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Substance   Listen
noun
Substance  n.  
1.
That which underlies all outward manifestations; substratum; the permanent subject or cause of phenomena, whether material or spiritual; that in which properties inhere; that which is real, in distinction from that which is apparent; the abiding part of any existence, in distinction from any accident; that which constitutes anything what it is; real or existing essence. "These cooks, how they stamp, and strain, and grind, And turn substance into accident!" "Heroic virtue did his actions guide, And he the substance, not the appearance, chose."
2.
The most important element in any existence; the characteristic and essential components of anything; the main part; essential import; purport. "This edition is the same in substance with the Latin." "It is insolent in words, in manner; but in substance it is not only insulting, but alarming."
3.
Body; matter; material of which a thing is made; hence, substantiality; solidity; firmness; as, the substance of which a garment is made; some textile fabrics have little substance.
4.
Material possessions; estate; property; resources. "And there wasted his substance with riotous living." "Thy substance, valued at the highest rate, Can not amount unto a hundred marks." "We are destroying many thousand lives, and exhausting our substance, but not for our own interest."
5.
(Theol.) Same as Hypostasis, 2.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Substance" Quotes from Famous Books



... The whole substance of your magazine articles has been nothing but half-truths, and a half-truth is worse than a lie. You know that it is to gratify your personal spite, and not to help the general public, that you have engaged in your frenzied writings. The public is wiser than you think, although ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... introduced too. Some air is necessary to keep up the combustion, and therefore some nitrogen is unavoidable. But some steam is advisable in every gas producer, unless pure oxygen could be used instead of air; or unless some substance like quicklime, which holds its oxygen with less vigor than carbon does, were mixed with the coke and used to maintain the heat necessary for distillation. A well known gas producer for small scale use is Dowson's. Steam is superheated in a coil of pipe, and blown through glowing anthracite along ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various

... to be able to prove myself to the first party of Confederates I should meet. Yes; that is reasonable. I might have been subjected to much embarrassing questioning—and to detention—but for something on my person to give substance to my statement. The Doctor was far-sighted. ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... I; 'you may think you have made a choice, but it was blindfold, and you must make it over again. The Count's service is a good one; what are you leaving it for? Are you not throwing away the substance for the shadow? No, do not answer me yet. You imagine that I am a prosperous nobleman, just declared my uncle's heir, on the threshold of the best of good fortune, and, from the point of view of a judicious servant, a jewel of a master to serve ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... exciseman. It was but infrequently that real tragedy took place; considering the times, and the manner of those times, the records of Sussex are fairly clean. Such brutal murders as that of Chater in 1748, which crime was expiated at Chichester, were rare. The professionals were nearly all men of substance and standing in the land. The marine smuggler was of course a separate breed whose adventures and danger were of a different sort and, despite the glamour of the sea, of much less interest and excitement; on the other hand most of the inhabitants of such ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... dread thereof the very earth doth quake. Look when I with malin this bright brand doth shake; All the whole world from the north to the south, I may them destroy with one word of my mouth, To recount unto you my innumerable substance That were too much for any tongue to tell; For all the whole Orient is under mine obedience, And prince am I of purgatory, and chief captain of hell. And those tyrannous traitors by force may I compel Mine enemies to vanquish, and even to dust to drive, And with a twinkle ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... it rejoices my heart. I know also that such love could not spring from the hearts that were kindled by no spark of the Divine, but the lesson comes to you and to me, my brother and my sister, that he who opens not only the granary of earthly substance, but opens also the portals of the heart, and lets the Divine spark kindle into a blaze, will be thrice blessed in that day when the jewels of the eternity are made up. I do not desire to convey the impression that all our civilization is the outgrowth of Odd-Fellowship. ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... series of acts of the Thirty-first Congress—the act known as the fugitive-slave law included—are received and acquiesced in by the Whig party of the United States, as a settlement in principle and substance of the dangerous and exciting question which they embrace; and so far as they are concerned, we will maintain them and insist on their strict enforcement, until time and experience shall demonstrate the necessity of further legislation, to guard against the evasion of the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... of Pitt, but of Dr Johnson, who furnished the report to the Gentleman's Magazine. Probably Pitt did say something of the kind attributed to him, though even this is by no means certain in view of Johnson's repentant admission that he had often invented not merely the form, but the substance of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... moral and material victory was that soon afterwards there were four applicants, men of substance, for shares in the Daily company. And this, by the way, was the end of the tale. For these applicants, who secured options on a majority of the shares, were emissaries of the Signal. Armed with the options, the Signal made terms with ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... Courtenay of Powderham, whatever that may mean: Father knows more about it than I do, and so, I think, does Fanny. Grandmamma once told me she would never have thought of allowing Mamma to marry Father, if he had not been a Courtenay and a man of substance. She said all his other relations were so very mean and low, she could not have condescended so far as to connect herself with them. Why, I believe one of them was only a farmer's daughter: and I think, from what I have heard Grandmamma and my Uncle Charles say, that another of them had ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt

... said there is no instance in the Gospels of a woman being an enemy of Jesus. No woman deserted or betrayed, persecuted or opposed Him. But women followed Him, they ministered to Him of their substance, they washed His feet with tears, they anointed His head with spikenard; and now, when their husbands and brothers were hounding Him to death, they accompanied Him with weeping and wailing to the ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... and binds. Nor only creatures, void of intellect, Are aim'd at by this bow; but even those, That have intelligence and love, are pierc'd. That Providence, who so well orders all, With her own light makes ever calm the heaven, In which the substance, that hath greatest speed, Is turn'd: and thither now, as to our seat Predestin'd, we are carried by the force Of that strong cord, that never looses dart, But at fair aim and glad. Yet is it true, That as ofttimes ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... case both a great and a good and a Christian man. And thus, whatever modification and adaptation may have been made in this masterpiece of his, in view of its publication, and after it was first published, the original essence, most genuine substance, and unique style of the book were all intended for its author's peculiar heart and private eye alone. And thus it is that we have a work of a simplicity and a sincerity that would have been impossible had its author in any part of his book sat down to compose for the public. Sir Thomas Browne ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte

... increased in other greatness, and preserve to him that dependence entire. It was indeed a thing which, considering the times and the necessity of the service, he ought above all to retain; but while he kept it in substance, he should abolish it in shows to the queen, who loved peace, and did not love cost. And on this account he could not so well approve of his affecting the place of earl-marshal or master of the ordnance, on account of their affinity ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... far cry from these scientific data to the recognition that force, in all its various forms of manifestation, proceeds from the same energy, and that the curious manifestation of it in radium is explained by the possibility that this substance is merely a remarkable conductor of this intense energy in the ether. The human organism may make itself increasingly a conductor and transmitter of this energy, and the secret of coming into perfectly harmonious relations with this energy is the secret of all achievement. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first. He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were, breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath; we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself under the likenesses of a dove and ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... higher, until finally, after a year of overwork and anxiety—the latter not decreased by a chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from the former in the penitentiary—he found himself on top, with solid substance under his feet; and thereafter "played it safe." But his hunger to get was unabated, for it was in the very bones of ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington

... in some localities allegations persist that Negro citizens are being deprived of their right to vote and are likewise being subjected to unwarranted economic pressures. I recommend that the substance of these charges be thoroughly examined by a Bipartisan Commission created by the Congress. It is hoped that such a commission will be established promptly so that it may arrive at findings ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... in brief, the substance of the earliest life of Homer we possess, and so broad are the evidences of its historical worthlessness, that it is scarcely necessary to point them out in detail. Let us now consider some of the opinions to which a persevering, patient, and learned—but by no means ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... the Manchester Guardian have kindly allowed me to make use of their copyright in the letters written by me to that newspaper during the first half of the year. The substance of the letters has been reproduced in the hope that home-staying folk may find in them something of the atmosphere that surrounds the collision of armed forces. It is a strange and rude atmosphere; ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... as of an animated substance, if Constantine could have regenerated his new metropolis, by transfusing into it the vital and vivifying principles of old Rome,—that brilliant spark no longer remained for Constantinople to borrow, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... of a story," said the pastor. "We have the Institute idea because we had to have it. And so the League gave it form and substance." ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... indictment were quashed on the ground of a defect in its substance, then the case falls. But this is only defective in form. Another grand jury can indict you again. Now if the District Attorney should be a little easy—and I think that, considering your age, and my influence with him, he would be—a new commitment might not issue perhaps before ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... glimpse of Carroll in more than two months, he gazed with an immense satisfaction over the broad river moving brown and glacier-like as though the logs that covered it were viscid and composed all its substance. The enterprise ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White

... herself ridiculous, and he would not connect himself with a family who could uphold a young man in duping an old woman: Lady Trant might shape his message as she pleased, but this was to be its substance. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth—in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... Coming to the substance,—the first point, "popular sovereignty." It is to be labeled upon the cars in which he travels; put upon the hacks he rides in; to be flaunted upon the arches he passes under, and the banners which wave over him. It is to be dished ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... identical spot where the water was found at the first exploration, the water glistened before them. Returning toward the opening a loud beating sound was heard, which at first startled them. It was evidently at the mouth of the cave. It sounded like the beating of a stick against some hard substance. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay

... that the topics for the malevolence of his antagonists were both scanty and strained. But they ceased not, with the true pertinacity of angry dulness, to repeat, in prose and verse, in couplet, ballad, and madrigal, the same unvaried accusations, amounting in substance to the following: That Dryden had been bred a puritan and republican; that he had written an elegy on Cromwell (which one wily adversary actually reprinted); that he had been in poverty at the Restoration; that Lady Elizabeth ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... astonished me more than I shall attempt to describe. I alluded before, gentlemen, to the circumstance of the defendant's being a married man. Yes! he has a wife living in Freetown, whom (from fear she should take a right from his substance) he has turned out upon the world! to the generosity—the kindness—of the stranger! surely we may infer that he may be left at home with more ample means to gratify his passions. He has also no children; this I am sorry for on his account; surely ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... Joseph Cook have been exploding them. As far as I can make out, they both appear to think it very good fun. But I was going to tell you about the black bags, which are filled with dynamite, a very explosive though inexpensive substance indeed, and carried by persons called "dynamiters." These bags are left at large in public buildings, while the dynamitards go away, and as soon as their owners turn the corner the bags explode and blow up the buildings, and anyone who happens ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... One circumstance during the trip did more to show me the terrible rapidity with which we dashed through the flume than anything else. We had been rushing down at a pretty lively rate of speed when the boat suddenly struck something in the bow, a nail, a lodged stick of wood or some secure substance which ought not to have been there. What was the effect? The red-faced carpenter was sent whirling into the flume ten feet ahead. Fair was precipitated on his face, and I found a soft lodgment on Fair's back. It seems to me that in a second's time—Fair himself ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis

... being so strongly—or, at least, so loudly—insisted on to-day. Man, that is to say, is not identical with God, any more than a son is identical with his father; but man is consubstantial, homogeneous, with God, lit by a Divine spark within him, a partaker of the Divine substance. As in nature we discern God revealed as Power, Mind, Will, Purpose, so in man's moral nature, and his inner satisfaction or dissatisfaction according as he does or does not approach a certain moral standard, we discern Him as Righteousness; and, more than all, since men, beings ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... subject of the differentiation of the ether merely that you may not suppose that the ether is a simple substance. For the present we will treat it as a simple substance, but next year we will take it up as a ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson

... that could have been asked. The people, everywhere, had come forward with frank, unanimous selflessness. They had faith in the cause—faith in the Government—faith in themselves; and they proved it by their works, giving with lavish hand from their substance. It was felt that the great prosperity of the North had, in a great measure, come from the South; that the looms of New England were fed with southern cotton; that the New York custom house was mainly busied over southern exports; that the soil of the South ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... the intangible shadow of pomp and luxury, while the substance was actual penury. But her inborn fertility of invention, her abundant resources, her tact in accommodating herself to circumstances, and her inexhaustible energy, had endowed her with the faculty of making the best of her contradictory position, and the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... tears: but all hath suffer'd change; For surely now our household hearts are cold: Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. Or else the island princes over-bold Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Before them of the ten years' war in Troy, And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things. Is there confusion in the little isle? Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile: 'Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death, Trouble ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... the "old De Willoughby place," the rice-fields in "South Ca'llina," and the "thousands of acres of gol' mines" in the mountains. There was a rich consolation in mere conversation on the subject of glories which had once had veritable substance, and whose magnitude might absolutely increase if fortune was kind. But it was not through inquiry that Latimer discovered the whereabouts of the man who shared his secret. In two days' time they met face to face on ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... This was the substance of my answer: "No men are more bound by interest than the Parliament to maintain the royal authority, so that they cannot be thought to have a design to ruin the State, though their proceedings may have a tendency that way. It must be owned, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... deal with motion and is abstract and separable, for the Divine Substance is without either matter or motion. In Physics, then, we are bound to use scientific, in Mathematics, systematical, in Theology, intellectual concepts; and in Theology we will not let ourselves be diverted to play with imaginations, but will simply apprehend that Form ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... doubles several of these numbers." Then, writing upon the definite relationship of electro-chemical equivalents, he states, Art. 835: "Electro-chemical equivalents are always consistent; i. e. the same number which represents the equivalent of a substance A, when it is separating from a substance B, will also represent A when separating from a third substance C. Thus 8 is the electro-chemical equivalent of oxygen, whether separating from hydrogen or tin or lead; and 103.5 is the electro-chemical equivalent of lead, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... who stand to gain by it, and with the cordial support of popular sentiment, the constituted authorities sedulously further the increase of shipping and commerce under protection of the national power. At the same time they spend substance and diplomatic energy in an endeavor to extend the international market facilities open to the country's businessmen, with a view always to a preferential advantage in favor of these businessmen, also with the sentimental support of the common man and at his cost. To safeguard these ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... already schooled herself to look upon her long love for Vane as, after all, only the sustained infatuation of a romantic school-girl, and upon him as a high-hearted, clean-souled but utterly impossible visionary who had sacrificed the substance for the shadow, and who, having chosen irrevocably, could only be left to work out his own destiny as he had ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith

... my own, I annex an editorial taken from the "New Orleans Times," of September 12, evidently written in defence of the measure. (Accompanying document No. 17.) Its real substance, stripped of all circumlocutions, can be expressed in a few words: "The schools of New Orleans have been institutions so intensely and demonstratively loyal as to become unpopular with those of our fellow-citizens to whom such demonstrations are distasteful, and they must ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz

... mingle, unite; refl., to lose form (or substance); to blend, be confused (confounded or mingled); to mingle, intermingle, vanish, be lost, be lost to sight ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... According to the plan of Divine Providence, we find that in all things the movable and variable are moved and regulated by the immovable and invariable; as all corporeal things by immovable spiritual substances, and the inferior bodies by the superior which are invariable in substance. We ourselves also are regulated as regards conclusions, about which we may have various opinions, by the principles which we hold in an invariable manner. It is moreover manifest that as regards things to be done human knowledge and affection ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... statues to sweat, to shed tears, or to be covered with spots of blood, because wood and stone often when mouldering or decaying, collect moisture within them, and not only send it forth with many colours derived from their own substance, but also receive other colours from the air; and there is nothing that forbids us to believe that by such appearances as these heaven may foreshadow the future. It is also possible that statues should make sounds like moaning or sighing, by the tearing asunder of the particles ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... of sacrifice, showing that hundreds and hundreds of them must have used it thus in succession. So was the vocal apparatus within the mouth, and so were the little toad-like feet upon which it was stood up. Also the substance of the gold itself as here and there pitted as though with acid or salts, though what those salts were she did not inquire. And yet, so consummate was the art with which it had originally been fashioned, that ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... Church and only one religion," said the cardinal; "all other forms and phrases are mere phantasms, without root, or substance, or coherency. Look at that unhappy Germany, once so proud of its Reformation. What they call the leading journal tells us to-day, that it is a question there whether four-fifths or three-fourths of the population believe in Christianity. Some portion of it has already gone back, I ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... have said recovery was only slow and partial. She tried to learn the lesson designed in this lengthening out of her earthly sojourn. "I thought my life was spared," she said, "to give the opportunity of devoting for a longer period my influence and substance to the cause of Christ, but I see now a deeper meaning in it. There is more personal holiness to be attained, more nearness to Christ, and more joy hereafter through a deeper work here ...
— Excellent Women • Various

... all its unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship's substance had been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic miles of emptiness that it did not show even ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... which these were about to embark were three canoes, two of which were large and one small. They were made of birch bark, a substance which is tough, light, and buoyant, and therefore admirably adapted for the construction of craft that have not only to battle against strong and sometimes shallow currents, but have frequently to be carried on the shoulders of their crews over rocks and mountains. ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... phrase that can be called great; and that if we could spend a year in writing a single sentence, it might be as well worth preserving as these proverbs. Some men have been made famous by one sentence, usually because it somehow expressed the substance of a lifetime. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... remark. If it were repeated to-day there would be a shout of disapprobation. On the other hand we shall not have another proposal to guarantee a colonial railway. This temporary fluctuation in opinion is not the first instance of men cherishing the shadow after they have rid themselves of the substance, and clinging with remarkable ardour to a sentiment after they have made quite sure that it shall not inconvenience them ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley

... shadow, but, as though gleaming with moonlight, it seemed to shine. Its glow was silvery, with a greenish cast almost phosphorescent. Was it standing on the path? I could not tell. It was too far away; too much in shadow. But I plainly saw that it had the shape of a man. Wraith, or substance? That ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... In substance Capt. Pipe said that the whites were encroaching too far upon the lands of the Indians and preparations were being made for a great union of tribes to drive the "Long Knives" back. He promised to lead a large party of his people ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden

... this, for it is a correction one will find one's self compelled often to make in his thinking. It is so difficult to keep out of mind the idea of substance in connection with the Natural Laws, the idea that they are the movers, the essences, the energies, that one is constantly on the verge of falling into false conclusions. Thus a hasty glance at the present argument ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... nature of life, to find out what life really is, it would be folly to commence by comparing man, the perfection of living beings, with an inorganic or inanimate substance like a brick, to discover the hidden secret; for, as Professor Orton says:[3] "That only is essential to life which is common to all forms of life. Our brains, stomach, livers, hands and feet are luxuries. They are necessary to make us human, but not living beings." Instead of man, then, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... his position was considered unsafe. Many of his letters to me have been lost, and I have thus far not been able to find the one giving the notice referred to, but the reply which is annexed clearly indicates the substance of the letter ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... the prick, and even ventured to place her fingers round it; and as she did so its substance increased. She gently pushed the skin up and down, it throbbed and grew harder and stiffer every moment, till at last it was proudly erect, standing against his spotless belly, as white as ivory and as hard as a ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous

... in passing through non-conducting substances always emits light. This light I have been sometimes inclined to suspect might have been supplied from the substance through which it passes. But I find that after the electric spark has diminished a quantity of air as much as it possibly can, so that it has no more visible effect upon it, the electric light in that air is ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley

... informal, and contrary to the law as laid down some hundred years ago by an old gentleman who never heard of a steam-engine, and who would have fainted at the sight of a telegraph post. As we have the most money on our side, I trust we shall win in the end. None of this useful substance, however, comes my way, as it is Mellor's work. But I hope to reap some advantage from it, both as to experience and introduction. I make no apology for troubling you with this long narration. I wish it to sink into your mind, and into ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... should he weight his fluttering message, so that it would fall in the road? Pee-wee was a scout of substance and had amassed a vast fortune in the way of small possessions. He owned the cap of a fountain pen, a knob from a brass bedstead, two paper clips, a horse's tooth, a broken magnifying glass, a device for making noises in the classroom, a clock ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... one serious monograph on Simon Bolivar written in English, and this is an article which appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. 238, V. 40, published in March, 1870. This article was written by Eugene Lawrence, and pretends to be a eulogy of the Man of the South. In substance it is nothing more than a superficial synopsis of the main facts of the public life of Bolivar, and a constant and virulent attack against Spain and the Catholic Church. It would seem that to the ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell

... had been newly wrought. In some of the cloisters there were representations of flowers, leaves, and vegetables carved in stone with "accuracy and precision so delicate that it almost made visitors distrust their senses when they considered the difficulty of subjecting so hard a substance to such intricate and exquisite modulation." This superb convent was dedicated to St. Mary, and the monks were of the Cistercian Order, of whom the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... put to sale." The ordinances are very severe on apprentices, who, if guilty of haunting taverns, alehouses, bowling alleys, or other misdemeanour, were brought to the hall and stripped and whipped by persons appointed for that purpose. Another company connected with the same substance, the Glaziers, has little history, and we pass on to the Glovers, who existed in 1349, and have had an honourable career. Gloves have played such a notable part in our national life, that it would be a pleasant task to record their history, but we must confine ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... the poisonous substance, (which they, however, preserved,) convey the knight to the palace, and restore him by tender care, was the next impulse of these brave women. Then, while Iseult the younger sat beside her patient, watching his slumbers, she idly ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... very remarkable illustration of the manner in which Yuan Shih-kai was trapped by official Japan during the monarchist movement has recently been extensively quoted in the Far Eastern press. Here is the substance of a Japanese (vernacular) newspaper account showing the uses to which ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... said that he who wears His magic cap, invisible may walk, And none so lynx-eyed as detect his presence, In the most peopled city—yet beware, Let him not, trusting to the demon's power, Cross the white splendour of the sun, for there, Although no palpable substance is discern'd, His ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various

... It is incredible, for almost from their shoulders hung all those troops, yet without curtailing anything [of the convent's usual bounty]. The convents were hostelries for those soldiers and captains, until their substance was gone. But when that commandant could have collected more than three hundred Indians (or rather, soldiers), and gone to meet the enemy and could have inflicted great damage upon him, he spent the time in scandalous feasting. Afterward he went to Dumangas ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various

... the visit which I had made with Tom Herbert to the house near Buckland; the scene between Darke and his companion; and, to keep back nothing, repeated the substance of their conversation. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... and wept softly, lest some one hear her, but none the less bitterly that she had no right conception of the cause of her grief. There was over her childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and poverty of the world. She knew naught of the substance behind the shadow, but the darkness terrified her all the more, and she cried and cried as if her heart would break. Then she, with a sudden resolution, born she could not have told of what strange understanding and misunderstanding of what she had heard ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... necessary to any part of the mechanism of a watch, that part is the pivot. Saunier very aptly puts it thus: "A liquid is subject to the action of three forces: gravity, adhesion (the mutual attraction between the liquid and the substance of the vessel containing it), and cohesion (the attractive force existing among the molecules of the liquid and opposing the subdivision of ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall

... painted a picture upon which he had lavished his usual painstaking care. But when he put it in the sun to dry, the panel cracked down the middle. After this disappointment Hubert went to work and invented a new substance with which colours are made liquid, a 'medium' as it is called, which when mixed with colour dried hard and quickly. It was possible to paint with the new medium in finer detail than before, and ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway

... by her father during those days. He sent messages by Antonia. Why didn't she come to see him? She was happy, yes. But could she forget her old father? Was she that kind of a daughter? Such was the substance of the messages ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... the Ideal, whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn. The farther she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land of unrealities. The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and which she had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not have been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a scene in a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them. They did not belong to her, nor she ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... issue naturally from him, not as a product comes from the hands of an artisan, but "as the tree from the seed, as the web from the spider." Brahma is not a deity who has created the world; he is the very substance of the world. ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... small rocky cleft above the river, not easily accessible.... Gral found it one day because he dearly loved to climb, though all to be found here were the lizards, stringy and without substance. But this day he found more. It was warmth, a warmth immeasurably more satisfying than the caves-above-the-ledge. Here for perhaps an hour the late sun stroked directly in, soft and containing, setting the narrow walls aglow with ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse

... by no means provided against his destructive, pain-giving activities. He has spare time and energy; and these he will devote, ten to one, to recreations involving, at the best, the slaughter of harmless creatures; at the worst, to the wasting of valuable substance, of what might be other people's food; or else to the hurting of other people's feelings in various games of chance or skill, particularly in the great skilled game ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and in later days as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... of unclean beasts but only two. And of the birds seven and seven, male and female, that they may be saved on the face of the earth. Yet after seven days I shall rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and shall destroy all the substance that I made on the earth. And Noah did all things that ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... the odours of nocturnal palm oil. The older travellers were certainly not blases; they seemed to find pleasure and beauty wherever they looked: Ca da Mosto (1455), visiting the Senegal, detected in this graveolent substance, fit only for wheel-axles, a threefold property, that of smelling like violets, of tasting like oil of olives, and tinging victuals like saffron, with a colour still finer. Even Mungo Park preferred the rancid tallow-like shea butter to the best ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... it did, I do not think you would be afraid to marry me. Don't think I am trying to persuade you! I am not. But are you sure that in refusing me you are not sacrificing substance to shadow?" ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... say nothing. Of Hungary I shall not speak now, because other and better opportunities of doing so will arise; but with respect to the Bohemians, the impression left upon my mind is, that the iron has entered deeply into their souls. I have alluded elsewhere to the substance of conversations which I have held with nobles, and priests, and peasants. I have to record now what passed between myself and a fellow-traveller in the diligence,—a medical man, of strong good natural sense, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... who delights the deities, was being milked on that occasion. Drinking her milk that resembled Amrita in taste, I knew what the virtues are of milk. I therefore, at once understood the origin of the substance that my mother offered me, telling me that it was milk. Verily, the taste of that cake, O son, did not afford me any pleasure whatever. Impelled by childishness I then addressed mother, saying,—This O mother, that thou hast given me is not any preparation of milk.—Filled with grief and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... young lawyer, who entered the priesthood after his baptism. He at once set his heart on the monastic life, but his mother took him to her chamber, and, by the bed where she had given him birth, besought him in fear, not to forsake her. "My son," she said in substance, "my only comfort in the midst of the miseries of this earthly life is to see thee constantly, and to behold in thy traits the faithful image of my beloved husband, who is no more. When you have buried me and joined my ashes with those of your father, nothing will then prevent you from retiring ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... that was the dominant thought. There was a sense of extreme disappointment, as though I had found out I had been striving after something altogether without a substance. I couldn't have been more disgusted if I had travelled all this way for the sole purpose of talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking with... I flung one shoe overboard, and became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking forward to—a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... measurable more by the amounts they contain of digestible and available non-nitrogenous constituents than by the amounts of the digestible and available nitrogenous constituents they supply. The non-nitrogenous substance (the fat) in the increase in live weight of an animal is, at any rate in great part, if not entirely, derived from the non-nitrogenous constituents of the food. Of the nitrogenous compounds in food, on the other hand, only a small proportion of the whole consumed is finally stored ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... amplified in arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the time to extempore delivery (not through indolence, but because explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar) have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... up, and wiping from her face a drop of blood which has oozed from a cut in her forehead caused by her striking it against some hard substance when she fell, she looked about her for a moment in a bewildered kind of way, not realizing at first what had happened; and even when she remembered, she was too much stunned and astonished to take it all in as she would afterward when she was calmer and could think ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... running his eye over the different objects of which the universe is composed, he will observe with astonishment that we can descend by almost imperceptible degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—from the most highly organized animal to the most entirely inorganic substance. He will recognize this gradation as the great work of Nature; and he will observe it not only as regards size and form, but also in respect of movements, and in the successive ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... "That is the substance of it," replied Captain Passford, as he restored the key of the cipher to his pocket-book, and rose from his seat. "Now you know all that can be known on this side of the Atlantic in regard to the two steamers. ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic

... forced, however, to come back to the substance of Mrs. Lessing's comment a few days later when he was being dined at the club by a twice-removed cousin of the Goodward's, the upright, elderly symbol of the male sanction which was the most that his fiancee's fatherless condition could furnish forth. The man was ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... sum and substance of Stisted's indictment of Lady Burton on this point. She makes her accusation without adducing a scrap or shred of evidence in support of it, and she makes it in the teeth of the most positive evidence on the other side. Let us examine ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... apply the name of God to very different conceptions, to empty it of all implication of personality, and to reduce it to signifying something very large and very vague, such as the Infinite or the Absolute (whatever these hard words may signify), the great First Cause, the Universal Substance, "the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being,"[1] and so forth. Now without expressing any opinion as to the truth or falsehood of the views implied by such applications of the name of God, I cannot but regard them all as ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... one, an ant-hill, about two feet high. The plan is to hack two holes, one in the top, another on the windward side, and to connect the two passages. There is then a fine draught, and you can cook both on the top and at the side. Inside, the substance of the hill itself gets red-hot and keeps a ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... knowledge. The same may be said of the attainments of many other sciences, such as geology or archeology. However much they may be altered and improved in detail in the course of time, these inductive truths may retain their substance unchanged. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... When the substance of this speech had been made known by Rima to the dying woman, she suddenly rose up from her couch, which she had not risen from for many days, and stood erect on the floor, her wasted face shining with joy. Then Nuflo knew that God's angels ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... of satire, laughing at them instead of gazing into them. They were doubtless grotesque enough in external appearance; but the poet of human nature should have penetrated through the appearance to the substance, and recognized in them, not merely the possibility of Cromwell, but of the ideal of character which Cromwell but imperfectly represented. You may say that Shakespeare's nature was too sunny and genial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... earth-colored bug is usually called the squash stink-bug. It has a very disagreeable odor which gives it this name. When disturbed it throws off from scent glands a small quantity of an oily substance which produces this odor. This is a protection to it for few birds or animals care to feed on it. Most species of sap or blood sucking true bugs have ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman

... has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers, to harass our people and eat out their substance. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... nothing which so thoroughly depletes and robs moral character of all substance—there is nothing which so effectually destroys all robust individuality—as the continuous asking of the ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... its observation is not limited by conditions of race and creed. Those who fail to see in Him what we see nevertheless see something and even by imperfect visions are moved to joy. The world transmutes that joy into blessing, not merely by giving of its substance but of its soul because men perceive that it is for the soul's good and because they hope to receive its benefits although they well know that giving is far better than receiving, in the very words of Him Who gave us the ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady



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