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More "Transmutation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the book are devoted to the discussion of certain subjects of vital interest and great moment just now in the scientific world—the theories of progression, development, transmutation, and variation of species. It seems, however, to be the intention of the author to give us, not so much his own views as a general resume or outline of the tendencies and conclusions of the scientific world upon these subjects. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... evolution theory, on the ground that "species, genera, families, &c., exist as thoughts, individuals as facts,"[288] and he offers the dilemma, "If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? and if individuals alone exist, how can the differences which may be observed among them prove the ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... wonder that men who had so much time upon their hands did not only restore all the antiquated pieces of false wit, but enriched the world with inventions of their own. It is to this age that we owe the production of anagrams, which is nothing else but a transmutation of one word into another, or the turning of the same set of letters into different words; which may change night into day, or black into white, if chance, who is the goddess that presides over these sorts of composition, shall so direct. I ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the ears of women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. She would not burn the world for him; she would not, though a purer poetry is little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or essence, in honour of him, and so, by love's transmutation, literally be the man she was to marry. She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of women. She said it: she said: "I must be myself to be of any value to you, Willoughby." He was indefatigable in his lectures on the aesthetics of love. Frequently, for an indemnification to her (he had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... transmutations and conversions are symbolized in the wheel of metamorphosis, where man sits on the upper part, a beast lies at the bottom, a half-man, half-beast descends from the left, and a half-beast, half-man ascends from the right. This transmutation is shown where Jove, according to the diversity of the affections and the behaviour of those towards inferior things, invests himself with divers figures, entering into the form of beasts; and so also the other ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... observed, that the theory of a continuous transmutation of species is not logically bound to furnish a full explanation of all the natural causes which it may suppose to have been at work. The radical distinction between the two theories consists in the one assuming an immediate action of some supernatural ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... did the Carmagnoles ultimately become; but France ran a fearful risk in being obliged to rely on them when the process of their transmutation ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... talk of your transmutation by and by," said the dame, "and find you clothes withal, and money besides; for it will take a good deal to carry ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... from Prof. Agassiz, one of the greatest authorities the world ever knew: "I will, therefore, consider the transmutation theory of species as a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency." ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... in the only wise, and verily, in a most sublime sense to see God face to face; which, alas! it seems too true, that no man can do and 'live', i.e. a 'human' life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather it would 'transmute' it, and the process of that transmutation to the senses of other men would be called 'death'.—Even as to caterpillars; in all probability the caterpillar dies, and he either does not see, which is most probable, or at all events he does not see the connection between the caterpillar and the butterfly, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... blackest night of human anguish. In boyhood, desiring to please his invalid and slowly dying mother, he had purchased and hung up opposite her bed, an illuminated copy of her favorite text; and now, by some subtle transmutation in the conservation of spiritual energy, each golden letter of that Bible text seemed emblazoned on the dusty wall of the court-room: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... natural forces and secret virtues of privileged objects, which formed the nucleus of mediaeval scientific research. The field is a fertile one for the imagination and possesses a strange attraction for certain minds. There are men alive in our own time to whom the transmutation of metals does not seem an impossibility, nor the brewing of the elixir of life a matter to be scoffed at as a matter of course. The world is full of people who, in their inmost selves, put faith in the latent qualities of precious stones and amulets, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... may there not? And there is no such restlessness as the restlessness of compulsory idleness. That is the main idea that is in the Psalmist's mind. He knows little about retribution, he knows still less about transmutation into a glorious likeness to that which is most glorious and divine. But he conceives a great, dim, lonely land, wherein are prisoned and penned all the lives that have been foamed away vainly on earth, and are now ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... speculations on the origin of species to such dreamers as the author of the 'Vestiges', by whose well-intentioned efforts the Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation in the minds of all sound thinkers. Notwithstanding this silence, however, the transmutation theory, as it has been called, has been a "skeleton in the closet" to many an honest zoologist and botanist who had a soul above the mere naming of dried plants and skins. Surely, has such an one thought, nature is a mighty and consistent ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... except that Crosbie pleased him much by talking learnedly of alchymy, as to which Johnson was not a positive unbeliever, but rather delighted in considering what progress had actually been made in the transmutation of metals, what near approaches there had been to the making of gold; and told us that it was affirmed, that a person in the Russian dominions had discovered the secret, but died without revealing it, as imagining it would be prejudicial to society. He added, that it was not impossible ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... sed de flamma suscipit vim coloris, ut magis credas inde nasci, cujus similitudine videtur ornari. Sed cum auro tribuat splendidum ruborem, argento confert albissimam lucem. Ut mirum sit, unam substantiam tradere, quod rebus dissimilibus possit aptari.' Have we here a hint of 'the transmutation of metals?' Cassiodorus seems to think that it is only the furnace that makes the difference between the colours of ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... the composition itself, I may say that it is full of life, indeed, spirited in every respect, in movement and in boldness of harmonic and melodic conception. The Tarantelle is a translation from Italian into Polish, a transmutation of Rossini into Chopin, a Neapolitan scene painted with opaque colours, the south without its transparent sky, balmy air, and general brightness. That this composition was inspired by impressions received from Rossini's Tarantella, and not from impressions ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... companions of Ulysses into beasts; and what is said of the Arcadians, who, after having drawn lots, swam over a certain lake, after which they were metamorphosed into wolves, and ran about in the forests like other wolves. If during the time of their transmutation they did not eat human flesh, at the end of nine years they repassed the same lake, and ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... this struggle manifest among living forms, among birds and beasts and insects in their competition for food and habitat, but—if we may believe the revelations of the science of radio-activity—a process of transmutation, of disintegration of the atoms of one element with simultaneous formation of another element, is taking place in every fragment of inanimate matter, a process which parallels in character the more transitory processes ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... herculean labors over the "Cirripede" book, that he began to settle down seriously to the great work of his life—the investigation of the origin of the species, of plants and animals. Briefly, it may be stated here that he seems to have been first led to ponder over the question of the transmutation of species, by facts that had come under his notice during the South American part of the voyage in the Beagle—such as the discovery of the fossil remains of huge animals akin to, but yet very distinct from, the living armadillos of the same regions; the manner in which closely allied animals ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... a "clear yellow oil" which was presently proved to be liquid chlorine. Now chlorine, in its pure state, had previously been known (except in a forgotten experiment of Northmore's) only as a gas. Its transmutation into liquid form was therefore regarded as a very startling phenomenon. But the clew thus gained, other gases were subjected to similar conditions by Davy, and particularly by Faraday, with the result ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest," which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my fellow-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... authority teaches:—'Man's life truly represents a progressive development of the nervous system, none the less so because it takes place out of the womb instead of in it. The regular transmutation of motions which are at first voluntary into secondary automatic motions, as Hartley calls them, is due to a gradually effected organisation; and we may rest assured of this, that co-ordinate activity always testifies to stored-up power, either ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... doubtless anticipate a romance on that ever-old, ever-new theme of a certain god with a torch leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths, until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by tin,—of the tin-wedding entering into the refiner's fire, and, by sure transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer silver,—of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... of the word, alchemy is the pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian era; thence it passed to the Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to western Europe, and its realization was a leading aim of chemical workers down ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... damaged vessel was knocked to pieces by its new owner, who used the timber to construct a shanty, a stable, and a pig-pen, for his family and other live-stock. Before this degrading transmutation was begun, the original proprietor of the now abandoned craft removed to the commodious cabin of an elegant barge, provided by the courtesy of Wilkinson. In this convenient vessel, navigated by a select crew under command of a faithful sergeant, the sole passenger ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... others have negatived the theory of Lamarcke as to the transmutation of species. The "nisus formativus" is admitted, but admitted with limits, "quos ultra citraque nequit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... member in the system inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale; and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land, and of land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate. By this means the spirit of money-jobbing ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... of a common ancestor; or, still further, whether mammalia, birds, reptiles, and fishes, could all have had a common origin;—these questions had hardly come up for discussion at all, for it was felt that, while the very first step along the road of "transmutation of species" (as it was then called) had not been made, it was quite useless to speculate as to how far it might be possible to travel in the same direction, or where the road would ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... episcopal church on Sundays, and sat where he could see Mysie—sat longing and thirsting ever till the music returned. Yet the music he never heard; he watched only its transmutation into form, never taking his eyes off Mysie's face. Reflected thence in a metamorphosed echo, he followed all its changes. Never was one powerless to produce it more strangely responsive to its influence. She had no voice; she had never been taught the use of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... that is next one; And, pour passer le temps, with the terminus all but in prospect, Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven. Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion! Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only! Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion, Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light of our knowledge! But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage-procession? But for that final discharge, would he dare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... three months, married with a completeness that even Tanqueray had not foreseen. She herself had been unaware of her capacity for surrender. She rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. One by one there fell from her the things that had stood between her and ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... several bodies, and divers other qualities; how it dissolves some, and hardens others; how it can consume almost all, or convert them into ashes and smoak: and last of all, how of those ashes, by the only violence of its action, it forms glass. For this transmutation of ashes into glass, seeming to me to be as admirable as any other operation in Nature, I particularly took ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... speaking, denotes a movement of passion": and when a man is angry with reason, his anger is no longer from passion: wherefore he is said to judge, not to be angry. In another way anger is taken for a movement of the sensitive appetite, which is with passion resulting from a bodily transmutation. This movement is a necessary sequel, in man, to the movement of his will, since the lower appetite necessarily follows the movement of the higher appetite, unless there be an obstacle. Hence the movement ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... fountain heads that water the spiritual fields of his philosophy and the seeds from which they are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but one spiritual garden). His experiments, social and economic, are a part of its cultivation and for the harvest—and its transmutation, he trusts to moments of inspiration—"only what is thought, said, and done at a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... by a hungrier mind, mark the second great characteristic of early childhood. These are the channels through which the world around comes into the life of the child. The sights and sounds of the physical realm, when carried beyond the portals of the senses, under the marvelous transmutation of God's touch, become ideas. The process, in so far as its secret has been revealed, will not be discussed at this point, but rather the relation of these ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... was the favourite slang term of the smashing fraternity for the metal used in their nefarious business, the spoons manufactured by Messrs. Yates and Son being the best material for transmutation ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... for elixir vitae, or the philosopher's stone, chanced upon this infernal synthesis and fusion. For him, no doubt, it proved a philosopher's stone in earnest, for the Borgia always extended a generous hand to those who could assist their damnable activities. Transmutation—so a skilled friend assures me—is now proved to be a fact, and another generation will be able perhaps to make gold, if the desire for that accursed mineral continues much longer ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... The process for radioactive transmutation is somewhat like a common chemical reaction. An alpha particle, which has the same charge (2) and atomic mass (4) as a helium nucleus, penetrates the repulsive forces of the nitrogen nucleus and deposits one proton and one neutron; this changes ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... the Doctor, Mrs. Pringle, followed by Miss Mally Glencairn and Miss Isabella Tod, also debouched from the gate, and the assembled females remarked, with no less instinct, the transmutation which she had undergone. She was dressed in a dark blue cloth pelisse, trimmed with a dyed fur, which, as she told Miss Mally, "looked quite as well as sable, without costing a third of the money." A most matronly muff, that, without being of sable, was of an excellent ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... disappointed, that some addition may be made in this way to the wealth of English poetry. A few exquisite pieces in Latin literature, the Catullian Ille mi par, for example, a few in our own, such as Jonson's Drink to me only with thine eyes, are translations. Possibly the miracle of such poetic transmutation may be repeated for me; possibly an English song may come to birth by my means also. With this hope in view, the translator is strongly tempted to engraft upon his versions elegances in the spirit of his native language, or to use the motives of the original for improvisations ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... as you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection—selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the very beginning as the condition of becoming conscious of anything, yet remains in constant change. Impressions pour in through the senses, enter the Whole that is already present; they drop their content into that Whole by means of the senses, and the miracle of transmutation, entirely ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... to discuss in the "Origin of Species" the principles of a natural classification. From September, 1854, and during the four ensuing years, Darwin devoted himself to observing and experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species, and in arranging a huge pile of notes upon the subject. As early as October, 1838, it had occurred to him as probable, or at least possible, that amid the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... "Transmutation," remarked Prescott, "was, as you know, finally declared to be a scientific absurdity in the eighteenth century. But I may say that it is no longer so regarded. I do not ask you to believe anything until you have seen; all I ask is ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... long as a part of the old articles remain? Those who maintain the affirmative ought at least to mark the boundary between authorized and usurped innovations; between that degree of change which lies within the compass of ALTERATIONS AND FURTHER PROVISIONS, and that which amounts to a TRANSMUTATION of the government. Will it be said that the alterations ought not to have touched the substance of the Confederation? The States would never have appointed a convention with so much solemnity, nor described its objects with so much latitude, if some ...
— The Federalist Papers
... is gone,' and could not but go, having now produced the still more indomitable Age of Hunger. Altars enough, of the Dubois-Rohan sort, changing to the Gobel-and-Talleyrand sort, are faring by rapid transmutation to, shall we say, the right Proprietor of them? French Game and French Game-Preservers did alight on the Cliffs of Dover, with cries of distress. Who will say that the end of much is not come? A set of mortals has risen, who believe that Truth is not a printed Speculation, but a practical ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... produced upon wild roses. In the one case there is an abnormal development of petals at the expense of the stamens, in the other an abnormal development of wool at the expense of the hair. Garden roses frequently exhibit stamens in which the transmutation to petals may be observed in various stages of accomplishment, and analogously the fleeces of tame sheep occasionally contain a few wild hairs that are undergoing transmutation to wool. Even wild wool presents here and there a fiber that appears to be in a state of change. ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... whose passion for accumulating wealth reduced him into almost as unfortunate a state as Midas, who, according to the fable, having obtained the long-desired power of turning every thing he touched to gold, was starved by the immediate transmutation of all food into that metal the instant it touched his lips. The late possessor of the house I am speaking of, when he was about fifty years old, turned away every servant but an old woman, who if she was not honest, was at least too weak to be able to put ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... entirely artistic and had nothing to do with coinage, while the great quantities that were then produced by the chemists—or as we should now-a-days call them alchemists—may be said to have taken them out of the category of the precious metals. This power of transmutation of metals was not universal, but it was so widely possessed that enormous quantities were made. In fact the production of the wished-for metals may be regarded as one of the industrial enterprises of those days by which these alchemists gained their living. ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... belongs the honor of first deciphering the Trojan inscriptions on the above-mentioned vase. He, not without much research, interpreted it as a dedication "To the divine Sigo," a deity whose name was found in Sigeum. The transmutation, however, seemed forced; and, while Haug was right in his method, his results were pronounced ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... so-called science of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies—derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... rococo, unrelated to current conditions as a tradition sung down in a ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it—when you consider, beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry, no blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an occasional telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an event of public importance, a suitable emotion. Yet ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... addressed them into that image of threadbare poverty and hunger-pinched dejection? Little aid from theatrical costume: the clothes seemed the same, only to have grown wondrous aged and rusty. The face, the figure, the man,—these had undergone a transmutation beyond the art of the mere stage wardrobe, be it ever so amply stored, to effect. But for the patch over the eye, you could not have recognized Mr. Chapman. There was, indeed, about him, still, an air of dignity; but it ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wantonly over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day. But this was not the cause of Jude's amazement. He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... discerning eye upon them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments—a moral and intellectual chequer-work; ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... law which an able French physician merely pointed out in his studies on the relations between Transmutation and Socialism,[50] and the truth and full importance of which I showed in my Sociologie criminelle (1892)—before I became a militant socialist—and which I again emphasized in my recent controversy with Morselli on the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... useless wares, which are never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose very names it does not know; and in order to perform this miracle of transmutation it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and the Chinese gong that was so prominent an object in the hall into a piece of Benares brassware, he could almost have fancied himself as standing on the brink of the sacred river. The marigolds in the garden required no transmutation.... ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... in getting a good sight of what actually takes place. Our purposes are prepared as I have described, and then those purposes—something altogether mental—change on a sudden to material motions. How is the transmutation accomplished? How do we pass from a mental picture to a set of motions in the physical world? What is the bridge connecting the two? The bridge is always down when we direct our gaze upon it, though firm ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the Hymn of Pan and The Indian Serenade. The Cloud is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, as ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... mention of the same thing. Beyond doubt that queer mixture of a man—missionary, fanatic, quack, what you will—had made diamonds as far back as the year 1280. He owned to having stumbled across the Recipe accidentally. Like other alchemists of his time, the transmutation of metals was his aim, and the crystallization of part of his graphite crucible was quite a matter of chance; but it occurred most surely; and he analyzed the why and wherefore, and wrote down the method of working in a place where he says it would last for all time unless ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... evidence of a sincere interest in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott," with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace into ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the esoteric and transcendental utterances which Kelley credited to the spirits, he cleverly introduced sufficient in the way of references to the elixir of life and the transmutation of metals, to keep alive in Dee's breast the hope of ultimately solving the crucial problems of medieval science. All the money Dee could procure was spent on ingredients for magical formulas, and to such lengths did his enthusiasm carry him that before long ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... having already done much, are easily persuaded that they can do more. When Rowley had completed the orrery, he attempted the perpetual motion; when Boyle had exhausted the secrets of vulgar chymistry, he turned his thoughts to the work of transmutation[1]. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... permeated that part of the world centuries ago. Even the most recent and startling scientific discoveries occasionally serve to prove that what we supposed to be the fantastic beliefs of the ancients were really truths of nature that we were not yet able to comprehend! The transmutation of metals is an example. We have already gone far enough in that direction to show that the alchemists of old were not the foolish and superstitious people we supposed them to be. We have given far too little credit to past civilizations and we are coming ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... rituals, explains that no one can attain to knowledge of the higher sciences without the "Clavicules de Salomon," of which the real secrets were never committed to print and which is said to contain the whole of Cabalistic science.[430] The catechism of this same degree deals mainly with the transmutation of metals, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... unsupported, is worth nothing. It would appear, however, that pretenders to the art of making gold and silver existed in Rome in the first centuries after the Christian era, and that, when discovered, they were liable to punishment as knaves and impostors. At Constantinople, in the fourth century, the transmutation of metals was very generally believed in, and many of the Greek ecclesiastics wrote treatises upon the subject. Their names are preserved, and some notice of their works given, in the third volume of Lenglet du Fresnoy's "History of the Hermetic Philosophy." ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... bodies called simple were really compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as we are masters of the laws influencing their combinations,"—when he comes forward and says that he has tried experiments at transmutation, and means, if his life is spared, to try them again,—how can we be surprised at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a gold-factory and is glutting the mints of Europe with bullion ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Was this strong woman, eager-eyed and brave, the quiet, low-voiced stenographer he remembered, busy only with her machine, her file-boxes, and her carbon-copies? Stern dared not realize the transmutation. He ventured hardly fringe it in ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... without food at times, because they say that he responds better to their fiendish practices when the body is well-nigh reduced to a shadow. Oh, I hear them talk! My father is a dabbler in mystic arts. They are luring him on to think he will one day learn the secret of the transmutation of metals, whilst I know they do but seek to make of him a tool, to subdue his will, and to do with him what they will. They will strive to practise next on me — they have tried it already; but I resist them, and they are powerless, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of our Hero's being put into a Pudding, and convey'd away in a Tinker's Budget; which is design'd by our Author to prove, if it is understood literally, That the greatest Men are subject to Misfortunes. But it is thought by Dr. B—tly to be all Mythology, and to contain the Doctrine of the Transmutation of Metals, and is design'd to shew, that all Matter is the same, tho' very differently Modified. He tells me, he intends to publish a distinct Treatise of this Canto; and I don't question, but he'll manage the Dispute with the same Learning, ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... extract the strength from those five hundred sweating bodies and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export. His dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to effect the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt, three inches wide and a yard in length, with which he always rode and which, on occasion, could come down on the naked back of a stooping coolie with a report like a pistol-shot. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... and Ducas (c. 23) exhibit the rude lineament of the Ottoman policy, and the transmutation of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... imagine this inorganic matter to take the place just before left unoccupied by the organic molecule. In this manner a cast of the interior of certain vessels may first be taken, and afterwards the more solid walls of the same may decay and suffer a like transmutation. Yet when the whole is lapidified, it may not form one homogeneous mass of stone or metal. Some of the original ligneous, osseous, or other organic elements may remain mingled in certain parts, or the lapidifying substance itself may be differently ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... shall conclude by a general observation. Notwithstanding the numerous objections we have raised against Mr. Darwin's theory, we do not declare ourselves hostile to a system of which zooelogists are the only competent judges. We are neither for nor against the transmutation of species, neither for nor against the principle of natural selection. The only positive conclusion of our debate is this: no principle hitherto known, neither the action of media, nor habit, nor natural selection, can account for organic adaptations without ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... to think that the "new light which was rising in his mind{8}" had not yet attained any effective degree of steadiness or brightness. I think so because in his Pocket Book under the date 1837 he wrote, "In July opened first note-book on 'transmutation of species.' Had been greatly struck from about month of previous March{9} on character of South American fossils, and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter), of all my views." But he ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... were."[421] The reader, whose curiosity may lead him to consult the authorities collected by Cudworth (pp. 185-188), will find in the doctrine of Anaximander a rude anticipation of the modern theories of "spontaneous generation" and "the transmutation of species." In the fragments of Anaximander that remain we find no recognition of an ordering Mind, and his philosophy is the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... its not being possible to define a difference, or an equality, of entropy between two bodies chemically different. We are unable, in fact, to pass by any means, reversible or not, from one to the other, so long as the transmutation of matter is regarded as impossible; but it is well understood that it is nevertheless possible to compare the variations of entropy to which these two bodies are both of them ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas! But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... magisterium; a chymical term expressive of the highest powers of transmutation, and sometimes used ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... voice had laid about her, she felt slowly coming into her, like a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still, watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that transmutation of the dead matter below it, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of the radio-active elements suggestive of the transmutation of metals was perhaps the most interesting idea suggested, but the discussion ranged mainly round the effect which the discovery of radio-activity has had on physics and chemistry in its bearing on the origin of matter, on geology ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... metals in the furnace were all melted, to find them converted into a mass of solid gold, which proved, on assay, to be of the purest quality. Every one was questioned as to what he had cast into the furnace, when there appeared no reason to suppose the transmutation could have been effected by such an accidental mixture of metals. At length it was remarked, that a dervish, accompanying the barber's son, had cast in a lump of ore, and immediately disappeared. Upon this the sultan summoned the youth to his presence, and inquiring ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... with pretty faces or white skin or rosy breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They fall apart and sleep ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the duality so common (yet so often overlooked) in human character, that Brewster was all this while manager of the Plymouth trading-post, near what is now New London. The only professors of the transmutation of metals who still impose on mankind are to be found in what is styled the critical department of literature. Their materia prima, or universal solvent, serves equally for the lead of Tupper or the brass ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... obliterate the root of the nose and to flatten the nostrils. The dog Latin of the Middle Ages had a reason for its creation of the verb denasare. Had Gwynplaine when a child been so worthy of attention that his face had been subjected to transmutation? Why not? Needed there a greater motive than the speculation of his future exhibition? According to all appearance, industrious manipulators of children had worked upon his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to table, but was so occupied with her grief for the blighted roses that she did not even notice the wonderful transmutation of her China bowl. Perhaps this was all the better; for Marygold was accustomed to take pleasure in looking at the queer figures, and strange trees and houses, that were painted on the circumference of the bowl; and these ornaments ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... nothing of the curious transmutation which the wit of man can work, would be very apt to wonder by what kind of legerdemain Aaron Burr had contrived to shuffle himself down to the bottom of the pack, as an accessory, and turn up poor Blennerhassett as principal, in this treason. Who, then, is Aaron Burr, and what the part ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... egoistic at all, but profoundly altruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it is absolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs from humanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation. For all its ethereality and remoteness, it yearns, "like a God in pain," over the sorrows of the world. With infinite planetary pity, it ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... among them all—to William Blake and to Paul Verlaine; and this is an indication to me that what my own soul requires is not philosophy or psychology or wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation of the little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint, low, sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable horizons, and bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet and deep and magical, such as have no concern with the clamour ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... will consult my History of Sindh (chapt. vii) and my experience which pointed only to the use made of it in base coinage. Hence in mod. tongue Kimiywi, an alchemist, means a coiner, a smasher. The reader must not suppose that the transmutation of metals is a dead study: I calculate that there are about one hundred workers in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... essay "On Criticism" ("Table Talk"): "There is another race of critics who might be designated as the Occult School—vere adepti. They discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their delight, his mysteries ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... this city a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors, and, by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and Incarnation were turned into an argument in behalf of the philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of redemption and for transubstantiation suggested others of similar construction to prove the transmutation of metals; the doctrine of the resurrection of the human body was by similar mystic jugglery connected with the processes of distillation and sublimation. Even after the Middle Ages were past, strong men seemed unable to break away from such reasoning as this—among ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... father's old weather-beaten farmhouse. The exterior was of marble, so dazzingly white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a lofty door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated wood that had been brought from beyond the sea. The windows, from ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... is the view to which we are most inclined—first, because we think a transmutation of species, from a lower to a higher type, has not been satisfactorily proved; and second, because of the strong impression we entertain, that the universe, subject to certain cyclical and determinate mutations, was made complete at first, with self-subsisting provisions for its perpetual renewal ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... the farther progress in the transmutation of nitrous air, in these circumstances, less remarkable. For when it has been brought to the state last mentioned, the agitation of it in fresh water almost instantly takes off that peculiar kind of inflammability, ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... come in suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species take their places apparently by substitution, not by transmutation." ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... some eight feet square, and from a wayward fancy of my own, closely resembles the cell of an alchymist. Its walls are hung with black drapery, on which appear the mystical signs of the planetary bodies, Hebrew, Persian, and various cabalistic characters, the dark enigmas of the work of transmutation, and the invocations or prayers for success employed by the alchymist. Here and there pieces of their quaint and uncouth shaped apparatus, the aludel, the alembic, and the alkaner, the pelican, the crucible, and the water-bath, occupy their respective stations. The clumsy, heavy, oaken table ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... physics point very strongly to such a conclusion, and agrees with Faraday, that, "to decompose the metals, then to reform them, to change them from one to another, and to realize the once absurd notion of transmutation, are the problems now given to the chemist for solution." We consider Professor Crookes to be one of the most eminent scientists now living, and any views he may advance are entitled ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... held as altogether improbable. But is not the thing rather arranged as it is by the consummate providence of nature? For were the chyle mingled with the blood, the crude with the digested, in equal proportions, the result would not be concoction, transmutation, and sanguification, but rather, and because they are severally active and passive, a mixture or combination, or medium compound of the two, precisely as happens when wine is mixed with water and syrup. But when a very minute quantity of chyle ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... the ART of the poem; and this perhaps, is what at first sight will strike the student most. He chose as a foundation for his work those laments of Bion for Adonis, and of Moschus for Bion, which are the most pathetic products of Greek idyllic poetry; and the transmutation of their material into the substance of highly spiritualized modern thought, reveals the potency of a Prospero's wand. It is a metamorphosis whereby the art of excellent but positive poets has been ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... markets with cattle. For making looking-glasses, coach-glasses, &c. Capital L2,000,000. For taking up ballast. For buying and fitting out ships to suppress pirates. For the importation of timber from Wales. Capital L2,000,000. For rock-salt. For the transmutation of quicksilver into a malleable, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... e're you made A transmutation it was through mine aid, Ye silver Smiths, your Ure I do refine What mingled lay with Earth I cause to shine, But let me leave these things, my fame aspires To match on high with the Celestial fires; The Sun an ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... a portion of his history. But he did not tell you that his continued failures in his search after the secret of metallic transmutation nearly killed him. Two years ago he was on the verge of the grave, working every day at his mad pursuit, and every day growing weaker and more emaciated. I saw that if his mind was not relieved in some way he would die. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... first those of his family. But be, like Harley, became, merely from the vehemence of his Whiggism, an ally of the Tories, and might, perhaps, like Harley, have been completely metamorphosed into a Tory, if the process of transmutation had not been interrupted by death. Foley's abilities were highly respectable, and had been improved by education. He was so wealthy that it was unnecessary for him to follow the law as a profession; but he had studied ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... This transmutation of the reproductive energy gives more vitality to those practising it. They will be filled with great vital force, which will radiate from them and will manifest in what has been called "personal magnetism." The energy thus transmuted may be turned into new ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... universe has been slowly manufacturing for millions of years. Our attitude implies that we want eternity to roll back and begin again, in such wise that we at any rate shall not be disturbed. Though we have a machine for the transmutation of facts into food for our growth, we do not dream of using it. But, we say, he is doing us harm! Where? In our minds. He has robbed us of our peace, our comfort, our happiness, our good temper. Even if he has, we might just as well inveigh against a shower. But has he? What ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... mind more aptly than by showing in what degree the feelings of nature yield to it when we are rendering to our friends the solemn testimony of our love? more forcibly than by giving proof that thoughts cannot, even upon this impulse, assume an outward life without a transmutation and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... possible that this determination should have been effected before the return of the "Beagle" to England; and thus the date (Chapter II./4. The date in question is July 1837, when he "opened first note-book on Transmutation of Species.') which Darwin (writing in 1837) assigns to the dawn of the new light which was rising in his mind, becomes intelligible." This seems to us inconsistent with Darwin's own statement that it was especially the character of the "species on Galapagos Archipelago" which had ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... a believer in magic and the transmutation of metals. There was always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder of projection had been cast into the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this city, a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors; and by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bourdeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple. Virgil, ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... persuaded by Arkel to postpone his journey to the bedside of his dying friend Marcellus; the opening scene of Act III, between Pelleas, Melisande, and Yniold. Numerous passages that are either not essential to the development of the action, or that do not invite musical transmutation, have been curtailed or omitted, with the result that the movement of the drama has been compressed and accelerated throughout. In outlining very briefly the action of the play (which should be read in the original by all who would know Debussy's setting of it) ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... and character remain the same whether they are kept in the Executive Mansion or deposited in the Departments. There is no mysterious power of transmutation in departmental custody, nor is there magic in the undefined and sacred solemnity of Department files. If the presence of these papers in the public offices is a stumbling block in the way of the performance of Senatorial duty, it ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... buried? For as here the change and resolution of dead bodies into another kind of subsistence (whatsoever it be;) makes place for other dead bodies: so the souls after death transferred into the air, after they have conversed there a while, are either by way of transmutation, or transfusion, or conflagration, received again into that original rational substance, from which all others do proceed: and so give way to those souls, who before coupled and associated unto bodies, now begin to subsist single. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... burned in his private cabinet; its doors were always locked. He passed days and nights there, but he spoke little about his pursuits. The mysteries of nature are studied in silence. He expected soon to discover its greatest secret—the transmutation ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... more forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical transmutation, one of the greatest works of art ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... an idealistic creed is formulated in precise and dogmatic language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty in the process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy of Comte, though embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited influence. Again, the poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly altruistic than that of Cowper or Wordsworth, is ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... prices of India rubber is as old as the rubber industry, one result of which has been an unceasing effort to discover a practical substitute. Never was the secret of the transmutation of metals sought more persistently by ancient philosophers than the secret of an artificial rubber has been by modern chemists, but, thus far, the one search has been hardly more successful than the other. One discovery has been made, however, by which our rubber ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... his intention; but that is relatively first, with which his operation begins—and this because the intention is prior to the operation. On the part of the matter—that is first which exists first in the transmutation of the matter. Now in the Incarnation the order depending on the agent must be particularly considered, because, as Augustine says (Ep. ad Volusianum cxxxvii), "in such things the whole reason of the deed is the power of the doer." But it is manifest ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... study its maxims. A society exists to-day the object of which is to further the knowledge of alchemical science. A common misapprehension is current to the effect that the object of the alchemists was the transmutation of the baser metals into gold, but in reality they were divided into two groups, those who sought eagerly the secret of manufacturing the precious metals, and those who dreamed of a higher aim, the transmutation of the gross, terrestrial nature of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... own opinions: therefore, that may have some truth in it, that is reported by the Jesuits of their miracles in the Indies. I could wish it were true, or had any other testimony than their own pens. They may easily believe those miracles abroad, who daily conceive a greater at home —the transmutation of those visible elements into the body and blood of our Saviour;—for the conversion of water into wine, which he wrought in Cana, or, what the devil would have had him done in the wilderness, of stones into bread, compared to this, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... astrology, witchcraft, and the transmutation of copper and lead into gold were generally believed in. In preaching before Queen Elizabeth, Bishop Jewell urged that stringent measures be taken with witches and sorcerers, saying that through their demoniacal acts "your Grace's subjects pine away even unto death, their color fadeth, their flesh ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... who at least endeavoured to stimulate some of his higher aspirations, and smiled upon his wearing the sword along with the lyre. In the last episode of his constantly chequered and too voluptuous career, we have the waking of Sardanapalus realized in the transmutation of the fantastical Harold into a practical strategist, financier, and soldier. No one ever lived who, in the same space, more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence. Having exhausted all other sources of vitality and intoxication—travel, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... now sat down to table, but was so occupied with her grief for the blighted roses that she did not even notice the wonderful transmutation of her china bowl. Perhaps this was all the better; for Marygold was accustomed to take pleasure in looking at the queer figures, and strange trees and houses, that were painted on the circumference of the bowl; and these ornaments were now entirely ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... wrought in this manner into the fabric of our own constitution, waylaying us in our hours of weakness, and irresolution, and secrecy, and speaking to our inward being in tones that are as startling as any that could be addressed to the physical ear,—undergoing this transmutation, and becoming a continual consciousness of duty and obligation, the law of God is more than a letter. It is a possessing spirit, and according as we obey or disobey, it is a guardian angel, or a tormenting fiend. We have disobeyed, and therefore the sense of duty is a tormenting ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... For this love of experimental philosophy, sir John Hawkins thinks an apology necessary. He tells us, with great gravity, that curiosity was the only object in view; not an intention to grow suddenly rich by the philosopher's stone, or the transmutation of metals. To enlarge this circle, Johnson, once more, had recourse to a literary club. This was at the Turk's head, in Gerard street, Soho, on every Tuesday evening through the year. The members were, besides himself, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... stunted furze, was broken with deep hollows full of stagnant water; some almost black, others covered with the rusty scum which denoted the presence of the powerful mineral, upon whose agency we relied for performing that strange piece of natural magic which may almost be called the transmutation of flowers. ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... distributes beauty or deformity as it pleases: it changes in turn, with the rod of Circe, men into brutes and animals into men: it even disposes of Life or of Death, and can bestow on its adepts riches by the transmutation of metals, and immortality by its quintessence and elixir, compounded of gold ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... not without a hope, not to say a certainty, of verifying the golden visions of the alchymists. Dr. Girtanner, of Gottingen, not long ago adventured the following prophecy: "In the nineteenth century the transmutation of metals will be generally known and practised. Every chemist and every artist will make gold; kitchen utensils will be of silver, and even gold, which will contribute more than anything else to prolong life, poisoned at present by the oxides of copper, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... your transmutation by and by," said the dame, "and find you clothes withal, and money besides; for it will take a good deal to carry the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Tao-teh-king, and been impressed by his tranquil elevation above the petty ills and concerns of life and the flesh. Her father, like all the ruling class, regarded Taoism—which had, indeed, degenerated into a mass of nonsense about the transmutation of base metals into gold and the elixir of life—with contempt. But this seemed to her no depreciation of the Greatly Eminent One or his philosophy ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was poring over an old tome which dealt with alchemy and the transmutation of metals, in which the learned writer gravely gave his opinion about baser metals being turned into gold, all of which Sir Morton Darley thought would be very satisfactory, as he could not succeed in finding a profitable lead-mine on ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... their hands did not only restore all the antiquated pieces of false wit, but enriched the world with inventions of their own. It is to this age that we owe the production of anagrams, which is nothing else but a transmutation of one word into another, or the turning of the same set of letters into different words; which may change night into day, or black into white, if chance, who is the goddess that presides over these sorts of composition, shall so direct. I remember a witty author, in allusion ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... of human anguish. In boyhood, desiring to please his invalid and slowly dying mother, he had purchased and hung up opposite her bed, an illuminated copy of her favorite text; and now, by some subtle transmutation in the conservation of spiritual energy, each golden letter of that Bible text seemed emblazoned on the dusty wall of the court-room: "God is our refuge and strength, a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... infrequency of these phenomena in this meridian; they being common both in Eastern Bengal, and in Western India beyond the Ganges.] Originally built of gold, the sins of the inhabitants were punished by its transmutation into stone, and latterly into mud and thatch: whoever enters it, and especially visits its principal idol (Siva fossilised) ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... has to do with this world of universals. Hence it is, too, that so much of the so-called science of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies—derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by the brain converted ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Chalcondyles (l. v.) and Ducas (c. 23) exhibit the rude lineament of the Ottoman policy, and the transmutation of Christian children ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... descendants of a common ancestor; or, still further, whether mammalia, birds, reptiles, and fishes, could all have had a common origin;—these questions had hardly come up for discussion at all, for it was felt that, while the very first step along the road of "transmutation of species" (as it was then called) had not been made, it was quite useless to speculate as to how far it might be possible to travel in the same direction, or where the road would ultimately ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... tradition sung down in a ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it—when you consider, beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry, no blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an occasional telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an event of public importance, a suitable emotion. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in the transmutation of nitrous air, in these circumstances, less remarkable. For when it has been brought to the state last mentioned, the agitation of it in fresh water almost instantly takes off that peculiar kind of inflammability, so that it extinguishes a candle, retaining its noxious ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... the thing skeptically, and half expecting it to vanish like the tools that made it, gingerly entered the port. Powered as it was by lead burning cosmic ray generators, the lead alone having been made by transmutation of natural matter, it was powerful, and speedy. The official entered it, and finding it still existing, tried it out. Much to his amazement it flew, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... self aloof and immune. She had dreamed that some inward irreproachability of thought, some light-hearted tact of open conduct, might leave still untainted that deeper core of thought and feeling which she had long thought of as conscience, while some deceiving and sophistical transmutation of values whispered to her adroitly that in some way all good might be bad, and that all bad might in ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... not yet sufficient. Besides, it requires heroic courage to admit our ignorance. 'I don't know,' he says, and that is the attitude of Morselli. Dr. Foa believes the phenomena to come within the domain of natural law, and to result from a transmutation of energy accumulated in the medium. He calls this 'vital energy' or 'psychic energy,' and adds: 'If these phenomena appear strange by virtue of their comparative rarity, they are not really more marvellous than the biological phenomena which ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... children. Besides these, many had their faces painted, and wore their shirts over the rest of their dress; while coloured pasteboard and ribbons furnished out decorations for others. Those who wanted all these properties, blacked their faces, and turned their jackets inside out; and thus the transmutation of the whole assembly into a set of mad grotesque mummers, was ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... which men were accustomed. But there may be restlessness along with inactivity; may there not? And there is no such restlessness as the restlessness of compulsory idleness. That is the main idea that is in the Psalmist's mind. He knows little about retribution, he knows still less about transmutation into a glorious likeness to that which is most glorious and divine. But he conceives a great, dim, lonely land, wherein are prisoned and penned all the lives that have been foamed away vainly on earth, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... performing all day long, we and all our ancestors, no one of us has succeeded in getting a good sight of what actually takes place. Our purposes are prepared as I have described, and then those purposes—something altogether mental—change on a sudden to material motions. How is the transmutation accomplished? How do we pass from a mental picture to a set of motions in the physical world? What is the bridge connecting the two? The bridge is always down when we direct our gaze upon it, though firm when any ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... caused by the transmutation of atomic energy," said an anonymous scientist, supposed to be on the staff of California Tech. The college quickly ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... the Facts Possible. None Ever Alleged, save Gulliver's. Domestication Disproves Transmutation—Horses; Pigeons; Dogs. The Egyptian Monuments. The Mummied Animals. The Geological Record. The Limits ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... dishonest or dishonourable. When he was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five once swallowed a whole bottle of his elixir. Nobody recognised her, for she had become a girl of sixteen ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest," which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my fellow-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... and though this is carrying delicacy far indeed, it reads to Christian wives a lesson not unworthy of their attention; for, though it is not desirable that their bodies should be turned into handfuls of ashes, even that transmutation were preferable to that infidelity which fixes the brand of shame on the cheeks of their parents, their children, and on those of all who ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... species to such dreamers as the author of the 'Vestiges', by whose well-intentioned efforts the Lamarckian theory received its final condemnation in the minds of all sound thinkers. Notwithstanding this silence, however, the transmutation theory, as it has been called, has been a "skeleton in the closet" to many an honest zoologist and botanist who had a soul above the mere naming of dried plants and skins. Surely, has such an one thought, nature is a mighty and consistent whole, and the providential order established in ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who married the other." He had been wont to "sit and look at his ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... are acquainted with who talks of making gold by the transmutation of one metal, by means of an alcahest[70] into another, is Zozimus the Pomopolite, who lived about the commencement of the fifth century, and who has a treatise express upon it, called, "The divine art of making gold and silver," in ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... to be amusing. For instance, if I were to tell you that the Princess and the Baron rode out together daily to inspect the cannon, it is either a piece of politics or scandal, as I turn my phrase. I am the alchemist that makes the transmutation. They have been everywhere together since you left,' she continued, brightening as she saw Otto darken; 'that is a poor snippet of malicious gossip - and they were everywhere cheered - and with that addition all becomes ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Solomon, or to Hermes, were the pious frauds of more recent adepts. The Greeks were inattentive either to the use or to the abuse of chemistry. In that immense register, where Pliny has deposited the discoveries, the arts, and the errors of mankind, there is not the least mention of the transmutation of metals; and the persecution of Diocletian is the first authentic event in the history of alchemy. The conquest of Egypt by the Arabs diffused that vain science over the globe. Congenial to the avarice of the human heart, it was studied in China ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... English poetry. A few exquisite pieces in Latin literature, the Catullian Ille mi par, for example, a few in our own, such as Jonson's Drink to me only with thine eyes, are translations. Possibly the miracle of such poetic transmutation may be repeated for me; possibly an English song may come to birth by my means also. With this hope in view, the translator is strongly tempted to engraft upon his versions elegances in the spirit of his native language, or to use the motives of the original ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... Jesuits of their miracles in the Indies. I could wish it were true, or had any other testimony than their own pens. They may easily believe those miracles abroad, who daily conceive a greater at home —the transmutation of those visible elements into the body and blood of our Saviour;—for the conversion of water into wine, which he wrought in Cana, or, what the devil would have had him done in the wilderness, of stones into bread, compared to this, will scarce deserve the name of a miracle: though, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... The transmutation of each into the other, both Life and Poetry, as revealed in their lives, is something as exceptional as it is beautiful in ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species take their places apparently by substitution, not by transmutation." ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... thereby force and confine the opinions of the Judges to our private statement; and through the medium of our subsequent decision we transfer the effect of those opinions to the parties, who have been deprived of the right and advantage of being heard by such, private, though unintended, transmutation of the point ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Congress should for long content itself with an abode which, without being venerable, is simply out of date. The main architectural proportions of the interior are dignified enough. What is wanted is merely the transmutation of stucco into marble, painted pine into oak, and pseudo-Italian arabesques into American frescoes and mosaics. Why should Congress itself be more meanly housed than ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... enjoyed profound tranquillity, internal and external, and our annalists find leisure to advert to various circumstances of domestic history. They mention a corporation formed for the transmutation of iron into copper by the method of one Medley an alchemist, of which the learned but credulous sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state, was a principal promoter, and in which both Leicester and Burleigh embarked some capital. The master ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... friend, you see My harp hung up here on the willow tree. Sing I could once; and bravely, too, inspire With luscious numbers my melodious lyre. Draw I could once, although not stocks or stones, Amphion-like, men made of flesh and bones, Whither I would; but ah! I know not how, I feel in me this transmutation now. Grief, my dear friend, has first my harp unstrung, Wither'd my hand, and palsy-struck ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... in magic and the transmutation of metals. There was always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder of projection had been cast into the crucible, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... even now only a young woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her an impression that was not in time capable of transmutation. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It was as a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Shelley's verse is precisely what dreams of the transmutation of "man" into "beyond-man." That which saddens humanity beyond words is the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... half-killed, must have doubted even less—that if Satan pleased, they should finally find this powder which would load them with riches and even render them almost immortal—for at that epoch the philosopher's stone passed not only for an agent in the transmutation of base metals, such as tin, lead, copper, into noble metals like silver and gold, but also for a panacea curing all ailments and prolonging life, without infirmities, beyond the limits formerly assigned ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Silent Woman (1609). The object of The Alchemist is to ridicule the belief in the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. The alchemist is "Subtle," a mere quack; and "sir Epicure Mammon" is the chief dupe, who supplies money, etc., for the "transmutation of metal." "Abel Drugger" a tobacconist, and "Dapper" a lawyer's clerk, are two other dupes. "Captain Face," alias "Jeremy," the house-servant of "Lovewit," and "Dol Common" are his allies. The whole thing is blown up by the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... composition itself, I may say that it is full of life, indeed, spirited in every respect, in movement and in boldness of harmonic and melodic conception. The Tarantelle is a translation from Italian into Polish, a transmutation of Rossini into Chopin, a Neapolitan scene painted with opaque colours, the south without its transparent sky, balmy air, and general brightness. That this composition was inspired by impressions received from Rossini's Tarantella, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... chanced upon this infernal synthesis and fusion. For him, no doubt, it proved a philosopher's stone in earnest, for the Borgia always extended a generous hand to those who could assist their damnable activities. Transmutation—so a skilled friend assures me—is now proved to be a fact, and another generation will be able perhaps to make gold, if the desire for that accursed mineral continues much longer to ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... colors upon different bodies and other diverse qualities; how it reduces some to a liquid state and hardens others; how it can consume almost all bodies, or convert them into ashes and smoke; and finally, how from these ashes, by the mere intensity of its action, it forms glass: for as this transmutation of ashes into glass appeared to me as wonderful as any other in nature, I took a special pleasure in describing it. I was not, however, disposed, from these circumstances, to conclude that this world had been created in the manner I described; for it is much ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... good to see that letter-head, but aren't you afraid to enter into competition with Mr. Tumulty, who has now, I see, bought the old Shepard mansion and will settle in Washington. How do they do it with the high cost of living what it is? ... The transmutation of brass into gold is ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... passion for accumulating wealth reduced him into almost as unfortunate a state as Midas, who, according to the fable, having obtained the long-desired power of turning every thing he touched to gold, was starved by the immediate transmutation of all food into that metal the instant it touched his lips. The late possessor of the house I am speaking of, when he was about fifty years old, turned away every servant but an old woman, who if she was not honest, was ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... but they had never made a full avowal that his being rested on any tangible physical basis. Rather had they fallen into the way of considering him as a disembodied intelligence, whose sole function was to direct the transmutation of values and credits and resources and opportunities into the creature comforts demanded by the state of life unto which it had please Providence to call them; and their dismay was now such as might occur at the Mint if the great stamp were suddenly and of its own accord to cease ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... dynamic factors, he goes on to say that "Lamarck, although he clearly grasped the law of competition, or the struggle for existence, the law of adaptation, or the correspondence of the organism to the changing environment, the transmutation of species, and the genealogical descent of all organic beings, the more complex from the more simple; he nevertheless failed to conceive the selective principle as formulated by Darwin and Wallace, which so ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... these facts that whatever may be presented to the imagination is transformed into a real object in the dream itself, so that it might be called a dream within a dream, and in the last instance the transmutation passes through three images and consecutive objects. This transmutation not only consists in the transition from our waking thoughts to the image of our dreams, but it takes place in the act of dreaming; ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... "There is another race of critics who might be designated as the Occult School—vere adepti. They discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... possession of. Therefore, rightly saith Seneca, in lib. de Moribus: Thou art not yet happy, if the Rout deride thee not. But I matter not, whether they believe, or contradict what I write, touching the Transmutation of Metals. I rest satisfied in this one thing, which with my eyes I have seen, and what with my hands I have done. For what Philosophers say of themselves, I also have with my hands handled this Spark of the Eternal ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... Agassiz we have this statement: "As a palaeontologist I have from the beginning stood aloof from this new theory of transmutation, now so widely admitted; its doctrines, in fact, contradict what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... wild wool are analogous to those produced upon wild roses. In the one case there is an abnormal development of petals at the expense of the stamens, in the other an abnormal development of wool at the expense of the hair. Garden roses frequently exhibit stamens in which the transmutation to petals may be observed in various stages of accomplishment, and analogously the fleeces of tame sheep occasionally contain a few wild hairs that are undergoing transmutation to wool. Even wild wool presents ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... of a man—missionary, fanatic, quack, what you will—had made diamonds as far back as the year 1280. He owned to having stumbled across the Recipe accidentally. Like other alchemists of his time, the transmutation of metals was his aim, and the crystallization of part of his graphite crucible was quite a matter of chance; but it occurred most surely; and he analyzed the why and wherefore, and wrote down the method of working ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... were afterwards increased to that amazing height by the snow that fell upon them*. But that all frozen sea-water would thaw into fresh, had either never been asserted, or had met with little credit. This is certain that Captain Cook expected no such transmutation, and therefore was agreeably surprised to find he had one difficulty less to encounter, that of preserving the health of his men so long on salt-provisions, with a scanty allowance of corrupted water, or what ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, assuming the transmutation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those of another. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... Tools of every sort must be more numerous, and this larger number of tools, if it is to represent the same investment of capital that the former number embodied, must also be simpler and cheaper. The whole equipment of capital goods will have to undergo a complete transmutation; but the essential thing is that the amount of the ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... certain absent objects of sense that have been perceived; there must be a suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if not a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me that the transmutation of the crude and theretofore unpoetical materials, which he found in the New World, into what is as absolute a creation as exists in literature, was a distinct work of the imagination. Its humorous quality does not interfere with its largeness of outline, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... confess, is the view to which we are most inclined—first, because we think a transmutation of species, from a lower to a higher type, has not been satisfactorily proved; and second, because of the strong impression we entertain, that the universe, subject to certain cyclical and determinate mutations, was made complete at first, with self-subsisting provisions for its perpetual ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... to the mould! In the very scheme of her dream it told; For, by magical transmutation, From her Leg through her body it seem'd to go, Till, gold above, and gold below. She was gold, all gold, from her little gold toe To her organ ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place. Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love passed like the flight of a ship ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... Sways, and maketh the tongue to sound! And the rope, with its twisted cordage three, Denoteth the Scriptural Trinity Of Morals, and Symbols, and History; And the upward and downward motion show That we touch upon matters high and low; And the constant change and transmutation Of action and of contemplation, Downward, the Scripture brought from on high, Upward, exalted again to the sky; Downward, the literal interpretation, Upward, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... preliminary view I must still mention one novelty that Paracelsus (1493-1541) introduced into the theory. Ibn Sina had taught that two principles entered into the constitution of metals. Mercury is the bearer of the metallic property and sulphur has the nature of the combustible and is the cause of the transmutation of metals in fire. The doctrine of the two principles leads to the theory that for the production of gold it was necessary to get from metals the purest possible sulphur and mercury, in order to produce gold by the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... things easy to the Gods. If any one were to form or fashion all things without any regard to the whole—if, for example, he formed a living element of water out of fire, instead of forming many things out of one or one out of many in regular order attaining to a first or second or third birth, the transmutation would have been infinite; but now the ruler of the world has a ...
— Laws • Plato
... thermodynamic operations. In this process of reconversion, whatever the nature of the machine used in the operation, there are invariably wastes, both of heat required for conversion into power and of the power thus produced. That machine which effects the most complete transmutation of the heat supplied it into mechanical power, which wastes the least amount of heat supplied and of power produced, is the best engine, and constitutes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... must be held as altogether improbable. But is not the thing rather arranged as it is by the consummate providence of nature? For were the chyle mingled with the blood, the crude with the digested, in equal proportions, the result would not be concoction, transmutation, and sanguification, but rather, and because they are severally active and passive, a mixture or combination, or medium compound of the two, precisely as happens when wine is mixed with water and syrup. But when a very minute quantity of chyle is mingled with a very large quantity of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... convey'd away in a Tinker's Budget; which is design'd by our Author to prove, if it is understood literally, That the greatest Men are subject to Misfortunes. But it is thought by Dr. B—tly to be all Mythology, and to contain the Doctrine of the Transmutation of Metals, and is design'd to shew, that all Matter is the same, tho' very differently Modified. He tells me, he intends to publish a distinct Treatise of this Canto; and I don't question, but he'll manage the Dispute with the same Learning, ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... Cuvier and others have negatived the theory of Lamarcke as to the transmutation of species. The "nisus formativus" is admitted, but admitted with limits, "quos ultra citraque ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... reader, whose curiosity may lead him to consult the authorities collected by Cudworth (pp. 185-188), will find in the doctrine of Anaximander a rude anticipation of the modern theories of "spontaneous generation" and "the transmutation of species." In the fragments of Anaximander that remain we find no recognition of an ordering Mind, and his philosophy is the dawn ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... they are not seen. In general, all that is described to us in the brain is the molecular vibrations. But we are not conscious of them. Where, then, is that of which we are conscious? (2) It should next be explained to us by what elaboration, transmutation, or metamorphosis a molecular disturbance, which is material, can transform itself into the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... been slowly manufacturing for millions of years. Our attitude implies that we want eternity to roll back and begin again, in such wise that we at any rate shall not be disturbed. Though we have a machine for the transmutation of facts into food for our growth, we do not dream of using it. But, we say, he is doing us harm! Where? In our minds. He has robbed us of our peace, our comfort, our happiness, our good temper. Even if he has, we might just as well inveigh against a shower. ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... and woefull Tragedie, Of the Rhodian feareful oppugnation, To all estates complaining ruthfully Of thine estate, and sudden transmutation: Excusing me if in thy translation Ought be amisse in language or in werke, I me submit with their supportation, To be correct, that am so small ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... forms which change in space (motion), by which the external world acts on the individual man, and so on. But externally to ourselves, the distinction between repletion of Space and mutation of Space does not exist, for each is in constant transmutation, whatever is is filling and changing at the same time—nothing is at a standstill," and to quote Ruckert: "The world has neither beginning nor end, in space nor in time. Everywhere is center and turning-point, and in a moment ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... syllables are converted into the corresponding numbers, according to the general mode of transmutation so often alluded to in Mantra Shastra, the word in question will be represented by ////. This sign then is evidently intended to represent the sacred Tetragram; the Parabrahmadharaka; the Pranava resolved into four separate entities corresponding ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... proving that bodies called simple were really compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as we are masters of the laws influencing their combinations,"—when he comes forward and says that he has tried experiments at transmutation, and means, if his life is spared, to try them again,—how can we be surprised at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a gold-factory and is glutting the mints of Europe with bullion of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hundred slaves; for slaves they were until their term of years was up. Schemmer worked hard to extract the strength from those five hundred sweating bodies and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export. His dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to effect the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt, three inches wide and a yard in length, with which he always rode and which, on occasion, could come down on the naked back of a stooping coolie with a report like a pistol-shot. These reports were frequent ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection—selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... orators, and historians of antiquity. In the study of Aristotle, and in metaphysical philosophy, they were proficients. Medicine, also, they cultivated with success. They delved in Alchemy in the search for the transmutation of metals. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... study. Wise men in their cells, before Athens was built, before the Pyramids were conceived, were thinking out this matter in strange parts of Egypt, in forgotten parts of Syria and Asia. For generations their dream has been looked upon as a thing elusive as the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of metals—any of these unsolved problems. For five hundred years—since the days of a Russian scientist who lived on the Black Sea, but whose name, for the moment, I have forgotten—the whole subject has lain dead. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... passer le temps, with the terminus all but in prospect, Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven. Ah, did we really accept with a perfect heart the illusion! Ah, did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only! Or through all transmutation, all shock and convulsion of passion, Feel we could carry undimmed, unextinguished, the light of our knowledge! But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage-procession? But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... insensitiveness to formal beauty is no disgrace. Such argue that our accomplishments and our interests are in other fields, where we more than match the accomplishments of older civilizations. They forget that every achievement not registered in terms of beauty has failed of its final and enduring transmutation. It is because the achievements of older civilizations attained to their apotheoses in art that they interest us, and unless we are able to effect a corresponding transmutation we are destined to perish unhonoured ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Chinese gong that was so prominent an object in the hall into a piece of Benares brassware, he could almost have fancied himself as standing on the brink of the sacred river. The marigolds in the garden required no transmutation.... ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... was of marble, so dazzlingly white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly ornamented portico supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a lofty door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated wood that had been brought from beyond the sea. ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... same relationship here that alchemy holds to physics. The old boys with their frog guts and awful offal knew a bit about things like distilling and smelting. But there was no real order to their knowledge, and it was all an unconsidered by-product of their single goal, the whole nonsense of transmutation." ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... hand, astrology, witchcraft, and the transmutation of copper and lead into gold were generally believed in. In preaching before Queen Elizabeth, Bishop Jewell urged that stringent measures be taken with witches and sorcerers, saying that through their demoniacal acts "your Grace's subjects pine away even unto ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... pretenders to the art of making gold and silver existed in Rome in the first centuries after the Christian era, and that, when discovered, they were liable to punishment as knaves and impostors. At Constantinople, in the fourth century, the transmutation of metals was very generally believed in, and many of the Greek ecclesiastics wrote treatises upon the subject. Their names are preserved, and some notice of their works given, in the third volume of Lenglet du Fresnoy's ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... it is transmutation. Between the ancient and the present sewer there is a revolution. What ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... is formulated in precise and dogmatic language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty in the process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy of Comte, though embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited influence. Again, the poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly altruistic than that of Cowper or ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... just addressed them into that image of threadbare poverty and hunger-pinched dejection? Little aid from theatrical costume: the clothes seemed the same, only to have grown wondrous aged and rusty. The face, the figure, the man,—these had undergone a transmutation beyond the art of the mere stage wardrobe, be it ever so amply stored, to effect. But for the patch over the eye, you could not have recognized Mr. Chapman. There was, indeed, about him, still, an air of dignity; ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... range of invention seems limited; and we find it revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. But Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an argument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed, might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in external form, we have no difficulty in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... study. They may be distinguished as physical, moral, and historical. Few of these arguments, taken separately, can be called altogether new. Their new power has been caused by the simultaneous filling up and completion of all of them; by their transmutation from filmy visions into massive and vast realities; from unauthorised misgivings into the most rigid and compelling of demonstrations: and still more, by the brilliant and sudden annihilation of the most obvious difficulties, which till very lately had neutralised ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... with any other silver. They either would not melt or in melting remained distinct. This, however, was a disputed point. Some of the alchemists in their writings seem disposed to attribute the ill success of their efforts at transmutation to the presence of some taint of these pieces in the silver upon which ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... L. entered somewhat minutely on the chemical reactions of the better known colorific and coloring principles, and their derivatives, so far at least as these throw any light on the production and transmutation of the red or purple colors extracted from what may be termed par excellence, the dye-lichens. After a few remarks on the chemical constitution of orchil and litmus, as given by Kane, Gelis, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... is in this city a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors, and, by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple. Virgil ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... surplus revenue among the States, which, operating at the same time with the specie circular and the causes before adverted to, caused them to suspend specie payments and involved the country in the greatest embarrassment. And as to the third, if carried through all the stages of its transmutation from paper and specie to nothing but the precious metals, to say nothing of the insecurity of the public moneys, its injurious effects have been anticipated by the country in its unqualified condemnation. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... variation could not fail to have been noticed, and must have given rise to reflection and speculation. The selection of the best animals for breeding purposes, and the consequent improvement of their stock, may well have suggested the transmutation of one kind of animal into a different kind, just as the crossing of different kinds of animals seems to have suggested the possible existence of centaurs, griffins and ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... he stood there, calm and imposing, the prototype of the modern priest, pleading against worldliness for the sake of beauty and of God. With delicately chosen words and exquisite imagery, the calm enthusiasm of the orator, always self-controlled and sweetly convincing, seemed to Douglas like the transmutation of a beautiful picture into a beautiful poem, instinct with life, vivid and thrilling. He stayed till the sermon was over and the solemn words of the benediction pronounced, till the deep, throbbing notes of the organ rang down the emptying aisles. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... her sailing-power is another branch of the equipment of a screw-ship, which requires the most earnest, patient, and intelligent consideration. Prepared to endure all the wear and tear of a sail-ship, she should at the same time be ready for transmutation into a steam-ship; namely, when, for any urgent service, her best powers of steaming are required, she should be able to divest herself speedily of yards and top-masts, and, the special service completed, resume all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from the very beginning grew into a familiar spirit of kindred form with their own, and though regarded as the subordinate and wife of the sun, was reverenced as the superior and husband of the earth. With the transmission of this myth began its transmutation. From the moon being a man, it became a man's abode: with some it was the world whence human spirits came; with others it was the final home whither human spirits returned. Then it grew into a penal colony, to which ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible." This observation has a still greater value when applied to Hawthorne himself. And out of this questioning belief and transmutation of superstition into truth—for such is more exactly his method—proceeds also that quality of value and rarity and awe-enriched significance, with which he irradiates real life until it is sublimed to a delicate cloud-image of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... which they were put were entirely artistic and had nothing to do with coinage, while the great quantities that were then produced by the chemists—or as we should now-a-days call them alchemists—may be said to have taken them out of the category of the precious metals. This power of transmutation of metals was not universal, but it was so widely possessed that enormous quantities were made. In fact the production of the wished-for metals may be regarded as one of the industrial enterprises of ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas! But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call, in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk furniture—too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed—too much of its upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost—and taste. An enlargement ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... [Footnote: When heated air imparts its motion to another gas or vapour, the transference of heat is accompanied by a change of vibrating period. The Dynamic Radiation of vapours is rendered possible by this transmutation of vibrations.] ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... especially the subtle force, the impeccable and careful instinct, the masculine delicacy of touch, by which the somewhat ruffianly temperament of the original Ferando is at once refined and invigorated through its transmutation into the hearty ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was ever dreamed of by the wisest of those who have grown old among furnaces and crucibles and retorts; wearing their lives away in a search after perpetual youth, and their substance in that which sooner and more surely than "riotous living" impoverisheth a man—the transmutation of the baser metals into gold—you fall a whistling maybe—or beg leave to suggest the word fudge. If so, take my word for it, like a pretty woman with the small-pox, the probability is, you are very ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... and its ideas, and the senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at Milan—his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence! His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style, with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this narrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... of helium lies in the clue it has afforded to the constitution of matter and the transmutation of the elements. Radium and other radioactive substances, such as uranium, spontaneously emit negatively charged particles of extremely small mass (electrons), and also positively charged particles of much greater mass, known as alpha particles. ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... system. Before the war they owned labor, land, and subsistence. After the war they still held the land and subsistence. The laborer was hired and the subsistence "advanced" to him while the crop was growing. The fall of the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... German couples over their honeymoon; that Dandolo and Foscari, Sansovino and Tintoretto, passed away with no suspicion of that latter-day trinity—Bride, Bridegroom, and Baedeker. Strange that that which was so real to themselves is so romantic to us! Such is the transmutation of time, which can colour with poetry things much more prosaic than life in ancient Venice. Nothing ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... what everybody knows about Circe, who changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts; and what is said of the Arcadians, who, after having drawn lots, swam over a certain lake, after which they were metamorphosed into wolves, and ran about in the forests like other wolves. If during the time of their transmutation they did not eat human flesh, at the end of nine years they repassed the same lake, and resumed their ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Mrs. Pringle, followed by Miss Mally Glencairn and Miss Isabella Tod, also debouched from the gate, and the assembled females remarked, with no less instinct, the transmutation which she had undergone. She was dressed in a dark blue cloth pelisse, trimmed with a dyed fur, which, as she told Miss Mally, "looked quite as well as sable, without costing a third of the money." A most matronly muff, that, without being of ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... country-home—is there such a parent who is not conscious of the misgiving and the re-assurance, as often as the absence and the re-union occur? Is there even the most trustful of wives, whose husband is on the other side of the globe, that is wholly undisturbed by the transmutation of the idol in her mind? When the husband is returning, and her hungry heart is feasting on the anticipation of his appearance, she may ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... M. Renan has indeed got into a sorry plight, and Mr. Rogers, in controverting him, has not greatly helped the matter. By stirring M. Renan's bemuddled pool, Mr. Rogers has only bemuddled it the more. Neither of these excellent writers seems to suspect that transmutation of species, the geologic development of the earth, and other like phenomena do not present features conflicting with ordinary experience. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Darwin would be greatly astonished to be told that their theories of inorganic ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... responded. "Our scientists have proved true the wildest theories of mediaeval scholars. The transmutation of metals seems to-day no longer an idle speculation, and radium has transformed into potential reality the dream of perpetual motion. The fundamental notions of mathematics are being undermined. One school of philosophers claims ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... intellectual movement of the period. This other side showed itself in mystical attempts at reducing nature to law in the light of the traditional problems which had been set, to wit, those of alchemy and astrology: the discovery of the philosopher's stone, of the transmutation of metals, of the elixir of life, and of the correspondences between the planets and terrestrial bodies. Among the most prominent exponents of these investigations may be mentioned Philippus von Hohenheim ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... you Philosophers, if e're you made A transmutation it was through mine aid, Ye silver Smiths, your Ure I do refine What mingled lay with Earth I cause to shine, But let me leave these things, my fame aspires To match on high with the Celestial fires; The Sun an Orb of fire was held of old, Our Sages new another tale have told; But be ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... itself all the more forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical transmutation, one of the greatest works of art in the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... transmutation lies fundamentally in the nature of representation. Representation can never be identical with its object. Helmholtz has made this most clear: "Our visions and representations are effects; objects seen and represented have worked on our nervous ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... materialistic friends have been spinning for us in their unverified theories of evolution, natural selection, selection of the fittest, rejection of the unfit—force-correlations, molecular machinery, transmutation of physical forces, differentiation, dynamical aggregates, molA(C)cules organiques, potentiated sky-mist, undifferentiated "life-stuff," and other hylotheistic and purely hypothetical formulA|, with which the average mind has been well-nigh ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... present from the very beginning as the condition of becoming conscious of anything, yet remains in constant change. Impressions pour in through the senses, enter the Whole that is already present; they drop their content into that Whole by means of the senses, and the miracle of transmutation, entirely ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... rhymes to catch the ears of women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. She would not burn the world for him; she would not, though a purer poetry is little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or essence, in honour of him, and so, by love's transmutation, literally be the man she was to marry. She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of women. She said it: she said: "I must be myself to be of any value to you, Willoughby." He was indefatigable in his lectures on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... masterly and luminous survey of the vicissitudes undergone by the songs and legends of Western and Northern nations in the course of transmutation from the primitive heroic stage into deliberate literary composition. The original material never attained the grand epical form; the process was interrupted by the advancement of learning, by ecclesiastical influences, and by ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... models and the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediaeval fancy; the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety of the Romans. Christianity ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... crucible before the eyes of the visitors, the juggler adroitly extracting the iron nail and inserting a gold one without detection. It mattered little if the converted gold nail differed in size and shape from the original, for this change in shape could be laid to the process of transmutation; and even the very critical were hardly likely to find fault with the exchange thus made. Furthermore, it was believed that gold possessed the property of changing its bulk under certain conditions, some of the more conservative alchemists ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... itself, and by thus counting more, the idea has entered into the spatial balance,—the idea has become itself form. Now it is the question whether all "idea," which seems so heterogeneous in its relation to form, does not undergo this transmutation. It is at least of interest to see whether the facts can ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... to the evolution theory, on the ground that "species, genera, families, &c., exist as thoughts, individuals as facts,"[288] and he offers the dilemma, "If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? and if individuals alone exist, how can the differences which may be observed among them prove the variability ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... philosophy, sir John Hawkins thinks an apology necessary. He tells us, with great gravity, that curiosity was the only object in view; not an intention to grow suddenly rich by the philosopher's stone, or the transmutation of metals. To enlarge this circle, Johnson, once more, had recourse to a literary club. This was at the Turk's head, in Gerard street, Soho, on every Tuesday evening through the year. The members were, besides himself, the right honourable ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodeling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has ever since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject of human interest, were in the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... preached to his overseers the value of fertilization; in one case, when looking for a new overseer, he said the man must be, "above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards gold;—in a word one who can bring worn out and gullied Lands into good tilth in the shortest time." Equally emphatic was his urging of constant ploughing and grubbing, and he even invented a deep soil plough, which he used till he found a better one in the English Rotheran ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... of natural phenomena, only two attempts of sufficient importance to be mentioned have been made. The first one was made by Lamarck, who, taking the really different ideas of descent and evolution as one, made use of the hypothesis of transmutation; thus becoming the pioneer of Darwinism. The other attempt was made by Darwin in his theory of natural selection, or struggle, for existence, and is called the "Theory ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... to make plain in the course of this excursion, the alchemists regarded the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and the transmutation of "base" metals into gold as the consummation of the proof of the doctrines of mystical theology as applied to chemical phenomena, and it was as such that they so ardently sought to achieve the magnum opus, as this transmutation was called. Of course, it would be useless to deny that many, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... lower and the triumph of the middle classes. Last of all came the successful realization of a national state. But in England nationalism came first; then under Edward the economic revolution; and lastly, under the Puritans, the transmutation of spiritual values. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... in the long run that Lincoln's credit and the popular confidence that supported it were as valuable both to his creditors and himself as if the sums which stood over his signature had been gold coin in a solvent bank. But this transmutation was not attained until he had passed through a very furnace of financial embarrassment. Berry proved a worthless partner, and the business a sorry failure. Seeing this, Lincoln and Berry sold out again on credit—to the Trent brothers, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... divers other qualities; how it dissolves some, and hardens others; how it can consume almost all, or convert them into ashes and smoak: and last of all, how of those ashes, by the only violence of its action, it forms glass. For this transmutation of ashes into glass, seeming to me to be as admirable as any other operation in Nature, I particularly ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... rivalry with the very greatest of his predecessors. A perception of the truth of this apparent paradox is the nearest one may come, I think, to the secret of his excellence. No matter what you do, if you do it well enough, that is, with enough elevation, enough spiritual distinction, enough transmutation of the elementary necessity of technical perfection into true significance—you succeed. And this is not the sense in which motive in art is currently belittled. It is rather the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... selection, combination, and transmutation, which every seed shews, are truly miraculous. Who can imagine that these wonderful faculties are contained in these little bits of matter? To me it appears much more philosophical to suppose that the mighty God of nature is present in full energy in all these operations. To this ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... still higher order than his own. Thus one creates his own world. He need not abjectly feel that he must accept sorrow, trial, defeat, and disaster at the moment, because compensation somewhere awaits him. The law of transmutation supersedes the law of compensation. One may bring to bear, at the moment, the potent force that transforms all: that changes dullness into radiance, trial into joy, depression into exaltation. And how? Simply by bringing to bear on the events and conditions of the hour the intense ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... more powerful than any supplied by Nature, that we have long discontinued the employment of any other. Even when we obtain electricity by means of heat, we find that the gain in application more than compensates the loss in the transmutation of one ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of rivers, and of the power of cataracts, tides, and winds, into vito-magnetic or electrical fluid; the transportation of this fluid to any locality through wire or cable; and its final transmutation into light, heat, or mechanical force sufficient for all work, are already demonstrated ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... easily persuaded that they can do more. When Rowley had completed the orrery, he attempted the perpetual motion; when Boyle had exhausted the secrets of vulgar chymistry, he turned his thoughts to the work of transmutation[l]. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... Then the functions; as of instinct, memory, fancy, instinctive intelligence, or understanding, as it exists in the most intelligent animals. Thus the idea (henceforward no more idea, but irrecoverable by its own fatal act) commences the process of its own transmutation, as 'substans in substantiato', as the 'enteleche', or the 'vis formatrix', and it finishes the process as 'substans e substantiato', that is, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... but that chivalry and gallantry would nearly or quite die out. No longer would she present herself to man, now in the bewitching character of a plaything, a doll, an idol, and now in the degraded character of his servant. But he would confess her transmutation into his equal; and, therefore, all occasion for the display of chivalry and gallantry toward her on the one hand, and tyranny on the other, would have passed away. Only let woman attire her person fitly for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the mystic doctrines of Paracelsus arose the famous "Brothers of the Rosy Cross." "The brotherhood was possessed of the deepest knowledge and science, the transmutation of metals, the perpetuum mobile and the universal medicine were among their secrets; they were free from sickness and suffering during their lifetime, though subject finally ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... some of the fountain heads that water the spiritual fields of his philosophy and the seeds from which they are sown (if indeed his whole philosophy is but one spiritual garden). His experiments, social and economic, are a part of its cultivation and for the harvest—and its transmutation, he trusts to moments of inspiration—"only what is thought, said, and done at a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... our Lord Jesus Christ" is to stand or fall with the belief in the sudden transmutation of the chemical components of a woman's body into sodium chloride, or on the "admitted reality" of Jonah's ejection, safe and sound, on the shores of the Levant, after three days' sea-journey in the stomach of a gigantic marine animal, what possible ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... new day. With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the Hymn of Pan and The Indian Serenade. The Cloud is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, as ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... with the esoteric and transcendental utterances which Kelley credited to the spirits, he cleverly introduced sufficient in the way of references to the elixir of life and the transmutation of metals, to keep alive in Dee's breast the hope of ultimately solving the crucial problems of medieval science. All the money Dee could procure was spent on ingredients for magical formulas, and to such lengths did his enthusiasm ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... merely a money concern. There is another member in the system inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale; and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land, and of land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate. By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
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