"Gradient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... startled by the falling tinkle of a stream. Far away a cow lowed, a long, deep monotone, or a goat's call trembled from nowhere to nowhere. But mostly there was a silence which buzzed with a multitude of small winged life. Going up the hills the Philosopher bent forward to the gradient, stamping vigorously as he trod, almost snorting like a bull in the pride of successful energy. Coming down the slope he braced back and let his legs loose to do as they pleased. Didn't they know their business—Good luck to them, ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... halloo," three Komaticks were racing and tearing down the gradient of the land to our camp, and all of us were out to see the finish. Kudlooktoo and Arkeo an even distance apart; and, heads up, tails up, a full five sledge-lengths ahead, with snowdust spinning free, the dog-team of the ever ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... is converted into brilliant jewels by the youthful sun not yet an hour old. Then turning sharply to the right, the train runs up the valley of the Posu, a mountain torrent which rushes and roars through a narrow defile. Snorting angrily, the engines climb up this steep gradient, cross the river by an iron bridge and then groaning under the brakes, slide down into another valley. The main direction however, is upwards, and as the country opens out below, one gets a first impression of the enormity and grandeur of Central Africa. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... however, is a more difficult obstacle than the Sauerbach, the brook which meanders through the open meadows of the Alsatian valley. A deep channel of more than sixty feet in width is overshadowed by forest trees; and the ground on either bank ascends at a sharp gradient to the crests above. Along the ridge to the west, which parts the Antietam from the Potomac, and about a mile distant from the former stream, runs the Hagerstown turnpike, and in front of this road there was a strong position. Sharpsburg, a village of a few hundred ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... piccaninnies! Thou'll no be telling me thot, Pold veg! Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took off in black bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like since I was born. Tiens, tiens, but it is well sad, that, my faith, yes. O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped. Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor any Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward, woozy wobblers! ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... years' wear has never moved them. They are buttressed on the outer edge by similar blocks set four or five inches lower, and themselves forming one side of the solidly paved water-way or gutter which was constructed as part of every such road on a steep gradient, to secure it from abrasion by flood or sudden rush from heavy rainfall. There are many excellent examples of this in the Forest of Dean. We are on the watch, however, for some part where the "margines" remain on both sides of the way. At last we come upon such ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... district, formerly either squalid, over-blocked, and dilapidated in some parts, or oversteep and dangerous to traffic in others. But a short time before that same Holborn Valley was one of the most heartbreaking impediments to horse traffic in London, with a gradient on one side of one in eighteen, while opposite it was one in twenty. Thus everything on wheels, and every foot-passenger entering the City by the Holborn route, had to descend twenty-six feet to the ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... Benito. "Can you call it a basin, the vast plain through which it runs, the savannah which on all sides stretches out of sight, without a hill to give a gradient, without a ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... — N. obliquity, inclination, slope, slant, crookedness &c. adj.; slopeness[obs3]; leaning &c. v.; bevel, tilt; bias, list, twist, swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c. 243; bend &c. (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd[obs3], rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity|; gentle slope, rapid slope, easy ascent, easy descent; shelving beach; talus; monagne Russe[Fr]; facilis descensus averni[Lat]. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... be varied at will by a simple electric field normal to the applied voltage gradient—a field which could be generated by a couple of dry cells if need be—and ranged from a hundred thousand to about three billion. For all practical purposes, here ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... further, for he knew that Miss Torrance was very like her father in some respects, and Hetty shook the reins. The next minute they had swept over the brink, and Flora Schuyler saw the trail dip steeply but slantwise to lessen the gradient to the frozen creek. The sinking sun was hidden by the high bank now and the snow had faded to a cold blue-whiteness, through which the trail ran, a faint line of dusky grey. It was difficult to distinguish at the pace ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Eskdale long before the Glacial Period terminated, and this would suggest an explanation for the layer of Warp (an alluvial deposit of turbid lake waters) which partially covers the delta. The fierce torrents that poured into Lake Pickering down the steep gradient of this canon would require an exit of equal proportions, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the gorge at Kirkham Abbey was chiefly worn at the same time as ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... she reached this spot, a marked change had come over her. Her pretty, even brows were slightly drawn together in an odd, thoughtful pucker. Her usually merry eyes were watchful and sober. It may have been the gradient of the hills, but somehow her gait had lost something of its buoyancy. Her steps were lagging, even hesitating, and, when she finally halted, it was almost ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... down an endless hill. We can hear the soft whine of scores of shells hurrying all together through the air. Every five minutes or so a certain howitzer, tucked into some hiding-place, vents its periodical growl, and we can hear the huge projectile climbing slowly, up his steep gradient with a hiss like that of water from a fire-hose. There is some other heavy shell which passes us also, somewhere in the middle of his flight. We cannot distinguish the report of the gun, and we do not hear the shell burst; but at regular intervals we can quite ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... they must shoot him; he was, I fear, a bloody-minded fellow at bottom, although, it is true he justified himself now by pointing out that this was no time to hesitate at trifles. Partly because they talked and partly because the gradient was steep and their horses needed breathing, they slackened rein, and the horseman behind them came tearing through the water of the ford and lessened the distance considerably in the next ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... valley: once struggling through the snow to the Otome Pass, on an immemorial and nearly perpendicular bridle path, and once by the modern road to the tunnel which, with characteristic address, the Japanese have bored through the rock, thus reducing a very steep gradient. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... the handkerchiefs of a giant spread out to dry. An occasional outcrop of rock, an occasional wood, an occasional "forest," treeless and brown, all hinted at wildness to follow, but the main colour was an agricultural green. The air grew cooler; they had surmounted the last gradient, and Oniton lay below them with its church, its radiating houses, its castle, its river-girt peninsula. Close to the castle was a grey mansion, unintellectual but kindly, stretching with its grounds across the peninsula's neck—the sort of mansion that was ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the road averages twenty-one feet. In difficult places, such as along ravines, or where the road had to be cut into the rock, it is naturally less wide, but nowhere under fourteen feet. The gradient averages 1—20 to 1—24. At a very few points, however, it is as steep as 1 in 15. If the hill portion of the road is excepted, where, being in zig-zag, it has very sharp angles, a light railway could be laid upon it in a surprisingly short time and at no considerable ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... her in these ruts. That was where she must 'ave scraped her silencer a bit. Then they turned sharp right—the ruts did—and then she stopped bonnet-high in a manure-heap, sir; but I'll swear it was all of a one in three gradient. I think it was a barnyard. We waited ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... memory. Measure the heights of a tree, telegraph pole and church steeple, describing method adopted. Measure width of a river, and distance apart of two objects a known distance away and unapproachable. Be able to measure a gradient, contours, conventional signs of ordnance ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... at the foremost carriage in alarm, so nearly was it upset in one of the ruts of the ill-kept road; but the rate at which they were going saved it, and they thundered along without accident to where the gradient grew ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... the earth constant conditions. It is now generally accepted that this is not probable, and that whether it cooled from a gas or coagulated from planetesimals, it became solid first at the center which then would be hottest, and both Becker[3] and A. Holmes[4] assume an initial temperature gradient. If that gradient were greater than the gradient of steady flow the conditions of steady flow would be approached most rapidly at the exterior, the loss of heat and energy would be altogether from within and it is easy to arrange for conditions mathematically in which almost all the loss ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... contemplation of the bright prospects which lay before him, when his reverie was broken by the sound of voices and the noise of horses' hoofs; and round a bend of the track, slowly ascending the uncertain gradient, ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... control. The right road was from the foot of the pool up a long shelf to a clump of juniper. Then there was an easy chimney; then a piece of good hand-and-foot climbing; and last, another ledge which led by an easy gradient to the top. I figured all this out as I have heard a condemned man will count the windows of the houses on ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... of the pole from the man behind me, when he had no more breath in his body, that saved us from being whirled round and carried back. Before one gets used to it, the sensation of struggling up a river where it descends a rocky channel at a rather steep gradient is a little bewildering. The flash of the water dazzles, and its rapid movement makes one giddy. There is no excitement, however, so exhilarating as that which comes of a hard battle with one of the forces of nature, especially when nature does not get the best ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... The Bourg or Satonay railway station is at the top of the Rue Terme, astreet commencing near the N.E. corner of the Place des Terreaux. From the Rue Terme the train is pulled up the hill by a rope in the same way as at Fourvire. The gradient is 16 per 100, and the distance 547 yards. At the top station, in the Boulevard de la Croix Rousse, passengers for Bourg enter the ordinary railway carriages. The rope railway runs every 5 minutes, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... frowning hard, his teeth set, and actually managed to swerve into King Street. Constance, in the parlour, saw an incomprehensible winged thing fly past the window. The cousins Povey sounded an alarm and protest and ran in pursuit; for the gradient of King Street is, in the strict sense, steep. Half-way down King Street Dick was travelling at twenty miles an hour, and heading straight for the church, as though he meant to disestablish it and perish. The main gate of the churchyard ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... way had to be taken up and an entirely new one laid down. One thing I did envy this simple-minded enemy of ours, and that was the pleasure he must have experienced in doing one bit of damage. Towards one culvert the line sloped down in a long gradient, and on this a couple of trucks and a van had evidently been placed and allowed to run down to the culvert, where, the bridge being gone, they plunged into the gap. Think of the glorious smash! The trucks must have got up considerable speed. And picture the crowd waiting expectantly ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... made on the side of Islamgee was broad but very steep on the average at a gradient of one in three; half way an almost straight angle intersected it, and we feared that there might be some difficulty in turning the heavy waggons without upsetting them. He did not speak much at first, being intent on examining the waggons below; ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... steals a feeling of exhilaration in the glad and gay atmosphere of the re-awakening world; and this, again, may open into a whole vista of recollections far back from childhood; and so the result may be one of many moods. We have all this time been brought up a sort of gradient of literary difficulty; and he is the supreme of supreme literary artists who can body forth the most subtle of ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Precisely what it was, he could not determine with any certainty, but he judged it to be a vehicle of some sort, a slow moving vehicle; and if so, it was of necessity travelling over a road, and that road, although it was indistinguishable from where Dick stood, was one of very easy gradient, judging from the movements of the object upon it. Satisfied now that he had made an important discovery, the lad carefully noted his surroundings, noted with equal care a number of objects which would enable him to fix the position of the road, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... view around the corner . . . not Farrell, but the newly-landed stranger she had spied through her binoculars—the presumed Inspector. His eyes were lifted as he calculated the new gradient ahead of him, and thus on the instant he caught sight of Santa aloft in the porch-way. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... observers as one of the grandest of lunar objects), has a deeply sunken floor, fringed with mountains rising some 12,000 feet above it, though they scarcely stand a fourth of this height above the plain on the west, which ascends with a very gentle gradient to the summit of the wall. Hence the contrast between the shadows of the peaks of the western wall on the floor at sunrise, and of the same peaks on the region west of the border at sunset is very marked. In Gassendi, ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... the line ran up a steep acclivity. It was from the lower end of this that the noise he had heard proceeded, and now was growing louder, almost deafening. It was the heavy, regular puffing of a powerful engine coming up a steep gradient, under full steam. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... of the encircling hills to the circular belt of plain below was of course quite an easy matter, compared with the ascent of the outer slope on the previous day, the gradient of the road being practically uniform all the way, and just steep enough to necessitate a slight application of the brakebar to the rear wheels of the wagon from the crest to the plain; and Dick ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... rails—the distant, the home, and the starting. Their respective positions will be gathered from Fig. 92, which shows a station on a double line. Between the distant and the home an interval is allowed of 800 yards on the level, 1,000 yards on a falling gradient, and 600 yards on a rising gradient. The home stands near the approach end of the station, and the starting at the departure end of the platform. The last is sometimes reinforced by an "advance starting" signal some ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... it lies at the foot of the hill, enjoys as fine a prospect as though it stood on the summit; the ascent is so gentle and easy, and the gradient so unnoticeable, that you find yourself at the top without feeling that you are ascending. The Apennines lie behind it, but at a considerable distance, and even on a cloudless and still day it gets a breeze from this range, never boisterous and rough, for its strength is broken and ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... down lower than ever, he released his clutch and slid downward his gear-lever. With a chuckle and shudder the long, black machine sprang forward, and shot with a soft sigh from her powerful engines down the sloping gradient. The driver stooped and switched off his electric head-lights. Only a dim grey swathe cut through the black heath indicated the line of his road. From in front there came presently a confused puffing ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it increased as it approached Denry. He withdrew the key from his mother's cottage and put it in his pocket. He was always at his finest in a crisis. And the onrush of the pantechnicon constituted a clear crisis. Lower down the gradient of Brougham Street was more dangerous, and it was within the possibilities that people inhabiting the depths of the street might find themselves pitched out of bed by the sharp corner of a pantechnicon that was determined ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Osborn did not answer. Redmire bank was an obstacle to horse traffic, and the road surveyor had plans for easing the gradient that would necessitate cutting down a wood where Osborn's pheasants found shelter. He had refused permission, and the matter had been dropped; but, if the farmers insisted, the council might be forced to use their powers. He was obstinate, and did not mean to let ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp from the actual work. From the water's edge to the donkey engine was barely four hundred yards. From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off on the lake shore in a straight line on a five per cent. gradient ran a curious roadway, made by placing two logs in the hollow scooped by tearing great timbers over the soft earth, and a bigger log on each side. Butt to butt and side to side, the outer sticks half their thickness above the inner, they formed a continuous ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... was about an acre and a half in extent, with a smooth rocky floor sloping down into the water at an inclination of just the right gradient for the launching-ways. It is true it was a long way away from the settlement; but Lance's arguments in favour of adopting it were so convincing that Johnson was fain to give way, which, he at last did with a very ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... turbines of 40 horse power each, now in course of erection. The working speed of this line was restricted by the Board of Trade to ten miles an hour, which was readily obtained, although the gradients of the line were decidedly unfavorable, including an incline of two miles in length at a gradient of 1 in 38. It was intended to extend the line six miles beyond Bush Mills, in order to join it at Dervock station with the north of Ireland narrow ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... seas. The hundred-fathom line lies far beyond them; these waters, though thoroughly oceanic in character, are not oceanic in depth. We may regard the islands as the last upward thrust of the granitic backbone that runs, at a diminishing gradient, from Dartmoor to Land's End, while the submarine plateau follows a similar gradient. Structurally, therefore, these isles are a continuation of Land's End, but the granite has become less consistent and more friable; it is largely broken into ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon |
