linked to "Inverse" :   opposite, multiplicative inverse, inverse tangent, reciprocal, inverse function, inverse cotangent, inverse cosine, math, backward, inverse sine, additive inverse, reverse, inverse secant, oppositeness, inverse cosecant



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