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Precipitate   Listen
verb
Precipitate  v. i.  
1.
To dash or fall headlong. (R.) "So many fathom down precipitating."
2.
To hasten without preparation. (R.)
3.
(Chem.) To separate from a solution as a precipitate. See Precipitate, n.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Precipitate" Quotes from Famous Books



... Afrikander leaders at the Cape of the insincerity of their original "mediation." In dialectics Mr. Fischer, Mr. Smuts, and Mr. Reitz are quite able to hold their own with Mr. Hofmeyr, Dr. Te Water, and Mr. Schreiner. They have not forgotten the Cape Prime Minister's precipitate benediction alike of President Krueger's Bloemfontein scheme and of the seven years' franchise of the Volksraad proposals. They remember also how the "Hofmeyr compromise" was proclaimed in the Bond and the ministerial press ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... of early hostilities, and there was a general call on the Government to anticipate the blow, when relations became strained between the two countries in 1903. The Tokio Government was anxious not to precipitate the war, for the organization of the army required some months for completion, but the feeling in the navy, army, and civil population forced its hand. After a brief delay of negotiations, during which both parties ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... Fenians on reaching Canadian soil was to "throw out their skirmishers into a hop field," where the Hops gathered by them were of the precipitate and retrogressive kind ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various

... had been its end. On his abrupt departure she had followed him to the station but the train was gone; and in travelling to Baden in search of him she had met his rival, whose reproaches led to an altercation, and the death of both. Of that precipitate scene of passion and crime Fitzpiers had known nothing till he saw an account of it in the papers, where, fortunately for himself, no mention was made of his prior acquaintance with the unhappy lady; nor was ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... earth are composed of metallic, mineral, and geological substances, being materialized or actually created in the atmosphere by an alchemico-organic process from zones or belts periodically open, which precipitate their contents in the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... very sorry he has come home,' wrote her correspondent, 'and yet if he had stayed in India there must have been an investigation on the spot. A public inquiry is inevitable, and the knowledge of his arrival in the country will precipitate matters. From all I hear I much fear that there is no chance of the result being favourable to him. You have asked me to write the unvarnished truth, to be brutal even, remember. His delinquencies are painfully notorious, and I apprehend that the last sixpence he owns will be answerable. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... soon see as silent a change as that in "The Rehearsal," of King Usher and King Physician. It may well be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of Newcastle—those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person. But there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did t'other day: "Je ne scais pas," dit il, "je ne scaurois m'exprimer, mais il a un certain tatillonage." If one could conceive a dead body hung in chains, always ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole

... marvelled now at Blood's restraint where Bishop was concerned. The Deputy-Governor looked round and met the lowering hostile glances of those fierce eyes. Instinct warned him that his life at that moment was held precariously, that an injudicious word might precipitate an explosion of hatred from which no human power could save him. Therefore he said nothing. He inclined his head in silence to the Captain, and went blundering and stumbling in his haste down that ladder to the sloop ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... terms, not meaning to extend it to the guard he had set upon Theodore, but forgetting it. The domestics, officious to obey so peremptory a Prince, and urged by their own curiosity and love of novelty to join in any precipitate chase, had to a man left the castle. Matilda disengaged herself from her women, stole up to the black tower, and unbolting the door, presented herself ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole

... hat broken and rumpled, and his sanguine countenance looking more sanguinary than I had ever before seen it, and his speech, also, in the highest degree inflammatory. His face and forehead were as blotched and swollen as if he had just run his head into a hornets' nest, and his manner as precipitate as if the whole swarm was ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... had no sufficient evidence of it to justify his taking any action against the men that he suspected. He did not even dare to express his suspicions, for he knew that if he were to do so, or even to intimate that he felt suspicion, the only effect would be to precipitate the consummation of the treachery that he feared, and perhaps drive some to abandon him who had not yet fully resolved on doing so. He was obliged, therefore, though suffering the greatest anxiety and alarm, to suppress all indications of his uneasiness, except to ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... once more commanded to put his son to death; but the seventh Wazir came in to him and kissing the ground before him, said, "O King, have patience with me whilst I speak these words of good counsel to thee; how many patient and slow-moving men unto their hope attain, and how many who are precipitate fall into shameful state! Now I have seen how this damsel hath profligately excited the King by lies to horrible and unnatural cruelties; but I his Mameluke, whom he hath overwhelmed with his favours and bounties, do proffer him true and loyal rede; for that I, O ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... her opposition to the match. The variants of the Marquis of the Sun are found chiefly among European nations,[205] whose history, institutions, and habits of thought lead them to attach great value to paternal authority. In the tasks performed in maerchen of this type, and the precipitate flight which usually takes place on the wedding night from the ogre's secret wrath, it would seem that we have a reminiscence of the archaic institutions of marriage by purchase and marriage by capture,—both alike incidents of the period when mother-right (as the ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... to me such sheer folly, such egregious lunacy, to precipitate one's self into the unknown, seeing that one can hardly expect the Giver of Life to welcome the soul He has not called. And I have often wondered what depths of misery, of shame, must overwhelm the uninvited soul in what someone ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... three thoughts passed through my mind; not as I detail them here, but following each other like quick flashes of lightning. My first impulse was to urge my horse forward, trusting to his superior weight to precipitate the lighter animal from the ledge. Had I been worth a bridle and spurs, I should have adopted this plan; but I had neither, and the chances were too desperate without them. I abandoned it for another. I would hurl my tomahawk at the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... has been reached there come difficulties and dangers, which, if we put Shakespeare for the moment out of mind, are easily seen. An immediate and crushing counter-action would, no doubt, sustain the interest, but it would precipitate the catastrophe, and leave a feeling that there has been too long a preparation for a final effect so brief. What seems necessary is a momentary pause, followed by a counter-action which mounts at first slowly, and afterwards, as it gathers force, with ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... the future. The wisest chemist does not know why the simplest chemical experiment results as it does. Take, for example, a water-like solution of nitrate of silver, and let fall into it a few drops of another water-like solution of hydrochloric acid; a white insoluble precipitate of chloride of silver is formed. Any tyro in chemistry could have predicted the result with absolute certainty. But the prediction would have been based purely upon previous empirical knowledge—solely upon the fact that the thing had been done before over and over, always with the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... composed 3000-2500 B. C., and that everything else is written in a learned dead Brahmanical language, a precipitate of the Veda language, and certainly very late: scarcely anything ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. What would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... which the senior clerk had torn up. The correctness of it established the fact of one part of my assertions, and that nothing but malice could have warranted its having been destroyed. Mr Drummond felt more than he chose to acknowledge; he was now aware that he had been too precipitate; even my having refused the money assumed a different appearance; he was puzzled and mortified. Few people like to acknowledge that they have been in error. Mr Drummond, therefore, left his wife to examine further into the matter, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... of things, some are afraid that the authors of your miseries may be led to precipitate their further designs by the hints they may receive from the very arguments used to expose the absurdity of their system, to mark the incongruity of its parts, and its inconsistency with their own ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the time that he was being far too precipitate, but he seemed so confident that I didn't interfere. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various

... will not dispute the point, though I am sure I am right," returned Lydyard. "But be not too precipitate. Since the apprentice has seen you, some alteration may be necessary in your plans. Come with me into the house. A few ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... foundations of the bridge; but he reasoned that they would scarcely suspect the object of Gordon's party and that, in any case, they were not organized or equipped to resist it. Moreover, the strategic point was four miles above the bridge site, and the surveying corps would hardly precipitate a clash, particularly since there was ample room for them to ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... something, and at once. He had read of serpents and travellers' encounters with them, but no memory of what was to be done under such circumstances came. Shoot? He dared not. He would be more likely to kill the girl than the serpent, and in any event would precipitate the calamity. Neither was there any way to awaken the girl and drag her from peril, for the slightest movement upon her part would bring the poisoned ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill

... ground for his own feet. However, they tossed their heads with menacing looks, often making slight feints of butting or pushing forward; but they took care not to come into actual contact, knowing well that the slightest force might precipitate one or both from their perilous position. Neither could they attempt to walk backward or turn round on so narrow a spot. Thus they again stood quite still for above an hour, occasionally uttering low sounds, ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston

... by the favor of a multitude, think himself under an obligation to gratify and submit to all the wishes of those who, from a fugitive and an exile, had created him general of so great an army and given him the command of such a fleet. But, as became a great captain, he opposed himself to the precipitate resolutions which their rage led them to, and, by restraining them from the great error they were about to commit, unequivocally saved the commonwealth. For if they had then sailed to Athens, all Ionia and the islands and the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... time, adopted by him, which, however strange and precipitate it appeared, a knowledge of the previous state of his mind may enable us to account for satisfactorily. He had now, for two years, been drawing upon the admiration of the public with a rapidity and success which seemed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... Sugar.—Place a solution of the substance supposed to contain grape sugar in a test tube and add a few drops of a dilute solution of copper sulphate. Then add sodium hydroxide solution until the precipitate which first forms is redissolved and a clear blue liquid obtained. Heat the upper portion of the liquid slowly to near the boiling point. A little below the boiling point the blue color disappears and a yellow-red precipitate is formed. ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... path ran along its shores, which were of great richness and beauty, and the estuary itself lay to our west and was about two miles across; on the east a series of rich undercliff limestone hills gradually rose into lofty and precipitate ranges, between which and the estuary was the fertile valley along which we wound our weary way; while groups of graceful acacias with their airy and delicate foliage gave a great charm to this beautiful spot. We moved slowly along, and ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... Phil's flight up the path, and noted the harmless fall of the final shots about her. She waved her hand from the doorstep, commented derisively upon the enemy's marksmanship, and flung the door open with a bang. A gust of cold air seemed to precipitate Phil into the room. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... precipitate departure from the Villa Cordouan at Royan, Dormer Colville and Barebone had been in company. They had stayed together, in one friend's house or another. Sometimes they enjoyed the hospitality of a chateau, and at others put up with the scanty accommodation ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman

... and their guests were heard to return, and ascend to their respective apartments, Lord Vane's gleeful voice echoing through the house. Mr. Carlyle came into his wife's dressing-room, and Madame Vine would have made a precipitate retreat. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... to North Bloomfield was very steep, and was made with grinding of brakes and precipitate speed. Arrived at the post-office, Dr. Mason and the two gamblers left the coach; and a store-keeper and two surveyors employed by the great Malakoff Mining Company took passage to Nevada City. In those halcyon days of hydraulic mining, the Malakoff, employing fifty men, was ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall

... country without seeing or sending to Mrs. Rivers. If she should receive me with coldness—why should I have exposed myself to the chance of such a reception? It would have been better to have waited for Rivers's arrival; I have been too precipitate; my warmth of temper has misled me: what had I to do to seek his family? I would give the world to retract my message, though it was only to let her know I was arrived; that her son was well, and that she might every hour expect him ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... The master of the inn said the funeral must take place at sunset, and Louisa shed bitter tears in the little room which was given her, while the corpse was being prepared for interment, for these precipitate funeral arrangements added greatly to Louisa's grief. Composed but deadly pale she followed Arthur's remains to the grave—his only mourner; there was no minister to be had, but Louisa could not see him buried thus, so read herself a portion ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings

... minute after, for no apparent reason, the crowd around Tristram surged forward to the bulwarks, and he was carried along with the rush. Then he found himself swaying unsteadily down a flight of steps and calling to the men behind not to hustle and precipitate him into one or other of the two longboats that lay below. Into the nearer of these his company swept him, and poured in at his heels until the gunwale was nearly level with the water. The rowers pushed off in the nick of time, and pulled their freight slowly across the sullen tide, while the rain ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... persuasion of friends, that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all." It is possible, too, that he had long been intimate with his debtor's family, and that Mary had previously made an impression upon him. If not, his was the most preposterously precipitate of poets' marriages; for a month after leaving home he presented a mistress to his astounded nephews and housekeeper. The newly-wedded pair were accompanied or quickly followed by a bevy of the bride's ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... to his dressing-room, to put on his state robes for the great court feast, the Duchess of Richmond returned to her own apartments, trembling and quivering with rage. She traversed these with precipitate haste, and entered her boudoir, where Earl Douglas was ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time: and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is than the transient and uncertain favour of a court. If once we are ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... while Louis XIV. was precluded from enforcing the decrees of the Pope as his predecessors had enforced them. The Jansenist party became much stronger, and only a slight incident was required to precipitate a new crisis. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... them at Philae. They ignite and bound into brilliance like sparks of meeting metal and flint. Ah, but the tropics are precipitate!" ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... eyes and threw back her head on the armchair. When she heard the noise of the carriage coming near the house, she opened the second letter. As soon as she saw the altered handwriting of it, the lines precipitate and uneven, the distracted look of the address, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... speculations, impossible to solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and a kind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteries surrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, though friendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe, ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... rashness, walking without fear, as is to be observed in Peter, when he slipped so foully. When through their want of circumspection, they precipitate themselves into danger, and cast themselves among their enemies' hands, is it any wonder, that it go not with them as they would; and that they provoke God to leave them to themselves; that they may know what they are, and learn afterwards not to tempt the Lord, and ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)

... wavered. Then Jill gave a shriek of laughter, and we broke and scattered something after the manner of a mounted reconnoitring patrol that has unexpectedly "bumped into" a battalion of the enemy. Our retreat, however, was not exactly precipitate, and we endeavoured to invest it with a semblance of hypocrisy not usually thought necessary in warfare; but it was in no sense dignified, and only a child, too young to differentiate between right and wrong, ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... no one can enter the cavern except by allowing the waves to precipitate him to the bottom of a subterranean lake, after ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... hills where dead sticks stand forlorn and only the fireweed blooms. Of rememberable roads the last stage of our journey to the Great Water is the one I have now in mind. It is the longest carry, two miles or less, sharply down hill, though less precipitate than the river, which, after many days of idling, now flings itself impatiently toward the shore. We linger where it makes its first great leap. Many have come thus far from the south, and, looking on the shallow pool beyond, have decided that there is no profit in going farther; or ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... the barrancas near Meacatlan; a narrow path, overhanging a steep precipice, and bordering a perpendicular hill, with just room for the horses' feet, affording the comfortable assurance that one false step would precipitate you to the bottom. I confess to having held my breath, as one by one, and step by step, no one looking to the right or the left, our gowns occasionally catching on a bush, with our whole train we wound slowly down ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... substance from algarobilla, dividivi, oak bark, pomegranate, myrabolarms, and valonea. The acid is obtained by precipitating it with water from a hot alcoholic extraction of the plants referred to, and recrystallising the precipitate from hot alcohol. Another method of preparation consists in boiling the disintegrated plants with dilute hydrochloric acid, washing the residue, and extracting with hot alcohol, from which the acid will then crystallise. ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser

... moment, the satisfaction of knowing that I am in a neighboring chateau, in the midst of a gathering of brilliant men and lovely young women, an inexhaustible subject for jokes. I feel, moreover, since my flank movement (as it is customary in war to call precipitate retreats), that I have lost something of my dignity in my own eyes, and I cannot conceal to myself, besides, that I am far from enjoying the same consideration on the part of ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... investigate the essence of every thing, not from its perversion, but from its energies according to nature. If therefore reason, when it energizes in us as reason, restrains the shadowy impressions of the delights of licentious desire, punishes the precipitate motion of fury, and reproves the senses as ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... the supper-room, whither those of the party, who had attended him to the north apartment, had retreated, upon hearing Dorothee's scream, and who were now earnest in their enquiries concerning those chambers. The Count rallied his guests on their precipitate retreat, and on the superstitious inclination which had occasioned it, and this led to the question, Whether the spirit, after it has quitted the body, is ever permitted to revisit the earth; and if it is, whether it was possible ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... action and action on second thought, presented once more. Briefly, the experience of sixty years strongly inclines me to a preference of matured and considerate action over that immediate action which notoriously is in nine cases out of ten as ill-advised as it is precipitate. Only in the field of politics is the expediency of the latter assumed as of course; yet, as in science and literature and art so in politics, final, because satisfactory, results are at best but slowly thrashed out. As respects wisdom, the modern statute ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... that it will provoke and raise a tumult; and in case that it be raised by loan, it will be hardly paid—if consent be not given in their sending men with it, and there be no good effect, which is contingent, and thus we are every way at a stand; some fearing these things will precipitate our ruin, and others apprehending that to act further will necessitate ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... green bead when heated with borax, or that on fusion with sodium carbonate and nitre, a yellow mass of an alkaline chromate is obtained, which, on solution in water and acidification with acetic acid, gives a bright yellow precipitate on the addition of soluble lead salts. Sodium and potassium hydroxide solutions precipitate green chromium hydroxide from solutions of chromic salts; the precipitate is soluble in excess of the cold alkali, but ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... see you again,' said the doctor, looking about him a little anxiously, and producing his card-case in a very precipitate manner. 'But, my dear Miss Gwilt, permit me to rectify a slight mistake on your part. Doctor Downward of Pimlico is dead and buried; and you will infinitely oblige me if you will never, on ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... ordered, but as early as April the Marshalls were running out of certain drugs. Gum opium and nitre "found by Congress" was included in the chest for the Pennsylvania 4th Battalion, and by May 11 the Marshalls were out of Peruvian bark, ipecac, cream of tartar, gum camphor, and red precipitate of mercury. The chests outfitted after June 1 also failed to include Epsom salts, and the last chest lacked jalap as well. Thus the majority of the battalions traveling north were already without some ...
— Drug Supplies in the American Revolution • George B. Griffenhagen

... which is false? how shall I not turn away from the truth? If a man be of such a good disposition as to be anxious about these things I will remind him of this: Why are you anxious? The thing is in your own power, be assured; do not be precipitate in assenting before you apply the natural rule. On the other side, if a man is anxious (uneasy) about desire, lest it fail in its purpose and miss its end, and with respect to the avoidance of things, lest he should fall ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus

... friends meet after a long separation, the first effusive greetings at an end, they remain silent as if they had nothing to tell each other, whereas it is the very abundance of things, their precipitate struggle for utterance that prevents their coming forth. The two former partners had reached that stage; but Jansoulet held the banker's arm very tight, fearing that he might escape him, might resist the kindly impulses that he ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... Trenton beam'd to light his rapid way, Pour'd the rude shock on Britain's vanguard train, And led whole squadrons in his captive chain; Where veteran troops to half their numbers yield, Tread back their steps, or press the sanguine field, To Princeton plains precipitate their flight, Thro new disasters and unfinish'd fight, Resign their conquests by one sad surprise, Sink in their pride and ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... very happy indeed that you did not come yourself: the mischief that would have happened from it to our affairs are incredible; and I must beg of you, nay, entreat and conjure you, not to think of taking any precipitate step of this nature. As to the idea of replacing you with Lord Fitzwilliam, not only it would be very objectionable on account of the mistaken notion it would convey of things being much riper than they are, but it would, as I ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... that he was going to do himself justice, and say something to heighten the effect his story had produced. At the same time he was aware of a certain want of clearness. He had the idea, but it floated vague, elusive, in his brain. He looked about as if for something to precipitate it in tangible shape. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... applausive. It was not that his spirits were visibly high—he would never, in the concert of pleasure, touch the big drum by so much as a knuckle: he had a mortal dislike to the high, ragged note, to what he called random ravings. He thought Miss Archer sometimes of too precipitate a readiness. It was pity she had that fault, because if she had not had it she would really have had none; she would have been as smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm. If he was not ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... "sentimental novel" from which she traced her descent. He organises a masquerade, mindful that it is always the scene of the heroine's "best adventure," with Fielding's Amelia and Miss Burney's Cecilia and probably other novels in view. The precipitate flight of Cherubina, "dressed in a long-skirted red coat stiff with tarnished lace, a satin petticoat, satin shoes and no stockings," and with hair streaming like a meteor, described in Letter XX, is clearly a cruel mockery of Cecilia's distressful plight in Miss Burney's novel. Even Scott is ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... had her in his power. She has now him in hers—since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who descends. He is that monstrum ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... papers of which he was possessed, seems to have struck Johnson's mind, with a sudden anxiety, and as they were in great confusion, it is much to be lamented that he had not entrusted some faithful and discreet person with the care and selection of them; instead of which, he in a precipitate manner, burnt large masses of them, with little regard, as I apprehend, to discrimination. Not that I suppose we have thus been deprived of any compositions which he had ever intended for the publick eye; but, from what escaped the flames, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... experience sufficed to convince him that daily journalism was not his forte. He was and is too indiscreet, precipitate, credulous, and inconsiderately generous to be a successful editor. If a paper could be conducted on purely altruistic principles, and without reference to profits, there would be no man fitter to occupy an editorial chair. For as an ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... Waring. The original of Waring was one of Browning's friends, Alfred Domett, the author of Ranolf and Amohia, then or afterwards Prime Minister in New Zealand.[18] The poem is written in a free and familiar style, which rises from time to time into a kind of precipitate brilliance; it is more personal in detail than Browning often allows himself to be; and its humour is blithe and friendly. In another poem, now known as Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, the humour is grotesque, bitter and pungent, the humour of hate. The snarling monk of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... stopping on a conspicuous perch, flung a ringing challenge in the face of the morning. With every mile the way he followed grew more beautiful. The river bed was limestone, and the swiftly flowing water, clear and limpid. The banks were precipitate in some places, gently sloping in others, and always crowded with ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter

... knocking at the outer gate became now every moment louder; and voices were heard impatiently demanding admittance. The Abbot, with dignity, and with a step which even the emergency of danger rendered neither faltering nor precipitate, moved towards the portal, and demanded to know, in a tone of authority, who it was that disturbed their worship, and ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... circulating, despite coercion laws and the imprisonment and banishment of its most prominent advocates. Kosinksi joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and the hours passed rapidly and very agreeably. I succeeded at length in dissuading Giannoli and Gnecco from their original intention of precipitate flight, partly by repeatedly assuring them that the state of the atmosphere was not normal and would mend, partly by bringing their minds to bear on the knotty ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... little. The person in whom she had been interested and who had caused her precipitate retirement, if not to a nunnery, to what answered the same purpose, had been very fond of that song. He used to sing it, leaning over the piano and ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... inflicted various punishments upon herself for her precipitate yielding to a hastily awakened sympathy, for it would surely anger the Emperor if he learned how carelessly she had treated his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... thousand myriads of the Angels of Destruction who are fashioned some of hail and some of flames, and whose glances drive terror and trembling to the heart of the beholder. These angels were about to precipitate themselves into the work of annihilation, but God restrained them, saying, "My wrath will not be appeased until I Myself execute vengeance upon ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... make an emperor Vitellius himself has proved. He had neither experience nor military reputation, but merely rose on Galba's unpopularity. Even Otho fell not by the strategy or strength of his opponent, but by his own precipitate despair. And to-day he seems a great and desirable emperor, when Vitellius is disbanding his legions, disarming his Guards, and daily sowing fresh seeds of civil war. Why, any spirit or enthusiasm which his army had ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... Means: But as I will not persuade any Body against it, that is already engag'd in this Sort of Life, to endeavour to get out of it, so I would most undoubtedly caution all young Women; especially those of generous Tempers, not to precipitate themselves unadvisedly into that State from whence there is no getting out afterwards: And the rather, because their Chastity is more in Danger in a Cloyster than out of it; and beside that, you may do whatsoever is done there as ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... audience a sight of me, and I hear some one exclaim, "There he is!" Horrible exposure! I dodge back out of view, as if to escape the discharge of a battery. A round of impatient applause rouses me. I count three, and precipitate myself forward to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... lingering death, would be a monstrous cruelty. And yet it is this very thing in "sudden conversion," that men object to—the sudden change, the decisive stand, the uncompromising rupture with the past, the precipitate flight from sin as of one escaping for his life. Men surely forget that this is an escaping for one's life. Let the poor prisoner run—madly and blindly if he like, for the terror of Death is upon him. God knows, when the pause comes, how the ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... was not a formal state of belligerency between England and Spain, though the tension of public feeling in Great Britain concerning Spanish relations with France was acute. If it were considered that such an act as the seizure of the Venus would be likely to precipitate a declaration of war, the motive for secrecy was strong. Secrecy, moreover, would have been in complete conformity with Spanish methods in South America. It is not recorded whether the seizure of the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... Hohenower. On two several days Broglie made a fierce attack upon his posts, chiefly directing his murderous fire against that commanded by Lord Granby; but on the second day the French gave way, and made a precipitate retreat, leaving behind them several pieces of cannon, with five thousand of their comrades sleeping the sleep of death. Their non-success produced mutual recriminations between Broglie and Soubise, who had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... command been deficient in discipline or other soldierly qualities, such an attack might have proved disastrous. As it was, it was promptly and gallantly repulsed, the repulse resulting in the enemy's precipitate evacuation of the city of Mayaguez, though it had been placed in ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman

... circumstances under which they were carried on, dry lenses had for the most part to be employed. Having in his possession a maceration of cod-fish in a fluid obtained from boiled rabbits, he found at the bottom of it, when in an almost exhausted condition, a precipitate forming a slightly viscid mass, to which his attention was particularly directed. It was seen to contain a vast number of Bacterium termo, but on examination with a one-tenth inch objective showed that it also contained a comparatively small number ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various

... whole given quantity. The newly-formed milk should be placed into a bottle having a tap in it about a quarter of an inch from the bottom. After standing perfectly quiet for twenty-four hours it is fit to bottle. All the above precautions being taken, the milk of roses will keep any time without precipitate or creamy supernatation. These directions apply to all the other forms of milk ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse

... and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the bluff is discovered; the laboring classes may be no longer willing to forego so largely, and the capitalist classes, no longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitate the ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... prominent, clearly isolates, and then, stepping along briskly and confidently, rushes ahead on the high-road to consequences.[3302] He has forgotten that his summary notion merely corresponds to an extract, and a very brief one, of man in his completeness; his decisive, precipitate process hinders him from seeing the largest portion of the real individual; he has overlooked numerous traits, the most important and most efficacious, those which geography, history, habit, condition, manual ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... a hurry," Daisy assured him, "either before your marriage or after. She has had a very bad shock, and she is only just getting over it. You will throw everything back if you try to precipitate matters. She is asleep, you know, Nick, and it is for you to waken her, but gradually—oh, very gradually—or she will start up in the old nightmare terror again. If she doesn't love you yet, she is very near ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... population time to increase and replace the fugitives and the injured, it would be best, I think, to leave the heap alone this year and not to resume my investigations until the next. After the thorough confusion due to the removal, I should jeopardize success by being too precipitate. Let us wait one year more. I decide accordingly, curb my impatience and resign myself. We will simply confine ourselves to enlarging the heap, when the leaves begin to fall, by accumulating the refuse that strews the paddock, so that we may have ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... precipitated so finely as to elude the highest microscopic power. By reflected light, such a medium appears bluish, by transmitted light yellowish, which latter colour, by augmenting the quantity of the precipitate, can be caused to pass into orange ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... direction of the box in which Felicity sat. He would fain have leaped upon the stage and have gone to her before she could escape him; he was burning to speak to her, to hear her voice and touch her hand. But her departure with her friends was little less than precipitate. It did not now occur to her lover that she might wish to avoid her husband; as far as he was concerned, she had no husband. He only appreciated his own disappointment, and stood chafing before the stupid herd that blocked his way to ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... me, through the medium of "N. & Q.," what manufacture of paper is best adapted to the two processes of Mr. Muller? I have tried several: with some I find that the combination of their starch with the iodide of iron causes a dark precipitate upon the face of the paper; and with those papers prepared with size, there appears to me great difficulty (in his improved process after the paper is moistened with aceto-nitrate of silver) to procure an equal distribution of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various

... alarmingly. More than once he paused, prepared for precipitate retreat, but still he heard no sound, and gradually a certain desperate hope came to him. Perhaps Dicky was asleep! Perhaps the power that drove him would be satisfied if he collected some things on a tray and left them ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... morning where I stood. The cloud had sunk, and filled with fold on fold The chimneyed city; so the smoke rose not, But spread diluted in the cloud, and fell A black precipitate on miry streets, Where dim grey faces vision-like went by, But ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... his position, I was compelled to halt the line, though under fire, for a few moments, until I ascertained that by bringing up my right and carrying the village of Aliwal, I could with great effect precipitate myself upon his left and centre. I therefore quickly brought Brigadier Godby's brigade, and with it and the 1st brigade under Brigadier Hicks, made a rapid and noble charge, carried the village, and two guns of large calibre. The line I ordered to advance—her Majesty's 31st foot and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various

... deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recall a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... heating mercury to a high temperature in a close vessel containing air, found that the mercury increased in weight, and became what was then called red precipitate, while the air, on being examined after the experiment, proved to have lost weight, and to have become incapable of supporting life or combustion. When red precipitate was exposed to a still greater heat, it became mercury again, and gave off a gas which did support life and ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... and balances again illustrates that the Constitution is the great negation of unrestrained democracy. The framers believed that a people was best governed that was least governed. Therefore, their purpose was not so much to promote efficiency in legislation as to put a brake upon precipitate action. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... necessary to ensure a return for the labor of husbandry, and this involves an original expenditure which it will usually require large capital to bear. In this climate the sun, like a mighty pump, is daily raising the water which the currents of cold air from the mountains, or from the sea, precipitate in the form of genial showers during the period of your growing crops; and the granite of the mountains slowly, but steadily disintegrating, gives up its fertilizing property to be scattered by unseen hands over plain and over valley. With care and with ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis

... reproachful look at his companion, and, with an abrupt nod to myself, turned and marched off alone across the street. I heard afterwards that he was popularly supposed to be as much afraid of a woman as most people are of a mad dog, which accounted for his precipitate retreat. I cannot say, however, that young Vincey showed much aversion to feminine society on this occasion. Indeed I remember laughing, and remarking to my friend at the time that he was not the sort of ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... the collector of the port, was a close friend of Roscoe Conkling, the head of the state machine; and A.B. Cornell, the naval officer, was chairman of the state and national Republican committees; It was evident that an attempt to change conditions in New York would precipitate a test of strength between the administration and ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... powers! I begin to think so," replied the other horseman. "But don't spoil all, Mr. Coates, by being too precipitate." ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... expected in Virginia. "Alas! my dear friend!" wrote Madame la Presidente de Mouchy, from Quebec, to her young friend George Warrington. "How contrary is the destiny to us! I see you quitting the embrace of an adored mother to precipitate yourself in the arms of Bellona. I see you pass wounded after combats. I hesitate almost to wish victory to our lilies when I behold you ranged under the banners of the Leopard. There are enmities which the heart does not recognise—ours assuredly are at peace among ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... the world. In 1732 died his friend Atterbury; and on December the 7th of the same year Gay, the most unpretending of all the wits whom he knew, and the one with whom he had at one time been domesticated, expired, after an illness of three days, which Dr. Arbuthnot declares to have been "the most precipitate" he ever knew. But in fact Gay had long been decaying, from the ignoble vice of too much and too luxurious eating. Six months after this loss, which greatly affected Pope, came the last deadly wound which this life could inflict, in the death of his mother. She had for some time been in her ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... protestations of regard, and beg me to make myself easy under a disappointment which was equally afflicting to him. He procured me lodgings, where I slept, or rather endeavoured to sleep, for that night. Next morning I saw him again, he then mildly observed on the imprudence of my precipitate flight from the country, and proposed my removing to lodgings at another end of the town, to elude the search of my father, till he should fall upon some method of excusing my conduct to him, and reconciling him to my return. We took a hackney-coach, and drove ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... North Esk Bridge: 'A less waterway might have sufficed, but the VALLEYS MAY COME TO BE MELIORATED BY DRAINAGE.' One field drained after another through all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when they shall precipitate by so much a more copious and transient flood, as the gush of the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the leakage of ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... at least a shelter from the weather, all sentiment apart. And our servants, too; how could they manage without us? The Yankees, on the river, and a band of guerrillas in the woods, are equally anxious to precipitate a fight. Between the two fires, what chance for us? It would take only a little while to burn the city over our heads. They say the women and children must be removed, these guerrillas. Where, please? Charlie says we must go to Greenwell. And have this house ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... same securities. The market was booming on what I had proclaimed was to happen, and here an absolutely new condition was being imposed, a condition which gave all my assertions the lie, which discredited me, and would, I felt sure, precipitate a terrible disaster. Inevitably the copper public would be dazed, would be shaken; a reaction would follow which would bring on a panic and a destruction of values impossible to measure. In it all, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... and green peas causes as much inflection as an infusion of raw meat; a decoction of grass is less powerful. Though I hear that the chemists try to precipitate all albumen from the extract of belladonna, I think they must fail, as the extract causes inflection, whereas a new lot of atropine, as well as the valerianate [of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... for another interview, where I might pour out the effusion of my love without danger of being interrupted, and perhaps reep some endearing return from the queen of my desires, I implored her advice and assistance in promoting this event: but she gave me to understand, that Narcissa would make no precipitate compliances of this kind, and I would do well to cultivate her brother's acquaintance, in the course of which I should not want opportunities of removing that reserve which my mistress thought herself obliged ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... were released by the partial burning of the box in which they were contained, crept along on the floor to the balcony of the Museum and dropped on the sidewalk, the crowd, seized with St. Patrick's aversion to the reptiles, fled with such precipitate haste that they knocked each other down and trampled on one another in the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... the vengeance of mankind upon his diadem. For the last three years of his political and military existence, he seems to have lain under an actual spell. Nothing but the judicial clouding of his intellect can account for the precipitate infirmities of his judgment. His march to Russia, as we have already observed, was a gigantic absurdity in the eyes of all Europe—his delay at Moscow was a gigantic absurdity in the eyes of every subaltern in his army. But his campaigns in France were only a continuation of those absurdities. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... the Indies, and, by his importunate and reckless propaganda, with inciting the Indians to rebellion. Granting that some abuses existed, they argued that his methods for redressing them were more pernicious than the evils themselves; prudent measures should be employed, not the radical and precipitate method of the fanatical friar, and time would gradually do the rest. Men who argued such as the Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos, were large holders of encomienda properties, who objected to having their sources of income disturbed. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... carried away by the excitement and interest of the time; of not having looked all round and thought out the difficulties before them; of having embraced opinions without sufficiently knowing their grounds or counting the cost or considering the consequences. There was the danger of precipitate judgment, of ill-balanced and disproportionate views of what was true and all-important. There was an inevitable feverishness in the way in which the movement was begun, in the way in which it went on. Those affected by it were themselves ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... attaches to La Madelena from its having repulsed the attack of Napoleon, and driven him to a precipitate retreat from his first field of arms. The young soldier, after being for some months in garrison at Bonifacio, was attached, by order of Paschal Paoli, to the expedition which sailed from thence in February, 1793, to reduce La Madelena. He acted as second in command of the artillery, the whole ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... do. It is a business long delayed. But I have made a full confession in writing for the Entente commission—ten closely written pages. A masterpiece, if I have to boast myself. And in order to avoid the anti-climax which your sense of honor would undoubtedly precipitate, I will put a period to it in an hour. A trigger pulled, and the nobility of my sad country loses another of its shining lights. I am overawed by the quaint justice of life. I end a career of villainy with a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... illustration from chemistry. A salt solution vigorously stirred by the spoon of God Almighty begins to crystallise. Something in me is struggling to crystallise. Who knows whether, when the clouds that surround and penetrate the solution precipitate, the result of all the storms in the glass will not be a new, solid piece of architecture. Perhaps the evolution of a Teuton does not stop at the age of thirty. In that case the crisis may come just before the attainment of settled manhood, the crisis which, to all appearances, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... "There is but one, I know; but that one is unexceptionable: it is the precipitate marriage of the widow of the assassinated with the chief assassin, and the letters which have been handed over to us by James Balfour, which prove that the guilty persons had united their adulterous hearts before it was permitted them to unite their ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... their somewhat precipitate departure,[13] perhaps it was necessary; nevertheless it seems to me that their presence would have put an end to irresolution on ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... above it, and are like the shadows of giants. Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and that the dust moves with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they advance quite near to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he would be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, as on the evening when he and I first encountered, close ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... storm the British lines at La Vigie. The neck of land connecting the promontory with the island is very flat, and the French therefore labored under great disadvantage through the commanding position of their enemy. It was a repetition of Bunker Hill, and of many other ill-judged and precipitate frontal attacks. After three gallant but ineffectual charges, led by d'Estaing in person, the assailants retired, with the loss of forty-one officers and eight hundred rank ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... good bow, and sent a shaft right through the breast of one of the men-at-arms, who, under De Bracy's direction, was loosening a fragment from one of the battlements to precipitate on the heads of Cedric and the Black Knight. A second soldier caught from the hands of the dying man the iron crow, with which he heaved at and had loosened the stone pinnacle, when, receiving an arrow through his head-piece, he dropped from the battlements ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... he could see nothing to account for the terror and eagerness in Truffey's pale face, nor for his precipitate flight. But being short-sighted and inquisitive, he set off after Truffey as fast as the dignity proper to an elderly weaver and a deacon ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... impulsive rather than reasoned. It is true that in the perfectly balanced temperament action will follow on judgment so quickly that the two operations cannot be distinguished. Such decisions may appear to be precipitate or impulsive, but they are not really so. But the young man who has the disease of fear in his brain cells will act on an impulse which is purely irrational, because it is based on a blind terror and ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... by the development of the lactic-acid bacteria that normally abound in the milk; or, as the cheese-maker expresses it, the milk is "ripened" to the proper point. The action of the rennet, which is added to precipitate the casein of the milk, is markedly affected by the amount of acid present, as well as the temperature. Hence it is desirable to have a standard amount of acidity as well as a standard temperature for coagulation, ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell

... silk, or wool, as the case might be. We must now attack the question of sulphur. First, we prepare a little alkaline lead solution (sodium plumbate) by adding caustic soda to a solution of lead acetate or sugar of lead, until the white precipitate first formed is just dissolved. That is one of our reagents; the other is a solution of a red-coloured salt called nitroprusside of sodium, made by the action of nitric acid on sodium ferrocyanide (yellow prussiate). The first-named is very sensitive ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... into the hands of the enemy. In order to reconnoitre the opposite bank, he crossed the river in a small boat; he had scarcely landed when he was attacked by a party of Spanish horse, from whose hands he saved himself only by a precipitate retreat. Having at last, with the assistance of the neighboring fishermen, succeeded in procuring a few transport, he dispatched two of them across the river, bearing Count Brahe and 300 Swedes. Scarcely had this officer time to intrench ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... very strongly presumed, is, to attend to these few plain principles:—First, to hear all parties equally, and not the managers for the suspected claimants only; not to proceed in the dark, but to act with as much publicity as possible; not to precipitate decision; to be religious in following the rules prescribed in the commission under which we act; and, lastly, and above all, not to be fond of straining constructions, to force a jurisdiction, and to draw to ourselves the management ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of silver by sal-ammoniac; then I edulcorated (washed) it and dried the precipitate and exposed it to the beams of the sun for two weeks; after which I stirred the powder and repeated the same several times. Hereupon I poured some caustic spirit of sal-ammoniac (strong ammonia) on this, in all appearance, black ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... phosphoric acid, there is not a trace of the potash or ammonia removed. Sulphate of alumina has also been used, both alone and in conjunction with lime. The advantage claimed by it over lime is, that the resulting precipitate is much less bulky. In other respects, however, it does not seem to be any more efficient as a precipitant. In the well-known A, B, C process, a mixture of alum, clay, lime, charcoal, blood, and alkaline salts, in different proportions, ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... hydrogen, and ammonium chloride and ammonia added. If phosphoric acid is absent, aluminium, chromium and ferric hydrates are precipitated. If, however, phosphoric acid is present in the original substance, we may here obtain a precipitate of the phosphates of the remaining metals, together with aluminium, chromium and ferric hydrates. In this case, the precipitate is dissolved in as little as possible hydrochloric acid and boiled with ammonium acetate, acetic acid and ferric chloride. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... things went on in the old pleasant manner, except that Ned, without any overt act to precipitate a fight, habitually treated Phil with a most annoying air of scorn and derision. This, though endured ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... convictions. Some hold—and for my part I am with them—that the attack is caused by quinine given in too large a dose to a subject who is rotten with malaria. But there are others who maintain that it is a malarial manifestation only, and that the big dose of quinine, which seems to some to precipitate the attack, is only a coincidence. Be that as it may, there is little difference in the treatment adopted by either school. Death achieves his victory as frequently with one as with another. Certain it is that, to the common mind, quinine ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... Manicamp, not venturing to be too precipitate and hasty, and letting his words fall very slowly one by one, "at all events, sire, poor De Guiche ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... seen a set of geese-dancers compelled to make a hurried flight before the hot poker of some irate housekeeper disturbed in her culinary operations, and much in the same way did we four aspirants for naval honours beat a precipitate retreat from the deck of the Torbay as, with a stamp of his foot, our future captain ordered us to be gone and instantly to get cut down and reduced into ordinary ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... I'm only a helpless woman, and I'm sure I couldn't rise to the occasion. Perhaps I've been too precipitate. I've made you swallow the ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... about diamonds, but a hurried scramble to dress, an a precipitate departure, after which one of the other ladies is heard to say very distinctly: "I remember that girl as a pupil when I was teaching in a public school, and I know all about her. Salary, four dollars ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne

... of mounted gendarmerie. Mansfeld, Lalain, Hoogstraaten; and Vilain, at the same time made a furious attack upon the front. The French cavalry wavered with the shock so vigorously given. The camp followers, sutlers, and pedlers, panic-struck, at once fled helter-skelter, and in their precipitate retreat, carried confusion and dismay throughout all the ranks of the army. The rout was sudden and total. The onset and the victory were simultaneous, Nevers riding through a hollow with some companies of cavalry, in the hope of making a detour and presenting a new front to the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the object of the sortie, the place to fight was evidently as far from there as possible. Off Toulon, even had Hotham been beaten, his opponents would have been too roughly handled to carry out their mission. As it was, this precipitate retirement lost the British an opportunity for a combat that might have placed their control of the sea beyond peradventure; and a few months later, Nelson, who at first had viewed Hotham's action with the generous sympathy and confident pride which always characterized his attitude towards ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny's grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn't mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was resolved not to mind—resolved at any cost to "see through" the New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any social benefit to their daughter; ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... women among them. However, I do not anticipate a serious riot. They may attack Europeans in the street, but with some fourteen or fifteen men-of-war in the port, they are not likely to make any organized assault. Arabi's agents will hardly precipitate matters in that way. Hard as they may work, it will take a month to get the defences into proper order, and any rising will be merely a spasmodic outbreak of fanaticism. I don't think the danger is likely to be pressing until, finding that all remonstrances are vain, the admiral begins ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty

... unblank. Had he been taken with a fit of diffidence, and been less precipitate than he intended? Womanhood hoped so, and rather enjoyed the possibility of his being kept a little in suspense. Or suppose he had forgotten his cover, and then should think the absence of a letter her fault? Thursday—still no tidings. Should she venture a letter to him? No; lovers were inexplicable ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... happened. He quickly reached for a bottle on the shelves before him, and I could see from the label on the brown glass that it was nitrate of silver. As he plunged a little in a test-tube into the jar a strong precipitate was gradually formed. ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... sulphide is sometimes found in nature as a golden-yellow crystalline mineral. It is formed as a black precipitate when a soluble sulphide and an iron salt are brought ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson

... for the letter contradicts itself in every passage. Now, she congratulates herself on having so charming a daughter-in-law; now, she suddenly stops short to observe what a pity it is that young men should be so precipitate! Now, she says what a great match it will be for her dear ward! and now, what a happy one it will be for Erpingham! In short, she does not know whether to be pleased or vexed; and that, pour dire vrai, is my ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of death returned, of course, that it was 'accidental;' but I long regretted that I had not been less precipitate, though perhaps all was for the best—for the sufferer as well as others. Mr Oxley had died some five weeks previously. This I found from Renshawe's will, where it was recited as a reason that, having no relative alive for whom he cared, his property was bequeathed to Guy's Hospital, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... of Clamanges was a field hospital which had been established by the Germans when they first occupied the place on the night of September 7th. They had held it until their retreat on the 10th, when their retirement was so precipitate that they had been unable to take with them ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... an evil spirit, who, assuming the shape of a horse, tried to allure the unwary to mount him, and then soaring into the clouds, or rushing over mountain, and water, would suddenly vanish into air or mist, and precipitate his ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... all time to come, roamed over by hostile savages, cutting off all safe communication between our Atlantic and Pacific possessions? I tell you that the time for action has come, and cannot be postponed. It is a case in which the "let-alone" policy would precipitate a crisis which must inevitably result in ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... scenery, in its wildest and most striking aspects. There are stern summits, enveloped in cloud, and stretching heavenwards; huge broad crests, heathy and verdant, or torn by fissures and broken by the storms; deep ravines, jagged, precipitate, and darksome; and valleys sweetly reposing amidst the sublimity of the awful solitude. There are dark craggy mountains around the Grey-Mare's-Tail, echoing to the roar of its stupendous cataract; and romantic and beautiful green hills, and inaccessible heights, surrounding ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... whence, at the beating of the drums, the folk crowded to make holiday. The drum-beat of the Polynesian has a strange and gloomy stimulation for the nerves of all. White persons feel it—at these precipitate sounds their hearts beat faster; and, according to old residents, its effect on the natives was extreme. Bishop Dordillon might entreat; Temoana himself command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts triumphed. And now it might ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... stuff, has his design outlined on the upright threads and sees in a mirror the shadow of the pattern and picture as it grows gradually to perfection. He spoke at much length on the question of dyes—praising madder and kermes for reds, precipitate of iron or ochre for yellows, and for blue either indigo or woad. At the back of the platform hung a lovely Flemish tapestry of the fourteenth century, and a superb Persian carpet about two hundred and fifty years old. Mr. Morris pointed out the loveliness of the carpet—its delicate suggestion ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... was about to throw in a detached word or two, by way of vindication, when a furious "Begone!" from his wife occasioned a precipitate retreat. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... say," Lord Valleys began once more, "that the bottom has been knocked out of things for you by this—this affair, don't, for goodness' sake, do anything in a hurry. Wait! Go abroad! Get your balance back! You'll find the thing settle itself in a few months. Don't precipitate matters; you can make your health an excuse ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... conspicuous. A fight was evidently in progress, and as the horses began to grow restive she begged of the driver to let her alight, saying she could easily walk the remainder of the way. Scarcely, however, was she on terra-firma when the yelling crowd made a precipitate rush towards her, and in much alarm she climbed for safety into an empty buggy, whereupon the horse, equally alarmed, began to rear, and without pausing an instant the terrified lady sprang out on the side opposite to that by which she had entered, catching ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... delay. "Ha! Count," exclaimed Noircarmes, "do not put lightly such implicit confidence in this stranger who is counselling you to your destruction. What will the Duke of Alva and all the Spaniards say of such a precipitate flight? Will they not say that your Excellency has fled from the consciousness of guilt? Will not your escape be construed into a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley



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