"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... firmness and solidity—in the right places. It must be understood at the very beginning that piano playing is far more than sitting before the instrument working the fingers six or seven hours a day. The mechanical side is only preliminary. Some one has said that the factors in playing are a trinity of H's—head, hand and heart. I try at once to awaken thought, to give a wider outlook, to show that piano playing is the expression, through the medium of tone, of all that the poet, painter ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... There is the ultimate danger of what can fairly be called superstition, that is to say giving to religion a magical kind of influence over the material side of life. Rites, relics, images tend to become, in irrational minds, invested with an inherent and mechanical sanctity, instead of being the symbols of grace. But it is necessary to risk something; and though the risk of what may be called a sort of idolatry is great, the risk of not arousing the sense of personal religion at all ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool itself. It is not in the head of the hammer, nor in the handle, nor in the combination of the two that the essence of mechanical characteristics exists, but in the recognition of its utility and in the forces directed through it in virtue of this recognition. This appears more plainly when we reflect that a very complex machine, if intended for use by children whose aim is not serious, ceases to rank in our minds ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the points of the compass of the Milburns' drawing-room to shake hands, burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn he grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward, a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with an amusement not untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she had a remarkable, effective, useful ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... said as he dropped his clothes on the floor. He could not find the way to put on his sleeping-jacket, and that made him pant. Any little thing that roused or thwarted his mechanical action aggravated his sickness till his brain seemed to be bursting. He got things right at last, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... has not escaped shrewd knocks from the wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Greek rhetoric at Rhodes, and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor, where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion; whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men desirous of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... more concerned about where we are going. I tell you we are being taken to some wonderful place. People who can construct such marvels of mechanical skill as this boat will not be behind in other things; then look at ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... more generally a favorite here; she is indeed skilful both as an actress and in the management of her voice, but I find her expression meretricious, her singing mechanical. Neither of these women is equal to Pico in natural force, if she had but the same advantages of culture and environment. In hearing Semiramide here, I first learned to appreciate the degree of talent with which it was cast in New ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... really need special consideration. Imagine how wasteful it would be if we had to attend to every movement in dressing ourselves! You can easily see that there are a great many acts that bring us in relation to others and that should be as mechanical and ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... all the manufacturers of Derby, of the mechanical ingenuity of Mr. James Fox, of Chester Road, on the banks of the Derwent. I paid him a visit, and beheld his powerful iron lathes, twenty-four feet long, used by machine makers for planing iron. Here I saw iron cut in groves or squared with great simplicity, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... but more likely four thousand living, moving, and having their being as a single individual. Dispersed for an instant as the boat-hook or paddle was driven through it, the mass coalesced automatically and instantly as if controlled by mechanical force, or composed of some resilient substance, and swayed again on its course, while the dead and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the mechanical sciences, and their application to manufactures and the arts, England offers larger scope of observation than any other country in the world. Throughout the vast establishments of our cotton, woollen, linen, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... stated the facts from which we derive our conviction that the conquest of the air, if achieved, is to be brought about through the agency of new and powerful mechanical combinations, rather than by means of the balloon; and though, as before remarked, the experiments of M. Petin and others may probably not be without useful results, we dismiss these brilliant phantasmagoria with the charitable reflection, that the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... Marine boilers of modern construction, proper proportions of. Marine engines. See Steam Engines, marine. Mastic cement for setting marine boilers. Maudslay, Messrs., boilers of "Retribution" and "Great Western," by, Mechanical powers, misconceptions respecting. Mechanical power, definition of, indestructible and eternal; the sun the source of mechanical power. Metallic packing for pistons. Metallic packing for stuffing boxes. Meyer, expansion valve by. Miller, Ravenhill & Co.'s mode of fixing piston rod to piston. Modern ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... when asked such a question, would have either set about detailing the mechanical composition of such and such colors, in such and such proportions, rubbed up so and so; or perhaps they would (and so much the better, but not the best) have shown him how they laid them on; but even this would leave him at the critical point. Opie preferred going to the quick ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... substance, the primary question as to the connection between matter and energy. While freely recognising the presence of this real "boundary of natural knowledge," we can yet, within this boundary, apply quite universally the "mechanical law of causality." The complicated "phenomena of mind," as they are called (more especially consciousness), fall under the "law of the conservation of substance" just as strictly as do the simpler mechanical processes ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... once more—half a penknife, a bunch of keys, but not a farthing. Suddenly I dive into my pocket and take the papers out again. It was a mechanical movement, an unconscious nervous twitch. I selected a white unwritten page, and—God knows where I got the notion from—but I made a cornet, closed it carefully, so that it looked as if it were filled with something, and threw it far out on to the pavement. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... supervises the financial department, and reserves to itself the municipal control.[A] It is a remarkable fact, characteristic of the Russians, that while they possess uncommon capacity to acquire all the details of engineering, and are by no means lacking in mechanical skill, they are utterly deficient in management and administrative capacity. Wasteful, improvident, and short-sighted, they can never do any thing without the aid of more sagacious and economical heads to keep them ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... you can use. He is out of the Middle West; a young man and a graduate of Purdue. He took the Civil degree, but stayed two years longer and romped through the Mechanical. He ought to be pretty well up on theory, ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... always from false taste that the species of reading above complained of proceeds; on the contrary, there may be a very correct perception of the writer's meaning and object, while from want of practice, from mere mechanical inexpertness, there may be an incapability of giving effect to that meaning: hence arises false emphasis, and a thousand ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... in order that they may become, like those of primitive women, so various that they develop the mind and fortify the body. This, however, is an evil which will be righted by the development of the mechanical side of industry, for machines tend constantly to become larger, heavier, speedier, more numerous and more automatic, requiring fewer workers to tend them, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... mind they give the first and foremost place to the imagination. The reason, they say, is mechanical, and cannot rise above the known; that is to say, the real; whereas the imagination is creative and attains to the unknown, the ideal. Its highest work is the creation of beauty. Because it is unruly, and precarious ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... did not keep pace with usurious calculations, and trades were concentrated in the capital. Mechanical skill was neglected in all the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... prophet will always be preparing himself. By learning, by meditation, by self-discipline, the true prophet will prepare his heart for the incoming of the Eternal Spirit, and the glory of Heaven will be as a fire on the altar of the honest heart. Art preachers we have had in too great abundance. Mechanical talkers have brought upon the pulpit the disrepute of dulness. The age now waits for the messenger in whose loving heart there is the glow and the radiance of divinest sympathy. The great actor himself would be the first to admit that ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and documents, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention. They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ancestors ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... these operations, and I believe been urgent to quicken them. But what I remember best of him is his hasty admirable contrivance for field-bakery in pressing circumstances,—the substance of which shall not be hidden from a mechanical age:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... who were old enough to appreciate and enjoy the sight, they went into the Gymnasium, which they found furnished with every kind of machine and mechanical means for developing the muscles and increasing the strength of both ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... curates of the parish came in the course of the day, and read and prayed beside the old man's bed, Jacob Nowell joining in the prayers in a half-mechanical way. For many years of his life he had neglected all religious duties. It was years since he had been inside a church; perhaps he had not been once since the death of his wife, who had persuaded him to go with her sometimes to the evening service, when he ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this; and, while very young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... about his work in a mechanical way, but neglected nothing. When the time came for the store to close, Silas Tripp took three dollars from the drawer and handed it to him, saying: "There's your wages, Chester. I expect it's the last I'll ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... of its beauty and charm must be lost. That is, I think, why the Japanese prose and poetry when translated into English seem so bald and lifeless. We know by experience that even a European language loses in the process of translation which is, except in very rare instances, a purely mechanical art. How much more so must be the case in regard to an Oriental language with its depths of hyperbole and replete with imagery, idealism, and ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Swift was a natural inventor. From a boy he had been interested in things mechanical, and one of his first efforts had been to arrange a system of pulleys, belts and gears so that the windmill would operate the churn in the old farmhouse where he was born. The fact that the mill went so fast that it broke the churn all ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... though, curiously enough, he never thought of becoming a farmer in good earnest; indeed, at this time he seems to have had no distinct bias towards any profession. Mr. Howitt had somehow become imbued with Rousseau's doctrine that every boy, whatever his position in life, should learn a mechanical handicraft, in order that, if all else failed, he might be able to earn his own living by the labour of his hands. Having decided that William should learn carpentering, the boy was apprenticed for four years to ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... store I looked over in this country was one in Boston, having an immense stock of agricultural implements, and tools for every mechanical purpose. I should know something of such matters, having whistled at the plough myself, and used most of the implements; and being therefore curious on the point, I looked in for the sake of old associations. I am positive that every article for agricultural and mechanical use is better ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... beneficial mechanical treatment requires, in addition to considerable mechanical ability, a thorough knowledge of rupture; something few have ever taken the pains ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... and the camps of manoeuvre (peace exercises) furnish but a weak substitute for it, weak in comparison with real experience in War, but not weak in relation to other Armies in which the training is limited to mere mechanical exercises of routine. So to regulate the exercises in peace time as to include some of these causes of friction, that the judgment, circumspection, even resolution of the separate leaders may be brought into exercise, is of much greater consequence than those believe who do not ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and country,—one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged. Surgery invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences of the age of stone,—a relic of which we may find in the practice of Zipporah, the wife of Moses,—to the delicate operations of to-day upon patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress which presupposes a skill in metallurgy ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... after a while, "it's got Tom. Now, why couldn't it have been a man-Dago to sing that air into the tuneful horn of the mechanical heavenly maid yonder? No reason, only it's got to be a woman to sing that man's song of 'Annie Laurie.' A man couldn't any more sing 'Annie Laurie' than you could make cocktails without bitters. The only way we can get either one of them here is in bulk, which we have done. It's canned Art, that's ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of his retirement and made to feel he was the favourite of the monarch, for the risk to life he had undertaken in spontaneous devotion to the State. Not only is such warmth and enthusiasm not the English method, but the Indian Government is a huge machine which goes grinding on in its mechanical way, and is besides, a bureaucracy which has a good deal of pride in regarding any new departure as a dangerous token of disrespect to its old and consecrated tradition of simple obedience to written orders and codified instructions. The highest originality is smothered ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... as if he had come out of a bandbox. He was so very much starched, indeed, that Jeff could not help wondering if a summer in the plains would make him less stiff. As he came nearer and put out a hand to the little boy, who was his wife's nephew, it seemed like a piece of wood with mechanical joints. ...
— A Little Hero • Mrs. H. Musgrave
... charm of being seen, appreciated and applauded by others, Andy loved the vigorous exercise of the spring-board. The mechanical athletic and acrobatic equipments of the show were superb. He made up his mind he could about live among the balancing bars and trapezes, ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... not for. He had none to share them with now! Lover, sister, friends, all were lost and gone! But he went on performing his military duties with an iron rigor and punctuality that made men admire, while they feared him. His life was more mechanical than human. Le Gardeur spared neither himself nor others. He never married, and never again looked with kindly eye upon a woman. His heart was proof against every female blandishment. He ended his life in solitary state and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... ounce aromatic spirits of ammonia in one pint of water and give the mixture as a drench. Repeat in twenty minutes if necessary. In extreme cases a mechanical treatment can be successfully employed by the use of ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... curious record of the fertility of the mind of man when left to its own resources; but it gives ample proof also that it is not under such circumstances it is most usefully employed. This patent office contains models of all the mechanical inventions that have been produced in the Union, and the number is enormous. I asked the man who shewed these, what proportion of them had been brought into use, he said about one in a thousand; he told ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which a child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters, secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing to repeated experiments in public, with every ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him. Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: Whosoever of ye raises ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... later on our reason (unfortunately asleep at the moment) wakes up and says: 'That baby was hired; the weeds and matches merely a dodge. The whole affair was a spectacle got up to extract money from a fool like you. It is as mechanical as a penny in the slot. Instead of relieving distress you have simply helped to perpetuate an infamous system. You ought to know that you can't do good in that offhand way.' The heart gives pennies in the street. The brain runs the Charity Organisation Society. Of course, ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... of St. Louis, came a mirror-like gap; and the other arm of the river curved sharply, the lock gates of the Mint shutting out the view with a bar of foam. Along the Pont-Neuf passed big yellow omnibuses, motley vehicles of all kinds, with the mechanical regularity of so many children's toys. The whole of the background was inframed within the perspective of the two banks; on the right were houses on the quays, partly hidden by a cluster of lofty trees, from behind which on the horizon there emerged a corner of the Hotel de ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... and that it promotes the distribution of both magnesia and potash in the ground, exercising a chemical action upon the soil which extends to any depth of it; and that, in consequence of the chemical and mechanical modifications of the earth, particles of certain nutritive elements become accessible and available to plants that ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... superficial men—the class to which the management of empires is for the most part entrusted—to ridicule theories, and, by a mode reasoning which would place any cabin boy far above Sir Isaac Newton, to insist upon the mechanical parts of government, and the routine of ordinary business, as the sole objects entitled to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... descriptive catalogue of all the furnaces, forges, and rolling-mills of the United States and Canada; secondly, a discussion of the physical and chemical properties of iron, and its combinations with other elements; thirdly, a complete survey of the geological position, chemical, physical, or mechanical properties, and geographical distribution of the ores of iron ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... trite and vulgar melody, devoid of all originality, repeating what has been heard a thousand times already; (2) equally trite and monotonous accompaniments, the harmony limited to half a dozen elementary chords, the rhythm mechanical and commonplace, and the cadences unchanging as the laws of Nature; (3) insipid, sensational titles; (4) words usually so silly that a respectable country newspaper would refuse to print them in its columns—true to the French ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... enthronement of a more self-conscious and theatrical ideal. Lord Rosebery called up before our imaginations the picture of what Alfred would have thought of the vast modern developments of his nation, its immense fleet, its widespread Empire, its enormous contribution to the mechanical civilisation of the world. It cannot be anything but profitable to conceive Alfred as full of astonishment and admiration at these things; it cannot be anything but good for us that we should realise that to the childlike eyes of a great man of old time our inventions and appliances ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... appearances, To make the path straight from effect to cause, Until we come to that First Cause of all, The Power, above, beyond the blind machine, The Primal Power, the originating Power, Which cannot be mechanical. He affirmed it With absolute certainty. Whence arises all This order, this unbroken chain of law, This human will, this death-defying love? Whence, but from some divine transcendent Power, Not less, but infinitely more than these, Because it is their Fountain ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... a word to say about my typewriter—the first, undoubtedly, that he has ever seen. This machine has caused the greatest surprise all along the route, and it is on occasions when the Chinese sees for the first time things of this intimate mechanical nature that he gives one the impression that he is a little boy. The people crowd into my room; they cannot be kept out, although at the present moment I have stationed my two soldiers in the doorway where I am writing, so as ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... I saw him squaring at me with every demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life, as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... perhaps a decade, he would draw in a section of a leaf, and if, as in my case, you happened to have a pretty sister attending the ladies' class in the school, he would add leaf to leaf until your whole paper was covered with his mechanical handiwork, in order to have a little extra conversation with you, although, I need scarcely add, it was not exclusively confined to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the necessary equipment and data they would need to deal with the problems they would face. Like all patrol ships, the Lancet was equipped with automatic launching, navigation and drive mechanisms; no crew other than the three doctors was required, and in the event of mechanical failures, maintenance ships were ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... further time on Wyk. Snap snatched several of his weapons and mechanical devices. We stowed them hastily in our pockets. One was like another to us; we could only guess ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... not very malleable, but extremely ductile, and very tenacious; it is of a greyish color, and nearly eight times heavier than water. Without iron, society could make no progress in the cultivation of the ground, in mechanical arts or trades, in architecture or navigation; it is therefore of the greatest use to man. Iron tools have been used in all European countries as long as their histories have existed; this metal appears likewise to have been known and used by the inhabitants ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... quite near him. Trirodov was walking straight upon Piotr, as if he did not see him; he moved quickly, almost automatically, like a mechanical doll. He held a hat in the hand that hung loose at his side—his face was pale—he had a wild look—his eyes were aflame. He uttered disconnected words. He walked so impetuously that Piotr had no time to turn aside. They came face to face, almost colliding with ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... survival, in the desert men will still find a use for the camel, and the elephant may linger to play a part in the pageant of the East. But the burthen of the minor traffic, if not the whole of it, will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall see even while the road is still remote, swift and shapely motor-cars going past, cyclists, and in these agreeable mountain regions there will also be pedestrians upon their way. Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the various illustrations that the articles to be treated are absolutely isolated from actual contact with the fire or the fire gases and other impurities which must be an objection to all methods of heating by means which are not of a purely mechanical nature. This principle not only recommends itself as scientifically correct and suited to the purpose in view, but is also a very simple and practical one. It affords the means of applying the heat at the point where ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... the cacao is placed on the plantation direct into trucks, which are covered with plaintain leaves, and run on rails through the plantation right into the fermentary. Some day some enterprising firm will build a fermentary in portable sections easily erected, and with some simple mechanical mixer to replace the present laborious method of turning the beans by ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... has not circumnavigated. I announced myself and was disposed of with the highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he should have a mechanical genius. And so on. Therefore I say that M. R. F. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... three-dimensional works of fine, graphic, and applied art, photographs, prints and art reproductions, maps, globes, charts, technical drawings, diagrams, and models. Such works shall include works of artistic craftsmanship insofar as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned; the design of a useful article, as defined in this section, shall be considered a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America: - contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. • Library of Congress Copyright Office
... workhouse servant has some slight reasons for showing acerbity, though she has none for practising cruelty. How could anybody expect a girl to turn out well after the usual course of workhouse training? The life of the soul is too often quenched; the flame of life in the poor body is dim and low; and the mechanical morality, the dull, meaningless round of useless lessons, the habit of herding in unhealthy rooms with unhealthy companions, all tend to develop a creature which can be regarded only as one of Nature's failures, if I may parody a phrase ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... in my full manhood (for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a god that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its head were all the brains of all the strong ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... religion of Jesus and the Apostles, in that, by separating God, as the abstract one Supreme Being, from the world, it leaves no place for the doctrine of God's immanence, or the indwelling of the Spirit of God in man. Hence in Islamism the divine revelation remains purely mechanical, with no natural point of connection in man, and therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... amused me, too, to discover in one of the cavities, among a great collection of costly bejewelled ornaments, such European articles as a pair of common scissors in a pasteboard case, several penknives of the commonest quality, an India-rubber squeaking doll, a child's toy train in tin, and a mechanical mouse. All were, no doubt, considered as treasures by the Arab potentate, yet I reflected that nearly every article in the whole of that miscellaneous collection had been acquired by the most ruthless ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... again, that the Temperance Societies can be made use of by the people for their instruction as well as pleasure. Assemblies of any kind are not the best places either for study or invention. Home or solitude are better—home is the great teacher. In domestic business we learn mechanical skill, the nature of those material bodies with which we have most to deal in life—we learn labour by example and by kindly precepts—we learn (in a prudent home) decorum, cleanliness, order—in a virtuous ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... tone to rouse him, for already he was half asleep again. In his preparation for the day, too, and at his breakfast, he was often virtually asleep while in mechanical action. It was not until the cold dark day was closing in, that he had any distincter impressions of the ride than jingling bells, bitter weather, slipping horses, frowning hill- sides, bleak woods, and a stoppage at ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... removed. In the case of many animals it seems as though the necessity of a fluid environment for living matter did not apply, for the superficial cells of the skin have no fluid around them; these cells, however, are dead, and serve merely a mechanical or protective purpose. All the living cells of the skin and all the cells beneath this have fluid ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... the patient, to fasten a bandage tightly enough to staunch the wound, but Leonardo Botalli, of Asti, body physician of Anjou, was nevertheless fortunate enough to devise a simple mechanical expedient, which proved successful. By his advice; a succession of attendants, relieving each other day and night, prevented the flow of blood by keeping the orifice of the wound slightly but firmly compressed with the thumb. After a period of anxious expectation, the wound again ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... great thing for our infant navy, if we succeed. Since our last conversation on that subject, Captain, at odds and ends of time, I have thought over the matter, and have begun a little skeleton of the thing here, which I will show you. Whenever one has a new idea of anything mechanical, it is best to clothe it with a body as soon as possible. For you can't improve so well on ideas as you ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... of the series of handbooks on industrial subjects being published by the Popular Mechanics Co. Like the magazine, these books are "written so you can understand it," and are intended to furnish information on mechanical subjects at a price ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part 2 • H. H. Windsor
... of such standing that his pronouncements in that field were practically final, a man called before kings to determine the worth of their national treasures and curiosities—and his greatest pride was that he had beaten the hitherto unmatched mechanical chess-player in public contest and had been invited to settle absolutely the nicest problems in ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... agree with Mr. Symonds when he says that Jonson 'rarely touched more than the outside of character,' that his men and women are 'the incarnations of abstract properties rather than living human beings,' that they are in fact mere 'masqueraders and mechanical puppets.' Eloquence is a beautiful thing but rhetoric ruins many a critic, and Mr. Symonds is essentially rhetorical. When, for instance, he tells us that 'Jonson made masks,' while 'Dekker and Heywood created souls,' we feel that he is asking us to accept a crude judgment for ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the road. Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard, and clinging to her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years; her cries had grown hoarse, and had a hard, mechanical action as they followed one another. They were really in no danger, for the boy held his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... none the less linked by one inseverable bond; it is the microscope; and while, amid the inconceivable diversity of its applications, it remains manifest that this society has for its primary object the constant progress of the instrument—whether in its mechanical construction or its optical appliances; whether the improvements shall bear upon the use of high powers or low powers; whether it shall be improvement that shall apply to its commercial employment, its easier professional application, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... eyes wander over the writing, his every faculty of soul and mind and being is concentrated in rapt love upon each word. For not every day will he suffer his eyes to rest upon them, lest too great familiarity with them should dull them with a mechanical nature when seen so often. They are kept for rare occasions, and now, his waking thoughts sweet with the influence of the recent dream, he reckons just such ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... them—dull and silent, they deaden her face. And Jennie, the charwoman, is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her arms, long and withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is twisted and her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest, she seems a mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... round with a slow mechanical motion, as if with a conscious effort of the will. His face was so white, and wore such a look of loss, that it almost terrified me like the presence of something awful. I stood speechless. He looked at me for a moment, and then came slowly ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... fathoms of water when the paying-out ceased, and nice management was required to keep the ship steady, as she had now no steerage-way; and oh! with what intense interest and curiosity and wonder did Robin Wright regard the varied and wonderful mechanical appliances, with which the whole affair ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... although, of course, in this respect and in many other respects, very much always depends on the manner in which the invitation is given. True politeness, however, should be studied even amongst the nearest friends and relations; for the mechanical forms of good breeding are of great consequence, and too much familiarity may have, for its effect, the destruction ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... on the organisation of the mechanical and material side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that women ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... expected did not occur, none of the small advantages accruing, now to this side and now to that, in isolated and accidental collisions being followed up. Half-hearted attacks provoked a sullen resistance which was satisfied with mere repulse. Orders were obeyed with mechanical fidelity; no one did any more than ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however, in the way of all but the resolute and unwearied scholar. These difficulties, in all their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... skilful management of their driver, would carry him and his wares across sloughs and swamps, where a steam-engine would have been clogged by the weight of a baby-wagon. If he broke his harness or his vehicle in the wilderness, he could repair it without assistance, for his mechanical accomplishments extended from the shoeing of a horse to the repair of a watch, and embraced everything between. He was never taken by surprise—accidents never came unexpected, and strange events never disconcerted him. He would whistle "Yankee Doodle" while his horses were floundering ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the other flank the territory was bounded by desert even more inhospitable than the one in which they scratched out their existence, a waste of lifeless sand, habitable only by the D'zertanoj and their mysterious caroj. These last could be animals—or mechanical transportation of some kind, either was possible from Ijale's vague description. Ocean, coast and desert, these made up all of her world and she could conceive of ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... sometimes for miles and miles, and for days together, covering the entire distance lying flat upon their bodies.... From the ceiling of the temple hang hundreds of long strips, katas, offered by pilgrims to the temple, and becoming so many flying prayers when hung up—for mechanical praying in every way is prominent in Thibet.... Thus instead of having to learn by heart long and varied prayers, all you have to do is to stuff the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... This message about no mechanical science being allowed, for example. Did the Junior mean the colonists wouldn't allow it? Must mean that. What else could prevent it? But when an E, a real E, took charge in an experimental colony, the colonists had nothing further to say about the matter. True, ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... In their days the sprawling suburbs of Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height, abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and turnip fields of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Another mechanical Method of making great Men, and adding Dignity to Kings and Queens, is to accompany them with Halberts and Battle-axes. Two or three Shifters of Scenes, with the two Candle-snuffers, make up a compleat Body of Guards upon the English Stage; and by the Addition of a few Porters dressed in Red ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... fact, a more slippery or guileful egg was never yet devised by nature's unconscious ingenuity. Then, again, the Antarctic chimaera (so called from its very unprepossessing personal appearance) relies rather upon pure deception than upon mechanical means for the security of its eggs. The shell or case in this instance is prolonged at the edge into a kind of broad wing on either side, so that it exactly resembles one of the large flat leaves of the Antarctic fucus in whose midst it lurks. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... in the last generation as the chief of the steam engineering of his day in the United States, the mentor of that profession, I can see more of my mother than in any other of the six brothers. He inherited, like all of us, his father's mechanical tendency and inventiveness, and added to it a persistency and constancy of purpose peculiarly hers, which none of the other children inherited to the same extent; and he had in its fullness the devotional sentiment, the absorption in religious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... to where, under the light of the hanging lamps, the table shone with napery and crystal; followed him as the criminal goes with the hangman, or the sheep with the butcher; took the sherry mechanically, drank it, and spoke mechanical words of praise. The object of his terror had become suddenly inverted; till then he had seen Attwater trussed and gagged, a helpless victim, and had longed to run in and save him; he saw him now tower up mysterious and menacing, the ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Lane, E.C., London, the first number of "The Lantern—Appearing Occasionally. Illuminated by Faustin. Price, sixpence." It was a twelve-page paper with four pages of superb illustrations in six colors. I winced when I contemplated its artistic and mechanical excellence, for I knew at what a price that quality had been obtained. A gold mine would be required to maintain that journal, and that journal could by no means ever be itself a gold mine. A copy lies before me as I write and noting it critically ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... carpenter, and the joyner, and rejoice to see, that their work and skill do daily improve; and that by the example and application of his Majesty's Universities, and Royal Society, the restoration and improvement of shipping, mathematical, and mechanical arts, the use of timber grows daily in more reputation. And it were well if great persons might only be indulg'd to inrich, and adorn their palaces with tapestry, damask, velvet, and Persian furniture; whilst by some wholesome sumptuary ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... of leisure. They have nothing to do but to ride round their plantations, hunt, attend the races, study politics for the next legislative or congressional campaign, and decide how to use the prodigious mechanical power, of slave representation, which a political Archimedes may effectually wield for the destruction of commerce, or any thing else, involving the ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... this can best be accomplished by employing the mind as well as the body. The movements should be as varied as possible, thus constantly offering the men something new to make them keep their minds on their work. A movement many times repeated presents no attraction and is executed in a purely mechanical manner, ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... their mechanical way, of bringing down all the spiritual into the material and formal, about the 'practice of the presence of God.' It is an ugly phrase, but it means a great thing, that Christian people ought, very much more than they do, to aim, day by day, and amidst their daily duties, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Ludmilla was found the next day by Mrs. Henderson, crying softly over her work at the mosaic department-work which was only the mechanical arrangement from patterns provided, for she had no originality, and would never attain to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is cut away under side, for a passage in every direction, numerous little pillars of wax being left for its support. How any person in the habit of watching their proceedings, with any degree of attention, could come at the conclusion that the bees raised such comb by mechanical means and then put under the props for its support, is somewhat singular. Their efforts united for such a purpose like reasonable beings, I ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... gone a hundred yards he had recovered a sort of mechanical self-possession, such as comes upon men at very desperate times, when they must not allow themselves to stop and think of what is before them. They were pictures, rather than thoughts, that formed themselves in his brain as he went along, for he saw all the past years again, ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of a Sunday on the green ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... worshippers have a right to expect that their hearts will be united by that Spirit at the throne of grace, so that "with one accord" they may present their petitions and claim the promise to those who are thus agreed. This is the true unity and uniformity which Christians are bound to seek, and any mere mechanical uniformity of words, apart from this, is but the outward trappings of form which are much more liable to satisfy the careless worshipper than to inspire in him any thought of the need of a more real approach ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... 116,349,897 acres acquired since the 4th of March, 1829, the United States have paid $72,560,056 in permanent annuities, lands, reservations for Indians, expenses of removal and subsistence, merchandise, mechanical and agricultural establishments and implements. When the heavy expenses incurred by the United States and the circumstance that so large a portion of the entire territory will be forever unsalable are considered, and this price is compared with that ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and all that did the miracle. You know, American technology and mass production in operation, something to be proud of. Tie Witch right in to the whole picture of the United States as the leader of mechanical—stress mechanical—miracles. ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... notion we would wish to cherish of the character of the poet, it is obvious that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' in all senses, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of adding, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... heroes walked on, hearing every word and trying to appear as if they did not. They spoke to one another with forced voices and mechanical smiles, and did their best not to be self-conscious in the matter of ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... give a cathartic remedy in a cathartic dose for constipation; in that case the reaction, if reaction follows, is not in the right direction, consequently the constipation is often aggravated. I have hardly ever seen, excepting in cases of mechanical obstruction, a severe and troublesome case of constipation that had not been caused by the use of cathartic remedies. So if we give an opiate, or an astringent, for a diarrhoea, we can see that it is a direct ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... passive that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men. Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in the face. This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of judgment: 'What shall it profit a man ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (whichever way one likes to put it) than does Mars. The invigorating influences of this excess of oxygen upon the Martians indisputably did much to counterbalance the increased weight of their bodies. And, in the second place, we all overlooked the fact that such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed was quite able to dispense with ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... interest to look at this." And as Mount Dunstan took the proffered pamphlet, and with amiable gravity opened it, he rapidly poured forth his salesman's patter, scarcely pausing to take his breath: "It's the most up-to-date machine on the market. It has all the latest improved mechanical appliances. You will see from the cut in the catalogue that the platen roller is easily removed without a long mechanical operation. All you do is to slip two pins back and off comes the roller. There is also another point worth mentioning—the ribbon ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... after I had done my utmost to make him understand how I wanted it done, I was surprised to find how very difficult this particular rendering of the music appeared to him. He was absolutely incapable of repeating it after me, and with each renewed effort his singing became so commonplace and so mechanical that I realised clearly that he had not understood this piece to be anything more than a phrase in recitative form, which he might render with any inflections of the voice that happened to be prescribed, or which might be sung either this way or that, according to fancy, as was usual in operatic ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... intellectual powers of their minds been more amply considered and cultivated, they would have exhibited an uncontrovertible example of the capacity and intelligence of the African. Although, as I have previously noticed, a superintendance directed only to the mechanical arts, applied to the local necessities of the Island, has had the most visible effects, yet, in proportion as their privileges have been extended, authority has become more inefficient, and their labour less unproductive ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... we have seen, all the mechanical difficulties had not been overcome. Many evenings had been devoted to discussing, not the form of its screw nor its dimensions, but whether it ought to be put behind, as the Tissandier brothers had done, or ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733, adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences. In 1739, he received the superintendence of the Jardin du Roi, not long since enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his successor. He had shifted from mechanics ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and through the grounds of the White House, in which presently, having edged through the throng in the ante-chambers, I found myself in that inane procession of individuals who passed by in order, each to receive the limp handshake, the mechanical bow and the perfunctory smite of President Tyler—rather a tall, slender-limbed, active man, and of very decent presence, although his thin, shrunken cheeks and his cold blue-gray eye left little quality of magnetism ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... was easier for Thoreau to make money than it would be for the ordinary artisan. When Thoreau wrote his famous maxim, "To maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime," he did not add that he was himself a man of remarkable mechanical gifts; he made, when he was disposed, admirable pencils, he was an excellent land-surveyor, and an author as well; moreover, he was a celibate by nature. He would no doubt have found, if he had had a wife and children, and no aptitude for skilled ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Calvert dressed himself with uncertain hands but mechanical regularity and neatness, and, under the automatic training of discipline and duty, managed to button his tunic tightly over his feelings, to pull himself together with his sword-belt, compressing a still cadet-like waist, and to present that indescribable combination ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... work to make wonder tales as stories are sometimes made to instruct while they entertain children, they would have left a mass of very dull tales which few people would have cared to read. They had no idea of doing anything so artificial and mechanical; they made these old stories because all life was a story to them, full of splendid or terrible figures moving across the sky or through the sea and in the depths of the woods, and whichever way they looked they saw ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... said to head the development of the century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical progression. Its development resembles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... will suspend the likenesses of his mother and brother on his wall. He generally, you will find, tries to improve on you—which, of course, is not always hard to do. But sometimes he comes to grief in the attempt, as happened in the case of his wonderful "hanging shelves." Ted Hammer, quite a mechanical genius, had made to himself a set of these shelves, which for neatness, simplicity, and usefulness were the marvel of the school. Of course Ebby got to know of it, and was unhappy till he could cap it with something finer still. So he made all sorts of excuses for coming constantly into Ted's ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... was a good thing for her; every time she met the gentle kind eyes and felt the warm clasp of his hand, Diana repeated the assurance to herself. The girl had sunk again into mental torpor; she did not see nor hear nor feel; she lived along a mechanical sort of life, having relapsed into her former stunned condition. Not crushed—there was too much of Diana's nature for one blow or perhaps many blows to effect that; not beaten down, like some other characters; she went on her way upright, alert, and strong, doing and expecting ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... progress and stages of his mind in the different phases of the practice; how he begins by deceiving himself, to end in deceiving others; the first uninquiring ignorance; the gradual admission of ideas, what he is taught or left to imagine; the faith, of what is fancied to be so, the mechanical belief; then the confusion of thought from the intrusion of doubt and uncertainty; the adoption of some undefined notions; and, finally, actual unbelief; followed by designed and systematic injustice in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... line, the angle of pitch, the inclination of the lateral faces to one another—before he discovered the exact proportions and the arrangement of lines which render his monument a true work of art, and not merely a costly and mechanical ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... by reason of our supplying them so cheap with every sort of goods, have forgotten the chief part of their ancient mechanical skill, so as not to be well able now, at least for some years, to live independent of us. Formerly, those baskets which the Cheerake made, were so highly esteemed even in South Carolina, the politest of our colonies, for domestic usefulness, ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... cylindrical stick, it does not become twisted. {6} Accordingly I allowed kidney-beans to run up stretched string, and up smooth rods of iron and glass, one-third of an inch in diameter, and they became twisted only in that degree which follows as a mechanical necessity from the spiral winding. The stems, on the other hand, which had ascended ordinary rough sticks were all more or less and generally much twisted. The influence of the roughness of the support in causing axial twisting was well seen in the stems which ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... on experiments upon a scale of the most magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Spriggs looked helplessly round the table. His wife's foot pressed his, and like a mechanical toy ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... mechanical artist places his hand on the formless block, to give it a form according to his intention, he has not any scruples in doing violence to it. For the nature on which he works does not deserve any respect in itself, and he does not value the whole ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... below Miss Mapp's window, and went bobbing along down the steep hill. She walked with the motion of those mechanical dolls sold in the street, which have three legs set as spokes to a circle, so that their feet emerge from their dress with Dutch and rigid regularity, and her figure had a certain squat rotundity that ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... grey, purple and green; very subdued and peaceful; earlier in the day it was marbled by small keen specks of sun and larger spaces of faint irradiation; but the clouds have closed together now, and these appearances are no more. Voices of children and occasional crying of gulls; the mechanical noise of a gardener somewhere behind us in the scented thicket; and the faint report and rustle of the waves on the precipice far below, only break in upon the quietness to render it more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... warranting any inference to the existence of a god, would on the contrary ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical necessity." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the machine for ironing the clothes," answered Bob. "They all run by electricity, too. The waste water from the pond runs a turbine water wheel and that's connected by a belt to an electric generator, a machine for changing mechanical energy to electrical energy, you know; and all we need to do is to throw this switch over and the wheel starts turning down at the pond and we have current. Of course, at night we take the current from the storage batteries for lights, after we shut down the wheel, but these ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... so they were unconsciously the factors in bringing together the work initiated by Owen and by Froebel. The Infant School of Wilderspin, already briefly described, was almost a dead thing, with its galleries and its mechanical prodigies, its object-lessons and its theology; now it was breathed upon by the spirit of the man who said: "Play is the highest phase of child development, of human development at this period: for it is the spontaneous representation of the inner, from inner necessity and ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... been much mistaken praise for the virtue of "mechanical obedience." There is no such thing. Men think in their smallest actions; if this were not so, it would not be possible to lead them. What has been blindly termed "mechanical response" requires ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... enthusiastic on the subject, but he said nothing. He had grown more silent and stonier than ever, if that were possible, during the last few days. And when he did ask a question concerning the every-day affairs of life, one felt it was merely mechanical, and that he scarcely cared whether he received ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... back to Yates the days of his youth, especially when Macdonald, putting the finishing strokes to his shoe, let his hammer periodically tinkle with musical clangor on the anvil, ringing forth a tintinnabulation that chimed melodiously on the ear—a sort of anvil- chorus accompaniment to his mechanical skill. He was a real sleight-of- hand man, and the anvil ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where.[961] He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not that GREAT, like his Odes?' Mrs. Thrale maintained that his Odes were melodious; upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... his intercourse with his own immediate connexions, his actions cannot be surpassed by any of the great heroes of antiquity. He evinced in early youth an active and ingenious disposition, and an extraordinary fondness for mechanical employments and pursuits. This bias of Adooley soon attracted the attention and notice of his father, and this revered parent did all that his slender means afforded of cherishing it, and of encouraging him to persevere in his industrious habits. Whilst yet a boy, Adooley was ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... powny!" "Grippit" was here most expressive. Indeed, this word has a significance hardly expressed by any English one, and used to be very prevalent to indicate keen and forcible tenacity of possession; thus a character noted for avarice or sharp looking to self-interest was termed "grippy." In mechanical contrivances, anything taking a close adherence was called having a gude grip. I recollect in boyish days, when on Deeside taking wasp-nests, an old man looking on was sharply stung by one, and his description was, "Ane o' them's grippit me fine." The following ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... his throne, a magnificent, but a sardonic figure for all that. As he rose, soft, weird music came from an angle where a screen of palm-ferns was placed. Though mechanical, the music was of ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... for women students, including special bursaries and scholarships, while dental and medical studies can be carried on concurrently. The course of study includes the passing of a Professional Preliminary Examination or Matriculation, followed by two years' mechanical work, and two years' hospital practice. The student can be articled to a qualified dental practitioner for mechanics, or can obtain tuition at the Dental Hospital. This branch includes the preparation of models, vulcanite and metal dentures, crowns, ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley |
