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Vertical   Listen
adjective
Vertical  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the vertex; situated at the vertex, or highest point; directly overhead, or in the zenith; perpendicularly above one. "Charity... is the vertical top of all religion."
2.
Perpendicular to the plane of the horizon; upright; plumb; as, a vertical line.
Vertical angle (Astron. & Geod.), an angle measured on a vertical circle, called an angle of elevation, or altitude, when reckoned from the horizon upward, and of depression when downward below the horizon.
Vertical anthers (Bot.), such anthers as stand erect at the top of the filaments.
Vertical circle (Astron.), an azimuth circle. See under Azimuth.
Vertical drill, an upright drill. See under Upright.
Vertical fire (Mil.), the fire, as of mortars, at high angles of elevation.
Vertical leaves (Bot.), leaves which present their edges to the earth and the sky, and their faces to the horizon, as in the Australian species of Eucalyptus.
Vertical limb, a graduated arc attached to an instrument, as a theodolite, for measuring vertical angles.
Vertical line.
(a)
(Dialing) A line perpendicular to the horizon.
(b)
(Conic Sections) A right line drawn on the vertical plane, and passing through the vertex of the cone.
(c)
(Surv.) The direction of a plumb line; a line normal to the surface of still water.
(d)
(Geom., Drawing, etc.) A line parallel to the sides of a page or sheet, in distinction from a horizontal line parallel to the top or bottom.
Vertical plane.
(a)
(Conic Sections) A plane passing through the vertex of a cone, and through its axis.
(b)
(Projections) Any plane which passes through a vertical line.
(c)
(Persp.) The plane passing through the point of sight, and perpendicular to the ground plane, and also to the picture.
Vertical sash, a sash sliding up and down. Cf. French sash, under 3d Sash.
Vertical steam engine, a steam engine having the crank shaft vertically above or below a vertical cylinder.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vertical" Quotes from Famous Books



... forged handwriting every letter of the alphabet, wherever written, may be examined with a microscope for the following characteristics: Size, shading, position relative to the horizontal line, inclination relative to the vertical line, sharpness of the curves and angles, proportion and relative position of the different parts, and elaboration or extension of the extremities. In scarcely one of these particulars can a man make two letters so much alike that they ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay

... (say with the light coming from the right side). (2) I reduced their portraits photographically to the same size, being guided as to scale by the distance between any two convenient points of reference in the features; for example, by the vertical distance between two parallel lines, one of which passed through the middle of the pupils of the eyes and the other between the lips. (3) I superimposed the portraits like the successive leaves of a book, so that the features of each portrait lay as exactly as the case ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... and its farms provided substantial quantities of meat, milk, grain, and vegetables to other republics. Likewise, its diversified heavy industry supplied the unique equipment (for example, large diameter pipes) and raw materials to industrial and mining sites (vertical drilling apparatus) in other regions of the former USSR. Ukraine depends on imports of energy, especially natural gas, to meet some 85% of its annual energy requirements. Shortly after independence ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... into a condition of ecstasy, also rose into the air in a recumbent posture. She remained in this state for the space of fifteen minutes, the silence being only broken by the distant rumbling of thunder. Many of the spectators could not believe their eyes. At length very gently her body assumed a vertical position, head downwards, but as a concession to polite feeling the remaining laws of gravity were suspended, like herself, and her skirts were not correspondingly inverted. Slowly the ecstatic lady continued to circulate, the assembly stood ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... boiler should be connected to a vertical vent system that will prevent: (1) positive pressure in the flue, (2) backward flow of flue gas through the unit when the burner stops, and (3) ...
— Installation and Operation Instructions For Custom Mark III CP Series Oil Fired Unit • Anonymous

... of slyness. The idea went to his vitals with a shock, and he faced about suddenly as if to defend his life. Then, for the first time, he became aware of a light about the level of his eyes and at some distance in the interior of the house—a vertical thread of light, widening toward the bottom, such as might escape between two wings of ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... white, the air, from sea to rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day or night, of countless sun and lunar rainbows. Valleys, so called, but fissures rather, slit the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away into a lofty and madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to the foot of man and trod only by ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... chamber which seemed familiar, though Graham could not recall distinctly when he had entered it before. In this was a ladder—the first ladder he had seen since his awakening—up which they went, and came into a high, dark, cold place in which was another almost vertical ladder. This they ascended, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... of the sun, upon a dry and sandy country, now made the air insufferably hot. Ali having robbed Mr. Park of his thermometer, he had no means of forming a comparative judgment; but in the middle of the day, when the beams of the vertical sun are seconded by the scorching wind from the desert, the ground is frequently heated to such a degree, as not to be borne by the naked foot; even the negro slaves will not run from one tent to another without their sandals. At this time of the day, the Moors are stretched ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... the room, Doubleday and Stone. Stone was just out of the barber's chair, his hair parted and faultlessly plastered on both sides across his forehead, and his face shaven and powdered. His forehead drawn in horizontal wrinkles rather than vertical ones, looked lower and flatter because of them. To add to the truculence of his natural expression, he was now somewhat under the influence of ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... was allowed to come. The teacher with the wound on his neck, who was with Garibaldi, led us at once to the vertical bars, which are very high, and we had to climb to the very top, and stand upright on the transverse plank. Derossi and Coretti went up like monkeys; even little Precossi mounted briskly, in spite of the fact that he was ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... there were steps that led down at one side to the ground, but the descent thence was so steep, so rugged and impracticable, that obviously no scheme of utility had prompted its construction. Jagged outcropping ledges, a chaos of scattered boulders, now and again a precipitous verge showing a vertical section of the denuded strata, all formed a slant so precarious and steep that with the sharp sound of the door, closing on its spring, Bayne looked up from his seat in the swing on the veranda across the ravine in blank amazement to see her there essaying the descent, as if in preference to an ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... of offering no foothold to this parasite, so harmful to its sister species. It accommodates itself well in many soils in which J. regia will grow, even dry and gravelly, but prefers soils which are fresh, open, rich, and especially, deep. Its roots are long and vertical and their development stops in contact with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... day. Beyond and above the trees a fiery blast blew from the north; but it was seldom a wandering puff stooped to flutter the edges of the tents in the little hollow among the trees. And into this empty basin poured a vertical sun, as if through some giant lens which had burnt a hole in the heart of the scrub. Lulled by the faint perpetual murmur of leaf and branch, without a sound from bird or beast to break its soothing monotone, the two men lay down within a few yards, though out of sight, ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... to control the rise and descent, and also the lateral movements of his machine; and there remains only the steering to be effected—the movement from side to side, from right to left, or vice-versa. At the rear of the biplane, as shown facing page 34, will be seen two vertical planes, E.E. These, being hinged, will swing from side to side; and they exercise a sufficient influence, when working in the strong current of air that blows upon them when a machine is in flight, to steer it accurately in any direction. ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White

... ed. 1807, p. 1106) gives various explanations of the name, assigning the supposed redness to the refraction of the rays of the vertical sun; or to the shadow of the scorched mountain-sides which form its shores; or, as Ctesias would have it, to a certain fountain which discharged red oxide of lead into its waters. "Abyssinian" Bruce had ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... to the study of Seismic Movements.—Apparatus for the study of horizontal and vertical seismic movements, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... the grandeur of centuries, wrapped in togas, who were those who moved the hands of the judges as they wrote, and who dictated their sentences over their heads. The dead judge! He saw great halls of vertical light with concentric rows of seats, and on them hundreds of men speaking, vociferating and gesticulating, in the noisy task of making laws. Behind them crouched the real legislators, the dead, the deputies in their winding sheets, whose presence was unguessed by these men of grandiloquent ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... eastern extremity of the aisles there are chambers formed by walls built, as the vertical straight joints and difference of materials employed indicate, at various periods. The chamber at the end of the northern aisle has an archway, now built up, in its eastern wall, and seems to have served as a vestibule. It is in these chambers that Salzenberg ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... and not 'tied. Fasten the swag with three or four straps, according to judgment and the supply of straps. To the top strap, for the swag is carried (and eased down in shanty bars and against walls or veranda-posts when not on the track) in a more or less vertical position—to the top strap, and lowest, or lowest but one, fasten the ends of the shoulder strap (usually a towel is preferred as being softer to the shoulder), your coat being carried outside the swag ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson

... same cause. They are within the same zone of volcanic formation. In the particular case of this hill range in Afghanistan the collapse did not appear to me to be due to the action of water, but to a sudden crumbling which had caused a very sharp vertical cut. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... guided by any apparatus that we could devise," assented the Doctor. "But that we should be obliged to float aimlessly, hither and thither, altogether the creatures of chance, I do not for a moment admit. The equator, receiving as it does, the vertical rays of the sun, is by far the hottest portion of the earth. The atmosphere at that quarter, being constantly superheated and correspondingly rarified, ascends into the vault above. This creates a semi-vacuum below, and the ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... sixty and seventy; an age at which the heart can seldom stand very much shocking, or lowering, especially where the brain is diseased. So they placed him in a shower-bath, narrow enough to impede respiration, without the falling water, which of necessity drives out air. In short a vertical box with holes ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... a messenger of Christ for his whole time. Comparatively few are called of God into the ministry; but every boy should seriously face the question, under God's guidance, whether or not he be one of those few. Take a pencil and draw a vertical line on a sheet of paper. On one side the line put down the reasons why you should go into the ministry; on the other side, the reasons why you should not. Be honest with yourself and with God. Weigh ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith

... originator of this system of vertical writing, is the only teacher who has had the years of practice in teaching it that make these the standard manuals for teachers and students. The adoption of vertical writing abroad and in this country is largely due to his ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... time Pepsis knew—or anyway acted as if she did—that to be struck by one or both of those terrible vertical, poison-filled fangs was sure death. It would be like a blow from a battle-axe, with the added horror of mortal poison ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... obtain a good view of the peak of Sinai, which I was anxious to sketch. Here, close at my right, arose, almost perpendicularly, the Holy Mountain; its shattered pyramidal peak towering above me some 1400 feet, of a brownish tint, presenting vertical strata of granite, which threw off the glittering rays of the morning sun. Clinging around its base was a range of sharp, upheaving crags, from one hundred to two hundred feet in height, which formed an almost impassable barrier to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... fissure is parallel with the long axis of the bone. This variety of break is not infrequent in the first phalanx; and a vertical fracture of the second phalanx is also said to be longitudinal, however, there is little difference (if any, in some subjects) between the vertical and transverse diameters of ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... on. Or else—seeing that every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four months—he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense, devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... maples and clusters of wine-berries shimmering like blood-drops among their glossy leaves. In places the pathway was underpinned with timber against the side of an almost sheer descent, and he noticed that one could have dropped a vertical line from the fish-hawk, which hung poised a few feet outside one angle, into the water. They descended cautiously to the first sharp bend, and here Geoffrey turned around in advance of his companion. "Do you mind telling me how long it is since you or anybody else ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... explain the dipping of the needle, which had been first noticed by William Norman. His deduction as to this phenomenon led him to believe that this was also explained by the magnetic attraction of the earth, and to predict where the vertical dip would be found. These deductions seem the more wonderful because at the time he made them the dip had just been discovered, and had not been studied except at London. His theory of the dip was, therefore, a scientific prediction, based on a preconceived ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... the orchard for a number of years. It's down in a pretty heavy bluegrass sod. In a portion of that we put the disc in on the tractor and disced and redisced until we got what we thought was a pretty fair seedbed. They found that vertical profile a mixture, and we are hoping to have clover sod instead of bluegrass sod. That's combined with fertility work. I won't take time to go into that, but I think this group is interested in knowing that there is quite an extensive fertility ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various

... gun with the hope of attracting attention of some nearby ship. As the ship began sinking I jumped overboard. The ship sank stern first and twisted slowly through nearly 180 degrees as she swung upright. From this nearly vertical position, bow in the air to about the forward funnel, she went straight down. Before the ship reached the vertical position the depth charges exploded, and I believe them to have caused the death of a number of men. They also partially paralyzed, stunned, or dazed a number of others, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various

... equal vertical bands of green (hoist side) and white with a red five-pointed star within a red crescent; the crescent, star, and color green are traditional symbols of Islam (the ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... it is worth being serious about," Alan put in, "if one of those lights drop into Boston or New York—especially if it happens to play in a horizontal direction instead of vertical." ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings

... intermediate conditions, the former end would drop, the expanded wings would be brought into a slanting condition over a smaller area of supporting air, and the whole apparatus would tend to glide downwards in that direction. The projection of a small vertical plane upon either side would make the gliding mass rotate in a descending spiral, and so we have all the elements of a controllable flight. Such an affair would be difficult to overset. It would be able to beat up even in a fair wind, and then it would be able to contract its bladders and fall down ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... (sometimes with an omission or change of some of the final letters:) as, danger, dangerous; glory, glorious; right, righteous; rock, rocky; clay, clayey; poet, poetic, or poetical; nation, national; method, methodical; vertex, vertical; clergy, clerical; adamant, adamantine. Adjectives thus formed, generally apply the properties of their primitives, to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... condition. I had, I imagine, a swarter skin and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over great summer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would have afforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a pleasant journey. The cloudless sky and vertical sun—how intolerable they would now seem, and scorch my brain and fill my shut eyes with dancing flames! At present even this mild June sun is strong enough to make the old mulberry tree on the lawn appear grateful. It is an ancient, rough-barked tree, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... resting on the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered their shape, and he heaved the whole huge thing high over his head, like a headsman's axe about to fall. The mere height of the thing, as he held it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting men to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the shock of that shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the stranger quail ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... turns round till he becomes giddy; and then stops, and looks horizontally; he now finds, that the apparent rotation of objects is from above downwards, or from below upwards; that is, that the apparent circulation of objects is now vertical instead of horizontal, making part of a circle round the axis of his eye; and this without any rolling of his eyeballs. The reason of there being no rolling of the eyeballs, perceived after this experiment, is, because the images of objects are formed in rotation round the axis of the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... irregularly from her efforts under a vertical sun, she stood erect, loosening the blouse over her bosom to the breeze and pushing back the clustering masses ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... recovery, when one finds himself in a large airy room, with a dreamy indistinct recollection of great past suffering, endured in a small miserable vessel within the tropics, where you have been roasted one moment by the vertical rays of the sun, and the next annealed hissing hot by the salt sea spray;—in a broad luxurious bed, some cool sunny morning, with the fresh sea breeze whistling through the open windows that look into the piazza, and rustling the folds of the clean wire gauze musquitto net that ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... consider the trajectory or curve described by a moving body in space as consisting of a series of right lines, described in successive intervals of time, and constituting the diagonals of parallelograms formed in a vertical plane between the vertical deflections caused by gravity and the production of the line of motion which has been described in each preceding interval of time. This must be obvious; for, if you say that the passage in vacuo of this cannon-ball, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... to establish an hydraulic saw-mill, which rapidly cut up the trunks of trees into planks and joists. The mechanism of this apparatus was as simple as those used in the rustic saw-mills of Norway. A first horizontal movement to move the piece of wood, a second vertical movement to move the saw—this was all that was wanted; and the engineer succeeded by means of a wheel, two cylinders, and pulleys properly arranged. Towards the end of the month of September the skeleton of the vessel, which was to be rigged as a schooner, ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... in width, rigged thortships, one forrid of the rider, and one aft, and each padded on the inside surface. A couple or three rope-yarns, rove fore-and-aft on each side, would prevent the rider listing to stabbard or port, while the vertical pitch would be provided for by a lashing rove across each shoulder. If the horse reared and fell back, you would just draw your head in, like a turtle, and let the bulkheads carry the strain. With such a tackle (pr. tayckle), Jack would undertake to ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... cellar excavation went three feet into limestone rock. The strata were perfectly level and the cellar floor of natural rock was apparently all that could be desired, smooth and flat, without involving any expense for concrete. One wall came where a vertical seam in the rock existed, and since this natural rock face was smooth and vertical and just where the cellar wall should go, it seemed unnecessary to dig it out and lay up masonry in its place. So it was left and the house built. When the spring ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... brown, and their perpendicular walls crowned with fantastic columns and figures of stone or clay, carved out by the winds and the rains of ages. Here and there, rising out of the plain, are curious sharp ridges, or square-topped buttes with vertical sides, sometimes bare, and sometimes dotted with pines,—short, sturdy trees, whose gnarled trunks and thick, knotted branches have been twisted and wrung into curious forms by the winds which blow unceasingly, hour after hour, day ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell

... as the apex of the movement that preceded it, but always its base carries us farther down the slope. Also, in the history of art the summit of one movement seems always to spring erect from the trough of its predecessor. The upward stroke is vertical, the downward an inclined plane. For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and shallow. From Giotto to Lionardo is a long and, at times, almost imperceptible fall. Duccio is a fine decadent of that Basilian movement which half survived the Latin conquest ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... extensively used. Beyond the point reached by the steamer the course of the river is for several hundreds of miles through the "Great Canon," as it is called, a chasm worn by the stream in the table lands of the "Colorado Plateau." This canon has nearly vertical banks, and is nowhere less than three thousand feet deep; in some places six thousand feet, or more than a mile ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... emotion of the mind—that is, as far as I have been able to observe, and I carefully attended to this point. Frowning, which is one of the most important of all the expressions in man, is due to the contraction of the corrugators by which the eyebrows are lowered and brought together, so that vertical furrows are formed on the forehead. Both the orang and chimpanzee are said[18] to possess this muscle, but it seems rarely brought into action, at least in a conspicuous manner. I made my hands into a sort of cage, and placing some ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... the lightning's flash, thought wings us across intervening space, to the sultry, arid plains of India, where seated upon the huge elephant, the inhabitants screen themselves from the burning rays of the vertical sun, and all nature seems fainting beneath the oppressive heat; there the deluded mother tosses her struggling infant into the serpentine Granges, and bowing before her idol, thinks she has appeased her God; we at a ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... comparatively little attention has been paid to the problem of similarly utilising the wave-power, which goes to waste in such inconceivably huge quantities. Where the tidal force elevates and depresses the sea-water on a shore, through a vertical distance of say eight feet, about once in twelve hours, the waves of the ocean will perform the same work during moderate weather once in every twelve or fifteen seconds. It is true that the moon in ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... The characters in vertical lines are read from top to bottom, the order of the columns being from right to left. There are ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... nearly three hundred feet in diameter, which does not touch the great crater save at a small part of its circumference. We peered eagerly into this nearly cylindrical funnel; but vain was our search into the secret of its volcanic action. From the almost horizontal tops of the nearly vertical steeps, nothing can be descried but the upper cone. On trying to reckon those one below another, vision becomes gradually lost in the perfect darkness beneath. No sound issues from this darkness. There are only exhaled ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous

... of the planing machine, enabling it to work both backwards and forwards by means of a screw and roller motion. His "Jim Crow Machine," so called from its peculiar motion in reversing itself and working both ways, is an extremely beautiful tool, adapted alike for horizontal, vertical, or angular motions. The minute accuracy of Mr. Whitworth's machines is not the least of their merits; and nothing will satisfy him short of perfect truth. At the meeting of the Institute of Mechanical ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... of a mine, shows, above ground, a typical horse whim driving a bucket windlass. Below ground is shown a crank-driven piston pump typical of those driven by Stangenkunst. In this case, however, it is driven by an underground vertical treadmill. ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf

... used, it is a good practice to make saw cuts along the diagonal lines and bore a hole at the intersection, thus allowing the spur to enter the wood more freely. Oil the other end of the wood while holding it in a vertical position, and give the oil a chance to penetrate into the wood. Then replace the live center by taking the stock and center and forcing it into the spindle by a sudden push of the hand. The tail stock is then moved about 1/2" to 1" from the end of the piece to be turned, ...
— A Course In Wood Turning • Archie S. Milton and Otto K. Wohlers

... ordinary artificial horizon is useless for very low angles. They can be measured to within two or three minutes, by means of a vertical point of reference obtained in the following manner:—Tie two pieces of thread, crossing each other at two feet above the ground, put the vessel of mercury underneath it, and look down upon the mercury. When the eye is so placed, that the crossed threads ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... the minute, and the poor cable must feel very sea-sick by this time. We are quite unable to do anything, and continue riding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the engines going constantly so as to keep the ship's bows up to the cable, which by this means hangs nearly vertical and sustains no strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the vessel. We were all up at four, but the weather entirely forbade work for to-day, so some went to bed and most lay down, making up our leeway, as we nautically term our loss of sleep. I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... found ourselves in a dark vault, which was full of machinery. By the light of a lantern we examined it. Here we saw an explanation of the whole trick. The shaft of the mill-wheel which was let through the wall of the tower was continuous as the axle of a vertical cogged wheel, and by a multiplication action turned a large horizontal wheel into which a vertical shaft descended. This shaft was let into the centre of four crossbeams, supporting the floor of the room in which ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade

... air of the breath, till the bird rose in air like a cork in water. But it has to be, not a buoyant cork, but a buoyant bullet. And therefore that it may have momentum for pace, it must have weight to carry; and to carry that weight, the wings must deliver their blow with effective vertical, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... into a state in which one movement is as little obstructive to the other as possible. This happens in two ways: first by the particles limiting one another's movement till they all advance in one direction; and, secondly, in this way, that the particles limit their vertical movements in virtue of which they are approaching the centre of attraction, till they all move horizontally—i. e., in parallel circles round the sun as their centre, no longer intercept one another, and by the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... a pig, wild boar, or deer, a rough support, consisting of four vertical pieces of wood and a few horizontal parallel pieces, is erected outside the house, if the weather permits. A fire is built beneath the frame and the whole animal, minus the entrails, is laid upon it. Two men or more then set ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... indeed there be one, has no congenital link that will either drag man down to the "beast of the earth," or lift the latter up to the transcendent plane of humanity. Each must remain specifically in his own type, whatever may be their vertical tendencies, upwards or downwards.[8] And this word "type" implies a fundamental ground-plan—an archetype—an original conception of what each should unconditionally be, and what plane each should as unconditionally occupy. Man's place in nature can never be ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... lines. In our own country we have the Tyneside and Craven faults in the North of England, which are 30 miles long and often 20 yards wide; but even more striking is the great Cleveland Dyke—a wall of volcanic rock dipping slightly towards the south, but sometimes being almost vertical, and stretching across the country, over hill and dale, in an almost perfect straight line from a point on the coast ten miles north of Scarborough, in a west-by-north direction, passing about two miles south of Stockton and terminating about six miles north-by-east ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace

... in outline, but the actual execution requires considerable skill. Trees seldom stand quite vertical, there is danger of lodging in some other tree in thick woods, and it is therefore necessary to throw trees quite exactly. Some men become so expert at this that they can plant a stake and drive it into the ground ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes

... discussion, is the prolongation of the dorsal and ventral fins on to the lower of the body at the base of the tail, the attachments of these accessory portions being transverse to the axis of the body. These fishes have the peculiar habit of adhering to the vertical surfaces of sides of aquaria, even the smooth surfaces of slate or glass. In nature they are taken occasionally on gravelly or sandy ground, but probably live also among rocks and adhere to them in the same way as to vertical surfaces in captivity. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... called Romboides (narrow diamond) The Triangle or Tricquet (pyramid) The Square or quadrangle (square) The Pillaster or Cillinder (tall rectangle) The Spire or taper, called piramis (tall pyramid) The Rondel or Sphere (circle) The egge or figure ouall (vertical egg) The Tricquet reuerst (triangle) The Tricquet displayed (hour-glass) The Taper reuersed (narrow triangle) The Rondel displayed (half circle upon the other half) The Lozange reuersed (wide diamond ) u The Egge displayed (half oval upon the other half ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham

... a few hundred yards of the scattered township. For a mile or so its slopes were bare except for grass on which sheep and goats were grazed, and a few scattered trees. Studying the place through glasses I observed that these slopes were crowned by a vertical precipice of what looked like lava rock, which seemed to surround the whole mountain and must have been quite a hundred feet high. Beyond this precipice, which to all appearance was of an unclimbable nature, began a dense forest of large trees, cedars I thought, clothing it to the very top, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... contains a number of references to organ notes in form "c3", where the "3" is superscripted. In the text version of this e-book, the superscripted characters are surrounded with the vertical bar symbol "|", ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller

... must be understood, gives no adequate idea of the local intricacy of the system, while at the same time it is precisely this intricacy, both vertical and horizontal, that increases the cost and difficulty of making roads, and that has served in the past to keep the inhabitants ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... be asked, do the elegant markings of the tiger, the jaguar, and the other large cats agree with this theory? We reply that these are generally cases of more or less special adaptation. The tiger is a jungle animal, and hides himself among tufts of grass or of bamboos, and in these positions the vertical stripes with which his body is adorned must so assimilate with the vertical stems of the bamboo, as to assist greatly in concealing him from his approaching prey. How remarkable it is that besides the lion and tiger, almost all the other ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... the other for up-and-down travel, but also because there are movable planes in the wings of the machine, which have to be worked to tip or 'bank' it when making a turn or to keep it on an even keel when a gust of wind strikes it. The 'rudder' is the vertical plane at the tail of the machine, and is used for steering sideways, while the 'elevators' are the two horizontal movable planes just below the rudder, which are used for steering up and down. Similar planes to the latter, one situated in the back edge of each upper ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... settled downward toward the selected corner. There was no noise, no blast, no flame, no slightest visible or detectable sign of whatever force it was that was braking the thousands of tons of the vessel's mass in its miles-long, almost-vertical plunge to ground. ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... the wires A and B are clamped separately below, we may impart a sudden molecular disturbance to either A or B by giving a quick to-and-fro (torsional) vibration round the vertical wire, as axis, by means of the handle. As the wire A is separate from B, disturbance of one will not affect the other. Vibration of A produces a current in one direction, vibration of B in the opposite direction. Thus we have means of verifying every experiment by obtaining ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose

... forth, Wishing to reach the Castle when the heat Should weigh upon it, vertical at noon. My path lay thro' green open fields at first, With now and then trees rising statelily Out of the grass; and afterwards came lanes Closed in by hedges smelling of the may, And overshadowed by the meeting trees. So I walked on with none but pleasant thoughts; The Spring was in ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... in small bits from the barrel of cotton, the lint was distributed over the entire surface with great dexterity and uniformity, the mattress growing upward with perfectly vertical sides, straight edges and square corners. In this manner a thoroughly uniform texture is secured which compresses into a body of even ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... bell to be found upon the harness that children use when they play at horses. The shin-pad that carries the bells varies to some extent in the details of its construction; the number of bells also varies. Sometimes the vertical strips and lateral ties of the pad are of ribbon or braid; maybe oftener of leather. Sometimes the bells are stitched upon the lateral ties, top and bottom; it is more usual, however, to fasten them on the perpendicular ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp

... of this loom being represented as upright it is often spoken of as an upright or vertical loom. But it is drawn upright because the Egyptian artist did not understand perspective, and it was only by making the loom upright that he was enabled to show the details we have just been examining. For the same reason mat ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth

... whose axis is nearly always vertical and whose orifice faces upwards so as not to let the honey escape, varies a little in shape according to the supporting base. When set on a horizontal surface, it rises like a little oval tower; when fixed ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... striking feature of this skull is the well marked central vertical frontal ridge and some tendency to angularity of the vertex. In the whole this skull is of a more refined type than the others and suggestive of some fair intellectual development of the individual. There are two wormian bones on the left side of the skull, ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall

... enjoying the greatest reputation, which have, as an essential feature, a great number of rods which cannot possibly develop their strength, and might as well be of much smaller dimensions. These rods are the vertical and horizontal rods in the counterfort of the retaining wall shown at a, in Fig. 2. This retaining wall consists of a front curtain wall and a horizontal slab joined at intervals by ribs or counterforts. The manifest ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... which revolves in a vertical plane, 56 cm. in diameter and bearing near its periphery one-centimeter holes punched 3 cm. apart. E is an eye-rest, and L an electric lamp. SS is a screen pierced at H by a one-centimeter hole. The distance EH is 34 cm. The disc DD is so pivoted that ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... function, up to very recent times, was sexual and reproductive. Modern interests, business, social, intellectual, religious, artistic and philanthropic, which today loom so large, are a recent innovation, occupying in comparison with the period when they were not but a moment of time. In a vertical section of man—both racial and individual, they are seen to constitute but a superficial layer, from a contemporary standpoint predominant and paramount but in the light of the ages secondary and unstable. Biologically a woman is only an agent for ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... the shocks, which began at about eight o'clock in the morning, are said to have been vertical. Some faint idea may be formed of the extreme violence of this motion from the fact mentioned by Humboldt that the dead bodies of some of the inhabitants who perished were tossed over a small river to the height of several hundred feet, and landed ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... that lonely palm to the remote horizon, a thousand elfin fires arose—blue-tongued and spirituous. Grey pencilings of smoke stole straightly upward to the sky, so that look where she would Rita could discern nothing but these countless thin, faintly wavering, vertical lines ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... the great variety of human nature there is in every human being here. Our life isn't stratified; perhaps it never will be. At any rate, for the present, we're all in vertical sections. But I always go back to my first notion of Barker: he's ancestral, and he makes me feel like degenerate posterity. I've had the same sensation with Tom; but Barker seems to go a little further back. I suppose there's such a thing ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... noise of their unavailing regrets was all about him. He saw clearly only now and then. At other times the picture quivered dimly, through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the room it must have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame streamed up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces! Two, more particularly near the woman's: one a woman's also, white and clear-featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard, but which was ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... Burns, of Friendship, has invented and patented a new style of car. The inside is divided into a series of compartments by horizontal and vertical partitions of slats, wire netting, or any material which will permit the free circulation of the water. Each compartment has a chute extending down into it from the top, by means of which the lobsters ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb

... less clearly ascertained. Amongst the most remarkable are—the sigillaria, of which large stems are very abundant, shewing that the interior has been soft, and the exterior fluted with separate leaves inserted in vertical rows along the flutings—and the stigmaria, plants apparently calculated to flourish in marshes or pools, having a short, thick, fleshy stem, with a dome-shaped top, from which sprung branches of from twenty to thirty feet long. Amongst monocotyledons were some palms, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... shouldered. Looking at his figure, one would have said that he had a giant's strength; at his features, that he would use it like a giant. He was clean shaven, his hair rather closely cropped and gray. His low forehead was seamed with wrinkles above the eyes, and over the nose these became vertical. The heavy black brows followed the same law, saved from meeting only by an upward turn at what would otherwise have been the point of contact. Deeply sunken beneath these, glowed in the obscure light a pair ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... as they realised that the battle was on and that they were in the enemy's country. Under the guidance of Jakey they tramped up the track, turned toward what appeared as a vertical cliff, and clambered slowly and painfully over loose rocks, through stunted evergreens, and at last stood upon the rolling surface of the mesa above. From here on, the path was less obstructed. It was near midnight when the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason

... that your reef is good enough on the surface, the next thing to be done is to ascertain, by means of cuts and shafts, its nature below the surface. This may be done either by an underlay shaft, which follows the reef down from the surface, or by a vertical shaft, sunk some distance away from the outcrop, to cut the reef ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... two such slices to be prepared from our lump of coal—one parallel with the bedding, the other perpendicular to it; and let us call the one the horizontal, and the other the vertical, section. The horizontal section will present more or less rounded yellow patches and streaks, scattered irregularly through the dark brown, or blackish, ground substance; while the vertical section will exhibit more elongated bars and granules ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... biplane is characterized by warping wing tips and seams of heavy construction, while the surfaces of the Herring-Curtiss machine, are slight and it looks very light and buoyant as if well suited to its element. The Voisin biplane is fashioned after the manner of a box kite and therefore presents vertical surfaces to the air. Farman's machine has no vertical surfaces, but there are hinged wing tips to the outer rear-edges of its surfaces, for use in turning and balancing. He also has a combination of wheels and skids or runners ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club, she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town. But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her head during her ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... forehead recedes less than usual in these people, but the large size of the jaws, the quadrangular orbits, and the width between the cheek bones, are all remarkably developed; while the rounded head, elevated vertex, vertical occiput and great inter-parietal diameter, (which is no less than 5.7 inches,) render this skull a type ...
— Some Observations on the Ethnography and Archaeology of the American Aborigines • Samuel George Morton

