"Disproportion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied that everybody else might not share his interest. But I shall not use that argument; it is quite possible for an artist of Strauss's worth to keep us entertained. What grates upon me more is the way in which he speaks of himself. The disproportion between his subject and the means he has of expressing it is too strong. Above all, I do not like this display of the inner and secret self. There is a want of reticence in this Sinfonia Domestica. The fireside, the sitting-room, and the bedchamber, are open to all-comers. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... of the human comedy which have been an increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... opponents: "N'etes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Peres? Qu'on satisfait au precepte d'ouir la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe a la fois de differents pretres!" When [68] you have the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y porte davantage qu'une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... adopted on the Caernarvonshire side. A thick bank of earth had there to be cut through, and a solid mass of masonry built in its place, the rock being situated at a greater distance from the main pier; involving a greater length of suspending chain, and a disproportion in the catenary or chord line on that side of the bridge. The excavation and masonry thereby rendered necessary proved a work of vast labour, and its execution occupied a considerable time; but by the beginning of the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the Crown, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... thunder-clap on Joan and her husband. The Hungarian army consisted of 10,000 horse and more than 7000 infantry, and Aversa had only 500 soldiers under Giacomo Pignatelli. In spite of the immense disproportion of the numbers, the Neapolitan general vigorously repelled the attack; and the King of Hungary, fighting in the front, was wounded in his foot by an arrow. Then Louis, seeing that it would be difficult to take the place by storm, determined to starve ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Jefferson ideal, supporting themselves off their own grounds; an economical error, for sugar was their better crop, but unavoidable in the circumstances. With all this, the difficulty in the way of exportation so cheapened articles in the United States as to maintain a considerable disproportion in prices there and abroad, which kept alive the spirit of speculation, and maintained the opportunity of large profits,[251] at the same time that it distressed ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... France boasted of twenty. The clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have equalled in number their subjects in England. There was the same disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in their military resources. Edward could bring only eight thousand men-at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force was busy elsewhere, ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... the Congress came, And by their Concourse form'd the mighty Frame, What did the Liquid to th' Assembly call To give their Aid to form the ponderous Ball? First, tell us, why did any come? next, why In such a disproportion to the Dry! Why were the Moist in Number so outdone, That to a Thousand Dry, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... bit of ground there is about it for such a big house!" said Candace, whose country eyes were often struck by the disproportion between the Newport edifices and the land ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... the alliance of Austria and Italy with France. Germany, though unaware of the full magnitude of the perils from which it had escaped, breathed freely after weeks of painful suspense; the very circumstance that the disproportion of numbers on the battle-field of Woerth was still unknown heightened the joy and confidence produced by the Crown Prince's victory, a victory in which the South German troops, fighting by the side of those who had been their foes in 1866, had borne their full part. In Paris the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... shows that the leg-bones relatively to the weight of the entire skeleton have really increased in weight; but Table 8.III.b shows that according to the same standard the wing-bones have also really decreased in weight; so that the relative disproportion shown in the foregoing tables between the wing and leg-bones, in comparison with those of the wild duck, is partly due to the increase in weight and length of the leg-bones, and partly to the decrease in weight and length of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... Churra, is seen to be very abrupt, but nothing can be seen beyond the elevated plateau of this part towards the south. To the east and west the view has the usual appearance—grassy valleys and hills—with a great disproportion ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, And art aliue still, while thy Booke doth liue, And we haue wits to read, and praise to giue. That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses; I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses: For, if I thought my iudgement were of yeeres, I should commit thee surely with thy peeres, And tell, how farre thou didstst our Lily out-shine, Or sporting Kid, or Marlowes mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... call of the Republic, vigilantly keeping watch and ward on the banks of the Rhine and with no reasonable prospect of a term to this servitude. For the real ground of this dependence upon foreign forces is the disproportion between the populations of Germany and France and between the resources of the two nations. The ratio of the former is at present about six to four and it is growing perceptibly toward seven to four. The organizing capacity in commerce and industry is said to be even greater. If, therefore, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... by the extravagance of their family; for few men can make as much in a year as an extravagant woman can carry on her back in one winter. Some are ambitious of fashionable society, and will gratify their vanity at any expense. This disproportion between means and expense soon brings on a crisis. The victim is straitened for money; without it he must abandon his rank; for fashionable society remorselessly rejects all butterflies which have lost their ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... Undoubtedly, the relative disproportion would be very much greater if the number of deaths of those who go from other States, after it is too late for them to receive any benefit, could be eliminated from the actual number that die from among the inhabitants themselves. The question may arise right here among ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... made to illustrate are unawakened; the programme of republican government is lucidly announced, its watchwords adopted, its philosophy expounded, while its spirit and realization continue in abeyance: and thus everywhere we find a singular disproportion between formula and fact, profession and practice, specific knowledge and its application. The citizen of the world finds no armory like that which the institutions, the taste, and the genius of the French nation afford him, whether he aspire to be a courtier ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Effingham slipped out of the bay and hung with the wind upon their rear. In numbers the two forces were strangely unequal, for the English fleet counted only eighty vessels against the hundred and forty-nine which composed the Armada. In size of ships the disproportion was even greater. Fifty of the English vessels, including the squadron of the Lord Admiral and the craft of the volunteers, were little bigger than yachts of the present day. Even of the thirty Queen's ships which formed its main body, there were but four ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... strengthening fortresses and collecting troops, which he placed under the command of his veteran general, Prince Eugene. He was quite sanguine that here he would be abundantly able to repel the assaults of his foes. But here again he was doomed to bitter disappointment. The emperor found a vast disproportion between promise and performance. The diet had voted him one hundred and twenty thousand troops; they furnished twelve thousand. They voted abundant supplies; they furnished ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... lived on the earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ—an artificial organ which merely prolongs the natural organs—his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body. From this disproportion there issued the problems, moral, social, international, which most of the nations endeavoured to solve by filling up the soulless void in the body politic by creating more liberty, more fraternity, more justice than the world had ever seen. Now, while mankind laboured at this task of spiritualization, ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... reliability or want of reliability in certain materials or processes used in decoration, or the rules of treatment which will modify a low and dark room and make it seem light and airy, or "bring down" too high a ceiling and widen narrow walls so as to apparently correct disproportion? These things are the results of laws which she has never studied—laws of compensation and relation, which belong exclusively to the world of colour, and unfortunately they are not so well formulated that they can be committed to memory like rules of grammar; yet ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not surprising, when we remember the armour of the Greek spearmen, and the impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on troops so armed, as ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... you should. For though you should grant that there are Elements, it would not follow that there must be precisely four. And therefore I hope you will proceed to acquaint us with your other and more considerable Objections against Themistius's Opinion, especially since there is so great a Disproportion in Bulke betwixt the Earth, Water and Air, on the one part, and those little parcells of resembling substances, that the fire separates from Concretes on the other part, that I can scarce think that you are serious, when to lose no advantage against your Adversary, ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. If you think of what most of us do in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment. They find in life a field for every power. You and I do not. 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... ordinary, disproportion between moral worth and worldly prosperity has at all times led the observant and reflecting few to a nicer consideration of the current belief, whether instinctive or traditional. By forcing the soul in upon herself, this enigma of saint and sage, from Job, David, and Solomon ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... proceeded, at any given period, by any one of the many routes between her own residence and that of her aunt, without meeting a single individual whom she knew, or by whom she was known. In viewing this question in its full and proper light, we must hold steadily in mind the great disproportion between the personal acquaintances of even the most noted individual in Paris, and the entire population of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... negroes which of late have been imported into this Collony may endanger the safety thereof." The immigration of white servants was therefore encouraged by a special law.[10] Increase of immigration reduced this disproportion, but Negroes continued to be imported in such numbers as to afford considerable revenue from a moderate duty on them. About the time when the Assiento was signed, the slave-trade so increased that, scarcely a year after the consummation of that momentous agreement, two heavy duty acts were passed, ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... all the thinking portion of the white race, who are interested in good government and a well-ordered and law-abiding community ... for which this community ought to be profoundly grateful." And this man is also "ebon black." And here we would correct the impression that a large disproportion of the negroes are receiving "a higher education." The idea is given out that a great mistake has been made by the societies and philanthropists that are seeking the elevation of the freedmen. It would relieve the quite unnecessary alarm of objectors if they ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... with many homely touches which add to the truth without cheapening the effect of royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... The imprint of this disproportion or lack of proportion can even be found in the theological teaching of long ago and now. At one time religion was defined as having to do with a man's relation to God. That was emphasized to the utter hiding away of all else. ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... more difficult to ascertain what may be called the normal dimensions or proportions. Nevertheless observation and experience soon show what may be termed the average size of each plant, and any disproportion between the several organs is ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... But this disproportion will seem still more shocking when it is remembered that the calculation which we have just made concerning the electoral class is altogether wrong, altogether in ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... excellent library of 380 volumes then at Peterhouse. It had a character of its own. The usual overwhelming mass of Bibles, of church books, of the Fathers and the Schoolmen does not depress us with its disproportion. The collection was strong in astronomy and medicine: Ptolemy, Albumazar, Rhazes, Serapion, Avicenna, Haly Abenragel, Zaael, and others were all represented. Besides these, there was a fine selection of the classics—Plato, Aristotle, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... bigger, wonderfully smartened edition of the elf-like child. The dark locks were rolled back in pompadour fashion over a high cushion, the plait turned up in a queue, fastened at the nape of the neck by an enormous outstanding bow; the cheeks were fuller in outline, and the disproportion between nose and mouth less marked. She was by no means pretty, yet there was a charm about the quaint little face which made the onlooker smile involuntarily and feel a sudden outgoing ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 4th of Daniel, where the cutting down of a tree is used to symbolize the loss of the king's reason, there is no such disproportion between the duration of man's existence and that of a tree, as there is between the life of a beast and that of an empire. And therefore there is no incongruity if the time specified is a symbol of literal time, i.e., if a time is used to symbolize a ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... difficult to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations. The villages are so small, the churches so vast. It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills. From ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... where we have trustworthy statistics. In Austria, England, and Wales, there are nearly one hundred and five women for every one hundred men. In Sweden they are as one hundred and nine to one hundred. In all cities the disproportion is greater than in the country. In London there are one hundred and thirteen women to every one hundred men; and in the large towns of Sweden they stand as one hundred and sixteen ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... hegei syngene einai, e emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?" Plato, The Republic, Book ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... length of this colored spectrum with its breadth, I found it almost five times greater; a disproportion so extravagant that it excited me to a more than ordinary curiosity of examining from whence it might proceed. I could scarce think that the various thicknesses of the glass, or the termination with shadow or darkness, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... demonstrate that corsets and tight lacing do not necessarily go hand in hand. Distortion and feebleness are not beauty. A proper proportion should exist between the size of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders and hips, and if the waist is diminished below this proportion, it suggests disproportion and invalidism rather ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far as ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... system a minority in the country may return a majority of the House of Commons, but what more frequently happens, and what I am disposed to agree is equally injurious in its results, is that you have almost always a great disproportion in the relative size of the majority and minority in the House of Commons as compared with their relative size in the constituencies. That is the normal condition of our House of Commons. I have had experience ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... seems at length to have made its way to the minds of all that the disproportion between the public responsibilities and the means provided for meeting them is no casual nor transient evil. It is, on the contrary, one which for some years to come, notwithstanding a resort to ...
— 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
... Michico-Canadian stock and the gentlemen of my party were in their best trim. We occupied the beautiful eminence at the outlet of the lake. The assemblage of Indians was large, but I was struck by the great disproportion, or excess, of women ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... employed from first to last in the South African War were five times as numerous as the forces placed in the field by the Dutch nationalists—say 450,000 as against 90,000—we have here a numerical superiority which dwindles into insignificance beside the magnificent disproportion of the professional troops required to deal with a civilian ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... solemn or serious drapery fall, disclosing man, the poor biped, and in which attitudes![4127] Swift alone dared to present similar pictures. What physiological crudities relating to the origin and end of our most exalted sentiments! What disproportion between such feeble reason and such powerful instincts! What recesses in the wardrobes of politics and religion concealing their foul linen! We laugh at all this so as not to weep, and yet behind this laughter there are tears; he ends sneeringly, subsiding into a tone of profound sadness, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... almost exterminated them, from 7000 to 8000 being killed, and 600 taken prisoners, the latter being executed without mercy by Don John. The loss of the Spaniards was only about ten men. This extraordinary disproportion of numbers, and the fact that 1200 men so easily defeated a force ten times more numerous, completely dashed to the ground the hopes of the Netherlands, and showed how utterly incapable were its soldiers of contending in the field with the veterans ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... sacrifices accuracy to haste, nor indulges himself in contemptuous negligence, or impatient idleness; he has no careless lines, or entangled sentiments; his words are nicely selected, and his thoughts fully expanded. If this part of his character suffers any abatement, it must be from the disproportion of his rhymes, which have not always sufficient consonance, and from the admission of broken lines into his Solomon; but, perhaps, he thought, like Cowley, that hemistichs ought to be admitted ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... second century which terminated with the death of Hyginus, the average duration of the life of a Roman bishop very little exceeded eight years; whereas, during the remainder of the century, it amounted to nearly twelve years. According to the chronology of Pearson the disproportion is still greater, being as eight years and a fraction to fourteen years. If we insert the episcopate of Anacletus, it will be nearly ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... tales in such enormous phrases, with such gigantic structure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to false-hood; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing more and more diseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict what it will not be necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of a century or so more ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... finer and read two descriptions of the filigree ball. The disproportion in the rewards offered was apparent. That promised by Uncle David was calculated to rouse any man's cupidity and should have resulted in ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... (their seats being adapted to this course of proceeding and being bent down at their backs). They mistake their carriage and its horizontal lines for a proper measure of the normal plain, and therefore all the objects outside which really are in a horizontal position must show a disproportion of twenty to twenty-five degrees declivity, in regard to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or observed. She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband's) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been provided with tusks, they would long since have been annihilated for the sake of their ivory.[1] But it is a curious fact that, whilst in Africa and India both sexes have tusks[2], with some slight disproportion in the size of those of the females: not one elephant in a hundred is found with tusks in Ceylon, and the few that possess them are exclusively males. Nearly all, however, have those stunted processes called tushes, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... necessary mobility of the parts was obtained, and upon singing into the external artificial ear the piece of hay was thrown into vibration, and tracings were obtained upon a plane surface of smoked glass passed rapidly underneath. While engaged in these experiments I was struck with the remarkable disproportion in weight between the membrane and the bones that were vibrated by it. It occurred to me that if a membrane as thin as tissue paper could control the vibration of bones that were, compared to it, of immense size and weight, why should not a larger and thicker membrane be able to vibrate a piece ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... he muttered to himself. 'Have I ever been sane? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives and other men's is too great to be normal. Well, at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing penance ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what a blessed disproportion between the evil we do, and the evil we are capable of doing, and seem sometimes on the very verge of doing! If my soul has grown tares, when it was full of the seeds of nightshade, how happy ought I to be! And that the tares have not wholly strangled the wheat, what a wonder it is! We ought ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... called the battle of Hobkirk's Hill, reflected much honor on Lord Rawdon considering the disproportion of force which was, in fact, greater than at Guilford, yet it did not change materially the relative situation of the armies. Greene could still maintain his position and support the detachments operating in ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... to the humble. But St. Francis proposed to himself to explain that, when it pleases God to manifest Himself in some manner to a soul which is duly sensible of its nothingness, it is better impressed with its own nothingness, by the disproportion it sees between the Sovereign Being and His creature, which discovers to it a thousand imperfections which it was not previously aware of, as a ray of the sun penetrating into a room, discovers a multitude of atoms of which we were ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... pounds, and Ireland of but 36,000,000 pounds, there are in Ireland 75,000 agricultural proletarians more than in the neighbouring island. {272a} How great the competition for land in Ireland must be is evident from this extraordinary disproportion, especially when one reflects that the labourers in Great Britain are living in the utmost distress. The consequence of this competition is that it is impossible for the tenants to live much better than the labourers, by reason of the high rents paid. The Irish people is thus held in ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly all men. It seemed to him that he had never ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... country, one would expect that if any disproportion existed in the laws, it would be in favor of the ignorant and defenceless; but the reverse is lamentably the case here. Obedience to the laws is the price freemen pay for the protection of the laws;—but the same legislatures which absolutely sanction ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... the monstrosities of the existing system were fully revealed, as well as the wretched character of the "health officers,'' "inspectors,'' and the whole army of underlings, and I exhibited statistics carefully ascertained and tabulated, showing the absurd disproportion of various classes of officials to each other, their appointment being made, not to preserve the public health, but to carry the ward caucuses and elections. During this exposure Boole, the head of the whole system, stood not far from me on the floor, his eyes fastened upon me, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... real action, the notions of the actual strength of the enemy are generally so uncertain, the estimate of our own commonly so incorrect, that the party superior in numbers either does not admit the disproportion, or is very far from admitting the full truth, owing to which, he evades almost entirely the moral disadvantages which would spring from it. It is only hereafter in history that the truth, long suppressed through ignorance, vanity, or a wise discretion, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... looked as if it were not in the power of human passions to alter a feature of him. A countenance of wood could not be more fixed than his, when the blockhead of a character required it; his face was full and long; from his crown to the end of his nose was the shorter half of it, so that the disproportion of his lower features, when soberly composed, threw him into the most lumpish, moping mortal, that ever made beholders merry; not but, at other times, he could be wakened into spirit equally ridiculous." Genest says that Underhill acted again as the Grave-digger ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... which, Rochester meditated the base and cowardly revenge which he afterwards executed; and he thus coolly expressed his intention in another of his letters:—"You write me word, that I'm out of favour with a certain poet, whom I have admired for the disproportion of him and his attributes. He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl. If he falls on me at the blunt, which is his very good weapon in wit, I will forgive ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... five-and-forty sail. They fell in with the Dunkirk squadron, consisting of ten ships of war, one frigate, and four privateers, under the command of M. de Forbin. A furious action immediately ensued, and notwithstanding the vast disproportion in point of number, was maintained by the English commodore with great gallantry, until captain Acton was killed, captain Clements mortally wounded, and the Grafton and Hampton-Court were taken, after having sunk the Salisbury, at that time in the hands ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... much as x (the subsistence of eleven millions) by additional application of another equal quantity of labor on the same land in each period, then at the end of one hundred years there would be the disproportion of one hundred and seventy-six millions of people, with subsistence for only fifty-five millions. Of course, this is prevented either by checking population to the amount of the subsistence; by sending off the surplus population; or by bringing ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the semi-barbarian who does Desdemona to death, has been goaded to madness by the machinations of Iago; and even this last can plead his by no means gratuitous hatred. The disasters that weighed so heavily on the lovers of Verona were due to the inexperience of the victims, to the manifest disproportion between their strength and that of their enemies; and although we may pity the man who succumbs to superior human force, his downfall does not surprise us. We are not impelled to seek explanation elsewhere, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... brings also to consciousness the foreignness of the spiritual idea to natural phenomena. And the spiritual idea, having no other reality to express its essence, expatiates in all these natural shapes, seeks itself in their unrest and disproportion, but finds them inadequate to it. It then exaggerates these natural phenomena and shapes them into the huge and the boundless. The spiritual idea revels in them, as it were, seethes and ferments in them, does violence to them, distorts and disfigures ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... practical craft. This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. The Greeks—predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle—were speculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amount of clear and certain fact was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be asked, or what might be known, of the real conditions under which they were passing their existence. ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... they really mean that they are unenfranchised. You can scarcely be disfranchised if you have never been enfranchised; and I have regarded the enfranchisement of the people on the roll as more important for the time being than adding new names to the rolls. This would only tend to increase the disproportion between the representative and the represented. But I rejoiced when the Women's Suffrage Bill was carried, for I believe that women have thought more and accepted the responsibilities of voting to a greater extent than was ever ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Courtrai (1302), also called the Battle of the Golden Spurs, owing to the great number of these spurs collected on the battlefield after the defeat of the French knights by the Flemish militia. It was hailed at the time as a miraculous triumph for the commoners, the disproportion between the opposing forces being somewhat exaggerated by enthusiastic contemporary chroniclers. But its influence was not only social, it was national, for it definitely secured the independence of Flanders and of the other Belgian principalities ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... felt strongly the disproportion of their marriages to that of their younger sister. This consideration made them far from being content, though they were arrived at the utmost height of their late wishes, and much beyond their hopes. They gave themselves up to an excess of jealousy, which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... others were heroes on the foreign field. Some of these men are laying their lives down in the great work to which they have been called. All honor to these men! But their numbers are too few. The disproportion is too great in our professional schools. For example, when a medical school can boast of four hundred young men preparing to care for the physical life of the people and the theological school in the same institution can report barely one hundred men preparing ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... other way, mother; he has taken me," said Diana, half laughing at what seemed to her the disproportion between her mother's passion and the ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man can get used to an artificial life: it does not prove that there is no natural life for him to get used to. In the broad bird's-eye view of common sense there abides a huge disproportion between the need for a roof and the need for an aeroplane; and no rush of inventions can ever alter it. The only difference is that things are now judged by the abnormal needs, when they might be judged merely by the normal needs. The best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... from the disproportion of the means of our cognition to the knowable; seeing that in order to contemplate Divine things, the eyes must be opened by means of images, analogies and other reasonings which by the Peripatetics are comprehended under the name of fancies (fantasmi); or, by means of Being, to proceed to speculate ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... cause it to develop in a saccharine medium deprived of free oxygen, it will multiply just as if air were present, although with less activity, and under these circumstances its fermentative character will be most marked; under these circumstances, moreover, we shall find the greatest disproportion, all other conditions being the same, between the weight of yeast formed and the weight of sugar decomposed. Lastly, if free oxygen occurs in varying quantities, the ferment-power of the yeast may pass through ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... guardians of the poor, printed by order of the board, it appears that of the out-door poor receiving regular weekly supplies, in the first month, 1830, the time of the greatest need, the people of color were about one to twenty-three whites; or not quite four per cent., a disproportion of whites to colored, of more than two to one in favor of the latter. When it is considered that they perform the lowest offices in the community—that the avenues to what are esteemed the most honorable and profitable professions in society, are in a great measure, if not ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... their present numbers bear to the numbers of the rural population does not exceed one to six, whereas the urban population of the Atlantic border is not less than one to three of the rural. This disproportion of city and rural population will hereafter change more rapidly in favor of the interior than the Atlantic cities, because of the greater fertility of soil producing more food from an equal amount of labor; and also, by reason of the more rapid growth of the general population, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... life there is the same matter for astonishment as in Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of oxygen. The carbon of the food, not meeting with a sufficient supply of oxygen to consume it, passes into other compounds containing a large excess of carbon—or, in other words, fat is produced. Fat is thus an abnormal production, resulting from a disproportion of carbon in the food to that of the oxygen respired by the lungs or absorbed by the skin. Wild animals in a state of nature do not contain fat. The production of fat is always a consequence of a deficient supply of oxygen, for oxygen is absolutely indispensable for ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... accurately and firmly fitted to each other, so as not to admit of being moved. If the beak of a retort is to be luted to the neck of a recipient, they ought to fit pretty accurately; otherwise we must fix them, by introducing short pieces of soft wood or of cork. If the disproportion between the two be very considerable, we must employ a cork which fits the neck of the recipient, having a circular hole of proper dimensions to admit the beak of the retort. The same precaution is necessary in ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... considerations will at once establish that those bye-laws which afford protection to the well-governing of the merchant service in general, are not sufficient to maintain the necessary discipline on board of the East India ships. The greater the disproportion between the unit who commands and the numbers who obey, the greater the chance of mutiny. Sedition is the progeny of assembly. Even where grievances may be real, if there is no contact and no discussion, there will ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... young one to her capacious bosom while making tracks from her enemies; nor is she much "on the fight," not being so liberally furnished with jaw as the fierce and much larger bull—for this is the only species of whale in which there exists a great disproportion between the sexes in point of size. Such difference as may obtain between the MYSTICETA is slightly in favour of the female. I never heard of a cow-cachalot yielding more than fifty barrels of oil; but I have both heard of, and seen, bulls carrying one hundred ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... After being as the gods, one descends with rather too much of a run to the level of the ordinary mortal."—He turned on his elbow restlessly, and the movement altered the lie of the bedclothes, thereby disclosing the unsightly disproportion of his person through the light blanket and sheet. "And if one's own level happens unfortunately to be below that of even the ordinary mortal—well—well—don't ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... feeling of this kind, he has placed earlier than was conformable to history. I have now gone through all the unquestionably genuine works of Shakspeare. I have carefully abstained from all indefinite eulogies, which merely serve to prove a disproportion betwixt the feeling and the capability of expressing it. To many the above observations will appear too diffuse for the object and plan of these Lectures; to others they will perhaps seem unsatisfactory. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... both indefinite and incoherent. In consequence of the daily vicissitudes of his fortune, he is well aware that he is affected for better or for worse by agencies which fall outside the more familiar routine operations of society and nature. So great is the disproportion between the calculable and the incalculable elements of his life that he is like a man crouching in the dark, expecting a blow from any quarter. The agencies whose working can be discounted in advance form his secular world; but this world is narrow and meagre, and is overshadowed by a beyond ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... as if he appeared to consider it a mark of studied disrespect to be compelled to contrast his gaunt leanness with the young man's embonpoint, and was propitiated only by the reflection that he contributed in no way to his nephew's physical disproportion, since the latter was able to be at charges for his own welfare from resources derived from ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... hereat, for should I attempt her, and be slighted, she would never care for me afterwards; but again, I considered that if I should attempt and fail, she would never speak of it; or would any believe I durst be so audacious as to propound such a question, the disproportion of years and fortune being so great betwixt us: however, all her talk was of husbands, and in my presence saying one day after dinner, she respected not wealth, but desired an honest man; I made answer, I thought I could fit her with ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... periodical repentances? At the first temptation I forgot my remorse and good resolutions. I am weak and mean-spirited, and you are not firm enough to govern my vacillating nature. While my intentions are good, my actions are villainous. The disproportion between my extravagant desires, and the means of gratifying them, is too great for me to endure any longer. Who knows to what fearful lengths my unfortunate disposition may lead me? However, I will take my fate in my own hands!" he finally ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... struck in the case of all the child angels by what will seem to you the undue size of their abdomen. You will notice this even in the works of painters who, like Raphael, most idealise their subjects, while in those of others who, like Rubens, interpret nature more literally, the apparent disproportion becomes grotesque; or, in the coarser ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... from Cairo professed to be amazed at the ludicrous disproportion between their numerical forces and mine. They could not understand, and they wanted to know, by what strange privilege it is that an Englishman with a brace of pistols and a couple of servants rides safely across the Desert, whilst they, the natives ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... fearful of doing wrong even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like this,) if we did not look, not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be replied, in the first place, that, even in the biological domain of the "struggle for existence," the disproportion between the number of individuals who are born and the number of those who survive regularly and progressively grows smaller and smaller as we ascend in the biological scale from vegetables to animals, and from animals ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... age, do not average more than 500 lbs. and wethers not more than 40 lbs. At Port Dalrymple it is no uncommon occurrence for yearly lambs to weigh from 100 to 120 lbs. and for three year old wethers to weigh 150 lbs. and upwards; but this great disproportion of weight arises in some measure from the greater part of the sheep at this settlement, having become, from constant crossing, nearly of the pure Teeswater breed. Still the superior richness of the natural pastures in these southern settlements, is without doubt the main cause of the increased ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... gift of invention; but the characters generally are seized in their most peculiar traits, and presented with a good degree of vigour and discrimination; while at the same time their more prominent features are not worked into disproportion ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... for this duty. Ephraim was a tall gaunt man, with hollow cheeks, a leathery complexion, and large feet. He walked or sat with his eyes continually fixed upon these feet—reproachfully, it seemed—as if their disproportion were a source of perennial woe; he carried his arms looped behind him, and had acquired a peculiar stoop—to facilitate his vigilant guardianship of his feet, apparently. Mr. Shine, as superintendent of the Waddy ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... figures would probably make them more nearly correct. That would give a total population of about 715,000. Accepting the number of inhabitants as 715,000 the population per square mile is about 39.6. A comparison with the surrounding West Indian countries reveals considerable disproportion. The Dominican Republic is not quite one-half the size of Cuba but has only one-fourth the number of inhabitants; it is almost double the size of the Republic of Haiti but has less than one-half the inhabitants; it is five times the size of Porto ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... it might be said, that, knowing his pride, and become hopeless of subduing him, except by means of himself, these monarchs and their people only humbled themselves before him, in order to aggravate the disproportion of his elevation, and by so doing, to dazzle his moral vision. In their assemblies, their attitude, their words, even the tone of their voice, attested his ascendancy over them. All were assembled there for his sake ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... Beautiful, while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms, waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity, her disproportion, her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious, in a word, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... his view receives; The prospect thought and contemplation gives. That seat of empire here salutes his eye, To which three kingdoms do themselves apply; The structure by a prelate[3] raised, Whitehall, Built with the fortune of Rome's capitol; Both, disproportion'd to the present state Of their proud founders, were approved by Fate. 90 From hence he does that antique pile[4] behold, Where royal heads receive the sacred gold; It gives them crowns, and does their ashes keep; There made like gods, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... ground, but even have taken a foremost place among the modern nations.[1] Instead of that, their princes were foolish enough to think that they could set France, Germany, or Spain in motion for the attainment of selfish objects within the narrow sphere of Italian politics, forgetting the disproportion between these huge monarchies and a single city like Florence, a mere province like the Milanese. It was just possible for Lorenzo de' Medici to secure the tranquillity of Italy by combining the Houses of Sforza ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... much?" "Yes, Sir; but chiefly females, and among them many widows." I had said nothing to provoke this ungallant reply. "In respect to the sacrament, what is the proportion between the communicants, as to sex?" "Sir, there are one hundred women to twelve men." I wish I could say that this disproportion were confined to France. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a literary amateur I will point out among its qualities the beauty of its style and its descriptions, the purity of the psychological analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its faults a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... impossible for us to guess at the cause of this disproportion in the number of the different sexes; but as all the women we saw were very liberal of their favours, I conjectured at that time, that the married and the modest, who might be supposed to form the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... which attacks of one sort or another—too often successful—had been made upon the lives of persons who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement, is the prospect so dark as it ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... same disproportion there is, though in a different way, between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but simply (as we all hate ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... strange disproportion in your years, And, let me add, disparity of tempers, Might make the world doubt whether such an union Could make you wisely, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... his bane. In due proportions where these atoms lie, A certain form their equal aids supply; And while unchanged the efficient causes reign, Age following age the certain form maintain. But where crude atoms disproportion'd rise, And cast their sickening vapors round the skies, Unlike that harmony of human frame, That moulded first and reproduce the same, The tribes ill form'd, attempering to the clime, Still vary downward with the years of time; More perfect some, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... is not the true one. But he is aware that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes and determined the future of mankind on ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... a constant source of loss to those who adopt it; and may we not speak, and yet with truth, as unfavourably of some of the other striking parts in the same system? What shall we say, first, to that injurious disproportion of the articles of croppage with the wants of the estates, which makes little or no provision of food for the labourers (the very first to be cared for), but leaves these to be fed by articles to be bought three thousand miles off in another country, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... with a power which ere three years had elapsed, carried on the war with fourteen legions, numbering an hundred and seventy thousand combatants, between the auxiliaries and Roman soldiers. It is in the magnitude of this disproportion, and the extremely small amount of the reinforcement which he received from home during the next fifteen years that the war lasted, that the decisive proof of the marvellous capacity of the Carthaginian general is to be found. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... that the fortune of war is sometimes more impartial than the disproportion of numbers might lead one to suppose; to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... has witnessed on the high seas, as it has been remarkable for the reverse on land. The French have not been wanting in excellent sailors—gallant seamen, too; but the results of their exploits afloat have ever borne a singular disproportion to the means employed—a few occasional exceptions just going to prove that the causes have been of a character as peculiar, as these results have, in nearly all ages, been uniform. I have heard the want of success in maritime exploits, among the French, attributed to a want of sympathy, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... is uncommonly serviceable, for, at the same time that it totally prevents putrefaction, it renders the skin moist and flexible for many days. While the bird is drying, take it out and replace it in its position once every day. Then, if you see that any part begins to shrink into disproportion, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the issue of which was so long a step towards the unification of Germany. I was then a master in a public school. The discussions of the impending war in our common-room, and the men who joined in them, are very present still to my mind; certainly not the faintest haze of mythical change or disproportion has had time to gather over those scenes in the interval. With some differences, no doubt, the world of this day is yet essentially the same as the world of that day; I certainly still, in my whole personal consciousness, ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... afflictions, and be frightfully scourged six times a day for that entire period, there would be just proportion nay, an inexpressibly merciful proportion between the offence and the punishment, in comparison with that which, being an absolutely infinite disproportion, does not really admit of any comparison, the sentence to an eternal abode in hell as a penalty for the worst kind and the greatest amount of crime a man could possibly crowd into a life of a thousand years. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... aims, its restless, agonizing aspirings after a something, clearly perceived to exist, but to be here unattainable—that all these things point to another life, the only true life of the soul? There is such a manifest disproportion between all objects of earthly attainment and the capacities of the spirit, that, unless man is immortal, he is vastly more to be pitied than the meanest reptile that crawls upon the earth. So I thought as I was walking this morning and saw a frog swimming in a puddle of ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... in their dealings and purchased by weight, establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;—never was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... over and above the difference they have in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining life. Children, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to greater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to labor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visible to those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into the interior economy of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 'natives.' His hair, the short, crispy wool of the African, was sprinkled with gray, and he had the thick lips and broad, heavy features of his race. He was nearly six feet high, stoutly and compactly built; and but for a disproportion in the size of his legs, one of which was smaller and two or three inches shorter than the other, he might have rated as a 'prime field hand.' There was nothing about him but his high, massive head, clear, piercing eye, and a certain self-poised manner, to indicate that he was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... decade, we find that the slight increase in the purchasing power of the total wages received (i.e. real wages) amounted at the most to no more than two or three per cent in these fifteen years. In a word, the disproportion between the prosperity of the wage earning and capitalist classes has in the past two decades become much greater ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... eating of a little fruit is. 2. Touching his laws, this I say further, they are both unreasonable, intricate, and intolerable. Unreasonable, as was hinted before; for that the punishment is not proportioned to the offence: there is great difference and disproportion between the life and an apple; yet the one must go for the other by the law of your Shaddai. But it is also intricate, in that he saith, first, you may eat of all; and yet after forbids the eating of one. And then, in the last place, ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... symmetry or disproportion of parts (either of which depends immediately upon the locomotive system)—or a certain softness or hardness of form (which belongs exclusively to the vital system)—these reciprocally denote a locomotive symmetry or disproportion—or a vital softness or hardness—or a mental delicacy ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience, that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is it all," ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... be the one to say it. The race must yet revert in its decrepitude, as I have in mine, to the climates of the South. Since I have been in Italy I have realised what used to occur to me dimly at home—the cruel disproportion between the end gained and the means expended in reclaiming the savage North. Half the human endeavour, half the human suffering, would have made the whole South Protestant and the whole East Christian, and our civilisation would now be there. No, I shall never ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... beauty in her day, but as she passed middle age the family failing seized upon her, and she grew huge and unwieldy, the disproportion of her enormous figure to her small feet giving her an awkward, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the van of his army, he did not wait for the rear, making his way onward by nearly impassable roads and coming before the outposts of the supplementary Russian army with only eight thousand men. With apparently utter indifference to the vast disproportion in numbers, the Swedish firebrand rushed forward, the Russians, not dreaming of such mad temerity, being sure that he had ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... recognize the beautiful in a detail even in the midst of other discordant details; and the more capable he is of possessing an absolute sense of the beautiful, the more readily will he perceive any disproportion of form. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the throne of the two Sicilies in 1736. When war broke out with Spain in 1739, the navy of England was in numbers more than equal to the combined navies of Spain and France; and during the quarter of a century of nearly uninterrupted war that followed, this numerical disproportion increased. In these wars England, at first instinctively, afterward with conscious purpose under a government that recognized her opportunity and the possibilities of her great sea power, rapidly built up that mighty colonial empire whose foundations were already ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... eight hundred of us—and then look at the construction work, the gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and educationally ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... causeth poverty, and inconvenience in a state; for it is a surcharge of expense; and besides, it being of necessity, that many of the nobility fall, in time, to be weak in fortune, it maketh a kind of disproportion, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... of such extensive wastes, that they impose an idea of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around and the party who are traversing it. Thus the members of a caravan of a thousand souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness unknown to the individual traveller, whose solitary ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... believe that the pea is not the original food plant of the Bruchus. The original plant must rather have been the bean, one seed of which is capable of supporting a dozen or more larvae. With the larger cotyledon the crying disproportion between the number of eggs and ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... all. I know nobody who blasts by praise as you do: for whenever there is exaggerated praise, every body is set against a character. They are provoked to attack it. Now there is Pepys; you praised that man with such disproportion, that I was incited to lessen him, perhaps more than he deserves. His blood is upon your head. By the same principle, your malice defeats itself; for your censure is too violent. And yet (looking to her with a leering smile) she is the first woman in ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... order to occasion the least inconvenience to the traffic and commerce of the country. From the fact that nearly 2,000 miles of Railway are already made or sanctioned on the narrow gauge, while not more than 300 are sanctioned on the wide gauge, a disproportion which will be still more largely increased by the new Railways now in contemplation, an inference might be drawn in favour of confining the gauge which is in such a decided minority within the narrowest possible limits; ...
— Report of the Railway Department of the Board of Trade on the • Samuel Laing
... or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between the rates of increase in population and food, and the consequent ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... supporters of the amendment, but pointed out other defects, which they expressed a hope would be remedied in the committee. For instance, the name of the ten-pound franchise had been given to Ireland without the reality; the Irish and English freeholders, from the nature of their tenures, and the disproportion between their means, were in opposite positions to each other. In respect to houses also, the franchise was too high; and, instead of being the instrument of reform, it would be productive of corruption. Thus Portarlington, which was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... are the people that do the other. Where do you get your money from for home work? Mainly from the Christian Churches. Who is it that keeps up missionary work abroad? Mainly the Christian Churches. There is a vast deal of unreality in that objection. Just think of the disproportion between the embarrassment of riches in our Christian appliances here in England and the destitution in these distant lands. Here the ships are crammed into a dock, close up against one another, rubbing their yards upon each other; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... inordinate, that he was oblig'd to discover it to Sir Francis; who, though he lov'd him very sincerely, had yet a Regard to his Daughter's Youth, and Satisfaction in the Choice of a Husband; especially, when he consider'd the great Disproportion in their Age, which he rightly imagin'd would be very disagreeable to Arabella's Inclinations: This made him at first use all the most powerful and perswading Arguments in his Capacity, to convince Sir Robert of the Inequality of such a Match, but all to no Purpose; for his Passion ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... the size of life, representing an early king, which Mr. Layard discovered at Kileh-Sherghat [PLATE LXIII, Fig. 1], and which is now in the British Museum, may be instanced as quite free from this disproportion. It is very observable, however, in another of the royal statues recently recovered [PLATE LXIII, Fig. 2], as it is also in the monolith bulls and lions universally. Otherwise, the proportions of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... unless the play and acting are really meritorious the audience is quite as much bored when the mounting is splendid as when it is merely decent. Possibly it is even more bored; unwittingly it is affected by a sense of disproportion. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... out the forecast of the Financial Relations Commission that the position of Ireland under the Act of Union would become steadily worse. We have probably not yet reached the bottom of the hill. Ireland is so poor that each new Act for the relief of poverty increases the disproportion between the expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland. There is no way out of that vicious circle. If England were to increase Irish taxation she would simply increase the poverty which she has to relieve. During the last fifty years, in fact, the British Government has had to give back in some form ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... and operated, he instantly diverged from the right path. Progress in his mind is exclusively produced by improvement in intelligence. It is the necessary result of man's activity in the face of that disproportion ever existing between what he knows and what he desires and feels the necessity to know.[58] Hence the most fatal of the errors of Condorcet's sketch. He measures only the contributions made by nations and eras to what we know; leaving out of sight their failures and successes in the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley |
