"Mercurial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certain star in the forehead, which you see not. Your chestnut or your olive-colour'd face Does never fail: and your long ear doth promise. I knew't by certain spots, too, in his teeth, And on the nail of his mercurial finger. ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... mercury, arsenic, and even strychnine, are the subjects of several patents. A mixture of coal tar and mercurial ointment of one. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... 8.—The fugitive and mercurial matter, of which a Lady's blush is made, after coursing from its natural position, the cheek, to the tip of the elbow, and thence diverging for a time to the knee, has finally settled in the legs, where, in the form of a pair ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... question with polite interest. Then, realizing that in her preoccupation she did not follow this flight of his mercurial spirits, he sobered. "It's a perfectly good name," he conceded, "but there must be more of it. What's ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... by the Chinaman, and Kerry stood out in the darkness of the dismal, brick-walled street, feeling something as nearly akin to dejection as was possible in one of his mercurial spirit. Something trickled upon the brim of his hat, and, raising his head, Kerry detected rain upon his upturned face. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness. This would put an end ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... speak of it, not once or twice, but uniformly, as little less than miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation. This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol 'sarsaparilla', and 'lignum vitae', or 'senna' in contempt of all ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Vance, an artist who had employed Pollyooly as his model for a set of stories for The Blue Magazine. Hilary Vance was devoted to Pollyooly, and he had a spare bedroom. But for a while the Honourable John Ruffin hesitated; the artist was a man of an uncommonly mercurial, irresponsible temperament. Was it safe to entrust two small children to his care? Then he reflected that Pollyooly was a strong corrective of irresponsibility, and took a ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... it; the clear eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur," and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fragile and transient as harebells. She had dropped into a different world, and the old one would fade like a receding star. She would soon find her that her only choice must be to make new associations and friendships and find new pleasures; and this her mercurial, frank, and fearless nature would incline her to do ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of danger from the outskirts was soon taken up in the centre of the city, and now nothing was to be seen in any direction but a dashing and scampering of the mercurial and excitable citizens of the place, each to his lodge or burrow. Far as the eye could reach was spread the city, and in every direction the scene was the same. We rode leisurely along until we had reached the more thickly settled portion of the city, when we halted, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... few months after the publication of the Dunciad. But Pope found a living antagonist, who succeeded in giving him pain enough to gratify the vilified dunces. This was Colley Cibber—most lively and mercurial of actors—author of some successful plays, with too little stuff in them for permanence, and of an Apology for his own Life, which is still exceedingly amusing as well as useful for the history of the stage. He was now approaching seventy, though he was to survive Pope for ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... chivalrous respect for women; their courage; their delicate sense of honor; their constancy, which can abide by an opinion or a purpose or an interest of their States through adversity and through prosperity, through the years and through the generations, are things by which the people of the more mercurial North may take a lesson. And there is another thing—covetousness, corruption, the low temptation of money has not yet found any place in our ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... with a deep breath, wanting to wind up the illimitable discussion of what might have been, though nothing could be legally proven, "it is a strange story. So our mercurial Ladislaw has a queer genealogy! A high-spirited young lady and a musical Polish patriot made a likely enough stock for him to spring from, but I should never have suspected a grafting of the Jew pawnbroker. However, there's no knowing what a mixture ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... to bed early, intending to get a good night's rest so that they might be up and doing betimes the next morning, they soon found that sleep was well-nigh out of the question, by reason of the uproar that never ceased the whole night through. The mercurial Chilians were wrought up to a pitch of the highest excitement and enthusiasm, and bands of them persisted in marching through the streets, shouting vivas at the top of their voices and singing war-songs. It appeared that the inhabitants of Valparaiso had been dreading an attack ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... few moments in silence, but then I took my share of the conversation. I wish you could have seen the old man's face light up little by little, as I showed him that to a person who understood the politics and condition of the mercurial country with which he had ignorantly attempted to trade, his condition was not near so bad as he thought it; that though one port was blockaded, another was opened; that though one revolution thwarted him, a few weeks would show another which would favor him; that the goods which, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... it. Upon thousands of hearts great sorrows and anxieties have rested, but not on one such, and in such measure, as upon that simple, truthful, noble soul, our faithful and sainted Lincoln. Never rising to the enthusiasm of more impassioned natures in hours of hope, and never sinking with the mercurial in hours of defeat to the depths of despondency, he held on with immovable patience and fortitude, putting caution against hope, that it might not be premature, and hope against caution, that it might not yield to dread and danger. He ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... had an attack of acute indigestion, which might have resulted seriously had it not been for the mercurial pills which promptly relieved him. The reader should observe that practically all of this testimony comes from Jones. There is no extraneous evidence that Patrick induced the giving of the mercury. Patrick, however, spread false rumors ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... He had the lively mercurial temperament of the Latin races from which he sprang. He speaks of himself as "warm, irascible, ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... boiling heat, is changed into an elastic aeriform fluid, susceptible, like all other gasses, of being received and contained in vessels, and preserving its gasseous form so long as it remains at the temperature of 80 deg. (212 deg.), and under a pressure not exceeding 28 inches of the mercurial barometer. As this phenomenon has not been generally observed, no language has used a particular term for expressing water in this state[10]; and the same thing occurs with all fluids, and all substances, which do not evaporate ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... mauve, and the chief agent in its production was bichromate of potash. This salt is not actively poisonous, and no one thought of attributing injurious properties to materials dyed with the aniline mauve. Next in chronological order came magenta red. It was first made from aniline by the agency of mercurial salts, and afterward by that form of arsenic known to chemists as arsenic acid. The fact that this at one time fashionable color was prepared by means of an arsenical compound was spread through the country in a very impressive manner ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... and his composure throughout all the rodomontade and bacchanalian outbreak of the mercurial Frenchmen; leaving the task of pledging them to his master of fence, Van Braam, who was not a man to flinch from potations. He took careful note, however, of all their revelations, and collected a variety of information ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... in. per 100 deg. Fahr., and from these data a scale is constructed, the correctness of which is easily verified by transferring the spiral heater into an air bath or oil of high boiling point, and then comparing the readings of the pyrometer scale with those of a mercurial thermometer placed alongside of the spiral heater. By this means it can be clearly demonstrated that, up to the highest point to which it is safe to use a mercurial thermometer, the readings of the pyrometer scale and that of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... greatest stage of all—Demosthenes (however bold at times, and restive in a matter which he held to be paramount) was required to bend, and did bend, to the local genius of democracy, reinforced by a most mercurial temperament. The very air of Attica, combined with great political power, kept its natives in a state of habitual intoxication; and even wise men would have had some difficulty in mastering, as it affected themselves, the permanent ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... which springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that in which he comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... a most active being, its habits conforming to the organisation with which it is endowed. Such an array of paddles prophesies of a mercurial temperament and an energetic character. It can, however, anchor itself and lie by when occasion offers. It is provided with two long cables, prettily set with spiral filaments or tendrils, by means of which it ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... my arrival, to tell me the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark. Chambers will tell you more perhaps than you will wish to read of it. Your little mercurial disquisition is ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... a pale grey; and this is again surrounded by a very delicate rose hue, which is lost in a band of pure white. Beyond this a protecting influence is powerfully exerted; and notwithstanding the action of the dispersed light, which is very evident over the plate, a line is left, perfectly free from mercurial vapor, and which, consequently, when viewed by a side light, appears quite dark. The green rays are represented by a line of a corresponding tint, considerably less in size than the luminous green rays. The yellow rays ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... made into a gentleman and a great man; and in order to confute a friendly objector decides to select from the workhouse a boy to experiment with. He chooses a boy with a bad reputation but with excellent instincts, and adopts him, the story narrating the adventures of the mercurial lad who thus finds himself suddenly lifted several degrees in the social scale. The idea is novel and handled with Mr. Manville Fenn's accustomed cleverness, the restless boyish nature, with its inevitable tendency to get into scrapes, being ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... other alteration than that produced by lassitude, he is already prepared, therefore, to renew his communications with its different members, all of whom were well disposed to show off in their respective characters, the moment they were favored with an opportunity. The mercurial Pippo, as he had been the most difficult to restrain during the day, was the first to steal from his lair, now that the Argus-like eyes of Baptiste permitted the freedom, and the exhilarating, coolness of the sunset invited action. His success emboldened others, and, ere long, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... was in an agony. He was menaced with the very thing he was in the hope of staving off, or a discussion on the subject of the sick man's previous life. The doctor was so mercurial and quick of apprehension, that, once fairly on the scent, he was nearly certain he would extract every thing from the patient. This was the principal reason why the deacon did not wish to send for him; the expense, though a serious ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... share, Must steer with care through all that glittering sea Of gems and plumes and pearls and silks, to where He deems it is his proper place to be; Dissolving in the waltz to some soft air, Or proudlier prancing with mercurial skill, Where Science ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... because it expands and contracts with temperature about the same as glass, and hence there is little chance of the glass cracking through unequal stress. The vacuum in the bulb is made by a mercurial air pump of the Sprengel sort, and the pressure of air in it is only about one-millionth of an atmosphere. The bulb is fastened with a holder like that shown in figure 64, where two little hooks H connected to screw terminals T T are ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... at all duped by the sudden conversion of his enemies, which was indeed more indicative of a mercurial and capricious temperament than of a sincere desire to make amends for their conduct: the real reason of these sudden demonstrations must be sought in the fears that were aroused in the minds of the better citizens, of the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... quarters, shift one's quarters; dodge; keep going, keep moving;. put in motion, set in motion; move; impel &c. 276; propel &c. 284; render movable, mobilize. Adj. moving &c. v.; in motion; transitional; motory[obs3], motive; shifting, movable, mobile, mercurial, unquiet; restless &c. (changeable) 149; nomadic &c. 266; erratic &c. 279. Adv. under way; on the move, on the wing, on the tramp, on the march. Phr. eppur si muove [It][Galileo]; es bildet ein ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the masonry, legs apart, and head thrown back, Darkey's companion felt more secure, and his mercurial spirits began to revive. He took off his cap, and brushing back his light brown curly hair with the hand which held it, he looked down at Darkey through half-closed eyes, the play of his features divided between a ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Genius fain wou'd Court superiour Blessings; those Passions are too hurrying to last; Vapours that start from a Mercurial Brain, whose wild Chimera's flush the lighter Faculties, which tir'd i'th'vain pursuit of fancy'd Pleasures; a Passion more substantial Courts our Reason, solid, persuasive, elegant, sublime, where ev'ry Sense crowds to the luscious Banquet, ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... before the doctrine of Bourbon authority must also be questioned. Even if French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the names of Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of France could not long remain stagnant with such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in power, before France showed ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... costive state of the bowels is common in pregnancy; a mild laxative is therefore occasionally necessary. The mildest must be selected, as a strong purgative is highly improper, and even dangerous. Calomel and all other preparations of mercury are to be especially avoided, as a mercurial medicine is apt to weaken the system, and sometimes even to produce a miscarriage. Let me again urge the importance of a lady, during the whole period of pregnancy, being particular as to the state of her bowels, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... "Yes, he's mercurial in all his movements. Laura, we must get out of this. There happens to be something else in the world for me to do than to sit around and follow up ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... became a dealer in grain and feed, and gave attention to that business for many years. But he was also active in the lumber industry in the Saginaw district and several other things. It was difficult for a man of such mercurial, restless temperament to stay constant to any one occupation; in fact, had he been less visionary he would have been more prosperous, but might not have had a son so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance of the optimistic vagaries which led ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... touch of embarrassment. It occurred to him that he had been betrayed by his mercurial temperament into an attitude which, considering the circumstances, was perhaps a trifle too jubilant. He gave his mustache a pull, and reverted to ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... first appearance grew white. Young men from eighteen to twenty occasionally become gray; and according to Rayer, paroxysms of rage, unexpected and unwelcome news, diseases of the scalp such as favus, wounds of the head, habitual headache, over-indulgence of the sexual appetite, mercurial courses too frequently repeated, too great anxiety, etc., have been known to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... their thorough proficiency in all classical and literary studies, the result of old-world method and application. Mentally and physically they were splendid men. The whole race of Flemings and Dutch was found by our young recruits to be a grave and powerful people, although exceptional cases of mercurial temperament were not rare. Some curious individuals were to be found among them, as is more the case in European nationalities in general than in our own. Both Americans were much liked and respected by all their new-found ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... which he is, even to this day, supposed—by the faithful—to have discovered Neptune, he had already announced the probable existence of an Intra-Mercurial body, or group of bodies. He had five observations besides Lescarbault's upon something that had been seen to cross the sun. In accordance with the mathematical hypnoses of his era, he studied these six transits. Out of them he computed elements ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... much disconcerted by the reported contretemps in town; but he dissembled well, with a show of whimsical exasperation because of this emergency that tore him so soon away from both Gosnold House and his other neighbour at table, a Mrs. Artemas—a spirited, mercurial creature, not over-handsome of face, but wonderfully smart in dress and gesture, superbly stayed and well aware of it; a dark, fine woman who recognised the rivalry latent in Sally's dark looks without dismay—as Sally ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London. Among the guests were the Countess of ——, Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... dinner he had often climbed up on the embankment and followed the cracked walls of the ruins. On bright nights one part of the castle was thrown back into shadow, and the other, by contrast, stood forth, washed in silver and blue, as if rubbed with mercurial lusters, above the Sevre, along whose surface streaks of moonlight darted like the backs of fishes. The silence was overpowering. After nine o'clock not a dog, not a soul. He would return to the poor chamber of the inn, where an old woman, in black, wearing the cornet head-dress ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case at present, a survey of English history suggests that the conventional stolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of his characteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change their mind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly England has never suffered from that rigidity of social system which has hampered in the past the adaptability of its rivals. Even in feudal times there was little law about status; and when the customary arrangement of society in two agricultural classes of landlord and tenant ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... The speaker, a mercurial youth of two and twenty, was one of a group of young people assembled, some on horseback, some in yellow buckboards, in front of a ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... appeared on the inoculated arms. It seemed to arise from the state of the pustule, which spread out, accompanied with some degree of pain, to about half the diameter of a sixpence. One of these patients was an infant of half a year old. By the application of mercurial ointment to the inflamed parts (a treatment recommended under similar circumstances in the inoculated smallpox) the complaint subsided without giving ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... sensible magnitude; and by means of these in a certain stage of their growth, we produce a blue which rivals, if it does not transcend, that of the deepest and purest Italian sky. Introducing into our tube a quantity of mixed air and nitrite of butyl vapour sufficient to depress the mercurial column of an air-pump one-twentieth of an inch, adding a quantity of air and hydrochloric acid sufficient to depress the mercury half an inch further, and sending through this compound and highly attenuated atmosphere the beam of the electric light, within the tube arises gradually ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... array of figures—beautiful, revolting, sly, fatuous, witty, brave, pusillanimous, mean, generous—meets the eye as we recall one by one these famous stories; beautiful and amorous, but mercurial ladies with henna scented feet and black eyes—often with a suspicion of kohl and more than a suspicion of Abu Murreh [456] in them—peeping cautiously through the close jalousies of some lattice; love sick princes overcoming all obstacles; executioners ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... dressed for the opera that night she pondered on it, and back from it to the change she had noticed in the girl of late. She hadn't been like the old, easy-going Chrystie; her indolent evenness of mood had given place to a mercurial flightiness, her gay good-humor been broken by flashes of temper ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... remembered as the "hot Sunday," the science-predicted period of returning glaciers and polar snows where palms and lemons now hold sway, seemed even more distant than the epoch suggested by the speculative. In proportion to the elevation of the mercurial vein which mounted to and poisoned itself at 100 degrees, the religious, the devotional, pulse sank lower, almost to zero; consequently, although circumstances of unusual interest attracted the congregation ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... songs that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, "Atta Troll" and "Deutschland," are full of Ariosto-like transitions. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... strength of the horse would have borne it, could not have been used for the purposes of health. Sister Marshman was seized with a disease of the liver, a disease which proves fatal in three cases out of four. Sister Ward was ill of the same disorder, and both of them underwent a long course of mercurial treatment, as is usual in that disease. Exercise was considered by the physicians as of the first importance, and we certainly thought no expense too great to save the valuable lives of our sisters. A single horse chaise, and an open palanquin, called a Tonjon, were procured. I never ride out for ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... his visit every day for the next four days. Crook's arrival each afternoon was the only break in the monotony of a life which was rapidly becoming unbearable to Desmond's mercurial temperament. He found himself looking forward to the wizened little man's visits and for want of better employment, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the study of his role under the expert's able direction. Desmond's beard had sprouted wonderfully, and Crook assured ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... carotid artery of a living animal to a reservoir of mercury, provided with an upright open tube or pressure- gauge.... Under pressure of the blood, the mercury rises in this tube, and the height of the mercurial column becomes an indication of the pressure to which the blood itself is subjected within the artery. The arterial pressure is found to be equal to the average of a column of mercury 150 millimetres, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... instruments with which we were now furnished. The times of register at sea had been three and nine, A.M. and P.M.; those hours having been recommended as the most proper for detecting any horary oscillations of the mercurial column. When we were fixed for the winter, and our attention could be more exclusively devoted to scientific objects, the register was extended to four and ten, and subsequently to five and eleven o’clock. The most rigid attention to the observation ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... said to be falling when the mercury in the tube is sinking, at which time its upper surface is sometimes concave or hollow. The barometer is rising when the mercurial column is lengthening; its upper surface being then, as in ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy
... Mercurial ointment mixed with black cylinder oil and applied every quarter of an hour, or as often as expedient. The following is also recommended as a good cooling compound for heavy bearings:—Tallow 2 lb., plumbage 6 oz., sugar of lead 4 oz. Melt the tallow ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... is very singular to see how this mercurial French People plunges suddenly from Vive le Roi to Vive la Republique; and goes simmering and dancing; shaking off daily (so to speak), and trampling into the dust, its old social garnitures, ways of thinking, rules of existing; and cheerfully dances towards the Ruleless, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... countenance. They looked down upon Richard, Storri looked down upon them; the greater included the less, and deductions were easy. Storri arrived at a most happy contempt of Richard as a mathematician gets to the solution of a problem, and, being mercurial, not thoughtful, arranged with himself that Richard was ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... by no means an easy object to observe on account of the mists which usually hang about low down near the earth. One opportunity, however, offers itself from time to time to solve the riddle of an "intra-Mercurial" planet, that is to say, of a planet which circulates within the path followed by Mercury. The opportunity in question is furnished by a total eclipse of the sun; for when, during an eclipse of that ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... the sun occurred in 1878, [Page 138] astronomers were determined that the question of the existence of an intra-mercurial planet should be settled. Maps of all the stars in the region of the sun were carefully studied, sections of the sky about the sun were assigned to different observers, who should attend to nothing but to look for a possible planet. It is now conceded that Professor ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... had a dollar to send. For he was too careless and too fond of his own pleasure to ever think of sending her money. "Jerry," he thought, "was a mighty stingy fellow, and never spent a cent on himself—and could easily send Nell all she wanted." And yet Gerald Rodman, knowing his brother's weak and mercurial nature, and knowing that he took no care in the welfare of any living soul but himself, would have laid his life down for him, because happy, careless Ned had Nellie's eyes and Nellie's mouth, and ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... atmosphere. If a glass tube and dish of mercury are attached to a board and the dish of mercury is inclosed in a case for protection from moisture and dirt, and further if a scale of inches or centimeters is made on the upper portion of the board, we have a mercurial barometer (Fig. 44). ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... no man of lofty genius or character has ever condescended to remain an actor. His lot pressed heavily even on so mercurial a trifler as David Garrick, who has given utterance to the feeling in lines as good perhaps as any ever written by a ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... If we compare the different groups of the animal kingdom, however, we find that the animals, too, bear this polarity as a formative element. The birds represent the spherical (dry, saline) pole; the ruminants the linear (moist, sulphurous) pole. The carnivorous quadrupeds form the intermediary (mercurial) group. As ur-phenomenal types we may name among the birds the eagle, clothed in its dry, silicic plumage, hovering with far-spread wings in the heights of the atmosphere, united with the expanses of space ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... every cave, gully, and recess, peered behind trees, penetrated copses of buckeye and manzanita, and listened. There was no sound but the faint soughing of the wind over the pines below him. For a while he paced backward and forward with a vague sense of being a sentinel, but his mercurial nature soon rebelled against this monotony, and soon the fatigues of the day began to tell upon him. Recourse to his whisky flask only made him the drowsier, until at last he was fain to lie down and roll himself up tightly in his blanket. ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... opinion, therefore," said Uncle Charlie, "that the 'Platonian's Mercurial Gazette' will make ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... to Grand Rapids that the intermittent, remittent, and pernicious fevers, which prevailed in that place and in the surrounding country, were generally treated by the resident physicians with mercurial or other cathartic remedies, followed or accompanied by Quinine and brandy or fermented drinks containing Alcohol, and opiates where they were supposed to be necessary. As I began to look into homoeopathy, I first prescribed Ipecac for ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... speaking, he conformed with the utmost docility, expressing no wish for greater or more frequent relaxation than consisted with his father's anxious and severe restrictions. When he did indulge in any juvenile frolics, his father had the candour to lay the whole blame upon his more mercurial companion, Darsie Latimer. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man presents strange, almost inexplicable, contrasts in character, as Bacon or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... removed the great irregularity arising from the unequal lengths of the oscillations; but the pendulum was affected by the tossing of a ship at sea, and was also subject to a variation in weight, depending on the parallel of latitude. Graham, the well-known clock-maker, invented the mercurial compensation pendulum, consisting of a glass or iron jar filled with quicksilver and fixed to the end of the pendulum rod. When the rod was lengthened by heat, the quicksilver and the jar which contained it were simultaneously expanded ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... third, in the discoloured mantle spangled all over, is Euphantaste, a well-conceited Wittiness, and employed in honouring the court with the riches of her pure invention. Her device, upon a Petasus, or Mercurial hat, a crescent; The word; "sic laus ingenii"; inferring that the praise and glory of wit doth ever increase, as doth ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... every eighty-eight days. There are, in reality, two of these lune-shaped regions, one at the east and the other at the west, each between 1,200 and 1,300 miles broad at the equator. At the sunward edge of these regions, once in eighty-eight days, or once in a Mercurial year, the sun rises to an elevation of forty-seven degrees, and then descends again straight to the horizon from which it rose; at the nightward edge, once in eighty-eight days, the sun peeps above the horizon and quickly sinks from sight again. The result is that, neglecting ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... who attended him was named Terro; he thought, by some peculiar train of reasoning, that he could cure him by applying a mercurial ointment to the chest, to which no one raised any objection. The rapid effect of the remedy delighted the two friends, but it frightened me, for in less than twenty-four hours the patient was labouring under great excitement of the brain. The physician said that he had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... with Tennyson and Browning, and wrote with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... far-off reverberation of that flutter was making itself felt in her heart now. It is so, no doubt, with many maiden ladies when they look back upon the past. But if she had ever felt a little sore at her sudden abandonment by the mercurial young man who had once touched her fancy, the tiny scratch had healed and been forgotten long ago. At the same time, although the idea of marriage after five-and-twenty years was too absurd to be dwelt on for a moment, the worthy lady could not help feeling how ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... departure—as from the message, it would appear he had not done—she determined to go round; and did so, following closely on the heels of the maid. Her ladyship had already wonderfully recovered her spirits. They were of a mercurial nature, liable to go up and down at touch; and Hamish had contrived ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... I understand you, but I fear that you do not understand me.' He went to where a self-acting mercurial air- pump was standing on a shelf. 'What is this curious arrangement of glass ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... wound around her head. Once she leaned back, her cheek against the sharp thwart, her gaze heavenward. She remained thus a long while, with body motionless, though her fingers continued to toy with the bit of heavy silk, as if keeping pace with some mercurial rush of thoughts. ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... his nature refined, critical, and yet imaginative, with its strong bias to pessimism, and its intolerance of all shams, and Cedric, with his facile, pleasure-loving temperament, at once indolent and mercurial—a creature of moods and tenses, as fiery as a Welshman, but full of ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... army may be towards its chief, is one question—whether either chief or army can be kept six months quiet,—another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood—tense, and tension;—which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always bright, and on, and would ever choose rather ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... thenceforth began to strive for separation from Great Britain. Early in 1796 Wolfe Tone proceeded to Paris to arrange for the despatch of a French auxiliary corps. On 20th April General Clarke, head of the Topographical Bureau at the War Office, agreed to send 10,000 men and 20,000 stand of arms. The mercurial Irishman encountered endless delays, and was often a prey to melancholy; but the news of Bonaparte's victories in Italy led him to picture the triumph of the French Grenadiers ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... to cure this disorder, have, in several instances, fallen victims to it's fury. Within this few days, a Dr. Rush has discovered this disorder is not the yellow fever of the West Indies and has applied an opposite mode of cure by copious bleedings, mercurial medicines, &c. with some success. What is truly extraordinary, the infection does not affect people ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... The mercurial Felix, who had more cleverness in him than people gave him credit for, smiled outright at this eminently feminine way ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... the insults are exhausted, quietude reigns. Some one makes a joke, all are laughing together in amity. From impending tragedy to comedy the work of a few minutes. A mercurial race indeed, but not a forgetful one. A black fellow never forgives a broken promise, and he can cherish a grudge from generation to generation as well as ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... sound was utterly unexpected, and completely incongruous. That was the wonder of her, Kennon reflected. Her mercurial temperament made life something that was continually exciting She was ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... too mercurial and too adventurous to remain long under the weight of fear or sadness. He reasoned as follows: To-day, as heretofore, I have little or nothing to lose; if I decide to go out from this house, I continue to pass for the ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... After performing prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being crowned on the Capitol. The only name she is known by is Corinne. The pair are soon introduced by the mercurial Erfeuil, and promptly fall in love with each other, Corinne seeking partly to fix her hold on Nelvil, partly to remove his Britannic contempt for Italy and the Italians, by guiding him to all the great spectacles of Rome ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... times, for several days together. These ulcers came without any apparent cause, have continued for many weeks, and have only been a little benefitted by rest, although he has applied many kinds of ointment, the last consisting of equal parts of mercurial and of the tar ointment. I applied the lunar caustic upon each ulcer, but not over the excoriation, and I enjoined the patient to leave the whole exposed ...
— An Essay on the Application of the Lunar Caustic in the Cure of Certain Wounds and Ulcers • John Higginbottom
... the Danube to that splendid lake!" cried the mercurial stripling; "and what is there in all the lordship of Stramen ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... aneroid barometer were securely bolted to the bulkhead, side by side, in such a position that they could be seen from outside by merely glancing through the window. And near them, hung in gimbals from a long bracket, was a very fine Fitzroy mercurial barometer. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... women who sup are mercurial things, and it was a gay leave-taking half an hour or so later in the little Moorish room at the head of the staircase. But Ernestine left her host without even appearing to see his outstretched hand, and he let her go without a word. Only when Francis would have followed ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that such severe penalties should be visited on a woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote. If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... indefatigable Rumford made an elaborate series of experiments on the conductivity of the substances used in clothing. His method was this:—A mercurial thermometer was suspended in the axis of a cylindrical glass tube ending with a globe, in such a manner that the centre of the bulb of the thermometer occupied the centre of the globe; the space between the internal surface of the globe and the bulb was filled with the substance whose conductive ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... degree of satisfaction and certainty, that iodine is an inestimable gift of God, by means of which we are enabled to free mankind from one of the most frightful complications, the psoric, sycosic and mercurial miasms. I have been induced by various signs to believe that, in white swelling of the knee ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... of mercurial dialogue, which in the South is a natural gift, is only learned under favourable conditions, and is often condemned by those who have it not, as a popinjay's accomplishment. Immediate cordiality to strangers ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... ever-busy imagination, his deep acquaintance with the world, owing to his sagacious penetration, and the advantageous position in which, through his birth and other circumstances, he had been placed, conjoined to the highly mercurial powers of his wit, rendered his conversation peculiarly interesting; enhanced, too, as it was by the charm of his fascinating manners. Far from being the surly, taciturn misanthrope generally imagined, I always found him dwelling on the lightest and merriest subjects; carefully shunning ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... time I had a severe attack of measles, which came very near carrying me off. I was left with anasarca, or general dropsy, and with weak eyes. To cure the former the physicians plied me, for a long time, with blue pill, and with mercurial medicine in other forms, and also with digitalis; and finally filled my stomach to overflowing with diuretic drinks. However, in spite of them all, I recovered during the next year; except that a foundation was laid for premature decay of the teeth, and for a severe eruptive disease. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... 'salivation,' including most of the symptoms enumerated above. May get eczema mercuriale and periostitis. Profound anaemia often a prominent symptom; neuritis not uncommon. If fumes of mercury inhaled, mercurial tremors develop. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... older than she, much more dignified, and of the reticent sort to which the mercurial and loquacious naturally tend to reveal their secrets. She knew all that Annie knew, dreamed, or hoped about Hunt; but had never happened to meet him, much to the annoyance of Annie, who had longed inexpressibly for the time when Lou should have seen him, and she herself be able to ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... of refinement and superiority which enveloped her. Yet she almost constantly accompanied her husband to rehearsal and play, where, for a time, her presence was grateful both to the pride and a more amiable passion of her mercurial lord. But the sight of that shy, shadowy figure haunting the wings, of those keen, critical eyes ever following the business of the stage, at last grew irksome to him, and he would fain have persuaded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the welling spontaneity of his music, even in moments of exalted or passionate utterance, was continually surprising: it was music not unworthy of the golden ages of the world. Yet MacDowell was a Celt, and his music is deeply Celtic—mercurial, by turns dolorous and sportive, darkly tragical and exquisitely blithe, and overflowing with the unpredictable and inexplicable magic of the Celtic imagination. He is unfailingly noble—it is, in the end, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... their power of germination if subjected to heat. But one observer now made another experiment, which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether. He took some of this boiled infusion that I have been speaking of, and by the use of a mercurial bath—a kind of trough used in laboratories—he deftly inverted a vessel containing the infusion into the mercury, so that the latter reached a little beyond the level of the mouth of the inverted vessel. ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... "Pshaw!" answered his mercurial companion; "he knows on which side his bread is buttered, and I warrant you has not lived so long among Englishmen, and by Englishmen, to quarrel with us for bearing an English mind. But see, our Scot has done ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... until the wretch Dumollard, who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the rest, which I remember well having seen there,—the "sudabit multum." and others,—also of our New York Professor Carnochan's handiwork, a specimen of which I once admired at the New York College. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Its pattern Nature gave, A sunbeam dancing in a dimpled wave; KIRKLAND alone such grace from Heaven could win, His features radiant as the soul within; That smile would let him through Saint Peter's gate While sad-eyed martyrs had to stand and wait. Here flits mercurial Farrar; standing there, See mild, benignant, cautious, learned Ware, And sturdy, patient, faithful, honest Hedge, Whose grinding logic gave our wits their edge; Ticknor, with honeyed voice and courtly grace; And Willard, larynxed like a double ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sick stranger remained unobstructed. He had no notion of teaching him; but the foreign boy in his languor and helplessness curiously fascinated him, perhaps from the very contrast of the passive, indolent, tropical nature with his own mercurial temperament. The Spaniard, or perhaps the old Mexican, seemed to predominate in Fernando, as far as could be guessed in one so weak and helpless. He seemed very quiet and inanimate, seldom wanting ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sign some twenty feet high and a whole block long. Emblazoned upon its broad surface was "Higbee's Hams." At one end and towering another ten feet or so above the mammoth letters was a white-capped and aproned chef abandoning his mercurial French temperament to an utter frenzy of delight over a "Higbee's Ham" which had apparently just been vouchsafed to him ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... mounted on a Tub, like unto the sign of the Indian Bacchus at the Tobacconist's, would they dance and stamp and foot it merrily—with plenty of fruit, salt fish, pork, roasted plantain, and so forth, to regale themselves withal, not forgetting punch and sangaree—quite forgetful, poor mercurial wretches, for the time being of Fetters and the Scourge and the Driver that would hurry them to their dire labour the morrow morn. Surely there never did exist so volatile, light-spirited, feather-brained ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... which I think few of the Mountebanks do. Sure I am that a Quack sold 21 Pills for 20 l. whereof the Patient took 4 at two doses, to the great hazard of his life, who then repairing to me for my advice, I by Tryal of one of them found them to be Mercurial, and wished him to return them back, but the Quack would not give him 10 s. for ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... obtained by remaining so long amidst such quantities of it. Then a siesta, and after drove to dine with our kind friends who procured permits for our admission to the "Fabrica del Tobago." After dinner to spend the evening with a Spanish family related to our mercurial friend, Don Caesar de Bazan. Had dancing, polkas and mazourkas being especial favorites; singing also, and music from La Norma and Sonnambula, exquisitely performed. At eleven o'clock were forced to tear ourselves ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay |
