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More "Invention" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bohemia whose army had been defeated in the battle of the White Mountain in 1620. John Nepomuk was raised, they maintain, in opposition to the real national hero and martyr John Hus; therefore the whole story of the former John's death is all invention, and the tablet on the bridge over which he went to martyrdom is a brazen misstatement of fact. The tablet is of bronze, anyway, and shows the saint floating serenely on the surface, his head surrounded by a halo of stars ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... poem called the Theseid gives of this rising of the Amazons, how Antiope, to revenge herself upon Theseus for refusing her and marrying Phaedra, came down upon the city with her train of Amazons, whom Hercules slew, is manifestly nothing else but fable and invention. It is true, indeed, that Theseus married Phaedra, but that was after the death of Antiope, by whom he had a son called Hippolytus, or, as Pindar writes, Demophon. The calamities which befell Phaedra and this son, since none of the historians have contradicted ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... slight and subtle that they rarely pass into books and are only fully felt by direct personal contact, and the smallest knowledge of life shows how quickly anecdotes and sayings are distorted, coloured, and misplaced when they pass from lip to lip. Most of the 'good sayings' of history are invention, and most of them have been attributed to different persons. A history which is plainly written under the influence of party bias has the value of an advocate's speech giving one side of the question. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... In Boaistuau's and Gruget's editions of the Heptameron the dialogue following this tale is replaced by matter of their own invention. They did not dare to reproduce Queen Margaret's bold opinions respecting the clergy, the monastic orders, &c., at a time when scores of people, including even Counsellors of Parliament, were being burnt at the stake for ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... desired no more of it! He had a considerable income from investments, and also at least four thousand a year from the Five Towns Universal Thrift Club, that wonderful but unpretentious organization which now embraced every corner of the Five Towns—that gorgeous invention for profitably taking care of the pennies of the working-classes—that excellent device, his own, for selling to the working-classes every kind of goods at credit prices after having received part of the ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... whether the saying, "The corpse of an enemy smells sweet," attributed to Charles IX. of France, in allusion to Coligny, is historical or was the invention of a romancer. It occurs in ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the government, and take the power into their own hands. Letters containing the details of this plot were discovered by the Dutch, and straightway sent to the monarch. The statement has been made by Spanish writers, that this conspiracy had no existence excepting in Dutch invention, and that the proofs of guilt were all forged for the purpose of more completely destroying the Portuguese; but the evidence is too strong to be overthrown by any such allegation. The result was, that imperial edicts were immediately put forth, enjoining the expulsion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... shut in the berth which was now vacated, the occupants being called off to their respective duties, and the assistant-surgeon having retired into the dispensary to concoct a specific against sea-sickness of his own invention, which made him and those he persuaded to ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... a fault or a folly. And yet it is just this enthusiasm of the young men that moves and lifts the world. It is this faith in themselves and in the possibility of great things, it is this faith that lies at the heart of every invention, of every great discovery, of every magnificent achievement. Read the history of invention. The world is full of stories of men who got a new idea. They were laughed at, they were told it was impracticable; and, if they ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... have seen the railroad; I am so glad you have seen that magnificent invention. I wish I had been on it with you. I wish you had seen Stephenson; you would have delighted in him, I am sure. The hope of meeting him again is one of the greatest pleasures Liverpool holds out to me.... With regard to what are called "fine ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... upper region, there burst forth an uproar so sudden and overwhelming that it might well have been taken for a premature testing of a large sample of Partridgite; until a moment later it began to resemble more nearly the shrieks of some partially destroyed victim of that death-dealing invention. It was a bellow of anguish, and it poured through the house in a cascade of sound, advertising to all beneath the roof the twin facts that some person unknown was suffering and that whoever the sufferer might be ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... century. It does not, indeed, seem probable that all these pious frauds were chargeable upon the professors of real Christianity, upon those who entertained just and rational sentiments of the religion of Jesus. The greatest part of these fictitious writings undoubtedly flowed from the fertile invention of the Gnostic sects, though it cannot be affirmed that even true Christians were entirely innocent and irreproachable in this matter" (Ibid, p. 55). "This disingenuous and vicious method of surprising their adversaries by artifice, and striking them down, as it were, by lies and fiction, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... extraordinary number is attested by Grotius, [185] a man of genius and learning, who preserved his moderation amidst the fury of contending sects, and who composed the annals of his own age and country, at a time when the invention of printing had facilitated the means of intelligence, and increased the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... great ends. Why do you deliberate, sir? What invention is needed? All is so plain. And many wish you disaster. If you refuse this, it may be hard to ...
— Oliver Cromwell • John Drinkwater
... Cowley's invention found a true master in Dryden, whose To the Pious Memory of ... Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686), Song for St. Cecelia's Day (1687), and Alexander's Feast (1697) are justly praised for their 'concerted music.' The example had in fact already been set by a still greater master; ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... heard a great deal about Robert Fulton and the influences that have grown from his invention, but the little ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... countenance; and a patriotic lord-mayor and the corporation of London, to impress the public with deeper convictions of its importance, witnessed the indestructible property of the structure on the 110th anniversary of the commencement of the great fire of London. Yet the invention sunk into obscurity, and few records remain of it except the pompous obelisk and the ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... eat to live, and the majority of them must work, or they will have nothing to eat. I think the most of them labor cheerfully, and my experience is that idleness is the worst foe of man. But, on the other hand, every year invention so protects and fortifies capital, that one must do a larger business or employ fewer men. In five years the condition of labor has greatly changed at Hope Mills, and in five years more it will change again. This is the inexorable law of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... history of the great storm of November, 1703, A Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happened in the late Dreadfal Tempest, both by Sea and Land, may be set down as the first of his works of invention. It is a most minute and circumstantial record, containing many letters from eye-witnesses of what happened in their immediate neighbourhood. Defoe could have seen little of the storm himself from the interior of Newgate, but it is possible that the letters are genuine, and ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... referred to a new invention by a California scientist, named Henry Myers, whereby telephonic communication had been curiously instituted with intelligences all around us—not spirits or ghosts, but forms of life like our own, but which our senses had hitherto not been able to perceive. They ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... by a secret spring, had been pushed aside, and discovered, built in the wall, a large and deep iron chest, the lid of which, being open, displayed the wondrous mechanism of one of those Florentine locks of the sixteenth century, which, better than any modern invention, set all picklocks at defiance; and, moreover, according to the notions of that age, are supplied with a thick lining of asbestos cloth, suspended by gold wire at a distance from the sides of the chest, for the purpose of rendering incombustible the articles contained ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... were dead. The letter might, therefore, have easily been lost; but if anything here below can take the place of Providence, it is the post. Postal spirit, incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post gets hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is addressed, it displays ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... had not the art to rid himself of an undesirable travelling-companion, Fate, in the shape of a tin bath-tub, interposed in his behalf. This tub was the little paymaster's pride and delight, for in a measure it was his own invention. Having had it constructed in England especially for use in America, he had become so enamored of it that by this time he would sooner have parted with any other possession. It was a round affair, about three feet in diameter, had ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... Criminelle (1907, pp. 460 et seq.; cf., the same author's article, "La Criminalite Ancillaire," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, July and December, 1906), has studied the psychology of the servant-girl. He finds that she is specially marked by lack of foresight, vanity, lack of invention, tendency to imitation, and mobility of mind. These are characters which ally her to the prostitute. De Ryckere estimates the proportion of former servants among prostitutes generally as fifty per cent., and adds that what is called the "white slavery" here finds its most complacent and docile ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... allowing for exceptions, the literary merits of the Queen Anne time are due to invention, fancy, and wit, to a genius for satire exhibited in verse and prose, to a regard for correctness of form and to the sensitive avoidance of extremes. The poets of the period are for the most part without enthusiasm, without passion, and without the 'fine madness' which, as Drayton ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... been in our service," he said, "instead of that of Sweden. You would have mounted fast. You have all the requisites for success, above all, promptitude of decision and quickness of invention. You did well in getting away from that Jewish scoundrel in the hut, and in killing his master, but it was your adventure with the wolves that showed your quality. That idea of setting fire to the tree in which you were sitting, ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... fabled animal, an invention of the ancient Egyptians, with the body and claws of a lioness, and the head of a woman, or of a ram, or of a goat, all types or representations of the king, effigies of which are frequently placed before temples on each side of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... professed to be accompanied with critical notes. In a third trunk was a bundle of papers relating to the History of the Troubadours; in a fourth, was a collection of memoranda and literary sketches, connected with the invention of Arts and Sciences, with Antiquities, Dictionaries, and pieces exclusively bibliographical. A fifth trunk contained between two and three thousand cards, written upon on each side, respecting a collection of prints; describing the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... other works, but to encourage and extend their perusal. We can not too strongly recommend to young culturists to keep themselves well posted in this kind of literature, and give to every discovery and invention in this science a fair trial; not on a large scale, so as to sink money in fruitless experiments, but sufficient to afford a sure test of their real value. To no class of men is study more ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... powerful, but it cannot work alone; it has to have a partner. Its partner is man's TEMPERAMENT—his natural disposition. His temperament is not his invention, it is BORN in him, and he has no authority over it, neither is he responsible for its acts. He cannot change it, nothing can change it, nothing can modify it—except temporarily. But it won't stay modified. It is permanent, like the color of the man's eyes and the shape ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that species which generally dazzles the vulgar—it was not extravagant nor bizarre—he affected no system and no school. Many authors of his day seemed more novel and unique to the superficial. Profound and durable invention proceeds by subtle and fine gradations—it has nothing to do with those jerks and starts, those convulsions and distortions, which belong not to the vigour and health, but to the epilepsy and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the plot, and the delineation of character, Hindu dramatists show considerable skill, yet they do not appear to have been remarkable for much fertility of invention. Love, according to Hindu notions, is the subject of most ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... highly. 'His Pilgrim's Progress has great merit, both for invention, imagination, and the conduct of the story; and it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind. Few books, I believe, have had a more extensive sale. It is remarkable, that it begins very much like the poem of Dante; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... existence. People live in it for reasons of their own. The people who do not live in it wonder for what reasons, but attain no better solution of the mystery than the statement that the air is very fine. "We have such bracing air!" says the resident, as proudly as if that said air were his special invention and property. Certain West-country doctors affect Norton-on-Sea for patients in need of restful change, and their melancholy advent justifies the existence of the great hotel on the esplanade, and the row of bath-chairs at the corner. There are ten bath-chairs in all, and ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... tact for invention are certainly features peculiar to the French character, but they are far behind the English in their methods of transacting business; this remark is applicable even to most of the public offices; that France is extremely flourishing, and Paris ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... and crafts and professions mankind has spent in every generation all that it had of drudgery or of genius, it has won in them its whole estate. The steel mill, the battleship, the court of justice, the university—these and the like of them are not accidents, nor miracles of individual invention, nor products of the vague longings and gropings of society in general. They are each the product of a brotherhood, of generations working to meet one social necessity, of an apostolic succession of masters living in the ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Committee should be requested to report, from time to time, the result of those measures which they had found from experience to be most successful; whilst every friend to such a cause, who might suggest an invention or a means to facilitate these objects, would be certain, that in this Committee his plans would receive the most attentive consideration from those who would possess the power and the inclination to carry them ...
— An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck (1825) • William Hillary
... Gore, Dissertations, p. 16. St. Luke i. 32, 33. — "How can all this," Dr. Chase asks, "be the invention of a believer in the Messiahship of Jesus when the Jews had rejected Him, and when the Resurrection and Ascension had raised the conception of His Messiahship to the height of a spiritual and universal ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... An ingenious invention of this description was recently exhibited at the Royal Institution. A pencil and a small bead are so connected together by means of a thread passing over pullies, that if a person, looking through an eye-piece, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... with a big half breed giving evidence for the Police in a rustling case. The Judge, ignorantly persisting in his demand for a name for a child of nature who had all his life been content with "Blue Pete," had swallowed an invention of the moment, though every rancher in the room laughed at the ludicrously unfit term they knew so well. "Peter Maverick," the halfbreed had replied ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... support to the substance of the thesis maintained above is very welcome, strengthened as it is by the point which he makes in the first of the following sentences: "The deliberate invention of an incident, which had no point of contact in the authentic record of his life, is a procedure of which no assured parallel is found in the book. We must at least believe that a trustworthy tradition lies behind the passage in ch. xi; and the conclusion to which ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... with which any lively literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... extreme satisfaction which children derive from quenching their thirst with pure water? And who that has perverted his appetite for drink, by stimulating his palate with bitter beer, sour cider, rum and water, and other beverages of human invention, but would be a gainer, even on the score of mere animal gratification, without any reference to health, if he could bring back his vitiated taste to the simple ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she had overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention. They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen, as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... they would not have oozed so speedily), in order to make that iced red-currant fool of which she had so freely partaken at Miss Mapp's last bridge party. That was a very scurvy trick, for iced red-currant fool was an invention of Miss Mapp's, who, when it was praised, said that she inherited the recipe from her grandmother. But Miss Poppit had evidently entered the lists against Grandmamma Mapp, and she had as evidently guessed that quite inferior ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... the part afterwards played in the trials. This statement has been repeated by so many recent writers as to become a commonplace of accepted history; it would seem, however, that the representation depends on the invention of a modern essayist, who transferred to the colonial period ideas derived from his acquaintance with the phenomena of contemporary spiritualistic seances, and that the habit of "trying projects," no doubt universal in colonial times, had nothing ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... tenfold for all the evil which had been inflicted on his servants. The dying words of these men were noted down: their farewell letters were kept as treasures; and, in this way, with the help of some invention and exaggeration, was formed a copious supplement to the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... youth, Whose every joy is born of pain, Through all our days were suffered to remain; Too merciful the law, That sentences each animal to death, Did not the road that leads to it, E'er half-completed, unto us appear Than death itself more sad and drear. Thou blest invention of the Gods, And worthy of their intellects divine, Old age, the last of all our ills, When our desires still linger on, Though every ray of hope is gone; When pleasure's fountains all are dried, Our pains increasing, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... these things from hearsay, from listening to the talk at the Towers, while Osborne had run up from Cambridge two or three times to hear this, or to see that, wonder of the season. But she had the advantage over him in greater boldness of invention to eke out her facts; and besides she had more skill in the choice and arrangement of her words, so as to make it appear as if the opinions that were in reality quotations, were formed by herself from actual experience or personal observation; such as, in speaking ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... limited range of their civil and domestic life, and out of the simple theme of the characters above mentioned, the invention of the Greek comic writers contrived to extract an inexhaustible multitude of variations, and yet, what is deserving of high praise, even in that on which they grounded their development and catastrophe, they ever remained true to their ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... sense urges that mechanical ingenuity, which has done so much in other directions, should be employed in making the acquisition of knowledge less cumbrous and less tedious; that as we travel by steam, so we should also read by steam, and be helped in our studies by the varied resources of modern invention. There lies on my table at this present moment a Handbook of Library Appliances, in which fifty-three closely printed pages are devoted to this interesting subject, with illustrations of various contrivances ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... nationalities—Egyptian or otherwise; and she rather wondered at the omission. But it did not occur to her to suppose that this portion of the entertainment had been entirely imaginary—a lurid figment of Harry's vivid fancy and fertile invention. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... de sa fin, Par une invention jolie, En flairant seulement le vin, De trois jours prolonga sa vie. Le vin retarde plus la mort, qu'il ne la hate, Temoin notre Hypocrate, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... the name I have used, "the Discourager of Hesitancy." It is the invention of Mr. Frank Stockton, as every one knows, but I applied it to my fellow-student because of her conduct in the case of the wrens; and a day or two later she proved her right to it by her treatment of a chipping-sparrow family near the house. She ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... bore upon several members of the Union, to the legislatures of none did this efficient and peaceable remedy, as it is called, suggest itself. The discovery of this important feature in our Constitution was reserved to the present day. To the statesmen of South Carolina belongs the invention, and upon the citizens of that State will, unfortunately, fall the evils of reducing it ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... to pause. He knocked off the tell-tale shoe with the help of a stone, threw it away into the middle of a bramble, and then after a little consultation, she decided on herself encountering the smith, not perhaps having much confidence in the readiness of speech or invention of her companion. ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a piece of wax, or an awl, according to the particular service in which his master thinks fit to employ him. When I saw him, he held a candle in this obsequious posture. I was very well pleased with the cobbler's invention, that had so ingeniously contrived an inferior, and stood a little while contemplating this inverted idolatry, wherein the image did homage to the man. When we meet with such a fantastic vanity in one of this order, it is no wonder ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... brigades and demi-brigades, the former commanded by Brigadier-General G. D. Wagner, Colonel C. G. Harker, and Colonel F. T. Sherman; the latter, by Colonels Laiboldt, Miller, Wood, Walworth, and Opdyke. The demi-brigade was an awkward invention of Granger's; but at this time it was necessitated—perhaps by the depleted condition of our regiments, which compelled the massing of a great number of regimental organizations into a division to ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... been engaged in these fascinating but wild pursuits, when results of very great importance began to appear. In a scientific point of view, the discovery of the strong acids laid the true foundation of chemistry; in a political point of view, the invention of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... with the introduction of this tremendous new motive power, men had begun to build space ships and explore the sky. And, as so often happens with a new invention, the thing had grown rather ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... from his leathern bullet-pouch a piece of greased rag, kept there to wrap bullets in before ramming them in the barrel, he placed it in the "pan" of his rifle. Does the reader know what the "pan" of a rifle is? If not he knows nothing of flintlock guns, and I must explain. Before the invention of percussion caps, guns were provided with a little groove-shaped trough by the side of the powder chamber. From this "pan" as it was called, a little hole led into the charge. Over the pan fitted a piece of steel on a hinge, so that it could be opened ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... production placed them beyond the reach of the great majority. A single copy served for a community or a district in which the Hebrew or the Greek tongue was understood, but in localities where other languages were in use the living voice was needed to make revelation known. It is only since the invention of printing and the application of the steam-engine to the economical and rapid production of books, and since modern linguists have multiplied the translations of the Bible, that it has become in their own tongues accessible to believers in all lands, available for private perusal and ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... 1640 issued out writs under the great seal to call a great council of all the peers of England to meet and attend his majesty at York, previous to the meeting of the long parliament, the earl of Clarendon[e] mentions it as a new invention, not before heard of; that is, as he explains himself, so old, that it had not been practiced in some hundreds of years. But, though there had not so long before been an instance, nor has there been any since, of assembling them in so solemn a manner, yet, in ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... enjoined her to keep a quiet tongue about his private affairs, which Mrs. Kebby usually did until excited by too copious drams of gin, when she talked freely and unwisely to all the servants in the Square. It was to her observation and invention that Berwin owed ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... assumed that Buddhism was brought into existence by Gautama Buddha. The previous existence of Buddhism, Jainism and Arhat philosophy is rejected as an absurd and ridiculous invention of the Buddhists and others, who attempted thereby to assign a very high antiquity to their own religion. In consequence of this erroneous impression every Hindu book referring to the doctrines of Buddhists is declared to have been written subsequent to the time of Gautama Buddha. For ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... on Tom Collins for the last month and I instantly knew that I recognized the young friend from New York. Also my wits were at a branching of the road and I didn't know just what to do or say as Jacob waited with easy courtesy for my decision. And again I was too much perturbed for invention and had to speak out ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... stove business required his whole attention, and the machine branch was sold out to one of the other partners; he then bent all his energies to the invention and perfection of the stoves, and the vigorous prosecution of the business of the company. After conducting the business of the company ten years, he felt the want of a larger field for enterprise, cast around for the most eligible situation, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... too, of the future. There have been fifty magical years when you look back,—years of discovery, of perfection in art and invention, of nations making rapid strides, of Africa illumined by explorers, of Japan coming to the front when hardly fifty years have elapsed since she first ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... "It is no invention, citizen," rejoined Chauvelin with slow emphasis. "The papers do exist. They are actually in the possession of the Montorgueils, father and son. To capture the two aristos would be not only a blunder, but criminal ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... omitted in the Treatise. The nod is given to elocution. Invention is discussed, but only as a tool to assist the communicator in amplifying his ideas, as a means to spin out his thoughts to extreme lengths. Arrangement, memory, and delivery are overlooked. Accordingly, the Treatise neatly fits into the category of a Renaissance rhetoric on ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... such perfection, they lengthen their summer as long as they please, giving to every plant the degree of heat it would receive from the sun in its native soil. The effect is very near the same; I am surprised we do not practise (sic) in England so useful an invention. This reflection leads me to consider our obstinacy in shaking with cold, five months in the year rather than make use of stoves, which are certainly one of the greatest conveniencies (sic) of life. Besides, they are so far from spoiling the form of a room, that they add very much to the ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... revelations of ancient fashions, forms, and customs, are its chief glory, not to be obscured even by its modern renown for linen woven by hand and by machinery. For a person who really understands Russian architecture,— not the architecture of St. Petersburg, which is chiefly the invention of foreigners,—Yaroslavl and other places on the northern Volga in this neighborhood, widely construed, are mines of information and delight. However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... these studious mistresses of invention give laws to the polished world. After passing to London, Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna, their models of fashion are disseminated all over Europe. These models alike travel to the banks of the Neva and the shores of the Propontis. At Constantinople, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... solicitude, went on board himself, before their departure, to see that everything had been completed to the wish of the officers. The ships were provided with a simple and excellent apparatus for distilling fresh from salt water, the invention of Dr. Irving, who accompanied the expedition. It consisted merely in fitting a tube to the ship's kettle, and applying a wet mop to the surface as the vapour was passing. By these means, from thirty-four to forty ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... probable, on the contrary, that, after what he had done in the morning, they would have ascribed his charges to a mistake, or seen in them a weak invention in order to cover his retreat? Therefore it was a thousand times better to keep silence, to be resigned to postpone to another day every attempt to avenge himself in a manner corresponding to the injury he had suffered, and all the more effectively, as his vengeance ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... considered one of the earliest reformers of the practice of physic. He left some papers written in elegant Latin, in the Ashmolean Collection, which contain many curious particulars relative to the first invention of several medicines, and the state of physic at that period. Petitot, the celebrated enameller, owed his success in colouring to some chemical secrets communicated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... Sir my Brother, most sorry:—and so you have actually signed that HANOVER CONVENTION with our worst Enemy? France is far from having done so; France has done, and will do, great things. Our Royal heart grieves much at your situation; but is not alarmed; no, Your Majesty has such invention, vigor and ability, superior to any crisis, our clever younger Brother! And herewith we pray God to have you in his holy keeping." This is the purport of King Louis's Letter;—which Friedrich folds together again, looking up from perusal of it, we may fancy with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... into five parts. This analysis of rhetoric into inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio is to all intents and purposes universal in classical rhetoric and must be understood to give one a valid idea of its content.[58] Inventio, so often lazily mistranslated as "invention," is the art of exploring the material to discover all the arguments which may be brought to bear in support of a proposition and in refutation of the opposing arguments. It includes the study of arguments and fallacies; and is that part ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... pain in bones and brain I had I need not mention; It seemed to me such pangs must be Old Satan's own invention; Albeit I Was sure I'd die, The doctor reassured me— And, true enough, With his vile stuff, ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... spite and jealousy, and which is expressed with the intention of doing mischief and giving pain to the person of whom the judgment is expressed. You will occasionally find such judgments supported by wilful misrepresentation, and even by pure invention. In such a case as this, the essential thing is not the unfavorable opinion; it is the malice which leads to its entertainment and expression. And the conduct of the offending party should be regarded with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... early eminence has been extended by some, even to the gifts of nature; and an opinion has been long conceived, that quickness of invention, accuracy of judgment, or extent of knowledge, appearing before the usual time, presage a short life. Even those who are less inclined to form general conclusions, from instances which by their own nature must be rare, have yet been inclined to prognosticate no suitable progress from the first ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... told me," he said, "that the invention of the scheme that has ended so well is due as much to you as to him, that you accompanied him on the reconnoitring expedition and shared in the dangers of the party in the barge. I trust Sir Francis Vere will ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... vibrations must necessarily be rendered irregular from the operation of many interrupting causes, such as the introduction or failure of certain manufactures, a greater or less prevalent spirit of agricultural enterprise, years of plenty, or years of scarcity, wars and pestilence, poor laws, the invention of processes for shortening labour without the proportional extension of the market for the commodity, and, particularly, the difference between the nominal and real price of labour, a circumstance which has perhaps more than any other contributed ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... have an advocate Across whose memory convenient clouds Come floating at convenient intervals. The harvest fields that man has honored most Are those where human life is reaped like grain. There never rose a mart, nor shone a sail, Nor sprang a great invention into birth, By other motive than man's love of gold. It is for wrong that he is eloquent; For lust that he indites his sweetest songs. Christ was betrayed by treason of a man, And scourged and hung upon a tree by men; And the sad women who were at his cross, And sought him early ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... "the fruit of your invention for tracing out your father, and I will tell you what has occurred to me as the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... with sudden vigour, "Oh, 'tis a lie," he cried, "a fresh invention of that lying brain to ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... sir and friend, that I blame only the Ecole itself; no, I blame the system by which it is recruited. This system is the concours, competition,—a modern invention, essentially bad; bad not only in science, but wherever it is employed, in arts, in all selections of men, of projects, of things. If it is a reproach to our great Ecoles that they have not produced men superior to other educational establishments, it is still ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... fancy has surrounded her history with many surprising incidents, and Lope de Vega, the Spanish dramatist, has made her the heroine of a romantic play, but her actual history is so full of interest that we need not draw contributions from fable or invention. ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... was more impressed with the grandeur of human invention, than when ascending the dome. I could with difficulty conceive the means by which such a mighty edifice had been lifted into the air. That small frame of Sir Christopher Wren must have contained a mind capable of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... kindly humanity may be distinguished in the selection, "The Inconsiderate Waiter," which you will read in this collection. The lovable Barrie, with his tenderness for child life, his poetic fancy and whimsical invention, will be revealed to you more truly when you have read his novels, Sentimental Tommy, Tommy and Grizel, The Little Minister, The Little White Bird, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... never heard of a man sending flowers to a woman. Flowers were used for decorative purposes, also for funerals. He sent Genevieve flowers nearly every day, and so far as he was concerned the idea was original, as positive an invention as ever arose in the ...
— The Game • Jack London
... brighter every year. His supreme achievement was to show that a book might be crammed with the most wildly exciting incidents, and yet reveal profound and acute analysis of character, and be written with consummate art. His tales have all the fertility of invention and breathless suspense of Scott and Cooper, while in literary style they immeasurably surpass the finest work of these ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and William Ellford, esquire, of Plymouth. The latter, as chairman of the Plymouth committee, sent up for inspection an engraving of a plan and section of a slave-ship, in which the bodies of the slaves were seen stowed in the proportion of rather less than one to a ton. This happy invention gave all those, who saw it, a much better idea than they could otherwise have had of the horrors of their transportation, and contributed greatly, as will appear afterwards, to impress the public ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... ominously like an echo from Naudet[28] who, in the course of lauding Plautus' infinite invention and variety of embroidery, would translate him into a zealous social reformer by saying: "L'auteur se proposait de faire beaucoup rire les spectateurs, mais il voulait aussi qu'ils se corrigeassent en riant." All this is disappointing. We should have expected Gallic ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... his son after the bushel-of-green-spectacles bargain. He invented the most wonderful stories, and told them with imperturbable sedateness. Finding a credulous listener in me, he drew all the more freely upon his invention. When, however, he gravely asserted that Jonas was not the only man who had spent three days and three nights in a whale's belly, but that he himself had caught a whale with a man inside it who had lived there for more than a year on blubber, which, he declared, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Avalon fisherman and tackle-maker, had made me a double split-bamboo rod, and I had brought the much-talked-of B-Ocean reel. This is Boschen's invention—one he was years in perfecting. It held fifteen hundred feet of No. 24 line. And I will say now that it is a grand reel, the best on the market. But I did not know that then, and had to go through the trip with it, till we were both tried out. Lastly, and ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... Confirmation, Penance, Holy Orders, Matrimony and Extreme Unction were declared not to be Sacraments of the Gospel, and the Roman doctrine concerning Purgatory, Indulgences, the invocation of saints, and veneration of images and relics was pronounced to be a foolish and vain invention, contradictory to ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... war has depended largely upon two factors. One of these is invention. New weapons and new methods have become available, and have modified tactics, strategy, the relative advantage of offensive and defensive. The other chief factor in the evolution of the war has been social organisation. As Machiavelli points out in his Art of War, there ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... adapted to each other that the greater dispersion produced by the substance of one should be corrected by the smaller dispersion of the other. This contrivance corrected entirely the colored images which had rendered all previous telescopes very imperfect. He finds in this invention all the elements of design, as it appeared in the thought and action of a human designer. First, conjecture of certain laws or facts in optics. Then, experiment proving these laws or facts. Then, the contrivance and formation of an instrument by which those ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... tremendous success. With Cato Addison reached the highest point of his fame as an author in his own day, but now we remember him much more as a writer of delightful essays, and as the creator or at least the perfecter of Sir Roger, for to Steele is due the first invention of the worthy knight. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... days, So that the weather, or the ferule's stings, Colds in the head, or fifty other things, Transformed the helpless Hebrew thrice a week To guttural Pequot or resounding Greek, The vibrant accent skipping here and there Just as it pleased invention or despair; No controversial Hebraist was the Dame; With or without the points pleased her the same. If any tyro found a name too tough, And looked at her, pride furnished skill enough; She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing, And cleared the five-barred ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the product, and if he has special skill may rightly have the advantage of it, also hold that if a man toils with his brain, perhaps for years, and, uniting genius with perseverance, evolves some valuable invention, the public may rightly claim the benefit. The Americans have been more far-seeing. The enormous museum of patents which I saw at Washington is significant of the attention paid to inventors' claims; and the nation profits immensely from having in this direction ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... same Chinese anticipated us in several most important discoveries, by as many centuries as we may have preceded others. In the knowledge of the properties of the magnet, the composition of gunpowder, the invention of printing, the manufacture of porcelain, of silk, and in the progress of literature, they were before us. But then the power of making further discoveries was arrested, and a stagnation of the intellect prevented their advancing in the path ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... and amusing way of giving a present is not really Eliza's own invention. I did it some years ago when I gave her a pincushion. As the pincushion was made to imitate a poached egg (and really very like), perhaps the humour in that instance had rather more point. However, I do not say this at all to find fault with Eliza. I am rather ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... things. It was then, one golden summer day, among the flowering woods of Richmond, that I invented a new art, the art of preposterous conversation. A middle-class country has prevented me from patenting my exquisite invention, which has been closely imitated by dozens of people much older and much stupider than myself; but nobody so far has been able to rival me in my own particular line of business, and my society 'turns' at luncheon parties, dances, and dinners are invariably ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of some blessed isle of the southern seas, whose empty luxuriance they might change into luxury, and there living a long harmonious idyll of wedded love, in which old age and death should be provided against by never taking them into account. This mere fancy, which, poor in courage as it was in invention, she was far from capable of carrying into effect, yet seemed to herself the outcome and sign of a whole world of devotion in her bosom. If one of the meanest of human conditions is conscious heroism, paltrier yet is heroism before the fact, incapable of self realization! But even the poorest dreaming ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... invention this, Worthy of Love's most honied kiss, This art of writing billet-doux In buds and odours and bright hues, In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks, Uttering (as well as silence may,) The sweetest ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... say, that Love passeth knowledge. How could man's imagination and invention ever have produced such a loving Person as our Lord, revealing ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... course of time he will learn—if indeed he has not already learnt, and is concealing the fact—that the "converted infidels" will not stand a minute's scrutiny. The only safe method is to drop questionable cases and resort to sheer invention. Even that method, however, is not devoid of peril, as one of its practitioners has recently discovered. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes must by this time be extremely sorry he circulated that false and foolish story ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... "Vrai Dieu!" that person had exclaimed. "If what the dwarf said be true? To cross the king!—and yet," he had added cynically, "it sounds most unlike. Did Aladdin flee from the genii of the lamp? Such a magician is Francis. Chateaux, gardens—'tis clearly an invention of Triboulet's!" And the fallacy of this conclusion the duke's plaisant had not ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... John Brenwalter. My father, a drunkard, had a patent for an invention, for making coffee-berries out of clay; but he was an honest man and would not himself engage in the manufacture. He was, therefore, only moderately wealthy, his royalties from his really valuable invention bringing him hardly enough to pay his expenses of litigation with ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... could not hope to keep it always confined to the channel of religious emotion. People began to feel the need of painting as something that entered into their every-day lives almost as much as we nowadays feel the need of the newspaper; nor was this unnatural, considering that, until the invention of printing, painting was the only way, apart from direct speech, of conveying ideas to the masses. At about the time when Bellini and his contemporaries were attaining maturity, the Renaissance had ceased ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... when ground and spread over the fields, they form a fertilizing manure. Combs, knife-handles and many useful articles are made from the horns, which, when softened in boiling water, become pliable, so as to be formed into lanterns—an invention usually ascribed to King Alfred. We are furnished with candles from the tallow, and the feet afford an oil adapted to a variety of purposes. Glue is made from the cartilages, gristles and parings of the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Most of the princes of the Low Countries remained faithful to him and the Count of Hainault seemed inclined to go back to him; but all hesitated as to what he was to do to recover from the check. Van Artevelde showed more invention and more boldness. The Flemish communes had concentrated their forces not far from the spot where the two kings had kept their armies looking at one another; but they had maintained a strict neutrality, and at the invitation of the Count of Flanders, who promised them that the King of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... came to supper. The family as a whole were very devoted. Mr. Chichester Bell, you may recall, was the co-inventor with my father and Mr. Tainter of the phonograph. The wax records that are used today are their invention and their company, the Columbia Phonograph Company, operated ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... the chief speaker: he held out brilliant prospects; he favored the Klosking with a discourse on advertising. No talent availed without it; large posters, pictures, window-cards, etc.; but as her talent was superlative, he must now endeavor to keep up with it by invention in his line—the puff circumstantial, the puff poetic, the puff anecdotal, the puff controversial, all tending to blow the fame of the Klosking in every eye, and ring it in every ear. "You take my advice," said he, "and devote this money, every penny of it, to Publicity. Don't ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... eaves or hollow trees, and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, art, law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, that man could come out of that state alone by his own unaided efforts. They ascribed the invention of language, art, and science, the institution of civil society, government, and laws, to the intervention of the gods. It remained for the Epicureans—who, though unable, like their modern successors, the Positivists or Developmentists, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... and natural science together and in harmony (despite the conflict between them). As men have progressed historically and socially from age to age their interpretation of nature has been modified with growing discovery, insight, invention, and utilization of her resources. Children also pass through a series of metamorphoses which are both physical and psychological, changing temper and mental tendency as the body ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... claim for Thorwaldsen that he was a great and original genius. He lacked that hirsute, independent quality of Michelangelo, and surely he lacked the Attic invention. He was receptive as a woman, and he builded on what had been done. He moved in the line of least resistance—made friends of Protestant and Catholic alike; won the warm recognition of the Pope, who averred, "Thorwaldsen is a good Catholic, only he does not know it." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... proverbial extent, with a general disbelief in the possible veracity of a brother sportsman, and an irresistible; desire to talk of new and privately discovered sporting-heavens. The gold-seeker stakes his claim, the "wild-catting" oil-borer boards up his lot, the inventor patents his invention, and the author copyrights his brain-fruit; but the sportsman crazily tells all he knows. So the secret gets out, and the discoverer is robbed of his treasure and forced to seek new fields for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... try his hand at chipping a tomahawk out of the rare material. But, as soon as he did so, Mr. Evans suggests, he would find to his surprise that it yielded to his blows; in short, that he had got that singular phenomenon, a malleable stone, to deal with. Hammering away at his new invention, he must shortly have hammered it into a shapely axe. The new process took his practical fancy at once: vistas of an untold wealth of scalps floated gaily before his fevered brain; and he proceeded to hammer himself various weapons and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and degradation of the conquered people—the revival of the military spirit with the private wars of the nobles—the feudal system and institution of chivalry—the crusades, and revival of letters following the capture of Constantinople by the Turks—the invention of printing, and consequent extension of knowledge to the great body of the people—the discovery of the compass, and, with it, of America, by Columbus, and doubling of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco de Gama—the discovery of gunpowder, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... he made his first investment in the purchase of an interest in an express company. While still engaged in this capacity he met Woodruff, the inventor of the sleeping car, and seeing the value of the invention he later engaged in its manufacture. From then forward, as superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania railroad, in the oil fields and in the steel industry of which he has long been regarded as the king, his rise has been the result, not of good fortune, ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... took him up and said what was appropriate regarding the budding celebrity. Biographers and reporters sought information concerning his life. As it was very simple and perfectly straightforward, they resorted to invention. And thus it is that at the present day Maupassant appears to us like one of those ancient heroes whose origin and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... went forward. They were past the first German barbed wire now, but the way was still not completely open, for more opposing strands were found farther on. However, this was not unexpected, for often three or more lines of this American invention were to be found opposing the ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... unreliability of the object image, it would seem very unsafe to use it as the link between percept and symbol. Much better to connect the symbol directly with the experience and let it gain its meaning from that. As to its value in constructive work in arts, literature, drama, and invention, the testimony of some experts in each field bears witness that it is not a necessary accompaniment of success. The musician need not hear, mentally, all the harmonies, changes, intervals; he may think them in terms of notes, rests, etc., as he composes. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... himself, "I had expected pleasure from the invention of arguments, from the arrangement of them, from the putting of them together, and from the thought, in the interim, that I was engaged in an innocent contest for literary honor; but all my pleasures were damped by the facts which were now ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... knowledge that is still so imperfect as to be actively self-conscious; nor yet that it should grow or vary perceptibly unless under such changed conditions as shall baffle memory, and present the alternative of either invention—that ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... of the day, we are told, and many hours stolen from the night, had long been devoted to the studies which were compelling him to become himself an observer of the heavens. He had worked wonders of mechanical invention, forced thereto by necessity; had become a member of a philosophical society, and his name was beginning to be circulated among the great, rumors of his work reaching and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... years since confronted the millers of this city was how to obtain from the wheat which they had to grind a white, clear flour, and to so increase the yield as to leave some margin for profit. The first step in the solution of this problem was the invention by E. N. La Croix of the machine which has since been called the purifier, which removed the dirt and light impurities from the refuse middlings in the same manner that dust and chaff are removed from wheat by a fanning mill. The middlings thus ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... and gnashing his teeth in darkness and torture, he heard a faint noise above his head. Then something seemed to leap from the ceiling and alight softly on the floor. He shuddered with terror. Was it some new torture of the Wondersmith's invention? The next moment, he felt some small animal crawling over his body, and a soft, silky paw was pushed timidly across his face. His heart ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... unmanly lamentations Roderic was with difficulty recovered by the assiduities of the attendants. At length incited by their expostulations to the collectedness of reflection and the fortitude of exertion, he determined, with that quickness of invention with which he had been endowed at his birth, upon a plan to elude, if possible, the perseverance of Edwin, and the menaces of his fate. Recollecting that his person was not unknown to the swain, he communicated his instructions to those who were about him, and ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... of Simp Wolley and Bud Briskett, who had tried to get his invention, as told in the preceding volume, "The Moving Picture Girls," but they were in jail, as far as he knew. Clearly there was some mystery here, but it was not to be solved ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted. By most writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels. Moreover, it has the hearty concurrence of the Hon. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... hair hung in graceful ringlets;" and in the procession female attendants, with ivory combs, seemed to dress and ornament the royal hair of the goddess. The palm-tree, and the lamp in the shape of a boat, appeared in the procession. If the symbol we are speaking of is not a mere modern invention, it is to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... moor brass, an' awm sure they've easier wark. For if this country doesn't get new machines, other countries will, an' when we're left behund hand an' connot meet 'em i'th' market, we'st be a deeal war off nor ony new invention can mak us. All at's been done soa far has helped to mak us better off. They connot mak a machine to think, they're forced to stop thear; an' aw dooant daat if we'd to live long enuff, ther'd be a time when chaps ud ha nowt to do but think-but it's to be hoaped 'at they'd have summat ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... traveller relates a circumstance concerning the orang-otang in its wild state, which is indicative of very considerable powers, both of reflection and invention. When the fruits on the mountains are exhausted, they will frequently descend to the sea-coast, where they feed on various species of shell-fish, but in particular on a large sort of oyster, which commonly lies open on the shore. "Fearful," he says, "of putting in their paws, ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... wet and dry, As empty as the last new sonnet, Till by and by came Mercury, And, having mused upon it, "Why, here," cried he, "the thing of things In shape, material, and dimensions! Give it but strings, and lo, it sings, A wonderful invention!" ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... he exclaimed. "Why, he fairly doted on her, and, since her death, he can hardly assuage his grief. He is a gentleman in every sense of the word, and his character ought to be a sufficient protection against so gross a slander. This is a contemptible invention of his political opponents. I will soon vindicate him, however. I shall have Mrs. Pattmore's body exhumed, and shall call an inquest. Then, if any one has any charges to make, there will be an opportunity for them to come forward. I will not consent to see a friend of mine ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... indescribably harmonious and striking about her entire dress. She wore a gown of mauve barege, little reddish brown buskins, whose ribbons traced an X on her fine, white, open-worked stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a Marseilles invention, whose name, canezou, a corruption of the words quinze aout, pronounced after the fashion of the Canebiere, signifies fine weather, heat, and midday. The three others, less timid, as we have already ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The most useful inventions and the most marvelous products of the human brain are not the railway and telegraph after all. The art of printing, which infinitely multiplies thought and sows it in the very air and every morning photographs the world anew, is a more useful invention and in its day was a great wonder. Still farther back, hidden in the mists of antiquity, lies the invention of the alphabet that is even more useful and marvelous. It is when we get back to the oldest tools, the hammer and plough and loom, that we come ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... the schemes by which our finances have been greatly helped everywhere, and which is now imitated by many Churches and Societies all over the world—the Self-Denial Week, established in 1886—was The General's own invention. It was at a time when, as ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... were to become a fact. Virgilia, who always ran with wealthy people, often gave the impression of possessing greater means than she really commanded; this was doubly serious when it came to her taking up with a man who was altogether dependent on his wits, his skill and his invention, and subject to the passing whims of a fickle public taste. She went down to the library, to discuss the affair with ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... very friendly manner, to go with his countrymen to {306} the mouth of the Wisconsin, where he said that he had an appointment to meet some French traders who were coming thither with goods—a piece of pure invention which, however, served its purpose very well. Accau refused to go, preferring the savage life to traveling with the friar. But Du Gay gladly joined him, and the two set off in a small canoe that had been ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... and early religious development, could hardly have been made by historians having the limited range of knowledge possessed by the native and classical writers who are responsible for the facts. It is an easy, but not a satisfactory method of criticism to declare what is not to one's liking to be invention and romance, and it has until late years been difficult to combat such an argument. The battle has raged round wordy disputes, the merits of which are governed by the abilities of the respective disputants; that this is no longer possible is due to the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... there is a passage in the Privy Council Records which gives an idea of the spirit of the age about which we write. It runs thus: "Whereas the boots were the ordinary way to explicate matters relating to the Government, and there is now a new invention and engine called the Thumbkins, which will be very effectual to the purpose aforesaid, the Lords ordain that when any person shall by their order be put to the torture, the said boots and thumbkins be applied to them, as it shall be found ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the words were written with cht, as in the Irish acht but, &c., or with the slight change of t into d, as in ochd, &c. This is the opinion of O'Brien, when he says the word lecht is the Celtic root of the Latin lectio—the aspirate h is but a late invention.—O'Br. Ir. Dict. voc. lecht. In process of time the true sound of cht or chd was confounded with the kindred sound of chc, which was commonly, though corruptly, ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... to him and his brethren in the early days. The truth is that every brook trout is an Ishmaelite. The hand of every creature is against him, from that of the dragon-fly larva to that of the man with the latest invention in the way of patent fishing-tackle. It is no wonder if he turns the tables on his enemies whenever he has a chance, or even if he sometimes goes so far, in his general ruthlessness, as to ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... in his pocket an ingenious little invention which he had exhibited all along the road as an indispensable article in every well-kept house. He wanted to show it to her, but it was too cold a day for her to stop outside. Wouldn't she allow him to step in and explain ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... may have as great an aversion to copying letters as myself and at the same time be aware of the necessity under many circumstances of keeping a duplicate, I must not forget to mention an extremely useful invention which adds another evidence of the prolific ingenuity of France. It consists in a machine for copying letters, registers, deeds, or in fact any description of written document, or stamped, or in relief, by which they can be repeated even a thousand times if required and in a very short space ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... Parliament was passed, confirming the patent to Mr Stead, as though it had been regularly filed within the prescribed period. A second patent was afterwards obtained, but that related more particularly to the form of blocks. The first patent, which had been infringed, was for an invention consisting of a mode of paving with blocks of similar sizes and dimensions, of either a sexagonal, triangular, or square form, so as to make ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... changing and destroying former types. The old order of everything changes and passes away, giving place to the new. But is this the whole truth? Evolution is a radical process, but we must never forget that it is also, and at the same time, exceedingly conservative. The cell was the first invention of the animal kingdom, and all higher animals are and must be cellular in structure. Our tissues were formed ages on ages ago; they have all persisted. Most of our organs are as old as worms. All these are very old, older than the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... rainbows, ere they drop in showers, A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs, Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs. Nay, oft in dreams invention we bestow To change a flounce or ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... dropping his cue with a loud clatter to the floor. "Soulscape! Here's a man talking about not creating, and then throws out an invention like soulscape! Harley, you ought to write a dictionary. With a word like soulscape to start with, it would sweep ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of poetry are the well-known ones which tell the number of days in the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... 'can tell the severe trial which the writing of it proved to me. I had expected pleasure from the invention of the arguments, from the arrangement of them, from the putting of them together, and from the thought, in the interim, that I was engaged in an innocent contest for literary honour. But all my pleasure was damped by the facts which ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... commentator, LANE, says that several Arab writers describe this mountain of loadstone, and amongst others he instances El Caswini, who lived in the latter half of the thirteenth century.[1] EDRISI, the Arab geographer, likewise alludes to it; but the invention belongs to an earlier age, and Palladius, in describing Ceylon, says that the magnetic rock is in the adjacent islands called Maniolae (Maldives?), and that ships coming within the sphere of its influence are irresistibly drawn towards it, and lose all power of progress except in its direction. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Cabot said. "And while we are speaking of the different kinds of glass we must not forget to mention the dark red ruby glass perfected in 1680 by Kunckel, the director of the Potsdam glass works, for it is a very ingenious invention. The deep color is obtained by putting a thin layer of gold between the white glass and the ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... likely to gain us the means of getting out of our difficulty, no more than my acquaintance with Mercury will help me to a pair of wings. So a truce to classical ideas, and let us see whether scientific ones may not serve us better just now. You have a quick invention, brother Caspar; can you think of anything—I mean anything within our reach—that would make the air-bag of ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... life into verse and song. When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him. Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be chronicled and sarcastically commented ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... know—it will work," Kitty continued. "I've been thinking and thinking, and if there's trouble between them; if he says he isn't going on with her till he's made his fortune; if he throws that unopened letter in her face, I'll bring in my invention to deal with the problem, and then you'll see! But all this fuss for a little tiny button of a thing like that in there—pshaw! Mr. Crozier is worth a real queen with the beauty of one of the Rhine maidens. How he used to tell that story of the Rhinegold—do you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Joshua! You feel the dawn coming, and then you crow! For lightness of touch and richness of invention, give ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... brief and general as the present, it would be out of place to discuss the history of this extraordinary invention. We have no hesitation in asserting that a method of magnifying distant objects was known to Baptista Porta and others; but it seems to be equally certain that an instrument for producing these effects was first constructed in Holland, ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... sake," until she should be better able to endure his trial, and until he should have more than his own pure word and character to show. And probably if he had then been tried, with so many things against him, and no production of that poor brother, his tale would have seemed but a flimsy invention, and "Guilty" would have been the verdict. And they could not know that, in such case, the guilty man would have come forward, as we shall see that ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Parliament as a working machine is about the clumsiest and least effective that can be conceived of. All our Parliaments are modelled on the necessities of bygone centuries. We want a working Parliament improved up to date; but we lack political invention, and have to jog along with the old lumbering machine—a sort of bullock dray trying to compete with an age of ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... if it cannot quicken the perceptions; if it has not the power to make the deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk—at least, sufficient for its own success—then, indeed—! But it is possessed of all these virtues, and more. If necessity be the mother of invention, then is love the mother of both; and surely the most ingenious devices and the cleverest productions had been connected ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... of luxuries; all of them wholesome, and some medicinal: indeed, the variety of aliments that seems capable of being produced from milk, appears to be quite endless. In every age this must have been a subject for experiment, and every nation has added to the number by the invention of some peculiarity ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... truth of what he told them,—that they could clean more cotton in a day by his machine than in many months by the old hand-picking way,—their excitement was great, and the report of the wonderful invention spread far and wide. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... near the house. Flora Macdonald waited on Lady Margaret, and acquainted her of the enterprise in which she was engaged. Her ladyship, whose active benevolence was ever seconded by superior talents, shewed a perfect presence of mind, and readiness of invention, and at once settled that Prince Charles should be conducted to old Rasay, who was himself concealed with some select friends. The plan was instantly communicated to Kingsburgh, who was dispatched to the hill to inform ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... a long one, but the evidence was most damning and convincing, although the brothers passionately declared that Miret's story was a pure invention. Sentence of death was passed, but was afterwards commuted to imprisonment for life, and the Roriques are now ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... corporeal reality. Hence Legouve's other dramas were unsuccessful, while the four in which he joined with Scribe are among the best of their generation. Each author gave to the common stock what the other lacked and needed. The one gave fertile invention, lively wit, and technical skill, the other gave delicacy, instinct, and charm. Each was the better for the other's partnership; and perhaps no child of their communion is more fascinating to gentle hearts, or will bear better to be read and ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... warmer admiration for his art than I have now, and the general public looked upon him as the greatest artist in England. No doubt he was very observant, and had a wonderful memory for animals and their ways, as well as some invention; he had also unsurpassable technical skill, of a superficial ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... becoming tragic. The thought of the pleasures of scraping the ice-cream freezer paddles was enough to make Sammy turn to desperate invention for release. ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... this form,—where humor, quaint and sly, Dimples the cheek, and points the beaming eye; Where gay invention seems to boast its wiles In ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... has shared, or rather led the way to the general improvement. Its shops, streets, and public buildings all exhibit that march, which is so much superior to the "march of mind," panegyrised by our rabble orators—the march of industry, activity, and invention; Frankfort is one of the liveliest and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... everything! Went out into the dark! Men did sometimes—she knew—caught like this in the full flush of passion. But surely not Miltoun, with his faith! 'If the lark's song means nothing—if that sky is a morass of our invention—if we are pettily creeping on, furthering nothing—persuade me of it, Babs, and I'll bless you.' But had he still that anchorage, to prevent him slipping out to sea? This sudden thought of death to one for whom life was joy, who had never even seen the Great Stillness, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... station of Norway House, he devoted himself to his great work. Rev. E. R. Young, in the Canadian Methodist Magazine for November, 1882, thus speaks of Mr. Evans' eminent service to the mission cause by his famous invention. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... painted pottery into several sub-types of specific distribution, and we know that this style existed from c. 2200 B.C. on. In general, it tends to disappear as does painted pottery in other parts of the world with the beginning of urban civilization and the invention of writing. The typical Yang-shao culture seems to have come to an end around 1600 or 1500 B.C. It continued in some more remote areas, especially of Kansu, perhaps to about 700 B.C. Remnants of this painted pottery have been found over a wide area from Southern Manchuria, Hopei, Shansi, Honan, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... both to create new things and to effect such new combinations of old things as will adapt them to new uses. We know that the colored man has accomplished something—indeed, a very great deal—in the field of invention, but it would be of the first importance to us now to know exactly what he has done, and the commercial value of his productions. Unfortunately for us, however, this can never be known in all ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... subconsciously put capitals to the words. But Richard Thorn was no fool. Too many men had been suckered before, and he, Richard Thorn, did not intend to be another sucker, no matter how impressed he might be by the performance of an invention. ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
... distinct even from the admirable personifications of Gray, because they are less earthly. The Ode to the Passions is, by universal consent, the noblest of Collins's productions, because it exhibits a much more extended invention, not of one passion only, but of all the passions combined, acting, according to the powers of each, to one end. The execution, also, is the happiest, each particular passion is drawn with inimitable force ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... frequent difficulty by which the authors of these petty compositions are distressed, arises from the perpetual demand of novelty and change. The compiler of a system of science lays his invention at rest, and employs only his judgment, the faculty exerted with least fatigue. Even the relator of feigned adventures, when once the principal characters are established, and the great events regularly connected, finds incidents and episodes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... doubt this story was all an invention, but I had no means of showing to the contrary. He begged me to go up-stairs, and help him kill the "varmint;" but I declined to do this, for I was not willing again to make myself the victim of his treachery. ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... limited only by Holy Writ. This must be done with rigorous impartiality, throwing aside all the prejudices of education, and be followed by prompt obedience to Divine truth, at any risk of offending parents, or laws, or resisting institutions, or ceremonies which he discovers to be of human invention. All this, as we have seen in Bunyan, was attended with great mental sufferings, with painstaking labour, with a simple reliance upon the Word of God, and with earnest prayer. If man impiously dares to submit his conscience to his ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... had beguiled him and filled him with enthusiasm before his conversion, is only too certain. But all this mythology and plastic art were looked upon as secondary things then, even by pagans. The serious, the essential part of the religion was not in that. Paganism, a religion of Beauty, is an invention of our modern aesthetes; it was hardly thought of in that ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... a treadmill chariot, which carried the horse on board the vehicle, but the horse once ran away and attained such a velocity in the streets of Stockholm that people declared the whole thing was a diabolical invention, and in deference to popular clamor Swedenborg discontinued ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... the infinitely great, and solar systems developing and revolving inside of the ultimate atoms, but the Copernicus or the Laplace of the atomic astronomy has not yet appeared. The atom itself is an invention of science. To get the mystery of vitality reduced to the atom is getting it in very close quarters, but it is a very big mystery still. Just how the dead becomes alive, even in the atom, is mystery enough ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... are gone. They are the footprints. Some one has said that we each day are here building the house we are going to occupy in eternity. If this be true, nothing should concern us so much as how to live. Some men are devoting their time and the power of their intellects to invention; some are studying statesmanship; some are studying the arts, others the sciences; but we have come to learn a little more about how to live. Many are thinking much about how they wish to die, but let us learn how to live. If we live ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... interval, pursued the work of his mental culture, these two dramas are a striking proof. The first ardour of youth is still to be discerned in them; but it is now chastened by the dictates of a maturer reason, and made to animate the products of a much happier and more skilful invention. Schiller's ideas of art had expanded and grown clearer, his knowledge of life had enlarged. He exhibits more acquaintance with the fundamental principles of human nature, as well as with the circumstances under which it usually displays itself; and far ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... During the long discussion over Texas the United States was having trouble with Great Britain over Oregon, which was then the whole country lying between the Mexican province of California and the Russian possessions on the north coast (now Alaska). Before the invention of steam cars and the construction of railroads, the Pacific coast region had been thought of little value. The popular idea was expressed by Webster when he said: "What do we want of this vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... conjecture. To me, impartially weighing the arguments and assertions on either side, the popular tradition of Cecrops and his colony appears one that can neither be tacitly accepted as history, nor contemptuously dismissed as invention. It would be, however, a frivolous dispute, whether Cecrops were Egyptian or Attican, since no erudition can ascertain that Cecrops ever existed, were it not connected with a controversy of some philosophical importance, viz., whether the early civilizers of Greece were foreigners or Greeks, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... innocently flattered himself upon the admirable results of his educational system. A country life, with plenty of exercise in the open air, and an unconventional but logical type of literary education that was his own invention. Result: "Mens sana in corpore sano." Arthur was a show case, and seemed to make possible the acquisition of a long series of "difficult" pupils at ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... the meaning of "sleep," and instead of applying it, as Scripture does, to the body, they apply it to the soul. Soul-sleep is nowhere taught in the Bible and is therefore an invention by those who handle the ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... the Sullivan family rose to witness another weary and dismal day of incessant rain, and to partake of a breakfast of thin stirabout, made and served up with that woful ingenuity, which necessity, the mother of invention in periods of scarcity, as well as in matters of a different character, had made known to the benevolent hearted wife of Jerry Sullivan. That is to say, the victuals were made so unsubstantially thin, that in ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... reproductive imaging, turn to the productive, beginning with the reproductive and adding productive features for the sake of cultivating invention. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... "One of my own invention," said the professor, smiling proudly. "You, Frank, haven't I always lain down beside you every night when ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Exhibition in London; and those who remembered it and its predecessor of 1851 have declared that the case of aniline dye-stuffs—for by that time quite a number of new pigments had been discovered—excited at the later the same attention as that given to the Koh-i-noor at the earlier. The invention, out of which grew the enormous German business already alluded to, and with which has been associated the discovery and manufacture of the synthetic drugs, was entirely British in its inception and in its early stages. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... a story of striking interest to tell. It would need the powers of invention of a romancer to devise a series of adventures as remarkable as those which befell old Marius in his flight. It is one of the strangest stories in all the annals of history, a marked illustration of the saying that fact ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... an adept at the ingenuity of vice. What he had left he pawned to get money, and with Beta and two others went on a four days' pleasure-drive, and then planned a longer tour in the Alps. Barriers were in the way, for both money and passports were lacking; but fertility of invention swept all such barriers away. Forged letters, purporting to be from their parents, brought passports for the party, and books, put in pawn, secured money. Forty-three days were spent in travel, mostly afoot; and ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... to many hundreds, I had never discovered a single work of fiction until my Father himself revealed the existence of Michael Scott's wild masterpiece. So little did I understand what was allowable in the way of literary invention that I began the story without a doubt that it was true, and I think it was my Father himself who, in answer to an inquiry, explained to me that it was 'all made up'. He advised me to read the descriptions ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Cunningham, "that one of Pope Leo's poems was on the invention of the photograph—in ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... chemists have bespoke him, after the geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his Grace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its present state, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all establishments. They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. They have calculated what quantity ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... even when freedom merely stands for licence; some were retired Anglo-Indians, whose experience in the public service in India would have carried greater weight had not the peculiar acerbity of their language seemed to betray the bitterness of personal disappointment. Every invention or exaggeration of the Bengalee Press found its way into the list of questions to be asked of the Secretary of State, who, with less knowledge than he has since acquired, doubtless considered himself bound ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... that does not nourish, with rotten raiment which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town- dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of the nomad tribe, or the cave of the pre-historic savage. Nay, the workers must even lend a hand to the great industrial invention of the age—adulteration, and by its help produce for their own use shams and mockeries of the luxury of the rich; for the wage-earners must always live as the wage-payers bid them, and their very habits of life are FORCED on ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... feet long, and run at the rate of 10,000 feet a minute. They are even made with the cutting teeth on both edges, so that the log can be sawed both going and coming. This idea was unsuccessful until the invention of the telescopic band-mill, Fig. 35. In this the entire mechanism carrying the wheels on which the band-saw revolves can be moved up and down, so as to bring the point where the saw leaves the upper wheel as close to the top of the different ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... arrangements. The amphitheatre was cleared out. A rude but convenient pavilion was formed for Schirene. They covered its ground with mats, and each emulated the other in his endeavours to study her accommodation. Her kind words and inspiring smiles animated at the same time their zeal and their invention. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... Judgment, Wit, Reason, Ingenuity, Scheming, Imagination, Invention, Composition, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... expedition, and about the deities with tails who in several places were encountered. To our conception they seem meaningless, and do not in any measure contribute to the progress of the story. They bear evidence of a later invention, and do not belong legitimately to ...
— Japan • David Murray
... brought to the mainland of Greece from the innumerable Greek colonies. But to record geographical knowledge, the first thing that is necessary is a map, and accordingly it is a Greek philosopher named ANAXIMANDER of Miletus, of the sixth century B.C., to whom we owe the invention of map-drawing. Now, in order to make a map of one's own country, little astronomical knowledge is required. As we have seen, savages are able to draw such maps; but when it comes to describing the relative positions of countries divided from one another by seas, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... study," replied Addison. "But any one can afford to study if by doing so some splendid new invention ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... is attested by Grotius, a man of genius and learning, who preserved his moderation amidst the fury of contending sects, and who composed the annals of his own age and country, at a time when the invention of printing had facilitated the means of intelligence, and increased the danger of detection. If we are obliged to submit our belief to the authority of Grotius, it must be allowed, that the number of Protestants, who were executed in a single province and a single reign, far exceeded ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... portions of the glorss git between the jaws of the microbe, preventin' 'im from closin' 'is mouth, and thereby enablin' you to suffocate 'im with the four ale. (To the Reader.) Will you allow me to show you how this little invention takes a photograph, Sir? kindly 'old it in your 'and, breathe on it, and look steadily on the plate for the space of a few seconds. (All of which the Reader, being the soul of courtesy, obligingly does—and is immediately ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... a good thirty miles to the southwest. Night fell and the young moon rose, with a brisk breeze at our backs that kept us still walking without any feeling of weariness. Captain Billy had given me at parting a small compass, of new invention, that a man could carry easily in his pocket; and this from time to time I examin'd in the moonlight, guiding our way almost due south, in hopes of striking into the main road westward. I doubt not we lost a deal of time among ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... art remained more faithful to its origin than elsewhere. Even when it had attained the highest development it ever reached in that country, and was on the point of crowning its achievements by the invention of a true alphabet, it continued to reproduce the general shapes and contours of objects. The hieroglyphs were truly a system of writing by which all the sounds of the language could be noted and almost reduced to their final elements; but they were also, up ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... their nakedness, by our first parents, after their disobedience, is probably intended to show the nakedness and shame which sin has brought upon our souls; and the consequent exposure to the hostile elements aptly represents the exposure of the naked soul to the wrath of God. The invention of fig-leaf aprons may perhaps represent the self-righteousness of the carnal heart. Impenitent sinners are always seeking out some invention of their own, by which they expect to be saved from the consequences of sin. But all their self-righteousness will be no better defence ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... altogether unreliable. Thus he makes Lee to have been a Fellow of a college at Oxford, from which he was expelled for marrying an innkeeper's daughter; whilst Lee neither studied at Oxford, nor married there, nor was a Fellow of any college; and he concludes by alleging that the result of his invention was to "make Lee and his family happy;" whereas the invention brought him only a heritage of misery, and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant girl,—the "slavey," Parload called her—up from the basement to the top of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin to forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in fifty of us did in the days of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... in the same house. This one was a sober woman; life meant business to her, and she taught me to sew in earnest, with a knot in the end of my thread, although it was only upon clothing for my ragchildren—absurd creatures of my own invention, limbless and destitute of features, except as now and then one of my older sisters would, upon my earnest petition, outline a face for one of them, with pen and ink. I loved them, nevertheless, far better than I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... either; and some are not conscious that they are distinct, but see in the Arabic mode nothing save decimal notation, and attribute to it all those high qualities that belong to the mode only. The Arabic mode is an invention of the highest merit, not surpassed by any other; but the admiration that belongs to it is thus bestowed upon a quite commonplace idea, a misapplication, which, in this as in many other cases, arises ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the proceedings which originated and now sustain the Rebellion, and those which initiated and carried through the Revolution! The Rebellion exhibits to us a complete inversion of the course of measures which inaugurated the Revolution. "Secession" was the invention of ambitious leaders, who overrode the forms of law, and have not dared to submit their votes and their doings to primary meetings of the people whom they have driven with a despotic tyranny. In the Revolution the people themselves were the prime movers. Each little country town ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... is I was not born in the golden age of Louis the Fourteenth, when it was not only the fashion to write folios, but to read them too! or rather, it is a pity the same fashion don't subsist now, when one need not be at the trouble of invention, nor of turning the whole Roman history into romance for want of proper heroes. Your campaign in Scotland, rolled out and well be-epitheted, would make a pompous work, and make one's fortune; at sixpence a number, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... my own invention. My father is a little weak in the head, but he understands a good many things, although he can not talk about them. He used to get weary of sitting still all day in his chair, so I lined the screens with these pictures in ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... Highland fling of his own invention. "And my injured knee is practically well now. Maybe I won't be able to hit ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... about making arrangements for repairing the damaged airship. This took him the better part of a week, but he did not regret the time, for while he was working he was busy making plans for his newest invention—the photo telephone. ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... Though poisenous envye ever sought to blame Or hyde the fruits of thy intention, Yet shall they all commend that high desygne Of purest gold to make a medicine That feel thy helpe by that thy rare invention. He dyed the 26th of May 1623, of his age 74. His loving sonne John Anthony, doctor in physick, Left this remembrance of his sorrow. He dyed ye 28th April 1655, being aged 70 years, and was buried nere this place, and left behind him 1 sone ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... members of the Union, to the legislatures of none did this efficient and peaceable remedy, as it is called, suggest itself. The discovery of this important feature in our Constitution was reserved to the present day. To the statesmen of South Carolina belongs the invention, and upon the citizens of that State will unfortunately fall the evils ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... among those having such communication most frequently. Its presence is probably the result simply of borrowing a convenient feature from those who invented it to meet a necessity. The conditions under which the houses were built have hardly been such as to stimulate the Tusayan to the invention of such a device. The uniform height of the second-story roofs seen in this village, constituting an almost unbroken level, is a rather exceptional feature in pueblo architecture. Only one depression occurs in the whole length ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... entertainment or utility. It has all that is impossible in the one or impossible in the other, without the wit and spirit of the first, or the just strokes of nature and useful lessons of morality in the second. However, if the invention of wings for mankind to fly with is sufficient amends for all the dulness and unmeaning extravagance of the author, we are willing to allow that his book has some merit, and that he deserves some encouragement at least as ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... is the cause of many a failure. We do not stand by our plans faithfully. Fashion, or criticism, or temporary weariness, or fickleness of taste, leads us off; and we have to begin our work all over. Look at the history of every noted invention; read the lives of musicians who were born with genius, but wrought out triumph by perseverance; and you will find abundant proof that without perseverance nothing ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... the author of the poem called the Theseid gives of this rising of the Amazons, how Antiope, to revenge herself upon Theseus for refusing her and marrying Phaedra, came down upon the city with her train of Amazons, whom Hercules slew, is manifestly nothing else but fable and invention. It is true, indeed, that Theseus married Phaedra, but that was after the death of Antiope, by whom he had a son called Hippolytus, or, as Pindar writes, Demophon. The calamities which befell Phaedra and this son, since none of the historians have contradicted the tragic poets that have written ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the prospective husband of a princess of Denmark, and Pandosto's (Leontes's) falling in love with his own daughter and his suicide on learning of her true birth, are wisely omitted. The characters of Paulina, the Clown, and some minor persons are Shakespeare's own invention. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... fortresses of Phyle and Panactum, in which were garrisons of Cassander, restored them to the Athenians. They, in requital, though they had before been so profuse in bestowing honors upon him, that one would have thought they had exhausted all the capacities of invention, showed they had still new refinements of adulation to devise for him. They gave him, as his lodging, the back temple in the Parthenon, and here he lived, under the immediate roof, as they meant it to imply, of his hostess, Minerva; no reputable or well-conducted guest to be quartered ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... throat with pendent brazen chains, each ending with a tinkling silver bell; but to the bridle there was neither rein for the rider nor strap for a driver. The furniture perched on the back was an invention which with any other people than of the East would have made the inventor renowned. It consisted of two wooden boxes, scarce four feet in length, balanced so that one hung at each side; the inner space, softly lined and carpeted, was arranged ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... enthusiastic about household invention," he concluded, smiling. "She thinks it assists in righting women's wrongs. Eh, Nellie? The freed and victorious female will put her foot on abject ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... through which Thalaba is conducted in the course of this production, be sufficiently various and extraordinary, we must not set down any part of the incidents to the credit of the author's invention. He has taken great pains, indeed, to guard against such a supposition; and has been as scrupulously correct in the citation of his authorities, as if he were the compiler of a true history, and thought his reputation would be ruined by the imputation of a single fiction. There ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... heaven of song has been like the pathway of his own broad sweeping eagle,—J.G. Percival,—is a Brother in Unity. And what shall I say of Morse? Of Morse, the wonder-worker, the world-girdler, the space-destroyer, the author of the noblest invention whose glory was ever concentrated in a single man, who has realized the fabulous prerogative of Olympian Jove, and by the instantaneous intercommunication of thought has accomplished the work of ages in binding together ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Universe, I guess it's the greatest invention, arter man. Now this is what I call 'ciphering' arter human natur', while figures are ciphering arter the 'assistant.' These two sorts of ciphering make edecation—and you may depend on't, Squire, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... part of the question before us, but facts they are; and if we find so much difficulty in calculating the extent to which the mere memory may be cultivated, are we, in these days of multifarious reading, and of countless distracting affairs, fair judges of the perfection to which the invention and the memory combined may attain in a simpler age, and among a more single minded people?—Quarterly Review, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of course; but it was an accident. No, what I refer to, Mr. Chelm, is the marvellous invention by which you sought to conceal it. I fully expected to see the floor open, and some demon carry you off amid ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... Leyden, and others, indulged in what they described as the "mystification" of their acquaintances by these semi-forgeries. Like theirs, Villemarque's work had usually an historical or legendary basis, but it is impossible to say how much of it is original matter of folk-song and how much his own invention, unless we compare his versions with those furnished by M. Luzel in his Guerziou Breiz-Izel (1868), which, however, only contains a few of the originals of the tales given in the Barzaz-Breiz, and ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... customs, are its chief glory, not to be obscured even by its modern renown for linen woven by hand and by machinery. For a person who really understands Russian architecture,— not the architecture of St. Petersburg, which is chiefly the invention of foreigners,—Yaroslavl and other places on the northern Volga in this neighborhood, widely construed, are mines of information and delight. However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... ball that was to come off the next week. They spun with the book tied to the distaff; they wove; they did all manner of fine needle-work; they made lace, painted flowers, and, in short, in the boundless consciousness of activity, invention, and perfect health, set themselves to any work they had ever read or thought of. A bride in those days was married with sheets and table-cloths of her own weaving, with counterpanes and toilet-covers wrought in divers embroidery by her own and her sisters' hands. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... cried Cutty, his nimble mind pouncing upon a happy invention. "You're romantic, Kitty. You're imagining all sorts of nonsense about this chap, and you must not let the situation intrigue you. If I spoke the name oddly—this Stefani Gregor—it was because I sensed in a moment that this was a bit of the overflow. Southeastern Europe, where the good ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... of a student he might also have run into that nugget of the ancient Greek. Morals are the invention of the weak to protect themselves ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... called on Mr Poulter, whom she had not seen for two weeks, the increasing physical disabilities of her condition compelling her to give up work at the academy. She found him engaged in the invention of a new country dance for a forthcoming competition. Mavis explained her errand, but had some difficulty in convincing even kindly Mr Poulter of Miss Nippett's ambitious leanings: in the course of years, he had come to look on his devoted accompanist very much as he regarded "Turpsichor" ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Casan, see Ghazan Khan. Casaria (Caesarea of Cappadocia). Cascar (Kashgar), Chaukans of. Casem, see Kishm. Caspian Sea (Sea of Ghel or Ghelan), ancient error about; its numerous names. Cassay, see Kinsay. Cassia. —— buds. —— fistula. Castaldi, Panfilo, his alleged invention of movable types. Castambol. Castelli, P. Cristoforo di. Casvin (Kazvin), a kingdom of Persia. Catalan Navy. Cathay (Northern China), origin of name; coal in; idols; Cambaluc, the capital of, see Cambaluc; Cathayans, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Mistral throughout Mireio and Calendau is his own invention. Here is the first stanza of the second ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... impossible, that America should resent the recommencement of ruthless submarine warfare by the Germans and declare war. I said that nearly all of the great inventions used in this war had been made by Americans; that the very submarine which formed the basis of our discussion was an American invention, and so were the barbed wire and the aeroplane, the ironclad, the telephone and the telegraph, so necessary to trench warfare; that even that method of warfare had been first developed on something of the present scale in our Civil War; and that I believed that, if forced to it, ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... example of this: the invention of industrial and agricultural machinery, that marvelous application of science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have had only beneficent consequences, has caused and is still causing the misery and ruin of thousands ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... was naturally shocked at these suspicions, and suggested that they were an invention of the enemy. Washington admitted the plausibility of the suggestion, but remarked that he had the same confidence in Arnold, a few days before, that he now placed ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... may be, Norton's Abyssinian pumps, for which I had vainly applied at Cairo, would doubtless discover the prime necessary in the Wadys, many of the latter being still damp and muddy. Moreover, the crible continue grilles filtrantes, the invention of MM. Huet and Geyler, introduced, we are told, into the mechanical treatment of metals, a principle which greatly economizes fluid. Founded upon the fact that sands of nearly the same size, but ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... tries to open the door for the captive eagle; but in vain. At least he will make what use he can of his wisdom. He asks him for advice about the new ship he is building, and has a simple practical letter in return, and over and above probably the two valuable pamphlets, 'Of the Invention of Ships,' and 'Observations on the Navy and Sea Service'; which the Prince will never see. In 1611 he asks Raleigh's advice about the foolish double marriage with the Prince and Princess of Savoy, and receives ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... mouth, so that he was in danger of losing it. Then said the wolf to the fox, "Now either yield thyself as vanquished, or else certainly I will kill thee; neither thy dust, thy mocks, nor any subtle invention shall now save thee; thou art now left utterly desperate, and my wounds ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should have betrothed myself ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... you may imagine, were sometimes very comical spectacles, especially when the aspirant for centipedal honors happened to be of a timid disposition. If he showed the slightest terror, he was certain to be tricked unmercifully. One of our subsequent devices—a humble invention of my own—was to request the blindfolded candidate to put out his tongue, whereupon the First Centipede would say, in a low tone, as if not intended for the ear of the victim, "Diabolus, fetch ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the base, I looked at Blackana, and asked: "How long have those Schools of Invention ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... fine sermon on the affair after Ernest Gregory had gone to his reward; for he showed how by the wonderful invention of his Maker, Joe Gregory, though dead, yet was allowed to save his brother's life and so proclaim the wonder of God to sinful man. And no doubt all right-thinking people ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
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