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Spiral   /spˈaɪrəl/   Listen
Spiral

adjective
1.
In the shape of a coil.  Synonyms: coiling, helical, spiraling, turbinate, volute, voluted, whorled.



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"Spiral" Quotes from Famous Books



... the inner lock-door. He saw that the interior of the ship was stripped and bare. But a spiral stairway descended from some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure, transparent, water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... overflowings of the Nile, Archimedes invented for this purpose the screw which bears his name. It was likewise used as a pump to clear water from the holds of vessels; and the name of Archimedes was held in great veneration by seamen on this account. The screw may be briefly described as a long spiral with its lower extremity immersed in the water, which, rising along the channels by the revolution of the machine on its axis, is discharged at the upper extremity. When applied to the propulsion of steam-vessels the screw is horizontal; and being put in motion by a steam-engine, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... noticed in her walk was in her playing too, and the Nocturne she had chosen and the soft darkness of her eyes, the light on her hair, as of moonlight from a golden moon. Seductive, yes; but nothing of Delilah in her or in that music. A long blue spiral from his cigar ascended and dispersed. 'So we go out!' he thought. 'No ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... satellite will be a slow spiral described round the planet. The spiral will at last, after many years, bring the satellite down upon the surface of the primary. Its final approach will be accelerated if the planet possesses an atmosphere, as Mars probably does. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... astonished eyes. This wing of the great building, in which the two queens, Catherine de' Medici and Mary Stuart, held their sumptuous court, is divided in the centre by a hexagon tower, in the empty well of which winds up a spiral staircase,—a Moorish caprice, designed by giants, made by dwarfs, which gives to this wonderful facade the effect of a dream. The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring at ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... luminous, and many astronomers think that the nebulae are intensely cold. However, the majority of the nebulae that have been examined are not gaseous, and have a very different structure from the loose and diffused clouds of gas. They show two (possibly more, but generally two) great spiral arms starting from the central part and winding out into space. As they are flat or disk-shaped, we see this structure plainly when they turn full face toward the earth, as does the magnificent nebula in Canes Venatici. In it, and ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... times, a fashion not abandoned till the fifth century and in Sparta not till later. The appearance of the hair over the forehead and temples should be noticed. It is arranged symmetrically in flat spiral curls, five curls on each side. Symmetry in the disposition of the front hair is constant in early Greek sculpture, and some scheme or other of ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... uppermost swine level housed those unfortunate animals that were nearest the sausage stage. On the next lower level, to which we now descended by a spiral stair through a ventilating opening, were brutes of less advanced ages. On the lowest of the three levels where special lights were available for our benefit even the women ceased to shudder and gave expression to ecstatic cries of rapture, as all the ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... but as I passed by one open porte-cochere, something, I know not what, made me turn sharply in, for my mind had become as fluff on the winds, not working of its own action, but the sport of impulses that seemed external. I went across the yard, and ascended a wooden spiral stair by a twilight which just enabled me to pick my way among five or six vague forms fallen there. In that confined place fantastic qualms beset me; I mounted to the first landing, and tried the door, but it was locked; I mounted to the second: the door was open, and with a chill reluctance ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... again and again over the long curls and grasped them a little, as if their spiral resistance made his inward vision clearer; then he passed his hand over the brow and cheek, tracing the profile with the edge of his palm and fourth finger, and letting the breadth of his hand repose on the rich oval ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... for the album, and Panshine, finding himself alone, took a cambric handkerchief out of his pocket, rubbed his nails and looked sideways at his hands. They were very white and well shaped; on the second finger of the left hand he wore a spiral gold ring. ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... last, they disappeared altogether. The shape was still holding me up and Cesar walked on, unled and sure-footed. I could not tell you, even approximately, how long this ride lasted; I only know that we seemed to turn and turn and often went down a spiral stair into the very heart of the earth. Even then, it may be that my head was turning, but I don't think so: no, my mind was quite clear. At last, Cesar raised his nostrils, sniffed the air and quickened his pace a little. I felt a moistness in the air ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... journey across the ages, is a microcosm which has, like the world itself, successive stages of youth, maturity, and old age; but it never dies—it renews itself perpetually. It is not like a perfect circle; it is like a spiral, and in its growth is always mounting higher. I believe in making students follow the same path that art itself has followed, so that they shall undergo during their term of study the same transformations that music itself has undergone during the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... dear," said the major, "was that spiral gentleman handed to me all hot by friend Mark, who took it sizzling out of the fire with a bit of bent stick held ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn

... can its constitution be rendered by chemical symbols and elements. In short, the mineral monad is one—the higher animal and human monads are countless. Otherwise, how could one account for and explain mathematically the evolutionary and spiral progress of the four kingdoms? The "monad" is the combination of the last two Principles in man, the 6th and the 7th, and, properly speaking, the term "human monad" applies only to the Spiritual Soul, not to its highest spiritual vivifying Principle. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... circle round about it. So near, yet kept at a distance; all-powerful, but in disgrace, the apparently devoted wife was lying in wait for death and opportunity; crouching like the ant-lion at the bottom of his spiral pit, ever on the watch for the prey that cannot escape, listening to the fall ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... insect aid is necessary to transfer the tiny, hairy spiral ejected from each cell of the antherid, after it has burst from ripeness, to the canal of the flask-shaped organ at whose base the germ-cell is located. Perfect flowers can fertilize themselves. But pollen-feeding flies, and female hive bees which collect it, and the earliest butterflies trifle ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... cooler was replaced by a spiral pipe type located between the engine cowl and the crankcase. Figure 3 shows an example of the former type of cooler located at the top of the engine between two of the cylinders. Figure 33 illustrates the latter type located between ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer

... atmosphere of steak, and strong, stout, stand-up English beer. For on the window-glass hung such a mist, that Mr Tapley was obliged to rise and wipe it with his handkerchief, before the passengers appeared like common mortals. And even then, a spiral little cloud went curling up from their two glasses of hot grog, which nearly ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he must seem to the angels a madman—a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the circles of hell have this property—that they have no end. It seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But no; for ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... strips as fine as reeds; and put one reed on the top of another, so that you could not see where they fitted: and they twisted them in and out like basket work, and knotted them into likenesses of ugly faces, and of strange beasts biting each other; and up they went, and up still, and they made spiral staircases at the corners, for the loaded workers to come up by (for I saw they were but weak imps, and could not fly with stones on their backs), and then they made traceried galleries for them to run round by; ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... he was apparently absorbed in the lecture; so intent indeed, was he in the task, that he did not hear the steps which wound the spiral stairs that conducted to his cell, and it was not till the wards harshly grated beneath the huge key, and the door creaked on its hinges, that Rienzi, in amaze at intrusion at so unwonted an hour, lifted ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... removed, you could not have taken to pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. You did not take to pieces ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... it, and when a monotonous even line is required, this is a most suitable stitch to employ. It is equally in request for outline and filling in, and its chain-like adaptability makes it specially good for following out curved forms or spiral lines. Tambour stitch is practically the same in result, though worked in quite a different manner, for it is carried out in a frame with a fine crochet hook, instead of with a needle. This makes it quicker in execution, but more mechanical ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie

... went down a spiral staircase leading to the foot of the Horseshoe Fall, where I could have passed 153 feet behind the falling sheet, but I soon got wet, and returned. Table Rock projects out many feet above this place, and will come ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore

... small fish and insects, his accustomed fare. When the fish do not approach his station, he flies along, just over the water, and occasionally hovers with rapidly moving wings over the spot where he sees a trout or minnow. In the next instant, descending with a quick spiral sweep, he seizes a fish, with which he rises to his post and swallows it in an instant. All these proceedings were watched frequently by the children, with intense delight, as they stood concealed among the bushes, not daring to move for fear of ...
— Frank and Fanny • Mrs. Clara Moreton

... through creditably, and he probably never suspected that I was a novice. I told him to put up eight "points," and put them all on the roof, and use the best quality of rod. He said he could furnish the "plain" article at 20 cents a foot; "coppered," 25 cents; "zinc-plated spiral-twist," at 30 cents, that would stop a streak of lightning any time, no matter where it was bound, and "render its errand harmless and its further progress apocryphal." I said apocryphal was no slouch of a word, emanating from the source it did, but, philology ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of the box is shewn in the diagram below. Its sides are of glass but the top and bottom are of tin. Before presenting the trick a cloth ball, made of a spiral spring covered with cloth, (triangular pieces of different colours sewn together), is compressed and placed between the bottom of the box and a glass flap which is pressed down over it until caught by a pin at the back of the box. When the ball is to appear, this pin is pressed and the catch releases ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson

... protected as by a fortress. But one way of approach was possible, and that straight to the porch. From the cliff the vines had crept to roof and chimney, and were waving their tendrils about a thin blue spiral of smoke. The cabin was gray and tottering with age. Above the porch on the branches of an apple-tree hung leaves that matched in richness of tint the thick moss on the rough shingles. Under it an old woman sat spinning, ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.

... terrible magnificence of that picture of lightning-coloured ice, the sulphur-tinctured shapes of the swollen bodies of clouds bringing their dark electric mines together in a huddle, the answering flash of the face of the deep to the lancing of each spiral dazzling bolt, with the air as still as the atmosphere of a cathedral for the thunder ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... could not be established in it, except by an impulse received from without; for there is every reason to believe, that the movement of a homogeneous fluid towards its centre, if it could take place without disturbing causes, would be in radial lines, and not in a spiral. ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... feet above sea level, and is about two hundred feet higher than Mount Moriah. From the summit a fine view of Jerusalem and the surrounding country may be obtained. The Russians have erected a lofty stone tower here. After climbing the spiral stairway leading to the top of it, one is well rewarded by the extensive view. Looking out from the east side, we could gaze upon the Dead Sea, some twenty miles away, and more than four thousand feet below us. We visited the chambers called ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes

... in speaking in Faneuil Hall than anywhere else. The time, place, and manner of the meeting were so novel, that a strong impression was made upon my mind. In the middle of the day, when the streets were crowded, I was conducted up a narrow, spiral passageway that led directly to a low platform on one side of the hall, where were the officers of the meeting, and there I faced an audience of men with their hats and overcoats on, all standing closely packed, with no room for any more. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... think of the horse of Marcus Aurelius as taking the next step, we think of a straightened leg set on the ground instead of a curved leg suspended in the air. And if we think of the Myronian Discobolus as letting go his quoit and "recovering," we think of the matchless spiral composition as unwinding and straightening itself into a shape as different as that of a tree is different from ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... spades, when they cut off the head of the whale, which was at once secured under the counter. A large hook being then fastened in a hole cut in the blubber at the head end of the animal, the operator commenced cutting off a strip about three feet broad, in a spiral direction, and a tackle having been fixed to the hook, this was drawn up on board, the body of the whale turning round and round. As the blubber was thus hoisted up, it was cut into pieces, known, as blanket pieces, and thrown into huge cauldrons arranged along ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston

... being the donjon. The form of this lofty keep is rectangular, and the machicolations and embattlements which were added in the fifteenth century are in a perfect state of preservation. Upon the platform, which I was able to reach by means of ladders and the half-ruinous spiral staircase, viper's bugloss spread its brilliant blue flowers over the dark stones, and enticed the high-soaring bees. The view of the wide and beautiful Dordogne Valley from these old battlements was not less grand because more than one-half of the sky was of a bluish-black—a mysterious ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... way up the stairs, until the first came into the light of a long narrow loophole in the wall. Then from the darkness above came the sharp crack of a revolver, and the man fell on his face, shot through the heart. Another crack, and the next shared his fate. Then there was a pause, for the spiral was so sharp that not more than two at a time were within sight of the ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty

... and figured in Plate XVII., which are among the most interesting pieces of work I know in Italy. I give their entire arrangement in Fig. XVIII.: both shafts have the same section, but one receives a half turn as it ascends, giving it an exquisite spiral contour: the plan of their bases, with their plinth, is given at 2, Plate II.; and note it carefully, for it is an epitome of all that we observed above, respecting the oblique and even square. It ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... a crown of glory almost but not quite directly overhead, so bright that all the waving bands that now assumed more the appearance of its rays paled before it. Then the crown began to revolve, and as it revolved with constantly increasing speed, it gathered all its rays into one gigantic spiral that travelled as it spun towards the east until all form was dissipated in a nebulous mist that withdrew behind the mountains and glowered there like a dawn and left the skies void of all light save the stars. It was a fine instance of the stupendous sportiveness ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... he was out of sight of the town, he lost altitude in a tight spiral over Salt Creek. At five hundred feet, he banked around and followed the creek, his throttle wide open. As the Cub flashed over Salt Creek Bridge, he put the plane in a shallow dive. Creek House loomed and he let out ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine

... with yours in a pale spiral to the bosom of the universal mother," Hwa-mei made response. "I likewise am content, having tasted ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... as we may truly call them, are of different forms, straight, spiral, and otherwise curved, and of varied length and colours. They are set in motion by the impulsion of thought. When we talked to the patient on a particular subject, one series of lines would be set in motion with indescribable rapidity; other topics ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... circling round and round, one fold upon another, which gradually increased to the size of my wrist in the middle, and then as gradually decreased till it terminated in a point again at the contrary extreme; all which spiral, if it were fairly extended in length, might be a yard or an ell long. I surveyed this strange vegetable very attentively; it had a rind, or crust, which I could not break with my hand, but taking my knife and making an opening therewith in the shell, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... up an easy, spiral flight of steps, to the door of a room, which he threw open. Cornelia was sitting in a large cushioned chair by the fire, with a papier-mache writing-desk beside her, covered with letters. There was a bright fire in the grate, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... Crooksbury Heath. How could she have been so weak as to allow these silly, chattering rooks to entice her away from that lordly bird? Even now it was not too late to atone for her mistake. In a great spiral she shot upward until she was over the heron. But what was this? Every fiber of her, from her crest to her deck feathers, quivered with jealousy and rage at the sight of this creature, a mere peregrine, who had dared to come between a royal gerfalcon and ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... see, as I thought, charity beginning at home. But the next sentence took in our whole land; and the next was a downright swoop upon slavery; so that I regarded his previous petitions merely as spiral movements toward the South. If the good man's petitions had been heard, woe to him and to the North, and to the slaves, to say nothing ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams

... job of hunting, but not as bad as you might think. They probably aren't much, if any, outside the orbit of Mars, and they usually stay within a couple of million kilometers or so of the Ecliptic, so we'll start at the sun and shoot our beam in a spiral to cover that field. We ought to be able to hit them inside of twelve hours, but if we don't, we'll widen our spiral and keep on trying until we ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... its white marble, it was one of the rare objects of art that gave Warwick a claim to distinction and justified the pride of its citizens. Around it were carved innumerable figures of soldiers, climbing a spiral pathway. Indistinguishable now in the moonlight, they still remained in the memory, like the echo ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... distinct, thick wreaths of gray-white smoke were sailing straight aloft. The waiting Apache of the Mazatzal was signalling the coming brother from the dark clefts of the Sierra Ancha. One hour later, just as ten was striking on the spiral of the office clock, two sudden shots were heard on the flats to the north-west, and the little herd of horses and mules, not two dozen in all, grazing under cover of the rifles of Sentries 3 and 4, came limping, lumbering in, fast as hoppled feet would ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... the angry whirlwinds sweep, Where curling billows rouse the fearful deep: Still round and round the fluid vortex flies, Diffusing briny vapours o'er the skies. This vast phenomenon, whose lofty head, In heaven immersed, embracing clouds o'erspread, 40 In spiral motion first, as seamen deem, Swells, when the raging whirlwind sweeps the stream. The swift volution, and the enormous train, Let sages versed in nature's lore explain. The horrid apparition still draws nigh, And white with foam the whirling billows fly. The guns were primed; ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... now so long as to be less a hoop than a fine oblong. Sometimes it was pear-shaped, sometimes amorphous; bulbous here, hollow there. And there seemed movement; I thought now and again that it was spiral as well as circular, that it might, under some stress of speed, writhe upward like dust in a whirlwind. It wavered, certainly, in elevation, lifting, sinking, wafted one way or another with the ease of a cloud of gnats. It was extraordinarily ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... strange way, the old man cast his eyes on his bench. There lay all the pieces of a watch that he had carefully taken apart. He took up a sort of hollow cylinder, called a barrel, in which the spring is enclosed, and removed the steel spiral, but instead of relaxing itself, according to the laws of its elasticity, it remained coiled on itself like a sleeping viper. It seemed knotted, like impotent old men whose blood has long been congealed. Master Zacharius vainly essayed to uncoil it with his thin fingers, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... has a current produced in the opposite direction. Henry proved that this principle might be made available to produce an action of a current upon itself, by forming a conductor in the whirls of a spiral, so that sparks and shocks might be obtained by the use of such spirals, when connected with a pair of galvanic plates, a current from which could give no sparks and no shocks. Henry's discoveries of the effects of a current in producing several ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... the beginning God, the Life in God, the Lord in God, the Holy Procedure, inhabited the dome, which, burning in magnificence primeval, and revolving in prismatic and undulatory spiral, appeared, and was the pavilion of the Spirit: In glory inexhaustible and inconceivable, in movement spherical, ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith

... of this both by Proctor and, I think, by Herbert Spencer, while in Mr. Webb's volume (opposite p. 212) is a diagram showing the "Coal Sack" as a "vacant lane" running quite through and across the successive spiral extensions laterally of the galaxy, without any reference or a word of explanation that such features, of which there are many, really demonstrate the untenability of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... pressed together, and a tiny spiral of smoke began to arise from Kwaque's finger-end that was different in colour from ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... close below is about eighteen inches high. Some of the drawings evidently represent the deified dragon-fly found almost everywhere among the ruins of Arizona and Northern Mexico. There are also the concentric circles, the conventionalised spiral, and the meander design, so common among the North American Indians, and still in use ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... had built a row of blocks completely around the circle, he trimmed the first blocks which he had placed to a wedge, that he might build his circle of blocks up in a spiral. ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... as a protection, and fragments of the parapet remain. Probably it was during the English occupation of Guienne which extended into Auvergne, that a castle and a chapel were sculptured out of the living rock. At the same time a remarkable spiral staircase was contrived in like manner. Numerous relics of all periods—flint tools, bronze weapons, statuettes, and coins—have been found among the rubbish thrown out from these dens. [Footnote: G. Tournier, Les Megalithes et les ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... engraving represents the view of one of them, at Brechin, in Scotland. It consists of sixty regular courses of hewn stone, of a brighter colour than the adjoining church. It is 85 feet high to the cornice, whence rises a low, spiral-pointed roof of stone, with three or four windows, and on the top a vane, making 15 feet more, in all 100 feet from the ground, and measuring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various

... the lower chapel a corridor leads to the Ancienne Salle Manger de Louis Philippe, or the Galerie des Colonnes, of the same dimensions as the Galerie de Henri II. immediately over it. To the right is the old spiral staircase of FrancisI. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... you must go through the little doorway under the scaffolding opposite the Rue Scribe; you then go up the little spiral staircase leading to the provision office, and there you will be supplied with ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... eschatologies to scorn. And the higher they ascend, as they follow the path, the more vividly do they realise how unimaginably high above them is the summit of the mountain which the path is ascending in spiral coils. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... the darkness of her complexion. The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the profusion of her sable tresses, which, each arranged in its own little spiral of twisted curls, fell down upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as a simarre of the richest Persian silk, exhibiting flowers in their natural colours embossed upon a purple ground, permitted to be visible—all these constituted a combination ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... crooked brass.—Ver. 98. 'Cornu' seems to have been a general name for the horn or trumpet; whereas the "tuba" was a straight trumpet, while the 'lituus' was bent into a spiral shape. Lydus says that the 'lituus' was the sacerdotal trumpet, and that it was employed by Romulus when he proclaimed the title of his newly-founded city. Acro says that it was peculiar to the cavalry, while the 'tuba' belonged to the infantry. The notes of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... him, we crossed a high range of mountains, and from their tops looked down upon the spiral line of the Yellowstone, marked by the rich tints of its willows and cottonwoods, red, yellow, and green, in the crisp frosts of October. The air on these mountain-tops is much rarefied, and so very clear and pure that objects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... lodgings, such as the old cells and old galleries of Anthophorae and Chalicodomae. If these favourite haunts are lacking, then a hiding-place in the wall, a round hole in some bit of wood, the tube of a reed, the spiral of a dead Snail under a heap of stones are adopted, according to the tastes of the several species. The retreat selected is divided into chambers by partition-walls, after which the entrance to the dwelling receives a massive ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... Bunsen battery that I activate not with potassium dichromate but with sodium. An induction coil gathers the electricity generated and directs it to a specially designed lantern. In this lantern one finds a glass spiral that contains only a residue of carbon dioxide gas. When the device is operating, this gas becomes luminous and gives off a continuous whitish light. Thus provided for, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... was a Tuscan column on a rustic pedestal, with a pedestal for a statue; the diameter of the base of the column was seventeen feet six inches, and the abacus of the capital was surrounded with an iron railing. The centre shaft, containing the spiral wooden staircase, ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... horses in the phylo-genetic line are more ancient than dogs: they are lower in the zoologic scale. Much lower still, i.e. among the Arthropoda, occur many other mathematical wonders. I only mention in a cursory way the logarithmic spiral of the spider's web, the precise curves realized without instruments of any kind by the Coleoptera and Hymenoptera in cutting leaves, the stereometry of the aphides. Then, as it were, at the bottom of the scale (if one may still speak of a ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... Foggini (Annotat. p. 31) suspects that the Persians were deceived by the of Aelian, (Tactic. c. 48,) an intricate spiral motion of the army. He observes (p. 28) that the military descriptions of George of Pisidia are transcribed in the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... preternatural strength. The whole flood of oriental theory was let loose by this evidence of familiarity with the usages of Hindostan. But it is pretty evident, when we inspect him closely, that the animal, though a strange beast of some peculiar conventional type, is no elephant. That spiral winding-up of his snout, which passed for a trunk, is a characteristic refuge of embryo art, repeated upon other parts of the animal. It is necessitated by the difficulty which a primitive artist feels in bringing out the form of an extremity, whatever it may be—snout, horn, or hoof. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the haze. And look at the celebrated "Lecon de Danse" by Degas—that dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in the foreground, and their mothers are covering ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her. Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life; porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... unemployment at or above 5 percent for 61 out of the past 62 months—and an end to the growing pressures for such restrictive measures as the 35-hour week, which alone could increase hourly labor costs by as much as 14 percent, start a new wage-price spiral of inflation, and undercut our efforts to compete ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy

... at a small table behind a spin-dizzy wheel of flickering lights and ever-centering spiral, one of Thornberry's psych-staff waited for a nod from the doctor. Then he started the wheel spinning and Bennington ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire

... planets have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon anonymously, to assure ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley

... Napoleon would outstrip the other { conquerors of the world. {Some Empire furniture shows the same fine { turning which characterizes Jacobean furniture { of both oak and walnut periods. We refer to { the round, not spiral, turning. See legs of { Empire sofa on which Madame Recamier reclines { in the well-known portrait ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... horn (Plate IX.), as it is called in the orchestra, is the sweetest and mellowest of all the wind instruments. In Beethoven's time it was but little else than the old hunting-horn, which, for the convenience of the mounted hunter, was arranged in spiral convolutions that it might be slipped over the head and carried resting on one shoulder and under the opposite arm. The Germans still call it the Waldhorn, i.e., "forest horn;" the old French name was cor de chasse, the Italian corno ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... who were admitted one by one by the porter, and all led silently to a small lower room, that she resolved on seeking out the Baron's servant, and sending him to warn his master, while she would take up her station at her lady's door. She found Osbert, and with him was ascending a narrow spiral leading from the offices—she, unfortunately, the foremost. As she came to the top, a scuffle was going on—four men had thrown themselves upon one, and a torch distinctly showed her the younger Chevalier holding a pistol to the cheek of the fallen man, and she heard the ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... long, rolled into little curls and plentifully oiled. A most peculiar deformation is applied to the nose and results in extreme ugliness: the septum is perforated, and instead of merely inserting a stick, a springy spiral is used, which presses the nose upward and forward, so that in time it develops into an immense, shapeless lump, as if numberless wasps had stung it. It takes a long time to get used to this sight, especially as ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... by his admirers, indeed, almost carried by them, he went slowly up the narrow spiral staircase. Arrived at the top, the soft wind was murmuring through the great iron railings, the cages of the bells. From the centre of the vault hung the famous "Gorda," an immense bronze bell, with all one side split by a large crack; the clapper, which ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And Lynette's visionary companion was upon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution. But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... Trocar.—"It consists of a hollow cylinder six inches long, and half an inch in diameter, within which another cylinder fitting it tightly plays. The inner one is cut off at its extremity, somewhat in the form of a pen, and is sharp. The sharp end is kept retracted within the outer cylinder by a spiral spring in the handle at the other end, but can be protruded by pressing on this handle when required for use. When thus protruded it is plunged into the cyst up to its middle; the pressure on the handle is taken off, and the cutting edge is retracted within its sheath. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... some spiral and somersault stunts for the benefit of some huns." ("Hun," used in this connection, not referring to the Germans. "Hun" is the slang term for student aviators, tacked on them ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach

... in atmospherical air without a very great elevation of temperature; but it is eminently combustible in pure oxygen gas; and what will surprise you still more, it can be set on fire without any considerable rise of temperature. You see this spiral iron wire—I fasten it at one end to this cork, which is made to fit an opening at the top of the glass-receiver. (PLATE ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet

... front of the closed door, and there was none around but myself. Then I was aware of a gust in the night-breeze blowing up for rain. Time had changed. Something had been taken from the future and something had been added to the past. The spiral gusts lifted the unseen litter of the street, and with them the harpies rose in my breast. And words impetuous would have burst out like the torrents of rain which the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... nestling stems and branches, and go crashing through. There are creeping plants of various sorts which clamber up the trees; and some of them have changed color in the slight frosts which already have befallen these low grounds, so that one sees a spiral wreath of scarlet leaves twining up to the top of a green tree, intermingling its bright hues with their verdure, as if all were of one piece. Sometimes, instead of scarlet, the spiral wreath is of a ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... invented. To effect this, the frame of the seat or couch is suspended on juribals or joints, turning at right angles to each other, and an elasticity is produced both in the seat or cushion, and in the swinging frames, by the use of spiral metal springs. These springs are made by twisting steel or iron wire into the form of an hour glass, that is, like two cones united at their apices. The lower points of their springs are to be sown to the canvass or webbing, and their upper ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various

... beginning of a new series."[Footnote*:Emerson] "While the earth remaineth seed-time and harvest . . . shall not cease." Life leads on to new death, and new death back to life again. Over and over when we think we know our lesson, we find ourselves beginning another round of God's Divine spiral: "in deaths oft" is the measure of our growth, "always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter

... in acquiescence; I followed her up the terrace into a stone hall where the dark Flemish pictures stared back at me and my spurred heels jingled in the silence. Up, up, and still up, winding around a Gothic spiral, then through a passage under the battlements and out across the slates, with wind and setting sun in my face and the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... shorter than combing wools, and in addition they possess to a much greater degree the power of felting—that is, of matting together in a close compact mass. Combing wools, on the other hand, are not only longer than the carding wools, but they are also harder, more wiry, and less inclined to be spiral or kinky. It must be understood, however, that under the present methods of manufacture, short wools may be combed and spun by the French method of spinning just as the long wools are combed and spun by the ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley

... three or four stairs at a time sprang the baron; then he walked quickly with beating heart down the long corridor to the west wing, where the nursery was, and pausing at the top of a spiral staircase which led to the side door he intended to go out by, he shouted impatiently to the housemaid who was left in charge of ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various

... often at the foot of the tree, and passed jauntily up the winding way that led to them, hopping from branch to branch, pausing on each, and circling the trunk as he went; now showing his trim violet-blue coat, now his demure Quaker-drab vest and black necklace; and so he ascended his spiral stair. ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller

... different picture. Here we reach definite survivals of Celtic traditions. There flourished in Britain before the Claudian conquest a vigorous native art, chiefly working in metal and enamel, and characterized by its love for spiral devices and its fantastic use of animal forms. This art—La Tene or Late Celtic or whatever it be styled—was common to all the Celtic lands of Europe just before the Christian era, but its vestiges are particularly ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield

... many of these sculpture-like monstrosities, that one might have thought she had robbed old Sophy's grandfather of his fetishes. They helped to give her room a kind of enchanted look, as if a witch had her home in it. Over the fireplace was a long, staff-like branch, strangled in the spiral coils of one of those vines which strain the smaller trees in their clinging embraces, sinking into the bark until the parasite becomes almost identified with its support. With these sylvan curiosities were blended objects of art, some of them not less singular, but others showing a love ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... and Marjorie carefully climbed the spiral staircase at the back. Her father followed, and sitting up on top of the 'bus, in the crisp, wintry air and bright sunshine, they went whizzing ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells

... combination with two monarchs, despotic at heart and of enigmatical or indifferent religious convictions, who yet reigned over peoples, largely influenced by enthusiasm for freedom. Thus liberty was preserved for the world; but, as the law of human progress would seem to be ever by a spiral movement, it; seems strange to the superficial observer not prone to generalizing, that Calvinism, which unquestionably was the hard receptacle in which the germ of human freedom was preserved in various countries and at different epochs, should ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... cup full of salt, and went after the Mouse-bird. It was at the bottom of the big tree, creeping up, round and round, as if on a spiral staircase, and the Brownie began to climb in the same way. But every little while the climber had to stop and rest. This had strange results, for there is a law in Brownie land, that wherever one of the little people stops ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... was on the floor; gray paper, spotted with pink and green flowers, covered the walls. In one corner, under a white netting, was a little bed, the woodwork gayly painted with knots of bright flowers. Near it, against the wall, was a black walnut bureau. A work-table with spiral legs stood by the window, which was hung with a green and gold window curtain. Opposite the window the closet door stood ajar, while in the corner across from the bed was a tiny washstand with two ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... Oh! look at them boring up, will you, in that corkscrew spiral way! Tell me that Casper Blue doesn't know his business; Perc will never get as much out of his biplane as that old and experienced aviator means to. Are we going ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy

... where, far at her right, the valley narrowed into a pine-screened gulch; and back again almost to the spot where the road dipped and disappeared. There her eyes were suddenly caught by something she had not seen before,—a thin spiral of blue smoke that mounted slowly until it was struck and dissipated by the breeze from across the ridge. Haig's ranchhouse, surely, nestling below the hill! The house would be visible, doubtless, from the place ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... mechanism for ships and mills, and they even ventured to guess what the earth's motive power might be. It was now five minutes of midnight. The chief furnished Ingram an oversuit and the young engineers dropped through manholes and down vertical and spiral ladders into the cellar of the steamer, the bottom of which was thirty feet ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton

... one, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his place on the social ladder, and is beset by stormy passions and conflicting interests, as in Descartes' theory of pressure and impulsion. But these forces increase as we go higher, so that we have a spiral which in defiance of reason rests upon the apex and not on the base. Now let us return to your particular world. You say you were on the point of being ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished from the ascending smoke of ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... no such unnecessary luxury as a lift in the Hotel Railleux. At the back of the hall the spiral staircase begins its steep ascent, ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... there he saw no one, and was about to depart again as he had come, when the head of Maud Lindesay appeared round the upper spiral looking more distractedly mischievous and bewitching than ever, her head all rippling over with dark curls and her eyes fairly scintillating light. She nodded to him and leaned a little farther over, holding tightly to ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... is somewhat larger than the common sheep, is covered with brownish hair instead of wool, and is chiefly remarkable for its huge spiral horns, resembling those of a sheep, but frequently three feet in length, and from four to six inches ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens

... at the greenness of the opposite bank. There, plainly in view, were the deep ruts of the main trail running close in against the bluff. His tired eyes caught no symbol of life either up or down the stream, except a thin spiral of blue smoke that slowly wound its way upward. An instant he stared, believing it to be the fire of some emigrant's camp; then realized that he looked upon the smouldering ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish

... two o'clock he came into the clearing about Lac Bain. As he hurried to Breed's quarters he wondered if Colonel Becker or Isobel had seen him from their window. He had noticed that the curtain was up, and that a thin spiral of smoke was rising from the clay chimney that descended to ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... long; when suitable for use, measuring twelve inches and upwards in length, and an inch in diameter, nearly cylindrical, often irregular, and sometimes assuming a spiral or cork-screw form; skin white and smooth; flesh white, not so firm as that of most varieties, and considerably ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... unique as roofs go. It was a large mattress with wooden sides, a kind of oblong box with a mattress top. I found it outside in a ruined cottage. Underneath the mattress part was a cavity filled with spiral springs. I arranged a pile of sandbags at each side of the hole in the floor in such a way as to be able to lay this curiosity on top to form a roof, the mattress part downwards. I then filled in with earth all the parts where the spiral springs ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather

... been widened to let pass the railway line for Madrid. Farther on, Moorish houses with lofty miradors and beautiful capped windows were tucked between ugly new buildings, and across the shaded avenue of a green park was flung an extraordinary, four-winged spiral staircase of iron. I groaned at the monstrosity, saying that Pedro himself had never perpetrated an act more cruel; and the Cherub excused it sadly, by saying that it was convenient for the crowds to pass from one ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... massive tower supports a tall but suddenly tapering spire of the most puzzling construction to the eye. It must have been designed by a monk of the olden time, with a Chinese turn of ingenuity. There is no order known to architecture to furnish a term or likeness for it. A ridgy, spiral spire are the three most descriptive words, but these are not half enough for stating the shape, style and posture of this strange steeple. It is difficult even to assist the imagination to form an idea of it. I will essay a few words in that direction. Suppose, then, a plain ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... shutters; how he had thrown himself across the current of a torrential gutter to divert the stream into the cellar shop of a tradesman who had offended him; above all, that feat of his when, ascending the spiral turret stair of the church, he had lowered himself down from the parapet, and, astride upon a gargoyle, had worked his way along it until he could secure a stone that lay in its mouth, the perilous and dizzy adventure watched by a breathless throng in the churchyard ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... precipice we come to a new phase of coastal scenery. From the high land above us green scrub-covered spur after spur shoots downward to the shore, enclosing numerous little beaches of coarse sand and many coloured spiral shells—"Reddies" we boys called them—with here and there a rare and beautiful cowrie of banded jet black and pearly white. The sea-wall of rock has here but few pools, being split up into long, deep, and narrow chasms, into ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... minute or so, we just stood there. Anton was explaining that he had heard a shot and that nobody in the gunroom answered. Geraldine told him, rather impatiently, to go down to the library and up the spiral. You see," she explained, "the library is directly under the gunroom, and there's a spiral stairway connecting the two rooms. So Anton went downstairs and we stood waiting in the hall. Fred was shivering in his bathrobe; ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... of Mardykes Hall is an oblong room wainscoted. From the door you look its full length to the wide stone-shafted Tudor window at the other end. At your left is the ponderous mantelpiece, supported by two spiral stone pillars; and close to the door at the right was the bed in which the two crones had just stretched poor Philip Feltram, who lay as still as an uncoloured wax-work, with a heavy penny-piece on each eye, and a bandage under his jaw, making his ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... had vulgarized the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth—earth left behind in the persons of the apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above—had an originality which set at naught all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below feel we are in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. A kind of controlling ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... own gaudy flannels and "loud-patterned" cotton goods, which are waving overhead in the sluggish evening breeze. Nothing can be more suggestive of lazily industrious Jewry than this short, thick-set clothier, with the curved nose, and spiral, oily hair, who sits out on the sidewalk and blows clouds from his meerschaum pipe. The women who lounge here are generally stoutish and slatternly, with few clothes on, but plenty of frowzy hair. Here and there one may see a pretty face among the younger girls; and it is sad to reflect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... here to discover a kind of scale of linear expression—the two extremes at either end: the horizontal and the vertical, with every degree and modulation between them; the undulating curve giving way to the springing energetic spiral, the meandering, flowing line sinking to the horizontal: or the sharp opposition and thrust of rectangular, the nervous resistance of broken curves, the flame-like, triumphant, ascending verticals. Truly ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane

... in the room. Jack chanced to rest his hand against it, when he must unconsciously have touched some secret spring, for a secret door opened, dividing the picture in two parts, and, to our hero's unbounded astonishment, he saw before him a small spiral staircase ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... you get to a rising ground on the western bank where stands a single hut, and about half a mile in the forest there are a few more: some of them square and some round, with spiral roofs. ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... late years that this road, or pass, has been completed. In former times, it was almost impassable. As the descent is rapid and very considerable, the danger attending it is obviated by the high road having been cut into a cork-screw-shape;[202] which presents, at every spiral turn (if I may so speak) something new, beautiful, and interesting. You continue, descending, gazing on all sides. To the right, suspended almost in the air—over a beetling, perpendicular, rocky cliff— feathered half way up with nut and beech—stands, or rather ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... so far as her power went, that her son should keep his wife's company. Where it was most pleasing to the king and the queen to live was at Pontoise, because the king's chamber was above and the queen's below. And they had so well arranged matters that they held their converse on a spiral staircase which led down from the one chamber to the other. When the ushers saw the queen-mother coming into the chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came running into his ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... the Needle rocks, rearing their craggy heads above the ocean, and giving an awful impression of the storms and convulsions which must have shaken and devoured this once enormous mass. Their present form bears no resemblance to their name, which was derived from a spiral rock, about one hundred and twenty feet high, that fell in the year 1764, and left the present fragments of its grandeur to moulder away, like the base of some proud column of antiquity. On the opposite coast is Hurst Castle, a circular fort, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... Sphagnam, a curious moss, with curious incomplete spiral cells in the leaves. I dare say it will bear preservation in Canada balsam. I have received a new microscope, a queer-looking thing, very portable; one object glass of a quarter inch focus, by Ross; two eye- pieces magnifying linearly ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... accounts for 15% of GDP Electricity: 368,000 kw capacity; 857 million kWh produced 3,339 kWh per capita (1991) Industries: tourism, banking, cement, oil refining and transshipment, salt production, rum, aragonite, pharmaceuticals, spiral welded steel pipe *** No entry for this item *** Agriculture: accounts for less than 5% of GDP; dominated by small-scale producers; principal products—citrus fruit, vegetables, poultry; large net importer of food *** No entry for this ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... of "tuning" receivers and transmitters, but the principle underlying them all is analogous to that of mechanical vibration. If a weight is suspended from the end of a spiral spring, and given an upward blow, it bobs up and down a certain number of times per minute, every movement from start to finish having exactly the same duration as the rest. The resistance of the air and the internal friction of the spring gradually lessen the amplitude of the movements, and ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... of an axis of hollow brass tube, eighteen inches in length, through which, upon a semi-spiral inclined at fifteen degrees, pass a series of steel wire radii, two feet long, and thus projecting a foot on either side. These radii are connected at the outer extremities by two bands of flattened wire—the whole in this manner forming the framework of the screw, which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... The other animal is more cylindrical in shape and has two pairs of legs on each division of the body. Its colour is a darker brown than that of the centiped, and it has a habit of coiling into a spiral shape, when disturbed, so that the soft under surface is concealed. This is the milliped. Both of these animals are quite harmless and feed on decaying vegetable matter. They stand midway between worms and insects in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... quantity of it before the coop. Close at his elbow stood the augur, to interpret the omen,—a weazened, bald-headed old senator, who wore a purple-striped tunic,[138] and carried in his hand a long stick,[139] curved at its head into a spiral. Drusus knew perfectly well that the fowls had been kept without food all that day; but it would have seemed treason to all the traditions of his native land to cry out against this pompous farce. The hungry chickens pecked ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... went running hurriedly up the spiral stair on his way to the typeroom. Three or four compositors had gone up ahead of him. He had risen out of sight when we heard a tremendous uproar above stairs. I ran up, two steps at a time, while the high voice of Mr Greeley came pouring down upon me like a flood. It had a wild, fleering tone. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... of the people of Ghareeah a greyhound bitch for four Tunisian piastres, so that we may now expect some hares and gazelles. In returning to the encampment I observed the phenomenon of a column of dust carried into the heavens in a spiral form by the wind, whilst all around was perfectly calm. Such columns are not of so frequent occurrence in the desert as is imagined, but from time to time, as in this ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson

... Manicamp's steps. On the first floor, behind curtains of red damask, the soft light of a lamp, placed upon a low table, faintly illumined the room, at the other extremity of which, on a large bedstead supported by spiral columns, around which curtains of the same color as those which deadened the rays of the lamp had been closely drawn, lay De Guiche, his head supported by pillows, his eyes looking as if the mists of death seemed gathering there; his long black hair, scattered ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... which was nothing else than the tightly bound body of Jerkline Jo. All three men wore masks over their faces and new bright-blue overalls to further aid in hiding their identities. Hiram saw the rope about the girl, running in a spiral from her shoulders to her ankles. He saw the cloth over her face, knotted behind ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins

... pushed into a corner to live forgotten or disdained. Why was she not rehearsing there with them? she asked herself. At once the answer came. Because your husband hates you—because he wants to make love to another woman. Then, like one crazed, she clattered down the iron spiral staircase to the stage. She did not even hear Mortimer and Dubois cry out as she pushed past, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... said the man, "it will be best for you to cross our Valley and mount the spiral staircase inside the Pyramid Mountain. The top of that mountain is lost in the clouds, and when you reach it you will be in the awful Land of Naught, ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... cruise, and fill up, if you can, any chinks that I haven't seen through already," he concluded, throwing his legs again over the back of the settee, and elevating his eyebrows as the cigar smoke curled in spiral ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... its forms, so do the waters of the China sea defy the naturalist to classify the myriad wonders of their denizens. The shores are strewn with shells of all shapes and sizes, which display every delicate shade of prismatic colour, every marvel of dainty tracery, every beauty of curve and spiral that the mind of man can conceive. The hard sand which the tide has left is pitted with tiny holes, the lairs of a million crabs and sea insects. The beaches are covered with a wondrous diversity of animal and vegetable growths thrown up and discarded by the tide. Seaweed of strange varieties, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... inside, which could only be divided into slices with a knife, either in stripes of a width permitted by the sides of the prism, or else shaved round and round, like the operation of cork making, and producing a long spiral shaving. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... to the eighth point as in its oblique advance over eight points. In the same manner, withes for the eight divisions of the diameter, fastened obliquely at the intersections on the entire longitudinal and peripheral surface, make spiral channels which naturally look just like those of ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... the remainder of their spiral pathway in silence, and having at last reached the summit, Lord Mountclere sank down on one of the steps, panting out, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... the place of a bridge. The venerable Professor led the way—tripping along so lightly, and yet so surely, as to excite our wonder. We then mounted the hill on the opposite side of the convent; where there are spiral, and neatly trimmed, gravel walks, which afford the means of an easy and pleasant ascent—but not altogether free from a few sharp and steep turnings. From the summit of this hill, the Professor bade me look around, and view a valley which ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... were adjoined Honoria's boudoir, from which a secret passage led down by a spiral to a panel behind hangings; raising these, one could enter the drawing-room unobserved. Dalton paused midway in the secret passage, and through a loop or narrow window concealed by architectural ornaments, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... bending, and the far-off heavens are opening in glory; and of these doors there is no end. We saw, when lately in Copenhagen, the famous tower of the Trinity Church, remarkable for the grand view commanded from the summit, and for the broad spiral ascent winding within it almost to the top, up which it is said Peter the Great, in 1716, used to drive himself and his Empress in a coach-and-four. It was curious to feel ourselves ascending on a path nearly level, and without the slightest perspiration ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... filtering through the tiny windows of the cupola millions of dust motes illuminated by the sun danced in an ascending spiral. The altar, with its antique carving, glowed faintly in the mellowed light with reflections of old gold. Upon it lay a duster and a pail, carelessly left since the last cleaning of the room, many ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... from the materialism of the age, and this is certainly well, in my mind, but then there is something more than this, more than a mere human reaction, I believe. I have not the power of writing myself at all, though I have felt the pencil turn in my hand—a peculiar spiral motion like the turning of the tables, and independent of volition, but the power is not with me strong enough to make ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... in many breeds the horns are deficient in the ewe, though this likewise occurs occasionally with the female of the wild musmon. In the rams of the Wallachian breed "the horns spring almost perpendicularly {96} from the frontal bone, and then take a beautiful spiral form; in the ewes they protrude nearly at right angles from the head, and then become twisted in a singular manner."[225] Mr. Hodgson states that the extraordinarily arched nose or chaffron, which is so highly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... the young people had thoroughly explored this remarkable old house. Perhaps the most notable thing about it is the spiral staircase of solid oak, which is three hundred years old; but the entire building is filled with little passages and unexpected, remote nooks and corners, which, like the quaint bedrooms, are crowded with curios, old pictures, ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... oesophagus. Neither should such rigid objects as a broom or rake handle be introduced, because of the danger from serious injury to the walls of the pharynx and oesophagus. The flexible probang, which is usually made of spiral wire covered with leather, is a very useful instrument to relieve choke when in the hands of an experienced operator. If the object causing the choke is situated in the neck portion of the oesophagus, it may sometimes be moved forward, or toward the stomach ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... long and attached to a bolt that runs through the door, the opposite end being fastened to the combination dial. Two kinds of dials are shown in Fig. 2. The piece D is fastened on the bolt an inch or two from the surface of the door to permit placing a spiral spring of medium strength in between as shown in Fig. 3. The opposite end of the bolt may be screwed into the dial, which can be made of wood, or an old safe dial will do. A nail is driven through the outer end of the piece D and the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... chandeliers which held these candles were of a very queer shape. They each represented the trunk of a tree with a seven-headed cobra wound round it. From each of the seven mouths rose a red or a green wax candle of spiral form like a corkscrew. Draughts blowing from behind every pillar fluttered the yellow flames, filling the roomy refectory with fantastic moving shadows, and causing both our lightly-clad gentlemen to sneeze very frequently. Leaving the dark silhouettes of the Hindus in comparative obscurity, this ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... of discovery, among other animals of less note, was presented "a quadruped with an amazingly long neck, head like a sheep, bearing two long spiral horns, white as polished ivory, and standing in perpendiculars parallel to each other. Its body was like that of a deer, but its forelegs were most disproportionately long, and its tail, which was ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... us they're thin, They're angular, or smooth and fat, Some spiral are, and gimlet in, And some are sharp, and others flat. The slim one pink you clean and neat, The flat ones bat a solid blow Much as a camel throws his feet, And leave you beastly incomplete. If lucky you don't ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... lichen is more lovely than the striated crystals of the granite on which it grows, or the moss on the mountain side more satisfying than the hidden amethyst and cairngorm in the rock beneath? Or is the botanist more astonished when his microscope reveals the architecture of spiral tissue in the stem of a plant, or the mineralogist who beholds for the first time the chaos of beauty in the sliced specimen of some common stone? So far as beauty goes the organic world and ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... the Spiral Arm, a sprawling sphere of influence vast, mighty, solid at the core. Only the far-flung boundary shows the slight ebb and flow of contingent cultures that may win a system or two today and lose them back tomorrow or a hundred years from now. Xanabar ...
— History Repeats • George Oliver Smith

... circle of vaulted grottoes, their shadowy depths bathed in the emerald twilight, deepened by the veil of verdure and the transparent foliage drooping over open window spaces. The Sultan's oval bathing tank, with stone galleries and spiral pavilions, occupies a hollow tower, but a touch of young life dispels the gloom, for a group of brown children swim and dive in the cool depths, shouting and splashing with a merriment unsubdued by the solemn sadness of the deserted halls. A Portuguese architect designed this fantastic retreat ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... length, as it appears to be almost at the foundations of Neolithic religion. Recent discoveries in New Caledonia have proved the existence in these far-off islands, as in Brittany, Scotland, and Ireland, of these strange symbols, coupled with the concentric and spiral designs which are usually associated with the genius of Celtic art. In the neighbourhood of Glasgow, and in the south-west of Scotland generally, stones inscribed with designs closely resembling those on the New Caledonian ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... along the passage for a bit," said he, nodding his head on his shoulder at the door, "until you come to a spiral staircase; and on the second landing is a door covered with green baize. Go through that, and down the long corridor to the end, and the Red Room is on your left up ...
— The Red Room • H. G. Wells

... of paddles prophesies of a mercurial temperament and an energetic character. It can, however, anchor itself and lie by when occasion offers. It is provided with two long cables, prettily set with spiral filaments or tendrils, by means of which it can make fast to any point. When not in use, it can retract them, and stow them away in two sacs or pouches within the body, where they may be seen coiled ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various



Words linked to "Spiral" :   hank, rotary motion, turn, structure, ornamentation, decoration, coil, construction, wind, double helix, rotation, ornament, twist, coiled, curve, economic process, curved shape



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