"Oscillation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and spasmodic. There was a clearly perceptible interval—probably several minutes—between the first stirrings of consciousness and the full clarification of my faculties. I began to be aware of the rumble and oscillation of the train without realizing what was meant. Then I opened my eyes and blinked at the lamp, and vaguely noted the yellow oil washing to and fro in the bowl. Then the white square of the "Avis aux Voyageurs" caught ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... domestication in certain animals induces and occasions a capacity for change which is wanting in wild animals—the introduction of new causes occasioning new effects. For, though a certain degree of variability (normally, in all probability, only oscillation) exists in all organisms, yet domestic ones are exposed to new and different causes of variability, resulting in such striking divergencies as have been observed. Not even in this latter case, however, is it ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... factors, the secret of mechanical invisibility is constructed. Gracely, an American—following a long series of world-wide experiments, tests of current strength, frequencies of oscillation, suitable metals, etc., which I cannot detail here—in 1955 was the final developer of the mechanisms subsequently used ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... that the line should be clear. The powerful engine called Rochdale (No. 247 on the company's register) was attached to two carriages, with a guard's van behind. The first carriage was solely for the purpose of decreasing the inconvenience arising from the oscillation. The second was divided, as usual, into four compartments, a first-class, a first-class smoking, a second-class, and a second-class smoking. The first compartment, which was nearest to the engine, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... walk at each side and hold, some ropes fastened to the uprights of the scaffolding, others long forked poles engaged under its horizontal pieces. By these means equilibrium could be restored after any extra oscillation on the part of the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... of 23 feet diameter. He started from an enclosure near North Audley Street, and descended after having been seven or eight minutes in the air. After cutting himself away, he floated over Marylebone and Somers Town, and fell in a field near St. Pancras Old Church. The oscillation was so great, that he was thrown out of the Parachute, and narrowly escaped death. He seemed a good deal frightened, and said that the peril was too great for endurance. One of the stays of the machine having given way, his danger was increased. The next person who tried this dangerous experiment ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... which presses so seriously upon his character as a writer, I would remark that there is a sort of knowingness, the wit of which depends—1st, on the modesty it gives pain to; or, 2dly, on the innocence and innocent ignorance over which it triumphs; or, 3dly, on a certain oscillation in the individual's own mind between the remaining good and the encroaching evil of his nature—a sort of dallying with the devil—a fluxionary act of combining courage and cowardice, as when a man snuffs a candle with his fingers for the first time, or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the race, Christianity is an advance on Judaism, Protestant Christianity an advance on Roman Catholic Christianity, and Liberal and Rational Christianity an advance on Church Orthodoxy. But all such advances are subject to reaction and relapse. Reaction differs from relapse in this, that it is an oscillation, not a fall. Reaction is the backward swing of the wave, which will presently return, going farther forward than before. Relapse is the fall of the tide, which leaves the ships aground, and the beach uncovered. Reaction ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... up and down with him. It was a question he found keeping itself poignantly, yet pleasantly, in his mind, after he had got into his berth under the solidly slumberous Boyne, and inclining now to one solution and now to the other, with a delicate oscillation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was his own invention, and which has been generally imitated since his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end of a verse; the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound; each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza. Dr. Johnson is also a complete balance-master in the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... examining an installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control—a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were then exhausted to the highest attainable vacuum. Oscillation was set up by means of one carefully standardized electrical impulse, instead of by the clumsy finger-touch Seaton had used. The bearings, built of arenak and Osnomian jewels, were as strong as the axles of a truck and ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... Chinese. We have no ancestral sympathies with these exotic rhythms, no inherited aptitudes for their instant comprehension, no racial impulses whatever in harmony with them. But when they have become familiar through study, after a long residence in the Orient, how nervously fascinant the oscillation of the dance, and the singular swing ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... with the forefinger of his left hand (his right being occupied in holding, as usual, the conducting-stick) this key is lowered, the protuberance passes into the cup filled with quicksilver, a slight electric spark is emitted, and the stick placed at the other extremity of the copper ribbon makes an oscillation before its board. The communication of the fluid and the movement are quite simultaneous, no matter how ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... arm, C, arm, D, chord of half angle of oscillation of arm, D, and angles of arms, with ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... that amusements have gone through waves upward and downward, but that the amplitude of the waves is very small. It is true that the shows of the late Roman empire were very base, and that the great drama has gone very high by comparison, but the oscillation between the two entirely destroys anything like a steady advance in dramatic composition or dramatic art. This is a very instructive fact. It entirely negatives the current notion of progress as a sort of function of time which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... better protection and in accordance with a Roman custom lately introduced into Carthage, a man was fastened by the waist to a long chain let into the wall. His beard and nails had grown to an immoderate length, and he swayed himself from right to left with that continual oscillation which is characteristic of captive animals. As soon as he recognised Hamilcar he darted ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... of the great goods that come of having two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth; and it is not a bad thing in a family, that the pendulums of father and mother should differ in movement so far, that when the one is at one extremity of the swing, the other should be at the other, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.... It was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair, which I could not longer have endured without total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I received a new, but—O God!—how ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... pulled out of shape from the interior, so that it is slightly flattened and as quickly released; it will immediately regain its original convexity owing to the elasticity of the nervures. From this oscillation a ticking ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... from under the newer formations along the flank of the Ural chain. It would thus seem that they spread continuously across the whole breadth of Russia in Europe. Though almost everywhere undisturbed, they afford evidence of some terrestrial oscillation between the time of their formation and that of the Silurian rocks on which they rest, for they are found gradually to overlap ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... nothing else than a tuning fork whose motion is kept up electrically in such a way as to last indefinitely, provided that the elements of the pile are renewed gradually, and that from time to time the metallic contact is changed, which causes, at every oscillation, the current to pass from the pile into the magnet, which keeps up ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... physicist, born in Paris; distinguished for his studies in optics and problems connected with light; demonstrated the rate of the rotation of the globe by the oscillation ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Regularity of recurrence. Periodicity. — N. periodicity, intermittence; beat; oscillation &c. 314; pulse, pulsation; rhythm; alternation, alternateness, alternativeness, alternity[obs3]. bout, round, revolution, rotation, turn, say. anniversary, jubilee, centenary. catamenia[obs3];, courses, menses, menstrual flux. [Regularity of return] rota, cycle, period, stated ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... infirmities when she described him as lame on one of his hind legs, for both those members were so effectually out of joint as to render locomotion of the simplest kind a difficulty attended by violent oscillation. This was probably the circumstance that had recommended Dash as the object of Robbie's half-drunken pastime; and after a fruitless half-hour's exercise the tractable little creature, with a woeful expression of face, was at length poised on ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... taking in ever-increasing doses—a terrible narcotic, one of whose multitudinous effects is that of sending all the patient's thoughts circling around one central idea like planets round the sun. Painful and agonising as had been my suspense,—my oscillation between hope and dread,—during my wanderings with the Lovells, these wanderings had not been without their moments of comfort, for all of which I had been indebted to Sinfi. She would sit with me in an English lane, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went through misery to a ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... mechanism or the necessary manoeuvres. Neither shall we attempt to fix even approximately the future velocity of the aerial locomotive. Let us rather attempt to calculate the probable velocity of a locomotive gliding through the air, without the possibility of running off the rails, without any oscillation, without the least obstacle. Let us fancy such locomotive encountering on its way, in the midst, one of those atmospheric currents which travel at the rate of forty leagues an hour, and following that current; add together these formidable data, and your ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... minute or two more, the table at which they were seated, began to move up and down with a kind of vertical oscillation, and several things in the room began to slide about, by short, apparently purposeless jerks. Everything threatened to assume motion, and turn the library into a domestic chaos. Mrs. Elton declared afterwards that several books were thrown about the room. — But suddenly everything was as still ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the draught clevis to the whiffletree bolt to permit the independent oscillation of the whiffletree without affecting ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... somebody's fault. The most sensational of novels would be dry if couched in the language which some philosophers have seen fit to use in expressing their thoughts. He who defines "existence" as "the still and simple precipitate of the oscillation between beginning to be and ceasing to be" has done his best to alienate our affections from the ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... was indeed a new play of the first magnitude. Tarzan was entranced. Soon he discovered that by wriggling his body in just the right way at the proper time he could diminish or accelerate his oscillation, and, being a boy, he chose, naturally, to accelerate. Presently he was swinging far and wide, while below him, the apes of the tribe of Kerchak looked on ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... geometer completely established the perpetual variability of the planetary ellipses. He demonstrated that the extremities of their major axes make the circuit of the heavens; that independent of oscillation, the planes of their orbits undergo displacements by which their intersections with the plane of the terrestrial orbit are each year directed toward different stars. But in the midst of this apparant chaos, there is one element which remains ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the violently agitated waters around its base. The Frenchman, unable longer to endure the awful sight bowed his head upon his hands; another moment, and he was lost to sight in the circle of mist and spray that enveloped the foot of the column; then a strong oscillation began to be visible in the body of the water-spout; it swayed heavily to and fro; the cloud at its apex seemed to stoop, and the whole mass broke and fell, with a noise that might have been heard for miles. The sea, far around, was crushed into smoothness ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... [Regularity of recurrence] — N. periodicity, intermittence; beat; oscillation &c 314; pulse, pulsation; rhythm; alternation, alternateness, alternativeness, alternity^. bout, round, revolution, rotation, turn, say. anniversary, jubilee, centenary. catamenia^, courses, menses, menstrual flux. [Regularity of return] rota, cycle, period, stated time, routine; days ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he looked back upon these winter months, Piers could distinguish nothing clearly. It was a time of confused and obscure motives, of oscillation, of dreary conflict, of dull suffering. His correspondence with Olga, his meetings with her, had no issue. He made a thousand resolves; a thousand times he lost them. But for the day's work, which kept him in an ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... held him by the heels and was standing him on his head. Then he rolled him over and pressed his chest, with that oscillation which is helpful in restoring seemingly drowned persons, while the breathless George stood idly by watching everything with straining eyes. He could do nothing but ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... firmly to the carriage door and the oscillation of the cab caused her to nod violently, but it was not in assent to Christopher's proposition. She appeared to be turning something over in ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... drop of water, appear like mere animated globules, free, single, and of various colours, sporting about in every direction. Numerous species resemble pearly or opaline cups or vases, fringed round the margin with delicate fibres, that are in constant oscillation. Some of these are attached by spiral tendrils; others are united by a slender stem to one common trunk, appearing like a bunch of hare-bells; others are of a globular form, and grouped together in a definite pattern, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... command of Sir James Clark Ross. These instruments were similar to the ordinary portable barometers, and differed from them only in the mode of their suspension and the necessary contraction of the tubes to prevent oscillation from the motion of the ship. The barometer on shipboard should be suspended on a gimbal frame, which ought not to swing too freely, but rather so as to deaden oscillations by some degree of friction. To the upper portion ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... equilibrium should be altogether lost. As everything in the universe is in movement, and as all the forces which are contained in matter act one against the other and counterbalance one another, all is done by a kind of oscillation; of which the mean points are those to which we refer as being the ordinary course of nature, while the extremes are the periods which deviate from that course most widely. And, as a matter of fact, with animals as much as with plants, a time of ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the kettle dreamily. The fire glowed and flashed and sank, and glowed again. Now he could distinctly see a serpent twisting among the embers. The clock ticked in measured unison with the slow oscillation of the flame serpent. The wind blew hard against the panes and sent a sudden ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... scientists that when the period of oscillation of the ship and the period of the wave are nearly the same, the turning over of the ship is an approximate consequence, and thus the wave to such a ship would appear more formidable than to another ship with a different ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... full share o' a' feelin's belangin' to fallen human natur'," said Mrs Mellis, with a slow horizontal oscillation of the head. "But ye jist come an' see wi' yer ain een, an' syne jeedge for yersel': it 's nae ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... often observed how they turn against any object which has chanced to hurt them, or which has annoyed them by regular and repeated motions, how they start at the sudden appearance or oscillation of some unlooked-for thing, at an unusual light, a colour, a stone, a plant, at the fluttering of branches, of clothes, or weathercocks, at the rush of water, at the slightest movement or sound in the twilight, or in the darkness of night. They look about, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... blankness falls upon him which makes the world a waste, and life a vain exertion. This follows his first serious contemplation of the abstract. In gazing, or even in attempting to gaze, on the ineffable mystery of his own higher nature, he himself causes the initial trial to fall on him. The oscillation between pleasure and pain ceases for—perhaps an instant of time; but that is enough to have cut him loose from his fast moorings in the world of sensation. He has experienced, however briefly, the greater life; and he ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... that he dared not watch too closely what followed. Inured as he thought he was to the tricks of Hyperspace, to acceleration and anti-gravity, the oscillation of that swinging seat, the weird swaying of the half-recumbent figure, did things to his sight and to his sense of balance which seemed perilous in the extreme. But when the groan broke through the hum of Ali's mysterious machine, all of them knew ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... certain knowledge as to whether changes in the periods at which the stream becomes visible, or the 'retardations' of the phenomena of which I have already spoken, indicate a regular precession of oscillation of the nodes — that is to say, of the points of intersection of the Earth's orbit and of that of the ring; or whether this ring or zone attains so considerable a degree of breadth from the irregular grouping and distances apart of the small bodies, that it requires several days for ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... a brass frame as shown in Fig. 6. This may be made of wood, although brass is better, as the eddy currents set up in a conductor surrounding a magnet tend to stop oscillation of the magnet. (The core is magnetized when a current flows through the instrument.) The brass frame is wound with magnet wire, the size depending on the number of amperes to be measured. Mine is wound with two layers of No. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... You must sit quite in the middle, or run the perpetual chance of capsizing. A little alarming, also, is it to look out on the stone-strewn furrow, over which the mules carry you safely enough; and when you have become reconciled to the oscillation, and have learned to trim the boat in which you have embarked, it is long before your ear becomes accustomed to the stunning sound of a hundred little bells fastened to the mules' heads. "Do take them off," said we, after half ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the long expected, impossible, amazing reality. When I had deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The message was simple: "Have received all. Await ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... was not always poised. It swung between its vision of transparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake. There are at least four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... train roared and flashed on its invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes of ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... of knowledge based on the analysis of the idea of Disorder—Two opposed forms of order: the problem of genera and the problem of laws—The idea of "disorder" an oscillation of the intellect between the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... leave out, against all the other official prestige and Court of St. James's. On such minor and personal incidents (so to call them,) often depend the great growths and turns of civilization. This moment of a woman and a queen surely swung the grandest oscillation of modern history's pendulum. Many sayings and doings of that period, from foreign potentates and powers, might well be dropt in oblivion by America—but never this, if I could ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Principal Forbes to the master of his later studies of men and the means of life, Thomas Carlyle. The religious instinct so conspicuous in him was a heritage from Scotland; thence the combination of shrewd common-sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnest; the restlessness, the fervour, the impetuosity—all these are the tokens of a Scotsman of parts, and were highly developed in ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... muddy estuary, into which floating carcasses were swept. At Punta Gorda, in Banda Oriental, I found an alternation of the Pampaean estuary deposit, with a limestone containing some of the same extinct sea-shells; and this shows either a change in the former currents, or more probably an oscillation of level in the bottom of the ancient estuary. Until lately, my reasons for considering the Pampaean formation to be an estuary deposit were, its general appearance, its position at the mouth of the existing great river the Plata, and ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... character as a writer, I would remark that there is a sort of knowingness, the wit of which depends, firstly, on the modesty it gives pain to; or, secondly, on the innocence and innocent ignorance over which it triumphs; or thirdly, on a certain oscillation in the individual's own mind between the remaining good and the encroaching evil of his nature—a sort of dallying with the devil—a fluxionary art of combining courage and cowardice, as when a man snuffs a candle ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that in a treatise entering into so high mathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word 'swing,' expressing the action of a body liable to continuous arrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify the oscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in which the motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... containing either water or methylic alcohol. Three or four gas jets, one of which is shown at E, are arranged around the porous vessel, as close as possible, but in such a way as not to touch it during the oscillation of the beam. These gas jets communicate with a gasometer tilled with hydrogen, the bell of which is so charged as to furnish a jet of sufficient strength. Experience will indicate the best place to give the gas jets, but, in general, it is well to locate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... remains always an idea that reality can never completely reach. In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one of these elements over the other, and the highest point to which experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between two principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the advantage. Ideal beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible, because there can only be one single equilibrium; on the contrary, experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... phrases, or foisting showy nonsense upon them for his own purposes, or simply laughing at them in his sleeve. But, in a purely literary sense, this ambiguous hovering between two meanings, this oscillation between the ironical and the serious, is always amusing, and sometimes delightful. Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in literature, by the ironical method; and tell the humorist, with an air of moral disapproval, that they never know whether he is in jest or in earnest. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... little or nothing was pleasantly uttered, and served perhaps as well as something cleverer to pass a faint electric flash between common mind and mind. The slouch, the hands-in-pocket mood, the toe-and-heel oscillation upon the hearth-rug—those flying signals that self was at home to nobody but himself, had for the time vanished; desire to please had tied up the black dog in his kennel, and let the white one out. By keeping close in the protective ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... this modulator, add an oscillation—Let's see, where's that slide rule, what quantities ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... imagination we behold them now, trudging gravely along behind the moving office fixtures, their goggle eyes cast down in Christian meditation, their horizontal ears flopping solemnly in unison with their measured tread. Ever and anon the leader halts, uprolls the speculative eye, arrests the oscillation of the ears, laying them rigidly back along the neck, exalts the conscious tail, drops the lank jaw, and warbles a psalm of praise that shakes the blind hills from their eternal repose. His companions take up the parable in turn, "and the ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... appeared as "doctrines" and offered themselves for incorporation with the "faith."[465] The limits of the latter therefore seem to be indefinitely extended, whilst on the other hand tradition, and polemics too in many cases, demanded an adherence to the shortest formula. The oscillation between this brief formula, the contents of which, as a rule, did not suffice, and that fulness, which admitted of no bounds at all, is characteristic of the old Catholic Fathers we have mentioned. In the second place, these fathers felt quite as much need of a rational proof in ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... seen those symptoms before," said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. "Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur. She would like advice, but is not sure that the matter is not too delicate for communication. And yet even here we may discriminate. When a woman has been seriously wronged by a man, she no longer ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... pyrometers agree; the changeable nature of the atmosphere; the uncertainty as to the true level of the sea; the extreme difficulty of measuring accurately the distance between the point of suspension and the centre of oscillation, and even of finding that centre; also the variety of terrestrial attraction, from which cause the motions of the pendulum are also liable to variation, even in the same latitude. In pursuing his researches, Capt. Kater discovered that the motions of the pendulum are affected ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The convex surface, which is movable and forms part of the cylinder, serves as a port face, and has two ports in it communicating with the two ends of the cylinder. The concave surface, which is fixed and plays ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... is an exceedingly animated speaker, resembling in this particular Mr. M'Duffie. M. Constant, however, has a different motion from the last gentleman, his movement being a constant oscillation over the edge of the tribune, about as fast, and almost as regular, as that of the pendulum of a large clock. It resembles that of a sawyer in the Mississippi. General Lafayette speaks with the steadiness and calm ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... accumulated during subsidence. I may add, that the only ancient tertiary formation on the west coast of South America, which has been bulky enough to resist such degradation as it has as yet suffered, but which will hardly last to a distant geological age, was deposited during a downward oscillation of level, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back, distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute, not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... fury by the people of the country which they were traversing; and with good reason, since the law of self-preservation had now obliged the fugitive Tartars to plunder provisions, and to forage wherever they passed. In this respect their condition was a constant oscillation of wretchedness; for, sometimes, pressed by grinding famine, they took a circuit of perhaps a hundred miles, in order to strike into a land rich in the comforts of life; but in such a land they were sure to find ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... merit may not indeed be great, but whose feeling is, I think, genuine. Whatever were his faults, and they were not few, hypocrisy was not one of them. His nature was fierce and honest. He might boast, but he could not pretend. His oscillation between the reformed and the Romish church can hardly have had other cause than a vacillating conviction. It could not have served any prudential end that we can see, to turn catholic in the reign of Elizabeth, while in prison for killing in a duel a player ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... whose influence on her character he found himself beginning to fear. But he wished also that she should be repelled to some extent by the merciless rigidity she would find at Northampton, and thus, after an oscillation or two come to rest in the quiet eclecticism of that middle ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... and other infidels, kicking violently against this standing miracle (because, if not so in itself, yet, according to Bishop Butler's just explanation concerning miraculous per de-rivationem as recording a miraculous power of vision), have by oscillation clung to the fixture of basis, and rejected it; for now Gibbon denies that the Arabs have held this constant tenor of life; they have changed it, he asserts, in large and notorious cases. Well, then, if they have, then ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man to ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... chronometer and we make the same sand measure over again the duration of a second equal period, so when the volcanic force has remoulded the form of a continent and the adjoining sea-bottom, the same materials are made to do duty a second time. It is true that at each oscillation of level the solid rocks composing the original continent suffer some fresh denudation, and do not remain unimpaired like the wooden and glass framework of the hour-glass, still the wear and tear suffered by the larger area exposed to subaerial ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... recollection of a class of gentlemen who used to attach an heterogeneal collection of massive seals and keys to one end of a chain, and a small church-clock to the other. The chain then formed a pendulum in front of their small-clothes, and the dignified oscillation of the appendages was considered to distinguish the gentleman. They were also used as auxiliaries in argument; for whenever an hiatus occurred in the discussion, the speaker, by having resort to his watch-chain, could frequently confound his adversary by commencing a series of rapid gyrations. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... for more than the bare necessities. When the physicist describes the pendulum in terms of a formula such as t 2pi[squareroot(l/g)] he exhibits a similar discernment. He has found that the time occupied by an oscillation of any pendulum may be calculated exclusively in terms of its length and the acceleration due to gravity. The monkey's higher proficiency and the formula alike represent a knowledge that is free in the sense that it is contained in terms that require no single ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... repairing workshop. Peter Dreyer managed this workshop, and there was no fault to find with his management; he was energetic and vigilant. He was not capable, however, of managing work on a large scale, for his mind was in constant oscillation. In spite of his abilities he ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of one hundred pairs of plates (10.) with this ring, the impulse at the galvanometer, when contact was completed or broken, was so great as to make the needle spin round rapidly four or five times, before the air and terrestrial magnetism could reduce its motion to mere oscillation. ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... Noko in French and the woman answering him. Her heart beat so that it well-nigh strangled her. But he did not come in. Presently the rumbling and unloading were over, and there was no sound but the oscillation of the vessel as it floundered in the tide with short beats, until the turning, and then the motion grew more endurable. If she could only see! But from her window there was nothing save an expanse of water, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a curious fact that terrestrial magnetism and the boreal auroras exhibit an oscillation parallel to that of the solar spots, and apparently the same occurs ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... contents wheedled and teased by a skillful spoon and bribed with salt and butter and a sprinkle of parsley. And even as we watch, the golden mass melts together; sighs and quivers, and thickens into wrinkles; bodies itself slowly into form and shape, under crafty oscillation; and is at last dexterously rolled out, a burnished ingot, upon the long platter, with a flourish that bespeaks practice and confidence. The stiff face of the old woman involuntarily relaxes with honest ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... shown that instead of occasional vibrations, with long intermediate periods of rest, we have in reality short intervals of rest with long periods of vibration, or rather perhaps that the crust of the earth is in constant tremor, with more violent oscillation from time to time. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the unknown. "It is only the imprudent who are lost. Olivari, who perished at Orleans, rose in a paper 'Montgolfier;' his car, suspended below the chafing-dish, and ballasted with combustible materials, caught fire; Olivari fell, and was killed! Mosment rose, at Lille, on a light tray; an oscillation disturbed his equilibrium; Mosment fell, and was killed! Bittorf, at Mannheim, saw his balloon catch fire in the air; and he, too, fell, and was killed! Harris rose in a badly constructed balloon, the ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... large telescope at the house of the latter at Kew. They determined to reinvestigate the motion of g Draconis; the telescope, constructed by George Graham (1675-1751), a celebrated instrument-maker, was affixed to a vertical chimneystack, in such manner as to permit a small oscillation of the eyepiece, the amount of which, i.e. the deviation from the vertical, was regulated and measured by the introduction of a screw and a plumb-line. The instrument was set up in November 1725, and observations on g Draconis were made on the 3rd, 5th, 11th, and 12th of December. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was hers. She moved to the other side of the dark hall in such a state of mind that she could hardly have told whether the magnetism of her brain was in the cerebrum or in the cerebellum or in a state of oscillation between ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... as constantly exhibited in lectures. Yet, it may fairly be regarded as a mere abstract principle, until the late Mr. Bramah, by substituting a pump instead of the smaller column, converted it into a most valuable and powerful engine.—The principle of the convertibility of the centres of oscillation and suspension in the pendulum, discovered by Huygens more than a century and a half ago, remained, until within these few years, a sterile, though most elegant proposition; when, after being hinted at by Prony, and distinctly pointed out by Bonenberger, it was employed by Captain Kater as the foundation ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... then certain: while the arts, all this time, are simply, as I said at first, the exponents of each phase of its moral state, and no more control it in its political career than the gleam of the firefly guides its oscillation. It is true that their most splendid results are usually obtained in the swiftness of the power which is hurrying to the precipice; but to lay the charge of the catastrophe to the art by which it is illumined, is to find a cause for the cataract in the hues of its iris. It is true ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... college; yet in this country, practically governed as it is now by universal suffrage, every man who does his duty must exercise political functions. And, if the evils which are inseparable from the good of political liberty are to be checked, if the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom; it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientifical questions; to be as ashamed of undue ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... circuit has a "natural period of oscillation" in which its electric charge vibrates. It is found possible to "tune," or "syntonize," the aerial rod or wire of a receiving station with a transmitter. A vertical wire about 200 feet in length, ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... cut off. This was a source of considerable encouragement to Marconi, and his apparatus was further improved so that the resonance of the circuit and the variation of the capacity of the primary circuit of the oscillation transformer made for increased efficiency. The coherer was still retained and by the end of 1900 enough had been accomplished to warrant Marconi in arranging for trans-Atlantic experiments between Poldhu, Cornwall and the United States, stations ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... answer you: but my mind has certain moments of repose, or rather of oscillation, which I would not for the world disturb. Music, eloquence, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... which it was connected by means of an inconceivably light—looking and yet very primitive bridge. It was formed of a single, broad and thick plank of the tulip wood. This was forty feet long, and spanned the interval between shore and shore with a slight but very perceptible arch, preventing all oscillation. From the southern extreme of the lake issued a continuation of the rivulet, which, after meandering for, perhaps, thirty yards, finally passed through the "depression" (already described) in the middle of the southern declivity, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the barometer is only .084. So regular is the oscillation, as likewise the variations of the magnetic needle, that the hour may be known within fifteen minutes by the barometer or compass. Such is the clock-like order of Nature under the equator, that even the rains, the most irregular ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... the latter—he has his answer to seek. But so far I dare hazard a reply to the question—In what other sense can the words be interpreted?— beseeching you, however, to take what I am about to offer but as an attempt to delineate an arc of oscillation—that the eulogy of St. Paul is in nowise contravened by the opinion to which I incline, who fully believe the Old Testament collectively, both in the composition and in its preservation, a great and precious gift of Providence;— who find in it all ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... second unit of time, we perceive that they point to a configuration in which the double linkage is between the carbon atoms 1 and 6, and the single linkage between 1 and 2. Therefore, according to Kekule, the double linkages are in a state of continual oscillation, and if his dynamical notion of valency, or a similar hypothesis, be correct, then the difference between the 1.2 and 1.6 di-derivatives rests on the insufficiency of his formula, which represents the configuration during one set of oscillations only. The difference is only apparent, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... women like to have their own way—but they like at the same time to have difficulties to surmount and to conquer; otherwise half the gratification is lost. Although tempests are to be deplored, still a certain degree of oscillation an motion are requisite to keep fresh and clear the lake of matrimony, the waters of which otherwise soon stagnate and become foul, and without some contrary currents of opinion between a married couple such a stagnation must ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... worthy friend, for it explains all the phenomena of caloric. Heat is only molecular movement, a single oscillation of the particles of a body. When the break is put on a train it stops. But what becomes of the movement which animated it? Why do they grease the axles of the wheels? In order to prevent ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... with it. For it is instructive to mark, in tracing the history of philosophic speculation, that its course resembles not so much the uniform current of a stream, as the alternate flowing and ebbing of the tide; or, if we may change the figure, that its movement may be likened to the oscillation of a pendulum, which no sooner reaches its highest elevation on the one side, than it acquires a tendency to rush to the opposite extreme on the other. There can be little doubt that the recent revival of speculative "Idealism" was the result, at least in ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... putting forth its best efforts, the thing struck two with as much clatter as though some one had been hitting an iron pot with a cudgel. That done, the pendulum returned to its right-left, right-left oscillation. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol |
