"Quincunx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that starfish have five points; and that if anyone inquire into the causes of this strange repetition, 'he shall not pass his hours in vulgar speculations.' We, however, must decline the task, and will content ourselves with a few characteristic phrases from his peroration. 'The quincunx of heaven,' he says, referring to the Hyades, 'runs low, and 'tis time to close the five parts of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations, making cables of cobwebs, and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... reminiscence of Homer, Il. xiv. 35, where the ships are described as drawn up in rows one behind the other on shore, and where {prokrossas} is often explained to mean {klimakedon}, i.e. either in steps one behind the other owing to the rise of the beach, or in the arrangement of the quincunx. Probably in this passage the idea is rather of the prows projecting in rows like battlements {krossai}, and this is the sense in which the word is used by Herodotus elsewhere (iv. 152). The word {krossai} however ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... mystically, considered. This discourse he begins with the Sacred Garden, in which the first man was placed; and deduces the practice of horticulture, from the earliest accounts of antiquity to the time of the Persian Cyrus, the first man whom we actually know to have planted a quincunx; which, however, our author is inclined to believe of longer date, and not only discovers it in the description of the hanging gardens of Babylon, but seems willing to believe, and to persuade his reader, that it was practised by the feeders on ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... section is covered with pines planted as regularly as our orchards; and the scenery of these mountain-sides green with dense forests in which the comical tree-tops stand with mathematical exactness in the square or quincunx order, is among the ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner |
