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More "Untenable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chateau has been carried," said the captain. "They are taking us on the left flank. Madame," he added, "should go at once; this place will be untenable in a few moments." ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... the crowded court room. The Attorney-General declared that the position that the Supreme Court of the United States had the power to decide conclusively as to the constitutionality of the laws of the United States and so tie the hands of the State authority was untenable and monstrous. "Georgia," he said, "hung Graves and Tassel over the writ of error of this same Supreme Court. God bless Georgia for that valiant and beneficent example."[Footnote: Ex parte Bushnell, 9 Ohio State Reports, 150.] It was, he continued, "a sectional court composed of sectional men, ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... virtues and faculties of men. It was very strange for me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together I found to be utterly untenable. We talk of peace and learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilisation; but I found that these are not the words that the Muse of History coupled together; that on her lips the words were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and death. I found ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... for them, they are useful, if not essential, in the right management of the young, but, like every thing else, require to be managed judiciously. It appears to me that the argument to the contrary would be untenable. I should like to see the man who would invest his capital in railways—electric telegraphs, steam ships, and in business of any kind, without hope of reward, pooh! it is the mainspring of human action, the incentive to public service, it rests not ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... it seemed to him, was to gain the cover of some trees in the distance, whence they might descend and take Bazeilles in flank and rear. Should they succeed in effecting a lodgment in the park of Montivilliers, the village might become untenable. This was no more than a vague, half-formed idea, that flitted through his mind for a moment and faded as rapidly as it had come; the attack in front was becoming more determined, and his every faculty was ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.' I venture to believe that to extol Him and to deny the validity of His claims is in flagrant contradiction to the facts of His life, and is an unreasonable and untenable position. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... written by Vasco de Lobeira in the time of king Ferdinand of Portugal who died in 1383: as Vasco de Lobeira was knighted in 1385, it would follow that he wrote the elaborate romance in his earliest youth. This conclusion is untenable, and the suggestion that the author was Pedro de Loboira (who flourished in the 15th century) involves a glaring anachronism. A further step was taken by the historian Joao de Barros, who maintained in an unpublished work dating between 1540 and 1550 that Vasco de ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and change, and come back later. You will do the same, I presume?" And he looked directly at Kresney, who had wit enough to perceive that the situation was untenable. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... flourish in Danish soil until a great intellectual battle had been set on foot, in the course of which conflicting opinions which had never yet been advanced in express terms should be made manifest and wrestle with one another, until it became clear which standpoints were untenable and which could be maintained. Although he cherished warm feelings of affection for both R. Nielsen and Broechner the two professors of Philosophy, he could not help hoping for a discussion between them of the fundamental questions which were engaging his mind. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... mentioned, which, absurd as it seems, was actually pursued by a few headlong reformers, who showed in various ways a singular alacrity at playing into the hands of their adversaries. It consisted in enunciating in the most violent and untenable form and the most offensive language the proposition that all slave-holding is sin and every slave-holder a criminal, and making the whole attack on slavery to turn on this weak pivot and fail if this failed. The ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... at the Cataract and find the home untenable; this place would be a safe retreat, and we should, in any event, have our treasure here in safety. It has been secure for the last century or so. I think it will keep for a few ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... are intended to represent? Do the various signs merely indicate the shape or configuration of the different constellations included in the divisions, or, are they simply masks designed to veil some hidden meaning? The former supposition is altogether untenable for two ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... received this hypothesis as improbable and untenable. Still, he was anxious to see the facts in place, and Charpentier was glad to be his guide. He therefore passed his vacation, during this summer of 1836, at the pretty town of Bex, in the valley of the Rhone. Here he spent a number of weeks in explorations, which served at the same ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... crushed the greatest rogue in London, taken from him eight thousand pounds of ill gotten money, and freed himself of an incubus that would have made his position untenable. ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... front of the city seems to be untenable, except for negroes; the Washington monument stands on the yielding plain in the rear of the Chief Magistrate's, a stunted ruin, finding no foundation; and much of the great Capital reserve near by, would be a dead weight, if any effort were made to dispose it of, as building lots. The ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... a long and happy life is all there is to be hoped for, since, had the future life which he has sometimes dared to hope for been possible, Zeus would long before have revealed it. He dismisses the preaching of one Paulus as untenable. ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... to me to that effect, and I felt as if I had lost my own son. Sergeant Flood of the machine gun section stood by his piece as long as possible, but finally a shell smashed the mount and this piece of trench became untenable. The pitiful remnant of the platoon, now consisting of seven men with Major Marshall, had to find a place to the right of the supporting trenches where they kept on fighting. The Germans had broken through on our left and were trying to force ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... the squadrons of the enemy. The Greeks had three lines of defence which they could hold against him, the natural strength of which nearly compensated them for the inferiority of their forces; these were Mount Olympus, Mount OEta, and the isthmus of Corinth. The first, however, was untenable, owing to the ill will of the Thessalians; as a precautionary measure 10,000 hoplites were encamped upon it, but they evacuated the position as soon as the enemy's advance-guard came into sight. The natural barrier of OEta, less formidable ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... not now considering," says Mr. Mill, "what it is that, in our author's opinion, we are bound to believe concerning the unknowable." Why, this was the very thing he ought to have considered, before pronouncing the position to be untenable, or to be irreconcilable with something else. Meanwhile, it is instructive to observe that Mr. Mill himself believes, or requires his readers to believe, something concerning the unknown. He does not know, or at any rate he does not tell his readers, what Hamilton requires them to believe ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... from "K" Company. Four versts behind him on the densely wooded road Lieut. Gardner with forty men and a Vickers gun was occupying the old Bolo dugouts. One verst further back in the big clearing was Kodish village, a place which by all the rules of field strategy was absolutely untenable. Here with four Vickers guns were the remainder of "K" Company along with the sick and the lame and the halt, scarce forty men really able to do active duty, but obliged to stay on to support their comrades. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Flower' being upon the tombs of the Crusaders, added to the circumstance that in his Egyptian researches he had never met with any allusion to it, induced Dr. Deck to discard the story of its Egyptian origin as untenable. 'I have unwrapped many mummies myself,' he wrote, 'and have had opportunities of being present at unrolling of others of all classes, and have never discovered another Resurrection Flower, nor heard of any one who had; and in the examination of hieroglyphics of every age and variety, I never discovered ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the tree, protruding through the window, rendered the centre of the room untenable, so Malartic and his three aids ranged themselves two and two against the wall on either side of it, armed with pistols and swords—ready to give the assailants ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... in search of further confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... routine, and whose only employment seems to be to strangle young authors. Blackwood, and the Edinburgh Review, contained article after article against the 'accuser' of Scotland; but the writers, instead of calmly sifting and disproving Mr. Buckle's untenable theories, new into a rage, and only established two things, to the intelligent public—their own malice ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... were in force at Pensacola, which was in Florida and therefore on Spanish territory; but he did not hesitate. He marched against the place with an army of three thousand, stormed the town, captured it, blew up the forts, which the Spaniards hastily surrendered, and so made it untenable as an English base. Perhaps no other exploit of his career was so audacious, or so well carried out. Pensacola subdued, he hastened to New Orleans, which was ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... indeed that this was done, for D'Urville's situation was untenable, and in a conversation with his boatswain he ascertained that not more than half a dozen of the sailors could be relied on; all the others were ready to go over to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Jewish State." His whole personality is reflected in that remarkable book. There you see his ideas in the process of becoming clear. There you see his sharp reactions; the reflection of his hopes, his disappointments, his shifts from untenable positions to positions possible after defeat. There you read his penetrating analysis of the figures on the Zionist stage upon whom he had to rely. There you are made to feel his doubts, his dread of death. In the midst ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... show yourself to me again," she answered, with sudden tears twinkling on her eyelashes. She seemed more tenderly human and approachable to-day than heretofore. Had she found her mountain-height of unmated solitude untenable?—found in herself a yielding woman, and in Balder the strength that is a man? This descent, which was a sweet ascent, made her ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... morning-star". Now all this panegyric is admissible only on the supposition of reciprocal justice. Plato, indeed, had the hardihood to say that the just man is happy in himself, and by reason of his justice, even although others are unjust to him; but the position is untenable. A man is happy in his justice if it procure for him justice in return; as a citizen is happy in his civil obedience, if it gain him protection in return. There are two parties in the case, and the moralist should obtain access to both; he should induce ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Hall I learned from Bakunin that the provisional government had passed a resolution, on his advice, to abandon the position in Dresden, which had been entirely neglected from the beginning, and was consequently quite untenable for any length of time. This resolution proposed an armed retreat to the Erzgebirge, where it would be possible to concentrate the reinforcements pouring in from all sides, especially from Thuringia, in such strength, that the advantageous position could be used to inaugurate ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... season of the year he would readily have accounted for the phenomenon that now fell under his observation, on the hypothesis that the woman was somebody's sister or cousin or aunt. But at present that explanation was untenable; Maitland happened to know that not one of the other men was in New York, barring himself; and his own presence there was ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Sedgwick, Mr. Lyell, and most authors believe, that the constituent parts of each layer were separately deposited as sediment, and then metamorphosed. This view, in the majority of cases, I believe to be quite untenable. In those not uncommon instances, where a mass of clay-slate, in approaching granite, gradually passes into gneiss, we clearly see that folia of distinct minerals can originate through the metamorphosis ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... detestable. We were en pleine crise for ten days. Every day W. went to the Chamber of Deputies expecting to be beaten, and every evening came home discouraged and disgusted. The Chamber was making the position of the ministers perfectly untenable—all sorts of violent and useless propositions were discussed, and there was an undercurrent of jealousy and intrigue everywhere. One day, just before Christmas, about the 20th, W. and his chef de cabinet, Comte de P., started for the house, after breakfast—W. expecting to be beaten by a ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.' What an Apollo Belvidere the man would be, moulded by no sympathies, standing aloof from his race, and independent of it, disdainful, magnificent, a palace of ice, untenable by the summer heat of Love. The true cosmopolite is the man of his age, even if he has known no latitude but that of his birth, for he has won for himself the highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... experience and developing will, to which every life is subordinated, renders the cruder conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select life going on amidst a majority of trivial and contemptible persons who "do not exist," untenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to believe at all in a comprehensive purpose in things is to abandon that attitude and all the habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in universal significance does not altogether preclude a belief in ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... fully convinced that Edestone possessed some wonderful invention or discovery which the United States intended to use as a final argument for peace, and, with the aid of this discovery, render untenable any position in opposition to its will taken by England or any of the other Powers. Had he dreamed that the United States was as ignorant as to the nature of this invention as he himself was, the history of the world ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... biological. For clearly the fact that the separated egg-cells grow into complete individuals shows that Weismann's theory, according to which one of the cells contained only body plasm, the other only germ plasm, is quite untenable. Thus the theory of the non-transmissibility of acquired characters is deprived of its supposed anatomical support and left quite in the air, to the imminent peril of a school of sociologists who had built thereon new theories of human progress. Also the question of the multiplied ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... no more pretense of firing muskets or defying the crew to dig them out. Their fort was an untenable position. At this sport of playing bowls with round shot they were bound to lose. Captain Wellsby sighted the last gun himself. It was a bronze culverin of large bore, taken as a trophy from the stranded wreck of a Spanish galleon. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... the trailing smoke and cinders quickly made the forward vestibule untenable. When they were driven in, Bucks and the receiver went through to the rear platform, where they were presently joined by Halkett ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... not get better workers, but gets a better manager or better machinery, keeping his workers. This fact proves that labour is the least important factor in modern production. The doctrine "Labour is the only source of wealth" is untenable ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... misconduct of his followers, left behind implacable hostility, and turned all friendship into bitterness. At last he entered Naples, and seemed to have asserted to the full the French claim to be supreme in Italy, whereas at that very time his position had become completely untenable. A league of Italian States was formed behind his back; Lodovico il Moro, Ferdinand of Naples, the Emperor, Pope Alexander VI., Ferdinand and Isabella, who were now welding Spain into a great and ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... reason to believe that this unfriendly and vexatious treatment was designed to bear harshly upon the hardy fishermen of the United States, with a view to political effect upon this Government. The statutes of the Dominion of Canada assume a still broader and more untenable jurisdiction over the vessels of the United States. They authorize officers or persons to bring vessels hovering within 3 marine miles of any of the coasts, bays, creeks, or harbors of Canada into port, to search the cargo, to examine the master on oath touching the cargo ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... elastic creed, to fling his life's allegiance into a communion whose tenets were so framed as to adjust themselves to the strain of purely individual interpretation. One must have tenets to interpret. What happened, when they became untenable? One might construe the Nicene Creed into a round dozen different 'ologies. A mere framework, a skeleton of belief such as the Apostles' Creed was capable of no such reconstruction. One either believed it, or one did not. Unless—Did anybody ever ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... hazel nuts. This mass exactly resembled a piece of uniformly transparent ice, but the oval and globular masses had the same conformation as has often been described in these hailstones, and on which Volta founded his ingenious but untenable theory of their formation. In the centre of each was a small, white, opaque nucleus, the size of a pea, and evidently one of the hailstones usually seen in England, to which the French give the name of gresil, confining the term grele to the larger masses of ice now under our observation. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... free? Is the power of contrary choice a necessary element in the freedom of the will? Does Edwards's "Inquiry respecting the freedom of the will" lead to conclusions false and untenable? Matson, ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
... even if he had so desired, Congress, his master, would not permit him to burn the city, and he had to make plans to defend it. Brooklyn Heights so commanded New York that enemy cannon planted there would make the city untenable. Accordingly Washington placed half his force on Long Island to defend Brooklyn Heights and in doing so made the fundamental error of cutting his army in two and dividing it by an arm of the sea in presence of overwhelming ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... Marshal of France in expectancy, trained in the school of the greatest generals, accustomed, during many years, to scientific war, to be baffled by a mob of country gentlemen, farmers, shopkeepers, who were protected only by a wall which any good engineer would at once have pronounced untenable! He raved, he blasphemed, in a language of his own, made up of all the dialects spoken from the Baltic to the Atlantic. He would raze the city to the ground: he would spare no living thing; no, not the young ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be considered, I might be thought to have erred by giving undue prominence to the favourable side, as I had done in the case of Bentham to the unfavourable. In both cases, the impetus with which I had detached myself from what was untenable in the doctrines of Bentham and of the eighteenth century, may have carried me, though in appearance rather than in reality, too far on the contrary side. But as far as relates to the article on Coleridge, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... of error ought to have been granted, unless the matter was apparent on the record. Whose office was it to make it thus apparent. Of the attorney who managed the pleadings. If, therefore, he has failed to do so, we may presume that he considered the ground untenable, or was guilty of inattention. Either presumption would be fatal to a citizen of the United States; and the condition of a foreigner cannot create a new measure in the administration of justice. It is moreover certain, that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... first thought was that someone had entered the room without my knowledge, and his figure had been reflected on the surface of the film, which was highly glazed, but a glance around the room assured me that this explanation was untenable. Moreover, I found, upon further investigation, that the film was lying in such a position that it would be impossible to reflect any person in the room. I then examined the skylight, only to find that, owing to the sharp inclination ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... There are many lakes under a more lustrous sky; but the healthy activities of life demand a scene brilliant without languor, and a beauty which can refresh and satisfy rather than lull or overpower. Without advancing any untenable claim to British pre-eminence in the matter of scenery, we may, perhaps, follow on both these points the judgment which Wordsworth has expressed in his Guide to the Lakes, a work which condenses the results of many years of ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... people look over the shoulders of persons painting, when they would never dream of looking over the shoulder of any one writing? Notwithstanding the crowd and polite requests to be "allowed to look," and the untenable effort required to give soft answers, I did manage to make a sketch or two at Aden—one of stony hills and government houses in the background, and in the front green water and the vendors of fans and beads, and curious brown, naked, active fellows in sharp stemmed ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... royalist cause had claims to distinction. The atmosphere of it clinging to one who was presumably in the heart of its counsels restored him to that view of his marriage as an alliance between high contracting powers which events in Boston had made so lamentably untenable. If he was disconcerted, it was by her odd way ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... matters are, if anything rather worse than better. That the Volunteers have sallied from some of their strongholds and entrenched themselves, and that in one place alone (the South Lotts) they have seven machine guns. That when the houses which they held became untenable they rushed out and seized other houses, and that, pursuing these tactics, there seemed no reason to believe that the Insurrection would ever come to an end. That the streets are filled with Volunteers in plain clothes, but having revolvers in their pockets. That the streets are filled with ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... not dismiss this theory lightly. It is spreading more and more widely throughout Asia, and some day it will be a force to be reckoned with. Also, these Pan-Asians will tell you the contention that the Orientals cannot manage their own affairs is untenable. Japan is an example to the contrary. If the smallest and least of the countries of Asia has been able to do this, it is because she has been let alone,—not ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... mystery. But they delude themselves. Self-existence is inconceivable; and this holds true whatever be the nature of the object of which it is predicated. Whoever agrees that the atheistic hypothesis is untenable because it involves the impossible idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that the theistic hypothesis is untenable if it contains the same impossible idea.... If religion and science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Owen occupied an entirely untenable position—but I am nevertheless surprised he did not try "abusing plaintiff's attorney." The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let people forget the exposure. I do not believe that in the whole history ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... Chillicothe (now Westfall). Here they were met, early on the 24th, by a messenger from his lordship, ordering them to halt, as a treaty was nearly concluded at Camp Charlotte. But Lewis's army had been fired on that morning, and the place was untenable for a camp in a hostile country, so he concluded to seek better ground. A few hours later another messenger came, again peremptorily ordering a halt, as the Shawnees had practically come to terms. Lewis now concluded to join the northern ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... appeal and the causes which were assigned for it, Henry pre-occupied the ground of the conflict; he entrenched himself in the "debateable land" of legal uncertainty; and until his position had been pronounced untenable by the general voice of Christendom, any sentence which the pope could issue would have but a doubtful validity. It was, perhaps, but a slight advantage; and the niceties of technical fencing might soon resolve themselves into a question of mere strength; yet, in the opening ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... is a menace to the position of the white man in trying to maintain racial superiority. The significant achievements of the Negro in Africa and this country were passed in rapid review to show how untenable this position of the white man is and how unlikely it can continue in view of the fact that the Negro is accomplishing more now than ever before in the history of the race. Professor John R. Hawkins ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... Truth?" "What is the Reality?" goes to the very root of the Riddle of the Universe. We are all trying in one direction or another to answer this question. As knowledge increases, old theories become untenable and have to be discarded, and, in their place, fresh ones are formulated to account for new phases of phenomena. There seems a general impression, among even thinking people, that scientists are wedded to, and always trying ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... market, the control of which is the foundation of her world sovereignty. The knowledge, therefore, that war depends on biological laws leads to the conclusion that every attempt to exclude it from international relations must be demonstrably untenable. But it is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and, as such, an ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... natural question rises why animals should have migrated from water to dry land at all when great difficulties were involved in the transition. The answers must be: (a) that local drying up of water-basins or elevations of the land surface often made the old haunts untenable; (b) that there may have been great congestion and competition in the old quarters; and (c) that there has been an undeniable endeavour after well-being throughout the history of animal life. In the same way with mankind, migrations were prompted by the setting in of prolonged drought, by over-population, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... Illinois, declared the proposition, as reported by the committee, to be "wholly untenable, is monstrous, absurd, damnable in its provisions, a greater wrong and outrage on the black race than any thing that has ever ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... really thinks it must be as hot as it is in India. Sir Thomas de Boots, swelling in his white waistcoat, in the armholes of which his thumbs are engaged, smiles scornfully, and wishes Sir Brian had ever felt a good sweltering day in the hot winds in India. Sir Brian withdraws the untenable proposition that London is as hot as Calcutta. Mr. Binnie looks at his watch, and at the Colonel. "We have only your nephew, Tom, to wait for," he says; "I think we may make so bold as to order the dinner,"—a proposal heartily seconded by Mr. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an article entitled "Mark Twain and Paul Bourget," by Max O'Rell. The following little note is a Rejoinder to that article. It is possible that the position assumed here—that M. Bourget dictated the O'Rell article himself—is untenable.] ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... counterfeit, sham, supposititious, unauthentic, bogus, feigned, fallacious, make believe, hypocritical, assumed, pseudo, sophistical, untenable; unveracious, dishonest, erroneous, untruthful; disloyal, perfidious, traitorous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... unwillingly obeyed, but we had not gone far before a succession of reports showed that the enemy had already got several guns into position, and had not the fort been strengthened, it would soon have been rendered untenable. Numerous successive attacks were made, but were repulsed as the first ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Greek philosophers the subject of inspiration and revelation has been fertile theme for discussion and dispute among scholars and theologians. Many different theories have been advanced, and ultimately abandoned as untenable. In its simplest meaning and use, inspiration describes the personal influence of one individual upon the mind and spirit of another. Thus we often say, "That man inspired me." What we are or do under the influence of that intellectual or spiritual impulse ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... sorry that in referring to a peculiarity in ancient seals under this title, MR. LOWER should have pinned to his notice a theory which I feel persuaded is quite untenable. It is surely something new to those who have directed their attention to the numerous devices upon seals to find that the husbandman had so low an opinion of his own social status as to reject the use of any emblematical sign upon his seal, when Thomas the smith, Roger the carpenter, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... non-Aryan race, and one which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have borrowed from or imitated them. So that the theory which would make government by discussion the exclusive patrimony of a single race of mankind is on the face of it untenable. ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... receipts from the enemy. As soon as it was admitted that it was in fact impossible to make Germany pay the expenses of both sides, and that the unloading of their liabilities upon the enemy was not practicable, the position of the Ministers of Finance of France and Italy became untenable. ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... it out at all," he concluded. "At first I thought he might be Tarzan of the Apes; but he neither speaks nor understands English, so that theory is untenable." ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... before the Austrians. Furious counterattacks were delivered by the Russians at Halicz and Jezupol, the bridgeheads of the southern bank of the Dniester. If the Austrians could not force a victory at these points, their position in Stanislawow would be untenable, since the Russians still had a clear road to pour reenforcements into the fighting area between the Dniester and the Carpathians. On March 1, 1915, the Austrians were defeated at Halicz in a pitched battle, and on the 4th ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... some confidence about the making of China, and about her ethnical development, where formerly we could only grope in the dark. The claim that "the Chinese race" produced the high Chinese civilization entirely by its own efforts, thanks to its special gifts, has become just as untenable as the other theory that immigrants from the West, some conceivably from Europe, carried civilization to the Far East. We know now that in early times there was no "Chinese race", there were not even "Chinese", just as there were no "French" and no "Swiss" two thousand ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... no value, it does not appear for what purpose he has published his answer to my paper; an experiment of his, settling Marignac's uncertain results, would have justified the reliance he places on them. The ground he takes is utterly untenable. Experiments are necessary to establish facts; without them there could be no science, and the highest credit is due to those who perform successfully difficult or costly experiments. Experimenting is, however, not the aim and object of science, but the means to arrive at the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... prove or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to take these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is not to disprove or take away the truth itself. We find every day instances of men resting their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know to be untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when they find out that this is so, and know not as yet on what other ground they are to take their stand. And some men succumb in the trial and lose their faith ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... the theorist has looked long and steadfastly till he is clear in his own mind concerning the nature of the thing which he is beholding. I submit that the "Savoyard" has unfairly made use of the failure of certain speculations in order to show that a distinct theory is untenable. ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... they have apparently traversed its utmost bounds. How they have effected the traject here, and by what process, or contingency, are merely curious questions, and can never be satisfactorily answered. The theory of a migration by Behring's straits, is untenable. If we could find adequate motives for men to cross thence, we cannot deduce the tropical animals. We cannot erect a history from materials so slender. It may yield one element of population; but we require the origin ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... the great finale of a pyrotechnic display, my two hours on a hillside clearing. I can neither enliven it with a startling escape, nor add a thrill of danger, without using as many "ifs" as would be needed to make a Jersey meadow untenable. For example, if I had fallen over backwards and been powerless to rise or move, I should have been killed within half an hour, for a stray column of army ants was passing within a yard of me, and death would await any helpless being falling ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... demand of such a philosopher to make Life; in the same sense, I mean, in which Euclid makes an Icosahedron, or a figure of twenty sides, namely, in the understanding or by an intellectual construction. An argument which, of itself, is sufficient to prove the untenable ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the alleged difficulties of the conduct of such masses are therefore untenable. On the contrary, the demand must be made on the Chief Command that, always in accordance with the strategical situation, it must clearly determine what it requires of the Cavalry, and group them in a suitable manner and in sufficient numerical strength under a single Leader, even if in the meanwhile ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... volume, "Facts and Comments," which contains many valuable thoughts not previously published, he declares that his critics have obviously confounded the origin of a thing and that which originates from it. "Here we have a striking example of the way in which an hypothesis is made to appear untenable by representing it as being something which it does not profess to be," he says. "I gave an account of the origin of music, and now I am blamed because my conception of the origin of music does not include a conception of music as fully developed. If to some one who said that ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... was invisible. "The old man must have an awful jag on today," was casually remarked when an extra fluffiness and imbecility was noticeable in the passing Bones. At first it was believed that he drank also, but when careful investigation proved this hypothesis untenable, he was freely called a "derned time-servin', yaller hypocrite." Not a few advanced the opinion that if Bones did not actually lead Uncle Billy astray, he at least "slavered him over and coddled him until the old man got conceited in his wickedness." This ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... cooked without water with Golapurab Banias, who are also found in Bundelkhand. They are mainly Hindus, with a small minority of Jains. The origin of the name is obscure; the suggestion that it comes from Nimar appears to be untenable, as there are very few Nemas in that District. They say that when Parasurama was slaying the Kshatriyas fourteen young Rajput princes, who at the time were studying religion with their family priests, were saved by the latter on renouncing their Kshatriya status and declaring themselves ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the disputed question whether Metternich played a fair game against Napoleon, or whether he tempted him to play with loaded dice while his throne was at stake. The latter supposition for a long time held the field; but it is untenable. On several occasions the Austrian statesman warned Napoleon, or his trusty advisers, that the best course open to him was to sign peace at once. He did so at Dresden, and he did so now. On November 10th he sent Caulaincourt ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... deep, sheer-sided gash, down at the bottom of which the Jihun brawled and boiled. I did not envy any army faced with the task of crossing it, even supposing the bridge should not be destroyed. But they would not need to cross in order to make the town untenable. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... stronghold which he intended to connect with the camp by means of stone walls the next day, having a shrewd notion that if he did not the Boers would, for the mound commanded the place, and would soon make it untenable. ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... But this monarch was not destined to find a place among the recognized occupants of the throne. For a time, indeed, fortune smiled on the Hojo. Within a few days after Kogon's assumption of the sceptre, Go-Daigo's retreat at Kasagi became untenable, and he fled, still escorted by the faithful Fujiwara Fujifusa. It must be recognized that, whatever the Fujiwara family's usurpations in the past, their loyalty to the Throne throughout this era of cruel vicissitudes redeems ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is simple duty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to be gained thereby for one's own side. Then, indeed, it rises towards, if not into, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... of view as untenable and anti-republican, and taking the opposite, that suffrage is a natural right—as necessary to man under government, for the protection of person and property, as are air and motion to life—we hold the talisman by which to show the right of all classes to the ballot, to remove every ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the side of the mountain. I had not gone far when the rain commenced—first in large drops, and then in a steady patter; before many minutes the storm burst upon the mountain in all its fury. The rain fell in sheets, and literally deluged surrounding objects. My resting place was becoming untenable, and my life was momentarily imperiled by huge masses of falling rock, which had been loosened from its bed and came tearing down the mountain side, carrying all before it. Shielding myself behind trees and boulders, I climbed upwards, in the hope of finding a more permanent ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... view of the League of Nations, and also from that of the Jugoslavs, will not be denied. That some of the main arguments to which he trusted his case were invalidated by the concessions which he had made to other countries was Italy's contention, and it cannot be thrust aside as untenable. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... plainest teachings of the gospel before them, is it not strange that there are so many virulent enemies to infant baptism? Their rejection of it seems to rest mainly upon the untenable position that baptism has meaning and force only when it is the fruit of an antecedent, self-conscious faith on the part of the subject, and that it is but the outward demonstration of a separate and prior participation of some inward grace. As infants have not a self-conscious faith, it is ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Omdurman held out more than two months. It was not until 15th January that Ferratch, with Gordon's leave, surrendered, and then when the Mahdists occupied the place, General Gordon had the satisfaction of shelling them out of it, and showing that it was untenable. ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... by Latin—which we possess in English. "The Paston Letters" have been, from opposite sides, accused of want of literary form and of not giving us interesting enough details in substance. The objections in either case[7] are untenable, and in both rather silly. In the first place "literary form" in the fifteenth century was exceedingly likely to be bad literary form, and we are much better off without it. Unless Sir Thomas Malory had happened to ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... other public ministers, and consuls, and those in which a State shall be party." These words, urged the Chief Justice, must be given an exclusive sense "or they have no operation at all." This position is quite untenable, for even when given only their affirmative value these words still place the cases enumerated beyond the reach of Congress, and this may have been their only purpose. However, granting the Chief Justice his view of Article III, still we are not ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... of the Japanese army under Kato, who had occupied the west coast, found its position untenable with a superior Chinese army threatening it. It also was compelled to retreat towards the south. But the veteran army of Kato was not content to yield all that it had gained without a struggle. A bloody engagement followed near Pachiung, in which the Chinese and Korean army suffered ...
— Japan • David Murray
... been made by an eminent Calvinistic clergyman of the present day, who, instead of coming to the legitimate conclusion that Calvinism is therefore untenable, as being an impracticable system, has recourse to a delusive theory of ecclesiastical fellowship, which confounds the visible with the invisible Church, or reduces the former to a mere nullity. According to his view of the subject, the Church of Christ consists, not of the collective ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... elsewhere, such conditions do not prevail, and that on no other sphere can such physical habitudes be found as will enable life to originate or to exist. It can be easily shown that such reasoning is based on untenable foundations. Other worlds have to go through processes of evolution, and there can be no doubt that many are in a state similar to our own. It required hundreds of thousands, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, before this earth was fit to sustain ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... the Khasia range, having been transported hither by ice at some former period; especially as the Mont Blanc granite, in crossing the lake of Geneva to the Jura, must have performed a hardly less wonderful ice journey: but this hypothesis is clearly untenable; and unparalleled in our experience as the results appear, if attributed to denudation and weathering alone, we are yet compelled to refer them to these causes. The further we travel, and the longer we study, the more positive becomes the conviction that the part played by these ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... doctrine as untenable, since the process which he observed is chiefly the result of a severe injury of the blood from the sodium chloride solution and the teasing. If a method of preparation be chosen which protects the blood as far as possible, and avoids every chemical ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... early and continue for many years. The true answer to such an objection is, that there is no need of neglecting either of these branches. There is time enough for all of them if only a proper method of instruction be pursued. Still more untenable is the idea that music is merely an ornamental study and of no practical value. This idea rests on the mistaken theory of education which holds that only the intellect needs training. If our sole aim is to get something to eat ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... command while those left on the south side intrenched themselves. Thomas was to move out from his lines facing the ridge, leaving enough of Palmer's corps to guard against an attack down the valley. Lookout Valley being of no present value to us, and being untenable by the enemy if we should secure Missionary Ridge, Hooker's orders were changed. His revised orders brought him to Chattanooga by the established route north of the Tennessee. He was then to move out ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... silver-white color; while on the third occasion, as if by magic, the color had changed again, and I got only yellow silk. The hypothesis of individual peculiarity, adopted the previous year to explain why some spiders gave yellow, and others white silk, was now untenable; and, remembering that, beside these two positive colors there was also (and indeed more commonly) a light yellow, as if a combination of the other two, I saw that the real solution of the mystery must lie in the spinners themselves. Examining carefully the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... abatement has been displaced or waived; that it could therefore no longer be relied on in the Circuit Court, and cannot claim the consideration of this court in reviewing this cause. This position is regarded as wholly untenable. On the contrary, it would seem to follow conclusively from the peculiar character of the courts of the United States, as organized under the Constitution and the statutes, and as defined by numerous and unvarying adjudications from this bench, that there is not one of those courts whose ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... and life, and that this is a far more important thing for us all than the greater or less truth of the dogmas with which such religiosity happens to be associated. In reply to this, without tediously labouring the argument, I venture to make the following observations. In the first place, it is an untenable idea that religiosity or devoutness of spirit is valuable in itself, without reference to the goodness or badness of the dogmatic forms and the practices in which it clothes itself. A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society, merely because ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... de la GÂŽographie', t. v., p. 80). All the hypotheses that have been advanced to show that Descartes (Cassini, p. 230; Mairan, p. 16), and even Kepler (Delambre, t. i., p. 601), were acquainted with the zodiacal light, appear to me altogether untenable. Descartes ('Principes', iii., art. 136, 137) is very obscure in his remarks on comets, observing that their tails are formed "by oblique rays, which, falling on different parts of the planetary orbs, strike the eye laterally by extraordinary refraction," and that they might be seen ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... fight at a great disadvantage on our retreat. As it is, even if General Bean is forced to circle around Newville, we can concentrate at Bremerton and fight on ground of our own choosing, though that would make this place untenable." ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... Even then English merchants and officials, who felt no great sympathy with the opium traffic, saw that these proceedings indicated an intention to put down the trade in other articles, and to render the position of foreigners untenable. Lin's demands culminated in the request for all stores of opium to be surrendered to him within three days. By the efforts of some of the merchants about a thousand chests were collected and handed over ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... herself," returned the Baron. "She has forgotten where the peril lies. True, we have received encouragement on every hand; but my Princess knows too well on what untenable conditions; and she knows besides how, in the publicity of the diet, these whispered conferences are forgotten and disowned. The danger is very real"—he raged inwardly at having to blow the very coal he had been quenching—"none the less real in that it is not precisely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... devoted craft from shoreward. The Peruvians there had dragged down to the beach a battery of field-pieces, with which they now opened a galling fire upon the Esmeralda. Her present berth at once became untenable, for she had not enough men left to work the guns on both broadsides, and Commander Prat at once rang down to his engine-room for "full speed ahead," the anchor having been raised at the beginning of the action; and the doomed vessel's engines began the last revolutions ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... was strongly urged by some scientists that a religion based on faith was untenable. Man, it was contended, should accept only what could be proved by reasoning from observed facts. Once again there emerged, particularly in scientific and literary circles, the belief that there could be a code of morals entirely ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... mankind, thinking that everyone is forged upon their anvil, or run out of their own mould, after the fashion of a tallow dip (a theory which, indeed, the sameness of mankind renders at times not quite untenable), it seems absurd because the progress of the world has gone on other lines — lines which prolonged indefinitely would never meet those which the Jesuits drew. All that I know is I myself, in the ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... default of such belief, not the most satisfactory evidence of our senses or of testimony can hinder us from holding a seeming miracle to be merely the result of some unknown natural cause. The argument of Dr. Campbell and others against Hume, however, is untenable, viz. that, as we do not disbelieve an alleged fact (which may be something conforming to the uniform course of experience) merely because the chances are against it, therefore we need never disbelieve ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... Constitution; the other that I must favor its existence where it then was, by working with the Republican party, which was only pledged to prevent its extension. To me, these positions seemed utterly untenable, their arguments preposterous, and I did my best to make this appear. I claimed the Constitution as anti-slavery, and taught the duty of overthrowing slavery by and through it, but no argument which I used did half the service of an illustration ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... lacewings must be regarded as due to secondarily acquired adaptations; 'they resemble Thysanura and the larvae of Heterometabola only as whales resemble fishes.' There are two considerations which render these theories untenable. The Neuroptera and Coleoptera among which campodeiform larvae are common, are less specialised than Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Diptera, in which they are unknown. And among the Coleoptera which as we have seen (pp. 50 f.) ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... learning what the party, as a whole, would do, now that it was clear that the fugitives had succeeded in crossing the Susquehanna in spite of all the preparations to prevent it; but the warriors gathered around were so numerous and began to spread out in such a fashion, that his position became untenable, and he found it no easy matter to get out of his rather uncomfortable quarters and to rejoin his companions, who were awaiting him some little distance off. All were in high spirits over the success of the strategy of the Mohawk, but they could not shut their eyes to the fact that in ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... country is unfit for occupation, for, though in favourable seasons there might in some few localities be abundance of feed for stock, the uncertainty of rain and frequent recurrence of drought renders it untenable, the grasses and herbage being principally annuals, which not only die but are swept away by the hot summer winds, leaving the surface of the soil completely bare. On Cooper's Creek, near the boundary, there is a small tract of second-rate ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... principles. He enunciates one brilliant generalization after another. Sometimes he reveals the mind of a seer or poet, throwing out conclusions which are highly suggestive, on the face of them convincing, but which on examination prove untenable, or at best must be set down as unproven or needing qualification. But these were just the slag from the great furnace of his mind, slag not always worthless. Brilliant and far-reaching as were his conclusions, he did not ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... is based on an egregious falsehood—the proverb, namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly sequence and subordination of the sexes. Who first invented it, it is difficult to conceive, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Stephen such remarks as these could not sound; to have the expectancy of partnership with one of the largest-practising architects in London thrust upon him was cheering, however untenable he felt the idea to be. He saw that, whatever Mr. Hewby might think, Mr. Swancourt certainly thought much of him to entertain such an idea on such slender ground as to be absolutely no ground at all. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... companions had cut off from the Philistines, the word orloth meaning the virile member, and not the prepuce. That Israelitish circumcision could have originated from either phallic worship or any of the hero-warrior usages is untenable as a proposition, as regards the living prisoners, and is contrary to the monotheistic idea which ruled Israel, or to the benign nature of their God. The strict opposition of the religion of Judaism to any other mutilation except that of the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... and uncomfortable one. His garrison was none too large at the best, and, although the majority of his soldiers displayed remarkable fidelity, there were occasional desertions. John Allan naturally used every means in his power to render the post untenable. In August, 1778, he sent Nicholas Hawawes, an Indian chief, with a small party to the mouth of the St. John with orders to destroy the cattle around the Fort, that were intended for the use of the troops[111], to take prisoners and encourage desertion. The Indians were provided with letters, ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... in this work of the subterranean origin of the hypogene formations would be untenable, if the supposed fact here alluded to, of the appearance of tertiary granite at the surface, was not a rare exception to the general rule. A considerable lapse of time must intervene between the formation of Plutonic and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... was a mystic; and since the materialistic world looks with suspicion on mysticism, it is probable that even Anstice, who knew and respected him, would have heard his last speech with a passing wonder that a man should hold so unpractical and untenable a view of existence as the ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... our exposed positions on the south bank, as well as the small posts still held on the north bank by Lieutenant Bissell and his machine gunners. Although the position held by the little American group had long been considered untenable, the members of it stuck it out until nightfall, when they received orders to retire to the south bank. At the same time, French colonials which had held a position throughout the day on the north bank on the edge of the town, withdrew in accordance with the same plan. The retirement ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... Guise, the military governor of Antwerp, informed the Government that the Belgian position was fast becoming untenable and, acting on this information, the capital of Belgium was transferred from Antwerp to Ostend, the members of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps leaving at daybreak on Wednesday by special steamer, while at the same time Mr. Winston Churchill departed ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... the yoke of men, nevertheless considered the only distinction a woman could achieve was through their favourable notice—an attitude of mind produced by moral and social codes so effectively calculated to foster immoral and untenable inconsistency! ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... air, and gravitational force to enable it to be the abode of intelligent life, whereas elsewhere, such conditions do not prevail, and that on no other sphere can such physical habitudes be found as will enable life to originate or to exist. It can be easily shown that such reasoning is based on untenable foundations. Other worlds have to go through processes of evolution, and there can be no doubt that many are in a state similar to our own. It required hundreds of thousands, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, before this earth ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... on the Ontario at Oswego, and on the 25th of August, landed within one mile of the fort. In two days, his batteries were opened at so short a distance that almost every shell took effect; and the governor, finding the place absolutely untenable, surrendered at discretion. The Indians having deserted, the prisoners amounted only to one hundred and ten men. A great quantity of military stores, together with nine armed vessels, mounting from eight to eighteen guns, also fell into the hands of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... dreams and somnambulism, there are many theories, all of which are more or less untenable. My own idea, given, of course, in a plain, crude way, is that thoughts originate on the inside of the brain and then go at once to the surface, where they have their photographs taken, with the understanding that the negatives are to be preserved. In this way the thought may afterward be ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... aristocracy, he admitted that the old French royalist cause had claims to distinction. The atmosphere of it clinging to one who was presumably in the heart of its counsels restored him to that view of his marriage as an alliance between high contracting powers which events in Boston had made so lamentably untenable. If he was disconcerted, it was by her odd way of keeping him ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... commenced, it was for the purpose of showing, by means of a passage not generally referred to, what the ancients conceived the "black broth" to be, and that consequently, all idea of coffee entering into its composition was untenable. How far this has been accomplished the reader must decide: but I cannot quit the subject without expressing my sincere persuasion, founded upon a view of the authorities referred to, that the account given by Athenaeus is substantially correct. Pig meat would be much in use with a people not ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... were imposed by Judge Kenesaw M. Landis of the United States District Court at Chicago for the offense of accepting rebates. The Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately determined that the fine was improperly large, since it had been based on the untenable theory that each shipment on which a rebate was paid constituted a separate offense. At the second trial the presiding judge ordered an acquittal. In spite, however, of the failure of this particular case, with its spectacular features, the net result of the rebate prosecutions ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... and his uncompromising nature compelled him to act on whatsoever he heard or saw: a savage custodian of public morals, he had in addition a perverse enthusiasm for lost causes, loved a minority for its own sake, and untenable tenets for theirs. Such, at all events, was my impression of Nipper Nasmyth, after my first term, which was also his last I had never spoken to him, but I had heard him speak with extraordinary force and fervor in the school debates. I carried a clear picture of his unkempt ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... and poised for flight: he was ready in wit; decried trifling subjects, yet would dispute for two hours over an absurdity; was dexterous and unanswerable in his syllogisms; would advance the crudest and most untenable theory, defend it, reducing the arguments of his opponents to meaningless folly, conquer apparently by both wit and reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it into senseless atoms, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... preparation for the king's palace. The throne to which he was called was no soft seat for repose. The Philistine invasion had torn away all the northern territory. He took the helm in a tempest. What was he to do? Ziklag was untenable; where was he to take his men? He could not stop in the Philistine territory, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature petrifactions ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... live long to endure her father's displeasure, but died in giving birth to her first child. Even this sad result had failed to melt the Colonel's heart. Contrary to all precedents of fiction, he would have nothing to do with his little granddaughter, and sought refuge from so untenable a position in removing from Cullerne. Nor was Martin himself a man to feel a parent's obligations too acutely; so the child was left to be brought up by Miss Joliffe, and to become an addition to her cares, but much more to her joys. Martin Joliffe considered that he had amply fulfilled ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... marines, exasperated by the scuffle, and by several smart raps on the head which they had received, hastened up the shrouds after the fugitive, who, however, ascended to the fore-top-mast cross-trees, whither his enemies, after some hesitation, pursued. Finding this post also untenable, he proceeded to swarm up the fore-top-gallant-mast shrouds, and at last seated himself on the royal yard, where he calmly awaited the approach of the enemy. These, however, feeling that the position was too strong to be successfully assailed by marines, deliberately ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... in Part II; but I may as well give here what seems to me to be an irresistable proof that this view (that A and I are Contradictories), though adopted in the ordinary text-books, is untenable. The proof ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... would seem as if Hume were boldly pressing his principles to the very uttermost—that is, were challenging a miracle as untenable, though attested by a multitude. But, in fact, he is not. He only seems to do so; for, if no number of witnesses could avail anything in proof of a miracle, why does he timidly confine himself to the hypothesis of the queen's physicians only coming forward? Why not call in the whole Privy Council?—or ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... near Pensacola. Lieutenant Slemmer, seeing that an attack was about to be made upon him, transferred his men from Fort McRae, an untenable position, to Fort Pickens, an almost impregnable fortification, which ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... by the good God, but by an evil principle, and allege in proof of their error the words of the Apostle (2 Cor. 4:4), "The god of this world hath blinded the minds of unbelievers." But this position is altogether untenable. For, if things that differ agree in some point, there must be some cause for that agreement, since things diverse in nature cannot be united of themselves. Hence whenever in different things some one thing common to all is found, it must be that these different things receive that one ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... is the product of a mere exaggeration of actual events, or is an allegorical picture, either of the operations of nature or of human traits, is an untenable and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... are all true; the most amazing thing about Greenwich Village is that the most unlikely things that you can find out about it are true. The obvious, every-day things that are easily believed are much the most likely to be untenable reports or the day dreams of imaginative chroniclers. You are safe if you believe all the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your knowledge concerning the Village. That is its special and ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... division which had come into our area, held the line in front of Armentieres. A small epidemic of suspected dysentery in that division took us through that town frequently, and we found it almost completely deserted. The Huns shelled it almost daily and had made the place almost untenable for civilians, though, as usual, a number of them hung on and did ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... the Somme certainly lost at least 600,000 men. Attrition, to be sure, works both ways, but if the Germans are out-gunned this year in the West to the extent expected their position must become untenable. The deadly work of reducing German man-power continues even though the Allied line does not advance. I know of a section of the German front opposite the French last winter which for five months did ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... that the theorist has looked long and steadfastly till he is clear in his own mind concerning the nature of the thing which he is beholding. I submit that the "Savoyard" has unfairly made use of the failure of certain speculations in order to show that a distinct theory is untenable. ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... Almeida, garrisoned by Portuguese and commanded by Colonel Cox and a British staff, should have held a month. But no sooner had the French appeared before it, on the 26th August, than a powder magazine traitorously fired exploded and breached the wall, rendering the place untenable. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... notion that science gives a complete view of truth, to which we may appeal as refuting idealism, is untenable. Science itself will not support the appeal, but will direct the appellant to another court. Perhaps, rather, it would be truer to say that its attitude is one of doubt whether or not any court, philosophical ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... seemed to him, was to gain the cover of some trees in the distance, whence they might descend and take Bazeilles in flank and rear. Should they succeed in effecting a lodgment in the park of Montivilliers, the village might become untenable. This was no more than a vague, half-formed idea, that flitted through his mind for a moment and faded as rapidly as it had come; the attack in front was becoming more determined, and his every faculty was concentrated ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Ridge, to bring away his wounded who were very numerous. About 3 P.M. the last of them came out, having had a terrible day, only four or five officers remaining unwounded. They stuck to it well, but it was an untenable position. The Turk contented himself with driving them off the Foka Heights, and did not attempt to advance farther—if he had, it might have proved just as bad for him as ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... award, contrary to expectation, was adverse to the coloured people. Here was indeed a unique occasion for the Transvaal Government to exercise geniality upon a point sorely felt by the British Government; but the very contrary course was adopted under the aegis of that notorious award, and upon the untenable plea that sanitation and regard to public health necessitated that measure ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... the remnants of the brigade. The situation now looked extremely serious, for the Turks, growing bolder, launched a most determined attack on Mansura, and in spite of numerous counter-attacks rapidly made the ridge untenable. The "Cameliers" again sacrificed themselves in a gallant effort to raise the siege and played sad havoc with the Turkish cavalry. Temporarily the advance was held, but as death from starvation and thirst was the only alternative to ultimate ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... which is known to God alone, and which consists of the good only? A moment's consideration of what has been pointed out in previous chapters to be the teaching of Holy Scripture, about "The Kingdom of Heaven," will show that the idea is untenable; because it is "The Kingdom of Heaven" which is distinctly described as imperfect in its present state here on earth; and we cannot conceive the idea of two universal Kingdoms of Messiah. What then is the teaching of Holy Scripture respecting ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge
... inspires.(922) The first consequence attending a depreciated currency is, that the good precious metal money is withdrawn from circulation and even from the country; for the reason that it cannot maintain its true value side by side with the paper money; the usual effect in all untenable mixed standards or currencies.(923) A second, and worse consequence is the unrightful revolution produced in so many income and property relations, based on old contracts, to the advantage of the debtor, to the disadvantage of the creditor, and of those who receive nominally ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... waters," the Jewish paraphrase is, "And a wind of God (i.e. a great wind) moved," &c. Here there is nothing in the context to assist us in determining the sense to be chosen; but, as will be seen in the sequel, modern science indicates that the Jewish interpretation is untenable, and that our translation is, consequently, the correct one. As an instance of confusion of time, we may refer to ii. 19. In our translation this verse seems to place the creation of animals after that of man; but in xii. 1, the very same ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose sublimity it was impossible to be altogether blind, were at best but tolerated as rude and wild natural geniuses. But the unqualified separation of genius and taste on which such a judgment proceeds, is altogether untenable. Genius is the almost unconscious choice of the highest degree of excellence, and, consequently, it is taste in its ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... rises why animals should have migrated from water to dry land at all when great difficulties were involved in the transition. The answers must be: (a) that local drying up of water-basins or elevations of the land surface often made the old haunts untenable; (b) that there may have been great congestion and competition in the old quarters; and (c) that there has been an undeniable endeavour after well-being throughout the history of animal life. In the same ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... grounds would be awed into silence by its moral beauty, unless he were deficient in reverence, purity, and love. It must therefore be said, distinctly, although it cannot be argued at length, that this ground also appears to me to be utterly untenable. I deny that it is impossible to speak the truth without implying a falsehood; and I deny equally that it is impossible to speak the truth without drying up the sources of our holiest feelings. Those who maintain the affirmative of those propositions appear to me to be the worst ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... perception of this omission. Butler avowedly appeals to the conscience, and therefore at least recognises God as directly revealed in a moral character. That seemed to supply a gap in the ordinary theology. But in the purely empirical view Butler's argument was untenable. It appealed to one of the 'intuitions' which were incompatible with its fundamental assumptions. The compunctions of conscience were facts to be explained by 'association,' not to be regarded as intimations of wrath. Butler's view might be inverted. The 'conscience' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... after her as she sped down the street. At first they thought she was in distress, but a glance at her shining face, its nobility accentuated by her elation, made that idea untenable. She was obviously ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... depending on an accurate knowledge of the latitude, but theoretical investigations show that the periods of this variation are incompatible with the assumption that the earth is an absolutely rigid body. Though this assumption has in other ways been found to be untenable, the confirmation of this view by the discovery of Dr. Chandler is ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... (He comes nearer, but remains standing) I have decided to take this step—which has not come easy to me, I can assure you—because I find the situation in which we ... in which all of us have been placed, untenable and, in a certain sense, ridiculous ... and because I think that, in one way or another, it should be brought to an end. The sole object of my visit is to ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... first of them being exclusively confined to deposits of this age. Of the three, the genus Deinotherium is much the most abnormal in its characters; so much so, that good authorities regard it as really being one of the Sea-cows (Sirenia)—though this view has been rendered untenable by the discovery of limb-bones which can hardly belong to any other animal, and which are distinctly Proboscidean in type. The most celebrated skull of the Deinothere (fig. 246) is one which was exhumed from the Upper ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... The Constitution of 1848 was a first step towards the destruction of Federalism. Another and almost a final step in the direction of centralisation was taken in 1874. The railways, and the vast interests they created, made the position of the cantonal governments untenable. The conflict with the Ultramontanes increased the demand for vigorous action; and the destruction of State Rights in the American war strengthened the hands of the Centralists. The Constitution of 1874 is one of the most significant works of modern democracy. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... constitutional monarchy without a crown and without a constitution. For what kind of a constitution is it if it has not the necessary confirmation by oath and won the general approval of nations because it was found to be untenable? It is a state without patriots and without patriotism, it is a state which arose by the amalgamation of eight irredents—the German one included—it is a state which had no future and in which the dynasty ... ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... Civil War. The only time the soldiers exposed themselves on the army frontiers were when they were storming trenches, and this was not attempted until the trench had suffered bombardment so it was made untenable. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... along till I could just distinguish the outlines of the sunken road. The trench in this direction was blown in level with the ground. I returned to W——k, whose headquarters were at the juncture of New Woman Street and the support line, telling him that the trench by the sunken road was untenable, and that I proposed placing my platoon in a smaller length of trench, and spreading them out fanwise when we started to advance. To this he agreed, and putting his hand on my shoulder in his characteristic fashion, ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... implacable hostility, and turned all friendship into bitterness. At last he entered Naples, and seemed to have asserted to the full the French claim to be supreme in Italy, whereas at that very time his position had become completely untenable. A league of Italian States was formed behind his back; Lodovico il Moro, Ferdinand of Naples, the Emperor, Pope Alexander VI., Ferdinand and Isabella, who were now welding Spain into a great and ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... aperture, while a confederate was to divert her attention by a continuous volley of small pebbles. But somehow Sally managed to distinguish the hammer-strokes from the noise of the bombardment, and at once made up her mind that the roof had become untenable. The only question was how to get down; for by that time the house was surrounded by a cordon of sentries. As a preliminary measure she then retreated to the top of the chimney, and one of our strategists ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... to Chili, Mr. Pendleton, has returned to the United States without having effected an adjustment in the second claim of the Macedonian, which is delayed on grounds altogether frivolous and untenable. Mr. Pendleton's successor has been directed to urge the claim in the strongest terms, and, in the event of a failure to obtain a prompt adjustment, to report the fact to the Executive at as early a day as possible, so that the whole matter may ...
— 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
... we have avoided on the one hand the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all- embracing government. We have avoided on the other hand the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help. The course we have followed fits the American practice of government—a practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet concrete needs—a ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... to Kosciuszko's intimacy with Gates, Washington's adversary, or, again, to Kosciuszko's extreme reserve—which latter conjecture, in view of the warm and enduring friendships that the hero of Poland won for himself in the New World, seems untenable. ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... to justify the use of the white flag for the dissemination of proclamations through our lines, in connection with which your Excellency offers arguments which I do not hesitate to say are utterly untenable. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... women, and children flocked thither from the neighbourhood, in the hope of escaping from the violence and rapine of the patriot army. Their expectations, however, were disappointed, as the Roman general deemed it more prudent to evacuate an untenable post, than to risk the dominion of the entire island on the event of a battle fought under adverse circumstances. At the same time the slaughter of the inhabitants justifies the inference that they were foreigners ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... selected characteristics, such as the above, summarize the entire tendency of a century of teeming human life, and stand alone among the signs that are chiefly to be considered in looking to the future, would be to take an untenable position. It may be said safely, however, that these factors, because the future to which they point is more remote, are less regarded than others which are less important; and further, that those among them which mark our own day are ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the Shaksperean idiom"; and Charles Knight, who has exploded the traditions of Rowe and Stevens about the deer stealing, the wife desertion and the testamentary insult, and conclusively shown that "the theory of Shakspere's first employment in repairing the plays of others is altogether untenable, supported only by a very narrow view of the great essentials of a dramatic work, and by verbal criticism which, when carefully examined, fails even in ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... but the white houses make a good show, and the walls are picturesque. On looking at Jerusalem from this place, the great features seemed to me to agree entirely with the established maps, and Dr. Clarke's theory appeared quite untenable. The only difficulty is, that there is no valley which runs up all the way so as to divide entirely Mount Zion from Mount Moriah. A ravine does run far enough to cut off the Temple, but no more. The extent of this difficulty must depend on the description ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at any moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin. The Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded on three sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to contain over a thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to the ships, in the case of an alert, was a recourse not to be thought of. Our talk that morning must have closely reproduced ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woman to do that; but he could perhaps make her position untenable; he would, perhaps, take ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... you might not show yourself to me again," she answered, with sudden tears twinkling on her eyelashes. She seemed more tenderly human and approachable to-day than heretofore. Had she found her mountain-height of unmated solitude untenable?—found in herself a yielding woman, and in Balder the strength that is a man? This descent, which was a sweet ascent, made her endlessly ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... and took up the thread of original thought where Atlantis dropped it, what probability is there of three or four separate nations all advancing at the same speed to precisely the same arts and opinions? The proposition is untenable. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... position among the rocks of the Scrofes would be untenable in the event of an attack by armed boats, he thought it right to venture out again, and making all sail, got safe to Dragomestri, a small sea-port town on the coast of Acarnania; from whence the annexed letters to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... your father, sat Mr. Maitland and myself. You see by my chair that I was less than two feet from the door. It is inconceivable that, in that half-light, anyone could have used that entrance and escaped observation. Do you not see how untenable your idea is? Had your father been stabbed he would have bled, but I am as certain as though I had made a thorough examination that there is not so much as a scratch anywhere upon his body." Gwen heard me through ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... December was detestable. We were en pleine crise for ten days. Every day W. went to the Chamber of Deputies expecting to be beaten, and every evening came home discouraged and disgusted. The Chamber was making the position of the ministers perfectly untenable—all sorts of violent and useless propositions were discussed, and there was an undercurrent of jealousy and intrigue everywhere. One day, just before Christmas, about the 20th, W. and his chef de cabinet, Comte de P., started for the house, after breakfast—W. expecting to be ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... survey of this debate, I will boldly affirm, that I never heard in this house a question so untenable in itself, so obstinately or so warmly debated; but hope that the sophistries which have been used, however artful, and the declamations which have been pronounced, however pathetick, will have no effect upon your lordships. I hope, that as the other house ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... are parched up, brown, and dead; great black patches showing the track of a destroying fire, the fine brown ash from the burnt grass penetrating the eyes and nostrils, and sweeping along in eddying and blinding clouds. They then look the very picture of an untenable waste, a sea of desolation, whose limits blend in the extreme distance with the shimmering coppery horizon. In the rainy season these arid-looking wastes are covered with tall-plumed, reed-like, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... doing me justice, Mr. Underwood. You know that my faith and hope are at the core the same as your own. All our question is what outworks are untenable.' Again he spoke hotly, but Mr. Underwood's gentleness ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pressure exerted on the contents of the thorax by the expiratory contraction. The glottis-closing muscles are fully capable of withstanding this comparatively slight pressure. The doctrine of breath-control is therefore scientifically untenable. This doctrine has no place in ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... of justice. We appear in this court, the executors and legatee of Mr. Stanley—his widow, his nearest friend, and his adopted representative—to deny a claim, just in itself, advanced in the name of his only son. Such a position must be either quite untenable, totally unjustifiable, an outrage upon the common decency of society, or it must stand on the firm foundation of truth. You will easily believe, that such a position would never have been taken, under circumstances so extraordinary, by three individuals, possessing only a common share of honesty ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... used to express the motions or changes of things which produced obvious actions, and, by an easy transition, were afterward applied, in the same way, to things whose actions were not apparent. This assumption is untenable, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... is lightly disregarded. But the biographer of Brunellesco is explicit on the point, giving many details about their sojourn; and this book was written during the lifetime of both Donatello and Brunellesco. The argument against the visit is, in fact, untenable. Artists were influenced by classical motives without going to Rome. Brunellesco himself placed in his competition design a figure inspired by the bronze boy drawing a thorn out of his foot—the Spinario of the Capitol. ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... (although not always edited with precise accuracy), we are indebted to Mr. T. Carlyle. But the view which he takes of his 'hero,' whether in regard of many particular facts alleged or neglected, or of the general estimate of Cromwell as a man,—as it appears to the author plainly untenable in face of proved historical ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... indulge in, it returned to the sea, and was the only one that landed. The sleeper at last moved, and I roused her up. At first she declared she had not been asleep at all, but when time and circumstances made that assertion untenable, she fell back upon the excuse that it was so dull sitting there with no one to talk to, and nothing to do, and, besides, her thoughts ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... states, but also free and independent states, and that the political connection between them and the State of Great Britain was, and always had been, by consent, that is, by implied treaty. Upon careful examination, all these theories were found to be untenable. The Colonial Charters clearly did not intend to recognize the Colonies as free states, much less as free and independent states; the doctrine of the extension to them of the British Constitution was inconsistent with their statehood ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... the British troops found not only a second but a third line of trenches protected by entanglements of a most formidable nature, and so situated as to render the ground recently won at such heavy cost almost untenable. To carry these lines would require another bombardment more intense even than that which had preceded the attack. Our line had advanced one ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... in this danse macabre of thought, a grim procession of blasted hopes, withered ideals and torturing ambitions, her mind gave itself first to one issue, then to another, while it was clear that her position at St. Ignace was fast growing untenable and that something would ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Dr. Griffis ("The Pilgrims in their Three Homes," p. 158) seems to give ear to Professor Arber's untenable allegations as to the Pilgrim leaders' responsibility for any error made in the "overmasting" of the SPEEDWELL, although he destroys his case by saying of the "overmasting:" "Whether it was done in England or Holland is not certain." He says, unhappily chiming ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... that those ghosts who come to disturb the living are always those of excommunicated persons, and that it is a privilege of the schismatic Greek church to preserve from decay those who incurred excommunication, and have died under censure of their church, is an untenable assumption; since it is certain that the bodies of the excommunicated decay like others, and there are some which have died in communion with the church, whether the Greek or the Latin, who remain uncorrupted. Such are found even among the Pagans, and amongst animals, of ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... introduced into the above illustrations to emphasize the false basis upon which the rates of interest rest. In the actual practice of usury the lender may have full information as to the use of the loan and its advantages to the borrower. If we eliminate this feature the basis still remains untenable. By no tortion of ethics can I demand that he, who does me a favor, shall pay me ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... that to be a witness of Jerrem's death Joan must take her stand among the lawless mob who made holiday of such sad scenes as this, his decision was that the idea was untenable. Jerrem too had a strong desire that Joan should not see him die; and although his avoidance of anything that directly touched upon that dreaded moment had kept him from openly naming his wishes, the hints dropped satisfied Reuben ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose the King's demand," said a royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that he may be noted as an enemy to the King's peace." The outraged Churchmen fell back on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a bull which forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their ecclesiastical ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... held, all the principal officers being present, and it was decided to evacuate the castle. It could indeed have been held for some days longer, but it was plain it would at length become untenable; the bridge of boats had already been struck in several places, and some of the barges composing it had sunk level with the water. Were it destroyed, the garrison of the castle would be completely cut off, and as no great advantage was to be gained by holding the position, for it was evident ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... had finished their tea they ought to leave the tables, and announced distinctly that she expected to faint if the present state of things continued. Mr. Sam offered to accompany her into the open air; just the way to give her her death of cold, she alleged. In short, his post became untenable; and having swallowed his quantum of tea, he judged it ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... opinion now current, Canaan is said to mean "lowland," and to be transferred from the land to the people, and from the people to the pretended ancestor. But this opinion is shown to be untenable by the considerations, that, according to historical tradition, Canaan appears first as [Pg 33] the name of the ancestor;—that the verb [Hebrew: kne] is never used of natural lowness, but always of humiliation;—that in our passage, where the name ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... public ministers, and consuls, and those in which a State shall be party." These words, urged the Chief Justice, must be given an exclusive sense "or they have no operation at all." This position is quite untenable, for even when given only their affirmative value these words still place the cases enumerated beyond the reach of Congress, and this may have been their only purpose. However, granting the Chief Justice his view of Article III, still we are not forced to challenge the validity of what Congress ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... with some of the strong man's powers, Muntar for a long time received its daily thumps stoically; but by degrees the resistance of the old hill declined, and when agents reported that the sheikh's tomb was used as an observation post, 8-inch howitzers got on to it and made it untenable. There was a bit of it left at the end, but not more than would offer protection from a rifle bullet, and the one tree left standing was a limbless trunk. The crest of the hill lost its roundness, and the soil which had worked out through the shell craters ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... very strange to me to discover this; and very dreadful—but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly untenable. Peace and the vices of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilisation; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the Englishmen, who had to hint to the French that if they did not exert themselves they would be left to perish, as it would be impossible to get them all on board the corvette before the frigate would become untenable. The corvette and her prize having been put somewhat to rights, made sail for Jamaica. They had a long passage up, and the greatest vigilance was necessary to keep the prisoners in order. A plot was discovered for retaking the ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... beg further to inform you that the rebels are now practically in an embarrassing predicament on account of internal differences, the warning of the friendly Powers, and the protest of the South-western provinces. Their position is becoming daily more and more untenable. If Your Excellency strongly holds out for another ten days or so, ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... an old-time stronghold, but, dominated on three sides by hills which look down into its quadrangle, it would be untenable to rifle fire. It was founded by Stefan Nemanides, son of Bolkan, Prince of the Zeta (a term which comprised all Montenegro and the Berdas), and eldest son of Stefan, Emperor of Servia. The Romanesque church, which occupies the centre of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... Book narrative was also given first place in Rafn's Antiquitates Americanae (Copenhagen, 1837). This ponderous volume contained all the original sources, but it has given rise to much needless controversy on the Norse voyages, for many of the author's conclusions were soon found to be untenable. He failed to winnow the sound historical material from that which was unsubstantiated or improbable. And so far as the original sources are concerned, it was particularly unfortunate that he followed ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... the engine, and dragged it at full speed to the scene of the fire; others seized the buckets, and hastened to fill them; soon a line was formed from the well to the burning tree. Quickly as this was done, the progress of the flames was still more rapid, and Picardet soon found his post untenable. On first perceiving the fire, the smith had climbed, like a frightened cat, to the very top of the poplar, at risk of breaking the tapering stem by the weight of his body; but the refuge was a very precarious one, for the fire followed him, and he required wings to rise higher than the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... batteries, and up a little branch coming from the rear of Fairview, takes in reverse the left of Williams's line, which has become somewhat separated from Geary, (whose position is thus fast becoming untenable,) moves up, and deploys upon the open ground at Chancellorsville. But he finds great difficulty in maintaining his footing, and would have at once been driven back, when Paxton's (old Stonewall) brigade comes up to his support on the double-quick. Jackson's spirit for a while seems to ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... what is called the ancient church in the interpretation of Scripture, is impracticable, inasmuch as, with regard to the greatest part of the Scripture, the church, properly speaking, has said nothing at all; and if it were practicable, it would be untenable, because neither the old councils, nor individual writers, could give any sign that they had a divine gift of interpretation; and if such a gift had been given to them, it would have been equivalent to a new revelation, the sense of the comment being ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... which de Medici had invented for cleaning out the harbour of Leghorn. He said it was as useless as it in fact turned out to be. Through the influence of the mortified inventor he lost favour at Court; and his enemies took advantage of the fact to render his chair untenable. He resigned before his three years were up, and retired ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Tyrrell's men, into Dunboy, under Captain Richard Mageoghegan, and Taylor, an Englishman, connected by marriage with Tyrrell. Another party of the same troops took possession of Clear Island, but were obliged to abandon it as untenable. The entire strength of the Dunboy garrison amounted to 143 men; towards the end of April —the last of the Spaniards having sailed in March— Carew left Cork at the head of 3,000 men to besiege Dunboy. Sir Charles Wilmot moved on the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... ever claimed for them [the MS. readings] a right of acceptance beyond the emendations of Theobald, Malone, Dyce, and Singer, (that is, a right not justified by their obvious utility or beauty,) such a claim must have been untenable, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... ground on each side of the water, and have visited it at midnight. I have considered the upheaval theories, subsidence theories, volcanic theories, and tidal wave theories which the provincial savants have suggested. They are all untenable. There is only one scoffer in the district, an Orangeman; and he admits the removal of the cemetery, but says it was dug up and transplanted in the night by a body of men under the command of Father Tom. This is also out of the question. The interment of Brimstone ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... amazing thing was the coolness of the men. The Newfoundlanders might have been practising trench-digging in camp in Scotland. When a man was hit some one gave him first aid, directed the stretcher-bearers where to find him, and coolly resumed digging. In two hours our position had become untenable. We had been subjected to a merciless and devastating shelling, and our first experience of war had cost us sixty-five men. In a new and safer position ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... George Bentinck would deem it wise, proper, and expedient; but if after Easter, then the complexion and character of the bill were, in the noble lord's judgment, utterly transformed, and it was declared to be quite untenable and unconstitutional. Was that the kind of support on which the government ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... husband and wife hurried back to Sardhana on learning that the officers had commenced negotiations with Aloysius the son of the deceased Sumroo, who resided at Dehli with the title of Nawab Zafaryab Khan, and had carried over with them a portion of the troops. Finding the situation untenable, they soon resolved on quitting it and retiring into the territories of the British with their portable property, estimated at about two lakhs of rupees. With this view they wrote to Colonel McGowan, commanding the brigade at Anupshahar; and finding that officer scrupulous at participating at ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... they sank under the rigors of external conditions no longer fitted for their existence. It has been attempted by some to prove the adaptability of these animals to the present conditions of the northern hemisphere; but so untenable in every phase is this opinion, that it would be sheer waste of time and space to attempt its refutation. That they may have migrated northward and southward with the seasons is more than probable, though it has been stated ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... contentions of Paine were met as vigorously by the negations of Bentham and Burke. And if it be supposed that the individual is born into the world with certain ready-made possessions, fixed and unalterable, the claim is untenable. Such an artificial account of man ignores entirely the evolution of moral nature, and denies the possibility of development in man's conception of law and duty. 'It is,' as Wundt says, 'to derive all the moral postulates that have been produced in our minds by previous moral development from ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... State or any combination of States, less than world-wide, could be substantially self-sufficient in respect of all raw materials is untenable. Even the United States lacks (mentioning minerals only) nickel, cobalt, platinum, tin, diamonds. Its supplies of the following are inadequate: antimony, asbestos, kaolin, chromate, corundum, garnet, manganese, emery, nitrates, potash, pumice, tungsten, vanadium, ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... some sea monster surging steadily at the tow line of the Vulcan. That theory was untenable. A monster might attack; it would ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design, then we are bound to go a step ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... "But an untenable one. And Fortune is equally elusive to those who seek her over-persistently. The truth, as usual, lies between ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... meaning "those only who were in order of succession to the throne." Such a definition would have excluded the Queen as effectually as the Princess Dowager; and when Mr. Grenville found the peers reluctant to accept this view (which, indeed, his own Lord Chancellor pronounced untenable), he then sent another of his colleagues to represent to the King that his mother was so unpopular that, even if the Lords should pass the bill in such a form as rendered her eligible for nomination, the Commons would introduce a clause to exclude her by name. With ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... finger-nail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... though the notion that the Torula is a creature which eats sugar and excretes carbonic acid and alcohol, which is not unjustly ridiculed in the most surprising paper that ever made its appearance in a grave scientific journal,[4] may be untenable, the fact that the Toruloe are alive, and that yeast does not excite fermentation unless it contains living Toruloe, stands fast. Moreover, of late years, the essential participation of living organisms in fermentation ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... excited the jealousy and opposition of the leading men of his nation. Even such popular enthusiasm as had followed his mighty works was of a sort that Jesus could not encourage. The situation in Judea had at length become so nearly untenable that he decided to withdraw into seclusion in Galilee, where, as a prophet, he could be "without honor." He had gone to Jerusalem eager to begin there, where God should have had readiest service, the ministry ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... regards Rindfleisch's doctrine as untenable, since the process which he observed is chiefly the result of a severe injury of the blood from the sodium chloride solution and the teasing. If a method of preparation be chosen which protects the blood as far as possible, and avoids every chemical and physical ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... the present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an Individualist origin for the products of industry is absolutely untenable. The astonishing perfection attained by the textile or mining industries in civilized countries is due to the simultaneous development of a thousand other industries, great and small, to the extension of the railroad system, to inter-oceanic navigation, to the manual ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... was admitted that it was in fact impossible to make Germany pay the expenses of both sides, and that the unloading of their liabilities upon the enemy was not practicable, the position of the Ministers of Finance of France and Italy became untenable. ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... under the name of Kogon. But this monarch was not destined to find a place among the recognized occupants of the throne. For a time, indeed, fortune smiled on the Hojo. Within a few days after Kogon's assumption of the sceptre, Go-Daigo's retreat at Kasagi became untenable, and he fled, still escorted by the faithful Fujiwara Fujifusa. It must be recognized that, whatever the Fujiwara family's usurpations in the past, their loyalty to the Throne throughout this era of cruel vicissitudes redeems a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... extra, that it is a mere artifice, and that hence it cannot be translated; now we come to their fact, viz., that Scripture has no such artificial style, and that Scripture can easily be translated. Surely their fact is as untenable as their doctrine. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Drummle appeared with a polite little avowal in Estella's hand, that she had had the honor of dancing with him several times. This left me no course but to regret that I had been "betrayed into a warmth which," and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable, the idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then sat snorting at one another for an hour, while the Grove engaged in indiscriminate contradiction, and finally the promotion of good feeling was declared to have gone ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... and Spilsby, Lincoln., 1391. I will not further multiply instances, as my own collection of rubbings would enable me to do. I should, however, observe, that the hypothesis of S.S.S. (as to "these figures" being "the private mark of the artist") is untenable: since the twenty-three examples above alluded to are scattered over sixteen different counties, as distant from each other as Yorkshire and Sussex. Two examples are well known, in which the dog so represented was a favourite animal:—Deerhurst, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... itself, filled with all these flaming masses, became so heated that it could no longer be breathed. The atmosphere itself was burning, the glass of the windows cracked,' and apartments became untenable. The Emperor stood for a moment immovable, his face crimson, and great drops of perspiration rolling from his brow, while the King of Naples, Prince Eugene, and the Prince de Neuchatel begged him to ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
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