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Germ   Listen
verb
Germ  v. i.  To germinate. (R.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Germ" Quotes from Famous Books



... moderation. Temperaments of every type are to be met in her pages—a sensitive poet, troubled by "confusion of thought" deepening into melancholia; a harum-scarum boy, in whose sunny joyousness she discerns the germ of supernatural grace; vehement sinners, fearful saints, religious recluses deceived by self- righteousness, and men of affairs devoutly faithful to sober duty. Catherine enters into every consciousness. ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... we can see that these ideas are transient. Parities of circumstance were probably commoner in the simple mechanism of ancient society than they are now, and in the succession of similar cases awards are likely to follow and resemble each other. Here we have the germ or rudiment of a Custom, a conception posterior to that of Themistes or judgments. However strongly we, with our modern associations, may be inclined to lay down a priori that the notion of a Custom must precede that ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly—very suddenly—this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... in 1919 the proportion had fallen to 597. During the same period civil marriages without religious ceremonial increased from 98 to 231 per 1,000. [106] These figures are an index of the religious complexion of the country. The Protestant Churches are being strangled by the development of a germ that was inherent in them from the beginning, and that growth is Rationalism. The majority of the upper, professional, and artisan class can no longer be claimed as staunch Protestants, but as vague theists; and amongst these educated people, misled by false ideas of pleasure ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... the Anthers converge over the nectaries, which consist of five glandular oval corpuscles, surrounding the germ, and at the same time admit air to the nectaries at the interstice between each anther; but when a fly inserts its proboscis between these anthers to plunder the honey, they converge closer, and with such violence as to detain the fly, which thus ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis

... cheat yourself into believing that it is nobler, and higher, and harder. What reproach is cast against all revolutionists?—that the men who have nothing to lose, the men who are reckless and outlawed, alone raise the flag of revolt. It is a satire; but in every satire there lies the germ of a terrible fact. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... legislative, and, to some extent, administrative powers; in other words, you would have a limited fiscal Parliament by the side of the British Parliament and the various Colonial Parliaments. This small body, which would have to be created, would perhaps be the germ of an Imperial Federation afterwards." He thought those were most remarkable, and striking words. If people would think the subject out in a calm judicial, and fair spirit, they would see in it the fulfilment ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young

... hundred years the science was still hampered by the lack of good microscopes. It was generally believed that all the organs of the body existed, packed in a tiny point of space, in the germ. About the middle of the eighteenth century, Caspar Friedrich Wolff discovered the true development; but his work was ignored, and it was only fifty years later that modern embryology began to work on the right line. K.E. von Baer ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... (such as toothache) to worms, visible as well as microscopic, which may be held a fair prolepsis of the "germ-theory" the bacterium. the bacillus, the microbe. Nymphomania, the disease alluded to in these two tales is always attributed to worms in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... thinking of Fitzgerald. Well, I believe that crime to have been premeditated, and that the man who committed it was mad. He is, no doubt, at large now, walking about and conducting himself as sanely as you or I, yet the germ of insanity is there, and sooner or later he will commit ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... we see the germ of his remarkably solemn ministry. His heart was filled, and his lips then spoke what he felt within his heart. He gave out not merely living water, but living water drawn at the springs that he had himself drank of; and is not this a true gospel ministry? ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar

... which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... must also aim at intensifying the effect of our fire power by attacking only at decisive points. On the other hand, it must be admitted, that in the magnitude of the masses themselves there lies the germ of weakness, and in our future wars we can hardly expect to find Infantry as firmly welded together as in the Armies of the past. I therefore by no means hold the opinion that dismounted Cavalry can achieve nothing ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi

... O'Neill this seemed extraordinarily powerful affection for a mere godson, and one lost to sight for twenty years at that. Yet Colonel Decies was a bachelor and, no, the patient certainly resembled him in no way whatsoever. The tiny new-born germ of a romance died at once in Miss O'Neill's romantic heart—and yet, had she but known, here was a romance such as her soul loved above all things—the son of the adored dead mistress discovered in extremis, and saved, by the devout platonic ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... instant he puts his imagination in sympathy with the innocent little circle, whose wide-open eyes are fixed so eagerly upon him. Thus the stories (not by any strained effort of the narrator's, but in harmony with their inherent germ) transform themselves, and re-assume the shapes which they might be supposed to possess in the pure childhood of the world. When the first poet or romancer told these marvellous legends (such is Eustace Bright's opinion), it was still the Golden ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... tall palms to brush out the rain water accumulated in the concave depressions where frond joins trunk, even twisted off the cuplike scarlet blossoms from hibiscus shrubs. They carried green brush to a series of smudges he lit to cordon the village against the vicious singing horde of germ carriers. Best of all, they ceased their incantations over the sick, unwound the tight cords they had knotted around the abdomens of the stricken to prevent the fever from "going further down," opened the grass windows that gasping lungs might obtain ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... an inflammation caused by a germ called the gonococcus, discovered by Dr. A. Neisser, of Breslau, Germany, in 1879. Any mucous membrane may be the seat of gonorrhea, but it attacks by preference the mucous membrane of the genital organs, and of one other organ—the eye. Its principal symptoms are: inflammation, pain, burning ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... of Paris, Louis made and published his own observations in regard to the same disease, and the whole medical world rang with plaudits of admiration at his genius and learning. But in the modest little tract of Nathan Smith, the gist and germ of all the magnificent discoveries of Louis are anticipated. And thus it is again demonstrated that men of genius are confined to no age and to no country, but whether in the wilds of New Hampshire or in the world's gayest ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... species. There is, however, this consoling knowledge, that the worshippers, such young girls and boys as we saw today excepted, know that Kali is but the symbol of power, not the power itself. Around this fact the forces able to overthrow superstition may be evolved hereafter. The germ is there. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... that had been is amply demonstrated by the fact that no such crushing defeat had ever been inflicted upon Scotland as that of Flodden, in which the King and the great part of his nobles perished. Perhaps it was the germ of the design to attract the lesser country into the arms of the greater by friendship rather than to set her desperately at bay against all peaceful influences, which had prevented the successful army from taking ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... the merest germ of an imagination will understand the extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief in a ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... producer has had the use of and can part with. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... reasonings was, that his Highness the Prince Stadtholder of Holland would feel infinitely obliged to the magistracy of the Hague if they simplified for him the government of the Seven Provinces by destroying even the least germ ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... a glance, or pretty soon, the general trend of a character. But not with you. Nothing that I might hear of you in the future, would very much surprise me. I should say to myself, 'Yes, the germ was there.'" ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats on the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... protectress. He is dreaming away his childhood in the silent gloom of the castle, or the sunny outdoor life of the hills and woods. He lives in imagination, blends the idea of his own being with everything he sees; and for years is happy in the bare fact of existence. But the germ of a fatal spiritual ambition is lurking within him; and as he grows into a youth, he hankers after something which he calls sympathy, but which is really applause. He therefore makes a human crowd for himself out of carved and tapestried figures, and the few ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... Country of the Sun's warm plenteous hand To every germ of virtue, how below Thy progress, mope Gold Mongers to and fro, Who think they're vaulting from sunlight so grand, It forms thy chiefest glory. Closely scanned, They are gross worms, each with the thought to grow "The Conqueror," as staged ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle

... verbs and three corresponding substantives to express the growth of plants, namely, spring, shoot, and sprout,—all indicative of rapidity of growth; for sprout, (Germ. spriessen) is akin to spurt, and denotes quickness, suddenness. The only one of these which remains in general use is shoot: for sprout is now only appropriated to the young growth from cabbage-stalks; and spring is heard no more save in sprig, which is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various

... characteristic features of the vocations to which they wanted to devote themselves, and they had given hardly any attention to the question whether they had the necessary qualifications for the special work. From this germ grew a little office which was opened in 1908, in which all Boston boys and girls at the time when they left school were to receive individual suggestions with reference to the most reasonable and best adjusted selection of a calling. There is hardly any doubt that the remarkable ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg

... he watched the unbending gravity of the other's face and since comment seemed expected he conceded, "There seems to be a germ of reason ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... my part, friends, I believe in the reality of good and evil. But I am convinced that there is not a single human action—were it even the kiss of Judas—which does not bear within itself the germ of redemption. Evil contributes to the ultimate salvation of men, and, in that respect issues from Good, and shares the merits belonging to Good. This has been admirably expressed by the Christians, in the myth concerning the man with red ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... taken," said Goethe, "that the trees do not grow into the sky"; but man is that tree which must outgrow the sky and lift its top into finer air and sunshine. The essential seed is Growth; not shell and bark, nor kernel, but a germ which pierces the soil and lifts the stone. Spirit is such a germ, and perpetual reinforcement is its quality; so that the great Being is known to us as a becoming Creator, adding himself to himself, and life to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... held in chat that ended with a kiss. He was always for kissing a pretty face, and found the habit hard to break, though there were times when he stamped and swore great oaths to himself that he would again kiss no woman's lips but his wife's—for the man had the germ of good in him. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... compartment was suffering from Chinese colds; we had them too, contracted at Shanghai. And let me tell you that a Chinese cold is something out of the ordinary. Whatever happens here happens on a grand scale, and these colds, whatever the germ that causes them, are more venomous than anything you've ever known. No wonder the railway station looked good to us; no wonder we were glad to be welcomed back to the old hotel, at the end of ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... found necessary to change the nature of the payment, and, instead of the gold and cotton required from the villages, labour was substituted, the Indians being required to lay out and work the plantations of the colonists in their vicinity. This was the germ of the cruel and oppressive repartimientos and encomiendas which were destined to depopulate the islands and to bring an indelible stigma on the Spanish colonial system in the Indies. In that year, 1496, Bartholomew Columbus sent three hundred natives, who were ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... the bright Kaustubha gem in thy bosom, thou art the beginning and the end of creation, and the great refuge of all. Thou art the supreme light and essence of the Universe! Thy face is directed towards every point. They call thee Supreme Germ and the depository of all treasures. Under thy protections, O lord of the gods, all evils lose their terror. As thou didst protect me before from Dussasana, do thou extricate me now ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... shut the stable door after the steed is stolen. God did not give your child the germ of enteric which constitutionally she was unfitted to cope with. It happened through some misfortune that God had nothing to do with, and, simply, she hadn't enough fight in her. There are times when we cannot understand why some things should be, especially if we feel that by stretching ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... heavenly Solomon, and his spouse the church. So the Jews from the most ancient times have interpreted it. Looking at this song from the position of the Old Testament, its ground-idea is: "Thy Maker is thy husband." Identical with this is the New Testament idea: "The bride, the Lamb's wife." The germ of this representation exists in the Pentateuch, where idolatry is regarded as spiritual adultery. Exod. 34:15; Deut. 31:16. We find it fully developed in the forty-fifth Psalm, which probably belongs to Solomon's ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... the corolla. The calyx is nothing but the swaddling clothes of the flower; the child-blossom is bound up in it, hand and foot; guarded in it, restrained by it, till the time of birth. The shell is hardly more subordinate to the germ in the egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... feature in the flirtation than he had expected. If she had been playing with him in an idle freak the game might soon have wearied her; but the smallest germ of passion—and women of the world do not change color for nothing—was a threatening development. The mere presence of Fitzpiers in the building, after his statement, was wellnigh conclusive as far as he was concerned; but Melbury resolved ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system at present, have we not just seen that they have only recently obtained the germs of a mouth and stomach? And may not some stride be made in the direction of true reproduction which shall be as great as that which has been recently ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... poisonous snakes in South America and India, have been exterminated by the capture of a few dozen of the creatures in the infested districts, their inoculation with the virus similar to the murus tiphi, tuberculosis or any other contagious-germ complaint to which the species treated was particularly susceptible, and the release of these individuals when the disease was seen to be taking hold. The rabbits and serpents released at once returned to their old haunts, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... was thus warming with the new-born faith, of which the germ was just opening in his heart, Stimson came out upon the terrace to see what had become of his officer. It was much past the hour when the men got beneath the coverings of their mattresses; and the honest boat-steerer, who had performed the duty on which he had been sent, was anxious about ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... than that of science.—HE often strikes down the strong, and preserves the weak, so that none here can tell when to expect his blows. I can, however, assure you on my honor, that your daughter, delicate as she is, at this time has not even a germ of the terrible malady which has ravaged your hearth. This germ is always in the blood of members of the same family. Art establishes this, though it can provide no remedy.—This secret enemy, however," said the physician, with a kind of pride, "before which ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... Paris. Without having overwhelmed you with the details of medicine, you know that it is about to undergo a revolution that will transform it. Until now it has been taught officially, in pathology, that the human organism carries within itself the germ of a great many infectious diseases which develop spontaneously in certain conditions; for instance, that tuberculosis is the result of fatigue, privations, and physiological miseries. Well, recently it has ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot

... When that was over, she made him lie down, and taking a novel, read him asleep. She woke him to an early tea—not, however, after it, to return to his study: in the drawing-room, beside his wife, he always got the germ of his discourse—his germon, he called it—ready for its growth in the pulpit. Now he lay on the couch, now rose and stood, now walked about the room, now threw himself again on the couch; while, all the time his wife played softly on her ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... but she was very thoughtful all that day, and during the days which followed, for she had found out the truth about herself, and a little germ that had been growing in her breast, but of which she had thought little till Daniel Barnett came up and spoke, and made her know she had a heart—a fact of which she became perfectly sure, when the news reached her ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn

... tasks. One of the chief justifications of the institution of higher historical teaching is, in our opinion, the opportunity afforded the teachers (presumably men of experience) of discerning in the students, in the course of their university career, either the germ of a vocation for critical scholarship, or fundamental unfitness for critical work, as the case may be.[110] Criticus non fit, sed nascitur. For one who is not endowed by nature with certain aptitudes, a career of technical erudition has nothing but disappointments in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... not droop and detach itself and sink into the ground. Instead, tufted and fluffy, like dandelion seed or thistledown, it floated upward in incredible quantities, so that for hundreds of miles the sky was obscured by this cloud bearing the germ ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... wilt guide me by Thy counsel, and afterwards receive me to glory.' The possession of Christ for our treasure, which possession always follows on our estimating Him as such, and desiring to have Him, that possession bears in its bosom the germ of the assurance that, whatever befalls my physical life, I shall not be less immortal than my treasure, and that where my heart to-day, by aspiration and desire and faith and love, has built its nest, thither I shall follow in His own ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... scheme before him. He has seen in the hands of a friend, perhaps, a curious book; and the notion takes possession of him, rather stealthily, yet rather languidly too, that it might be a "nice" thing to have oneself—that or such another. The spirit of collecting, like a delicate germ, is at first easily extinguished; but an incident as trivial and fortuitous as the one just suggested has ere now constituted the nucleus and starting-point of a large library. It may, indeed, be a favourable symptom and augury when a man begins ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... riches, in short, to reduce the power and influence of the old feudal and territorial nobility. The kingly authority, in our time, is not much of itself, and the principal question has become, how many or how few, or, in short, who are to share in its immunities. In this simple fact lies the germ of the revolution in France, and of reform in England. Money is changing hands, and power must go with it. This is, has been, and ever will be the case, except in those instances in which the great political trust is thrown confidingly ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... regard libraries, and consequently librarians, as the primary factors in human evolution. 'Where,' asks Mr. Ernest Cushing Richardson, the librarian of Princetown University, New Jersey, U.S.A., 'lies the germ of the library?' He answers his own question after the following convincing fashion: 'At the point where a definitely formed concept from another's mind is placed beside one's own idea for integration, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... immortal. There was no confine betwixt day and night; The only One breathed breathless by itself, Other than It there nothing since has been. Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled In gloom profound—an ocean without light— The germ that still lay covered in the husk Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat. Then first came love upon it, the new spring Of mind—yea, poets in their hearts discerned, Pondering, this bond between created things And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth, Piercing and all pervading, or from ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... the lessons they teach. "When the American Congress declared war on England in 1812," he says, "it seemed as if this unequal conflict would crush her navy in the act of being born; instead, it but fertilized the germ. It is only since that epoch that the United States has taken rank among maritime powers. Some combats of frigates, corvettes, and brigs, insignificant without doubt as regards material results, sufficed to break the charm which protected the standard of St. George, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... the results of social advance, but, while so prominent in social advance, the Arunta have no trace of religion. The tribes northward from them to the sea are also very advanced socially, but (with one known exception not alluded to by Mr. Frazer) have no 'All Father,' no germ of religion. ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... to see the sweet child,' said Miss Marstone. 'I dote on such darlings. I always see so much in their countenances. There is the germ of so much to be drawn out hereafter in ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of their kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... not without the germ of the same idea, Dean Moss (ob. 1729), in his sermon Of the Nature and Properties of Christian ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various

... grumbling, growling, gruff, as if all the foul weather of their past years were pent up within them, yet not much more discontented than such weather-beaten and battle-battered fragments of human kind must inevitably be. Their home, in its outward form, is on a very magnificent plan. Its germ was a royal palace, the full expansion of which has resulted in a series of edifices externally more beautiful than any English palace that I have seen, consisting of several quadrangles of stately architecture, united by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... only a moderate success, but in it we may find the germ of all Scott's later triumphs. For it was the spirit of these ballads with which his mind was so full which made it possible for him to write the Metrical Romances that made ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... he was now certain of the change which time, circumstance, and environment had wrought in himself; he was curiously conscious of the silent growth of a germ which, one day, must become a dictatorial and arbitrary habit—the habit of right thinking. The habit of duty, independent of circumstances, had slowly grown with his military training; mind and body had learned automatically ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... events how they render it impossible at this later stage. It is the young plant which absorbs the glucose, and which must therefore be destroyed; they cut off the radicle with their mandibles, and gnaw the stalk; the germ is thus suppressed. They have not yet finished their manipulations, which must enable them to preserve without further alteration the provisions which they have already rendered palatable. They bring out all ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... reputation by putting them in a popular dress. Oh! how little do they know, who have never done anything but repeat after others by rote, the pangs, the labour, the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs to get at the germ of an original idea—to dig it out of the hidden recesses of thought and nature, and bring it half-ashamed, struggling, and deformed into the day—to give words and intelligible symbols to that which was never imagined or expressed before! It is as if the dumb should speak for the first time, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... closely watching him, and to which of them, could he have been notified of this, would his raised eyes first, all impulsively, have responded; in which of them would he have felt it most important to destroy—for HIS clutch at the equilibrium—any germ of uneasiness? Not yet, since his marriage, had Maggie so sharply and so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte's leave and under Charlotte's direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should look ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... a longitudinal section of Potato-stalk with germinating zoospore, the germ-tube of which has pierced the cell-wall, and is growing inside the ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... in the great church died away, indeed, as newer impressions more imperatively claimed her attention; but the memory of it remained as a starting point to which any similar sensations subsequently recurring might be referred, as a phenomenon which seemed to contain within itself the germ and possible explanation of a thousand vague aspirations, yearnings which began about this time to spring up in her mind, and which almost unconsciously linked themselves with that solemn hour the remembrance of which, after her conversation with her father, she had set apart in her own heart, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... feeling of self-sufficiency, and the braggadocio which cause most men to ridicule what they do not understand, and the higher to look down with contempt on lower civilizations. Whoever is acquainted with the laws of the development of the plant, cannot fail to see in the seed the germ of its growth, and in its flower, the herald of decay. If there were inhabitants of the moon, and one of them should visit our earth, and find children and grown people side by side, while ignorant of the laws of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... vassals of the two great companies. When their strength had been spent in the labors of hunting and trapping, they retired to the vicinity of some post—the largest of these settlements being Fort Garry, the germ of the modern city of Winnipeg, which as early as 1823 boasted of a population of ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen

... meant to be, exactly like any other human being. It is in this endless, and to us inconceivable, variety of human souls that the deepest purpose of human life is to be realized; and the more society fulfils that purpose, the more its allows free scope for the development of every individual germ, the richer will be the harvest in no distant future. Such is the mystery of individuality that I do not wonder if even those philosophers who, like Mill, confine the use of the word sacred within the very smallest compass, see in each individual soul something sacred, something to be revered, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... as he walked on never dreaming that he had that morning sown the first germ of the ambition which was to overshadow all Daisy Allen's future life, and ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... interest British youth in the great deeds of the Scotch Brigade in the wars of Gustavus Adolphus. Mackay, Hepburn, and Munro live again in Mr. Henty's pages, as those deserve to live whose disciplined bands formed really the germ of the modern ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty

... somatic cells and immortal reproductive cells. The time-limit of any particular organism ultimately depends upon the number of somatic cell-generations and the duration of each generation. These quantities are "predestined in the germ itself" which gives rise to each individual. "The existence of immortal metazoan organisms is conceivable," but their capacity for existence is influenced by conditions of the external world; this renders necessary the process of adaptation. In fact, ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... however, all in a nutshell. Let the father properly train his daughter, and she will bring her first love-letter to him, and give him an opportunity to cherish a suitable affection, and to nip an improper one in the germ, before it has time ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... observations on castrated males, in whom the libido sometimes escapes the injury caused by the operation, although the opposite behavior, which is really the motive for the operation, is usually the rule. It is therefore not at all surprising, as C. Rieger puts it, that the loss of the male germ glands in maturer age should exert no new influence on the psychic life of the individual. The germ glands are really not the sexuality, and the experience with castrated males only verifies what we had long before learned from the removal of the ovaries, namely that it is impossible ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... animal kingdom, the germ of each is different, but each takes the identical substances from the same soil, and converts them into entirely different products. One will make a gum; the other produces a kind of milk; others will ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay

... then in stubbornly resisting any attempt to improve living conditions in these houses. In this respect, it cannot be too strongly pointed out, the Astors were in nowise different from the general run of landlords. Is it not murder when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place? Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places. Yet, so far as the Law was concerned, ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... to be the result of the Republican ferment in our country? It may not be widespread, and it certainly hardly exists above the working classes, yet I feel that the germ is there—and who can say how far it is doomed to flourish, or whether it will die away.... Ours has been so free and independent and prosperous a nation, that the notion of any fundamental change in the Constitution is awful. Yet when we boast of our freedom and prosperity ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... Nostrodamus in France, and Cardanus in Italy. These men represent a tendency which was pursued by thousands in the learned world. It was a tendency which had the honour of being the last in history to embody itself in a distinct mythical cycle. "Doctor Faustus" may probably have had an historical germ; but in any case "Doctor Faustus," as known to legend and to literature, is merely a personification of the practical side of the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... Gades Galatia Galba, Emperor Galba, Servius Galerius Gallia Cisalpina Gallia Narbonensis Gaul Gauls Games Gela Genabum Gens, Gentes Genseric Genua Genucius Gergovia Germanicus, Drusus Germanicus, son of Drusus Germ. Germans Glabrio Gladiators Glass Glaucia Golden House of Nero Good Emperors Gordian Goths Gracchi Gracchus, Gains Gracchus, Tiberius (senior) Gracchus, Tiberius Gratian ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... idea, many will say, that man should at one time be a tadpole like the frog! And yet—there's no help in prayer, as Falstaff said—even the human germ or embryo passes through a stage at which it shows the outlines of gills on the throat just like a fish. It is the same with the dog, the horse, the kangaroo, the duck mole, the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the lizard. They all ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real miracle lies in that divine league which bound all the forces of nature to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at work for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison and Phillips have been far less successful propagandists than the slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... writer of 1630 describes three classes of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg; first, those who believe that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the masses within restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith, but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran; and consequently believe nothing ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... to have a germ-proof room for him," laughed Alice Greggory, playfully snapping her fingers at the ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... the care of the mother—the efforts to stay the ravages of the germ in the tissues broken and weakened by the strain of child-birth. We had to invent excuses for the presence of the new doctor—and yet others for the presence of Dr. Overton, who came a day later. And then the problem of the nourishing of the child. It would be a ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... Scotland, both for his wisdom and learning, and well dedicate to the truth of Christ's word and doctrine."—(Sadler's Papers, vol. i. p. 83.) "The acute Sadler," as Sir Walter Scott remarks, "discerned the germ of those qualities which afterwards made this nobleman the great promoter of the Reformation, and in consequence a steady adherent of the English interest." (ib.) Both the Earl of Glencairn, and his son Lord Kilmaurs, received pensions from Henry the Eighth. Owing to the death of ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... France abandoned the exiles of Texas to their fate, a power dark, ruthless, and terrible, was hovering around the feeble colony on the Bay of St. Louis, searching with pitiless eye to discover and tear out that dying germ of civilization from, the bosom of the wilderness in whose savage immensity it lay hidden. Spain claimed the Gulf of Mexico and all its coasts as her own of unanswerable right, and the viceroys of Mexico were ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... theories were advanced regarding this worm plague. Some said they had rained down in cell or germ form; others, that they had developed with the sudden moisture from some peculiar embryo in the dry soil. Finding from my own further observation that they were segregated in the damper sections where the soil had not yet dried ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... principle of trial and error to the particular problems with which his science is confronted. Once the experimenter has discovered a way to compel mechanical power to toil for man, or to destroy the typhoid germ, or to talk across a continent without wires, the next task is to find a better way or an easier way. Far from decreasing the necessity for experiment, each new discovery in the realm of natural science opens the door to additional possibilities. To-day every important college, ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... richly humorous and so deliciously droll,—so rammed and crammed with the oddest conceits and the wildest fancies, and the quaintest, queerest thoughts, ideas, and speculations—are scarcely inferior to his essays. Indeed, some of the best and most admired of the essays are but extended letters. The germ of the immortal dissertation on "Roast Pig" is contained in a letter to Coleridge; the essay entitled "Distant Correspondents" is hardly more than a transcript of a private letter to Barron Field; and the original sketch ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... tripod, therefore, but the other type must be thought to have been the germ of the later-day apparatus, which yielded in its turn ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt

... sole purpose of increasing the revenues of the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the satisfaction of their ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... as a bag of sand. The tone produced was of crystalline purity, and by varying the size and length of the cylinders it proved possible to represent a complete musical scale. The instrument was the germ ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... come to these solitudes. Here selfishness dies away, and purity and magnanimity expand, the essence and germ of life. Sitting here in these cool recesses, screened from the sun, moist and musical with the waters, crusts of worldliness and vanity cleave off from the soul. The din dies away, and, with ears attuned ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... this simple state of the monera the fertilized egg of any animal is transformed—the germ vesicle; the original egg kernel disappears, and the parent kernel (cytococcus) forms itself anew; and it is in this condition, a non-nucleated ball of protoplasm, a true cytod, a homogeneous, structureless body, without different constituent parts, that ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... is in my heart any germ of virtue, if there is in my mind any element of knowledge, if there is in my will any honorable and good purpose, to you it is I ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... without comment. Most women cannot resist the temptation to answer a speech containing a sting or a reproach. It was part of her abnormality that she could let such things go by in a detached silence, which did not express even the germ of comment or opinion upon them. This, he said, was the result of her beastly sense of security, which, in its turn, was the result of the atmosphere of wealth she had breathed since her birth. There had been no obstacle ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... and interpret them into the terms of modern life and thought, for in the old we find the germ of the new. It is in Jewish history that we must look for the first true commonwealth or democracy, where the king was chosen by the people and where his authority was derived solely from and rested in the people. This has no ancient parallel, not even in Greece. International peace was also ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... laws have been diligently scanned to see if the practice or the germ of it could be discovered there. In thelred iii., 3, there is an ordinance ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... affectation, of manners: it implies a want of solid merit."—Ib. "If love and unity continue, it will make you partakers of one an other's joy."—Ib. "Suffer not jealousy and distrust to enter: it will destroy, like a canker, every germ of friendship."—Ib. "Hatred and animosity are inconsistent with Christian charity; guard, therefore, against the slightest indulgence of it."—Ib. "Every man is entitled to liberty of conscience, and freedom of opinion, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... suffering under its enactment, that they took up arms. They went to war against a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They saw in the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of mischief, the germ ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... Biersteintrinken," continued Dr. O'Rell, "has advanced in his scholarly work on 'Raderinderkopf' the interesting theory that catalogitis is produced by the presence in the brain of a germ which has its origin in the cheap paper used by booksellers for catalogue purposes, and this theory seems to have the approval of M. Marie-Tonsard, the most famous of authorities on inebriety, in his celebrated classic entitled ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... transformations take place. Let us pass in silence over this long period of repose, during which the Sitaris, in the form of a pseudochrysalis, slumbers at the bottom of its cell, in a sleep as lethargic as that of a germ in its egg, and come to the months of June and July in the following year, the period of what we might call ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... than an elected council. Still, if they wish it, I should not interfere and try to prevent it. But I venture to say that the clause enabling the Governor- General and his Cabinet to put seventy men in that council for life inserts into the whole scheme the germ of a malady which will spread, and which before very long will require an alteration of this Act and of the constitution ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright

... 'paper-tickets' of the Chinese typify the stars, the human virtues, and, indeed, every variety of subject. Sir William Jones was convinced that the Hindoo game of Chaturaji—that is, 'the Four Rajahs or Kings'—a species of highly-complicated chess—was the first germ of that parti-coloured pasteboard, which has been the ruin of so many modern fortunes. A pack of Hindoostani cards, in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society, and presented to Captain Cromline Smith in 1815, by ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... spring. Let him take a dozen or two kernels that appear to be in quality a fair average of the whole lot of seed on hand, place them in a tumbler with some dampened cotton, or a piece of sponge, and set the tumbler in a warm place, where the heat is uniform, and high enough to start the germ in a few days. In a day or two, if the seeds are good, they will begin to swell, and the embryo plant will soon begin to grow. Thus, according to the number of seeds that have germinated out of the number tested, the planter can calculate the probable per-centage ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones

... own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the perversity of the heart. Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... indeed, that most of these tenets are contained in the germ in the writings of earlier Deists. But there are yet others of which this ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... marvellous beauty and mysterious powers, who, being jilted by the girl of his heart, wishes to be revenged upon the human race. To this end he employs the activities of a German Professor, who produces what one might call a Kultur of the sterility germ. However, these cheery projects go astray, though in precisely what manner I have no very clear idea. But the end came at a gathering where the Prince played psychic music, and a chance union of hands between hero and heroine transmuted the former from "a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various

... to determine, to create—to create himself, to create society in the image of God! Spiritual creation the function of cooperative man through the coming ages, the task that was to make him divine. Here indeed was the germ of a new sanction, of a new motive, of a new religion that strangely harmonized with the concepts of the old—once the dynamic power ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... eight commissioners, two from each colony. The commissioners could summon troops in case of necessity and settle disputes between the colonies. This union proved most effective in the subsequent war with King Philip. It was the germ of American confederation. ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... University of Padua, like many an Englishman of his condition before him. He was twenty-one years of age, had as much money as was good for him and much more poetry than enough in his valise—to say nothing of the germ of those notes from which he afterwards (long afterwards) ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett



Words linked to "Germ" :   bug, wheat germ, muse, germ warfare, microbe, anatomical structure, germinate, structure, seed, microorganism, taproot, body structure, inspiration, complex body part, germ cell



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