"Self-acting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him. Next followed two lantern-bearers, holding glow-worms for lanterns in their fore-paws. These were wrapped in cases made of leaves, which they took off at night. Behind were six fire-flies, well supplied with self-acting lamps, which they kept hidden somewhere under their wings. Next marched four abreast the band of little weevils, carrying the umbrellas of state, which were morning-glories—some open, some shut. Behind them strutted four green grasshoppers, who were spear-bearers, ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... countries upon this delightful topic? I believe that Christianity, as dogma, accounts for the long silence. The opinions of the early Church refused soul, ghost, intelligence of any sort to other creatures than man. All animals were considered as automata—that is, as self-acting machines, moved by a something called instinct, for want of a better name. To talk about the souls of animals or the spirits of animals would have been very dangerous in the Middle Ages, when the Church had supreme power; it would indeed have been to risk or ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... a self-acting device which would close the draft and leave the furnace safe, without any further attention on my part, after putting in the coal and opening it up to burn. As some other boys may like to build the same regulator I will tell just how to make one ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Paddies. There we are, twelve miles out from Boston, in a country villa so convenient that every part of it might almost do its own work,—everything arranged in the most convenient, contiguous, self-adjusting, self-acting, patent-right, perfective manner,—and yet I tell you Marianne will die of that house. It will yet be recorded on her tombstone, 'Died of conveniences.' For myself, what I languish for is a log-cabin, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ASSOCIATION, started for the purpose of meeting the daily-increasing demand for self-acting and trouble-saving appliances in the domestic arrangements of the modern household, beg to inform their patrons that they are now able to supply ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... we ought to seek, does not consist in promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau gravely warns us, "inflict ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... It is reckoned that fifty men with modern machinery could do all the cotton-spinning of the whole of Lancashire a century ago. Mr. Leone Levi has calculated that to make by hand all the yarn spun in England in one year by the use of the self-acting mule, would take 100,000,000 men. The instruments which work this wonderful change are called "labour-saving" machinery. From this title it may be deemed that their first object, or at any rate their chief effect, would be to lighten labour. It seems at first sight therefore strange to find so ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... our scientists and astronomers (many of whom are now languishing in prison for the boldness of their researches and discoveries) that the Sun is no divinity at all, hut simply a huge planet,—a dense body surrounded by a luminous, flame-darting atmosphere,—neither self-acting nor omnipotent, but only one of many similar orbs moving in strict obedience to fixed mathematical laws. Nevertheless this knowledge is wisely kept back as much as possible from the multitude,—for, were science to unveil her marvels too openly to semi-educated and vulgarly constituted ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli |
