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More "Accretion" Quotes from Famous Books



... or burthens his memory with great accumulations of preparatory knowledge. A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... biography of him, in Italian, was not published till fifteen years later, in 1678. Unluckily the compiler of his legend in the Acta Sanctorum was unable to procure this work, by Nutius, which might contain a comparatively slight accretion of myths. The next life is of 1722, and the author made use of the facts collected for Joseph's beatification. There is another life by Pastrovicchi, in 1753. He was canonised in that year, when all the facts were remote ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... resembles a work of art, that it has been considered as a Roman fabric. The stone composing this isthmus is so compact, that the best mill-stones in the Ionian Islands are made from it; but it is in fact nothing more than gravel and sand cemented by calcareous matter, the accretion of which is supposed to be rapidly advancing at ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... the circumstances, narrated Tanno's unexpected arrival, his quizzical bantering of the persons whom he encountered on the road, my tenants' petition, my agreement with Marcus Martins, the accretion of Hirnio and Murmex to our party, Tanno's insistence on reaching the Salarian Highway through Vediamnum, and all the other trivial factors which had conspired to my undoing; I described the affray in Vediamnum, both ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... and the two following days, the requested reinforcements, in number some 1,500 men of all arms, arrived. With this accretion of strength it was now possible to renew the offensive, and General French at once turned his attention to the capture of Grassy Hill (Suffolk Hill on map No. 16), which he had early marked as the key to the Boer stronghold. This height lay ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... and completeness, a passion extremely fertile in complementary products. For example, the early Jewish notion of literally sitting down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the resurrection, was gradually developed by accretion of assisting particulars into all the details of a consummate banquet, at which Leviathan was to be the fish, Behemoth the roast, and so on.4 In the construction of doctrines or of discourses, one ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... rarely that she had any personal talk with her husband. The wall of separation between them seemed to be thickening by silent accretion all the time. It was very difficult to scale this wall, and she felt that any effort to do so irked him no less than it did her. So, with an instinct not to let go the present opportunity, she said, rather eagerly, as he was ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder

... of the history of David according to the simple thread of the old narrative. The first accretion we notice is the legend of the encounter of the shepherd boy with Goliath (xvii. 1-xviii. 5), which is involved in contradiction both with what goes before and with what follows it. According to xvi. 14-23, David, when he ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... finding a counterpart in the line of mails vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775 from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... piece of music—which elicits the sensual, viceful, and unholy desires of our nature—is, and that utterly. The beautiful was created the true, morally as well as physically; vice is a deformment of virtue,—not of form, to which it is a parasitical addition—an accretion which can and must be excised before the beautiful can show itself as it was originally made, morally as well as formally perfect. How we all wish the sensual, indecent, and brutal, away from Hogarth, so that we might show him to the purest virgin ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... characteristically seen in the method of dealing with homosexual practices and other similar sexual aberrations. Here, legally, England is closer to Germany than to modern France. No country in the world, it is often said, has preserved by tradition and even maintained by recent accretion such severe penalties against homosexual offences as England. Yet, unlike the Germans, the English do not actively prosecute in these cases and are usually content to leave the law in abeyance, so long as public order and decency are reasonably maintained. English people, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... to be believed that such an extraordinary system of sound-signs could have been the invention of any one man or even of any one age. Like all our other acquisitions, it must have been the slow growth and accretion of ages; it must have risen step by step from picture-writing through an intermediate condition like that of the Chinese, where each word or thing was represented by a separate sign. The fact that so old and enlightened ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... concentrated them on those of his nome. If he was a Memphite, he worshipped Phthah Sekhet, and Tum; if a Theban, Ammon-Ra, Maut, Khons, and Neith; if a Heliopolite, Tum, Nebhebt and Horus; if a Elephantinite, Kneph, Sati, Anuka, and Hak; and so on. The Egyptian Pantheon was a gradual accretion, the result of amalgamating the various local cults; but these continued predominant in their several localities; and practically the only deities that obtained anything like a general recognition were Osiris, Isis, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... 'alias' rule, and what is now the penultimate vowel is long unless it be i. Examples are 'nation', 'accretion', 'emotion', 'solution', while i is shortened in 'petition', 'munition', and the like, and left short in 'admonition' and others. In military use an exception is made by 'ration', but the pronunciation ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... out of the way. The others watched this removal with mixed emotions. The two remaining principals were impassive and frozen-faced. Their two Assassins, who had probably bet heavily on Marnark, were chagrined. And Klarnood was looking at Verkan Vall with a considerable accretion of respect. Verkan Vall pulled on his boots and resumed ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... Increase. — N. increase, augmentation, enlargement, extension; dilatation &c. (expansion) 194; increment, accretion; accession &c. 37; development, growth; aggrandizement, aggravation; rise; ascent &c. 305; exaggeration exacerbation; spread &c. (dispersion) 73; flood tide; gain, produce, product, profit. V. increase, augment, add to, enlarge;. dilate &c. (expand) 194; grow, wax, get ahead. gain strength; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... top plateau, not from the slopes (or subsidiary plateaus at the head of the wadis), as did the great St. Acheulian weapons. The circular object is very remarkable: it is the half of the ring of a "morpholith "(a round flinty accretion often found in the Theban limestone) which has been split, and the split (flat) side carefully bevelled. Several of these interesting objects have been found in conjunction with Palaeolithic implements at Thebes. No doubt the flints ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... forgotten, and for it to become assimilated to the habits of thought and manner of life of the people that it is deeply respected. The English reverence is not for statute law, but for the common law which is the slow accretion of ages. A new enactment is treated like the new boy at school. He must submit to a period of severe hazing before he is given a place of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... sepulchral animal, which age and ill-treatment had taught to move as if knees and hocks were useless refinements in locomotion. He had just enough of a tail left to tie the nose of another cow to; and so, by the accretion of living joints, the strange monster lengthened out into ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... essentially a tool and nothing more. Each generation became lazier and there's no one alive who can keep this Central System in proper working order." He leaned forward to emphasize his point. "You see, it's very slowly breaking down. There's a steady accretion of inefficiency mutations in the axons and that's why more and more switching mistakes are being ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner

... or it is a full turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in remote climes. It is a blending of primval Keltic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, Italic, and Arab traditions, each adding a beauty, each yielding a charm, bat each accretion rendering ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... loose to play for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent because the body becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the fitness of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... of Lords, which consisted at this time of some fifty members, [Footnote: D'Ewes, Journals, 599] had an existence as a royal council quite apart from the House of Commons, and there were still many evidences that it was the original body and the House of Commons a later accretion. In 1601, when Elizabeth appeared in the House of Lords to open her last Parliament, the Commons, who were waiting in their own chamber, did not hear of her presence promptly, and when they hastened to the Lords' chamber the door was closed and they could not obtain admission, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... moment in which I read them. Works of imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual accretion, remains with me; indeed, that is pretty much the whole result I obtain from anything I read. But books of knowledge, of scientific or natural facts, though they sometimes affect me beyond the finest poetry with an awe and delight that brings tears to my eyes, have but one ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... literary arguments which hardly admit of this form of expression—such as the improbability that the Preface or Prologue was not part of the original Gospel, but a later accretion; or, again, from Marcion's treatment of the Synoptic matter in the third Gospel, both points which might be otherwise worth dilating upon. I pass over these, and come at once, without further delay, to the one point which seems to me really ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... petrification of a princely family, as a punishment for marrying within the forbidden degrees, but myth grows apace in this haunted land, and every century offers fresh variations of old-world stories, until original form is lost beneath a weight of accretion, like the thick moss blurring the chiselled outlines of some carven monument. After careful scrutiny of the miniature temple which suggests so many interpretations of symbolic imagery, we return to the little presbytery to hear of the subsiding river, and the good priest, announcing ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... Christians,—of which fact I stand in melancholy attestation. I have a vague impression that piety does not grow up in a night, like Jonah's gourd or Jack the Giant-killer's beanstalk; but is a pure, glittering, spiritual stalactite, built by the slow accretion of dripping tears. Do you suppose that you can successfully train my soul as you have managed my body?—that you can hold my nose and pour a dose of faith down my throat, like ipecac or cod-liver oil? ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent because the body becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the fitness ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... alluvial gold, in great pure masses, mammillary, or botryoidal (like a bunch of grapes) in shape, have assuredly been formed by accretion on some metallic base, from gold salts in solution, probably chloride, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... resembles, in fact, the other reef at the entrance of the Gulf, where tile soundings have changed, in late years, from 7-7 1/2 fathoms to 3-3 1/2. Geologists differ as to the cause—elevation or accretion by ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... of the accretion and rising of the land is somewhat opposed to the popular belief that Ceylon was torn from the main land of India[1] by a convulsion, during which the Gulf of Manaar and the narrow channel at Paumbam were formed by the submersion of the adjacent land. The two theories might be reconciled ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... conclusion therefore is that no such thing as a hierarchy of ordained deacons, priests and bishops was known to Christ, to Paul, or the writers of the first two and a half centuries. The teaching and belief of those days was nonsacerdotal and non-sacramental, and nothing but a superstitious accretion overlaying the original truth can account for the spectacle which vast portions of the Christian world now present, as indeed do vast portions of the Buddhist world. The fate reserved for both these great prophets seems to be identical, the submergence of their ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... eminence on which a fort has been erected, but which is now in a dilapidated condition, overlooks the streets, and forms the eastern limit of the mouth of the tributary. The Tapajos at Santarem is contracted to a breadth of about a mile and a half by an accretion of low alluvial land, which forms a kind of delta on the western side; fifteen miles further up the river is seen at its full width of from ten to a dozen miles, and the magnificent hilly country, through which it flows from the south, is then visible ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... "revelation" in the stricter sense of a preternatural enlightenment of the mind, it might conceivably be either by way of a real accretion of knowledge—an addition to the contents of the mind—or else by way of manipulating contents already there, as we ourselves do by reminiscence, by rumination, comparison, analysis, inference. Thus we can conceive the mind being consciously controlled ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... body, and to be directed from that centre outwards, then, without inquiring into collateral appearances, and other proofs with regard to the natural concretion of those substances, we might suppose that these concretions might have proceeded from that central body gradually by accretion, and that the concreting and crystallizing substances might have been supplied from a fluid which had before retained the concreting substance in solution; in like manner as the crystallizations of sugar, which are formed in the solution of that saccharine substance, and are termed ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... Christian Science are gained through growth, not accretion; idleness is the foe of progress. And scientific growth manifests no weakness, no emasculation, no illusive vision, no dreamy absentness, no insubordination to the laws that be, no loss nor lack [15] of what constitutes ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... indeed, she had always been this royal creature, this woman bright and winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole mass so fully; if a pearl—lazy growth and accretion of amorphous life—should fuse and form again in sparkling crystals, the miracle would be less. And with what complete unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet and strange as any child has found it! ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... of that slow, inflexible race. He would make love philosophically, Gaunt sneered. A made man. His thoughts and soul, inscrutable as they were, were as much the accretion of generations of culture and reserve as was the chalk in his bones or the glowless courage in his slow blood. It was like coming in contact with summer water to talk to him; but underneath was—what? Did Dode know? Had he taken her in, and showed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... London, altering, improving, and adding to the manuscript of the book. New lines of investigation would suggest themselves, new theories to be thought out, and the task would grow day by day by a very simple but unforeseen process of natural accretion. Hume thought it near completion in 1769; but towards the end of 1772, a couple of months after Smith's answer to Pulteney, he gives it most of another year yet for being finished. He writes from his new quarters in St. Andrew Square, asking Smith to ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... continent, and so much resembles a work of art, that it has been considered as a Roman fabric. The stone composing this isthmus is so compact, that the best mill-stones in the Ionian Islands are made from it; but it is in fact nothing more than gravel and sand cemented by calcareous matter, the accretion of which is supposed to be rapidly advancing at the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... conceptions and exact performance; not to be startled or dazed by novelties, but capable of measuring and assimilating whatever best suited it. On the whole, his nature, while retaining its individuality and poise, was rather a highly receptive than a strongly original one. Its growth was a steady accretion of knowledge, ideas, experiences and aptitudes, without the exhibition of that power which in minds of a rarer order reacts upon impressions with a transforming influence. There is more appearance of freedom, of spontaneousness—paradoxical ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... eminently an Anglo-Saxon gift, though there are many individual exceptions to this limitation. Our social life is largely a form, a whirl, a commercial relation, a display, a duty, the result of external accretion, not of internal growth. It is not in any sense a unity, nor an expression of our best intellectual life; this seeks other channels. Men are immersed in business and politics, and prefer the easy, less exacting ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... that was Nan. Here she was, all beauty, all wisdom, in the natal gifts of her, telling him, with every breath, she loved him and only him. And yet, his knowledge of life was quick to answer, it was the accretion of long hungers, the sum of all desires since she was little and consigned to Aunt Anne's delicate frigidities for nurture and, as the event proved, for penury. She had no conception of a love as irresistible as hers ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... business flourished. Not that he much exerted himself, or greatly rejoiced to see his till more heavily laden night after night, by natural accretion custom flowed to the shop in fuller stream; Jollyman's had established a reputation for quality and cheapness, and began seriously to affect the trade of small rivals in the district. As Allchin had foretold, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... said about the first three Gospels (and we shall come to that question in our next chapter), the remaining books of the New Testament have come down to us, unaltered, from the men who first wrote them. There is none of that process of redaction, and accretion, and reconstruction whose traces we have found in many of the Old Testament books. There may be, here and there, a word or two or a verse or two which has been interpolated by some officious copyist, but these alterations are very slight. The books in our hands are the very same books which ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... this second period succeeded finally the third,—that which witnessed the birth and growth of the Egyptian mania. Its natal moment has not been precisely determined; perhaps it was a gradual accretion. Mr. Glyphic's relatives in Brooklyn were one day electrified by the news that the quondam Henry—now Hiero—purposed instant departure for Europe and Egypt. Before starting, however, he built the brick wall round his estate, shutting it out forever from human ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. As elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past. Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour; and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its day on the piled strata of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... just as the (all-pervading) ether is. Nor, again, can it be maintained that Release is something to be ceremonially purified, and as such depends on an activity. For ceremonial purification (sa/m/skara) results either from the accretion of some excellence or from the removal of some blemish. The former alternative does not apply to Release as it is of the nature of Brahman, to which no excellence can be added; nor, again, does the latter alternative apply, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... the top plateau, not from the slopes (or subsidiary plateaus at the head of the wadis), as did the great St. Acheulian weapons. The circular object is very remarkable: it is the half of the ring of a "morpholith "(a round flinty accretion often found in the Theban limestone) which has been split, and the split (flat) side carefully bevelled. Several of these interesting objects have been found in conjunction with Palaeolithic implements at Thebes. No doubt the flints lie on the actual surface where they were made. No later ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... sobriety seem their most noteworthy characteristics. Compared with the "Bar at the Folies-Bergere," either the "Raft of the Medusa" or the "Convulsionists of Tangiers" is a classic production. And the difference is not at all due to the forty years' accretion of Protestantism which Manet represents as compared with the early romanticists. It is due to a complete difference in attitude. Gericault imbued himself with the inspiration of the Louvre. Delacroix is said always to have made a sketch ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell









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