... in both decks were placed diagonal stays of fir (6 x 10 inches), almost at right angles to the ship's sides, and securely fastened to the sides and to the beams by wooden knees. There are 68 of these stays distributed over the ship. In addition, there are under the beams three rows of vertical stanchions between decks, and one row in the lower hold from the keelson. These are connected to the keelson, to the beams, and to each other by iron bands. The whole of the ship's interior is thus filled with a network of braces and stays, arranged in ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... it reached the orifice in the top of the cave of light, Clewe heard the conical steel top grate slightly as it touched its edge, for it was still swinging a little from the motion given to it by his entrance; but it soon hung perfectly vertical and went silently ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... thing from the standpoint of the current theories is that these conformable relations of incongruous strata are often repeated over and over again in the same vertical section, the same kind of bed reappearing alternately with others of an entirely different "age," that is, appearing "as if regularly interbedded" (A. Geikie) with them, in a manifestly ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... mooncalves they were some little distance away from us in a place of tumbled rocks. The less vertical surfaces of the rocks were thick with a speckled green plant growing in dense mossy clumps, upon which these creatures were browsing. We stopped at the edge of the reeds amidst which we were crawling at the sight of them, peering out at then and looking round for a second glimpse of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... not so simple as might be supposed by those who are not acquainted with the way in which the cardinal points are correctly determined. By solar observations, or rather by the observations of shadows cast by vertical shafts before and after noon, the direction of the meridian, or north and south line, can theoretically be ascertained. But probably in this case, as in determining the latitude, the builders took the stars for their guide. The pole of the heavens would mark the true north; and equally the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... demonstrated, the transport of the artillery became a duty like any other; only, now that the enemy were warned, it was more dangerous. The fort resembled a volcano with its belching flames and smoke; but, owing to the vertical direction in which it was forced to fire, it made more noise than it did harm. Five or six men were killed to each wagon; that is to say, a tenth of each fifty; but the cannon once safely past, the fate of the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... upper end. The concrete was allowed to accumulate behind this gate until a wheelbarrow load was had, when the batch was let loose by lifting the gate and was discharged into barrows at the bottom. In another case a vertical chute 15 ft. long, consisting of a 15-in. square box with a canvas end, was used. The concrete was dumped into the chute in batches of about 8 cu. ft.; two men at the bottom "cut down" the pile with hoes to keep it from coning and causing separation ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... and held her attention a long moment. A curious, half-wistful, half-pathetic expression crept into her eyes as the realization came to her sharply that she was fading. There were lines and shadows and pallor that ought not to be in the face of a woman of thirty-five. She smoothed the vertical lines in her forehead, and then let her hands remain over her face, while behind their cool smoothness her mind ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... known as astigmatism, is due to the fact that the eye does not always have a perfectly spherical front (cornea). The curvature in one direction is different from that in others. For example, the vertical curvature may be more convex than the horizontal. Such a condition produces a serious defect of vision. It can be corrected by means of cylindrical lenses of the proper strength so placed before the eye as to correct the ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle

... round shallow pilasters as at the Chora, S. Theodosia, and the Myrelaion. Sometimes the string-courses or the pilasters or both are omitted, and their places are respectively taken by horizontal and vertical bands. Decorative pilasters flush with the wall are employed in the marble ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... tendency to be less numerous and shorter on the north side, and the bark on the north side was usually finer in texture and of a smoother surface. Also moss was more often found on the north side of vertical trees. The tops of pine trees usually leant toward the southeast—but that that was not always a sure sign in all localities, as in some places the tree tops were affected by the prevailing winds. The ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... death, which occurred in 1847. He had given it an impulse which it never lost. In 1846 Mr. Applegath patented certain important improvements in the steam press. The general disposition of his new machine was that of a vertical cylinder 200 inches in circumference, holding on it the type and distributing surfaces, and surrounded alternately by inking rollers and pressing cylinders. Mr. Applegath estimated in his specification that in his new vertical system the machine, with eight cylinders, would print about 10,000 ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... majority retain throughout life one or more of the following characteristics, which may therefore be described as permanent signs of the inherited disease: Dwarfing of stature from interference with growth at the epiphysial junctions; the forehead low and vertical, and the parietal and frontal eminences unduly prominent; the bridge of the nose sunken and rounded; radiating scars at the angles of the mouth; perforation or destruction of the hard palate; Hutchinson's teeth; opacities ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... impermeable to any substance, however small, thrown at it; a thin jet of water only half an inch in diameter, if discharged at great pressure equivalent to a column of water of 500 metres, cannot be cut even with an axe, it resists as though it were made of the hardest steel; a thin cord, hanging from a vertical axis, and being revolved very quickly, becomes rigid, and if struck with a hammer it resists and resounds like a rod of wood; a thin chain and even a loop of string, if revolved at great speed over a vertical pulley, becomes rigid and, if allowed to escape from the pulley, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... official report of his discoveries. No living being seemed to have visited this desolate coast for the last thirty years. In this spot a loadstone needle, suspended as delicately as possible, immediately moved into an almost vertical position under the magnetic influence; if the centre of attraction was not immediately under the needle, it could only be at a trifling distance. The doctor made the experiment carefully, and found that the imperfect instruments of James Ross had given his ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters. A new method ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... rock, for the most part crystalline in form. Though quite near to Bombay, and only a few miles from Khandala, the summer residence of the Europeans, the threatening heights of this giant were long considered inaccessible. On the north, its smooth, almost vertical face rises 2,450 feet over the valley of the river Pen, and, further on, numberless separate rocks and hillocks, covered with thick vegetation, and divided by valleys and precipices, rise up to the clouds. In 1854, the railway pierced ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... it. When so traced they are all in true perspective. If the glass be sloped in any direction, the lines are still in true perspective, only it is perspective calculated for a sloping plane, while common perspective always supposes the plane of the picture to be vertical. It is good, in early practice, to accustom yourself to enclose your subject, before sketching it, with a light frame of wood held upright before you; it will show you what you may legitimately take into your picture, and what choice there is between a narrow ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... in upon him. The major, somewhat ignorant of the situation, pushed onward till he suddenly found himself on the brow of a precipice which descended at an almost vertical inclination for a hundred and fifty feet. Here was a frightful dilemma. To right and left the Indian runners could be seen, their lines extending to the verge of the cliff. What was to be done? surrender to the Indians, attempt to dash through their ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... chief features of these methods are summarized. The Slack and Brownlow apparatus we will deal with first. This purifier is one which is intended to remove the matter in suspension in the water to be treated by subsidence and not by filtration. The apparatus consists of a vertical iron tank or cylinder, inside which are a series of plates arranged in a spiral direction around a fixed center, and sloping at an angle of 45 deg. on both sides outward. The water to be dealt with flows through a large inlet tube ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... suddenly called upon to do so, say what peculiarities their writing possessed. For example, how many could say off-hand how they dotted an i—whether with a round dot, a tick or a dash—whether the tick was vertical, horizontal or sloping; what was the proportional distance of the dot from the top of the i. Again, ask a practised writer how he crosses the letter t—whether with a horizontal, up or down stroke? It is safe to assume ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn

... are cut and fitted to each other with the greatest accuracy, and joined with a cement of lime, with little or no sand in it. It has been ascertained that a bed has been cut in the solid rock, eight inches deep, to receive the lowest external course of stones. The vertical height, measured from this base in the rock to the top of the highest platform now remaining, is 456 feet. This last platform is thirty two feet eight inches square, and if to this were added what is necessary to ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner

... He could now see the interior of the pit, which, being in the side of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost corner the square outline of a van appeared, with its back towards him. A light came from the interior, and threw a moving shadow upon the vertical face of gravel at the further side of the pit into ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... western face of Denali and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the level foreground of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed, a glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming a stupendous vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand feet to a splendid sharp crest perhaps some forty or fifty miles away; there, a little farther to the south, rose the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous elevation of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them, near the base, little sharp peaks ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... earth under existing laws of nature, as the evolutionists allege, for one hundred thousand years, not only must they have multiplied until their bones would have covered the earth, and filled the sea, but, as Sir John Herschel shows, they would have formed a vertical column, having for its base the whole surface of the earth, and for its height three thousand six hundred and seventy-four times the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... against the cloudless sky to the south. A little to the east, beyond the valley of the Cernon, which I intended to cross, were high hills or cliffs, treeless and sterile, with hard-cut angular sides, terminating upwards in vertical walls of naked stone. These were the buttresses of the Causse de Larzac. The lower sides of some of the hills were blue with lias marl, and wherever they were steep not a blade ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... to touch ground finally with the whole weight of the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet, and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed. When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig into ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... earth, which, calculated upon the moon's orbit, is equal to about 11 deg., it is necessary to add these 11 deg. to those caused by the already-mentioned delay of the moon, or, in round numbers, 64 deg.. Thus, at the moment of firing, the visual radius applied to the moon will describe with the vertical line of the place an angle ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne

... a height of seventeen Neapolitan palms (nearly fifteen feet) from the level of the ground, were discovered four skeletons together in an almost vertical position. Twelve palms lower was another skeleton, with a hatchet near it. This man appears to have pierced the wall of one of the small chambers of the prothyrum, and was about to enter it, when he was smothered, either ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... war! What a country for defence!" he said to himself, as Nevill's yellow car sped along the levels of narrow ridges that gave, on either hand, vertical views far down to fertile valleys, rushed into clouds of weeping rain, or out into regions ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... up into a ball. Mr. Lindsay Carnagie informed me (1838) that he had examined many burrows over a stone-quarry in Scotland, where the overlying boulder-clay and mould had recently been cleared away, and a little vertical cliff thus left. In several cases the same burrow was a little enlarged at two or three points one beneath the other; and all the burrows terminated in a rather large chamber, at a depth of 7 or ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... "It must be over three miles under us to the bottom, on the vertical. Ten miles of thirty-three per cent grade—if we go down we'll ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin

... central parts of the mass are compact, or at most crenulated with a few minute cavities, and are often columnar. At Quail Island this structure was assumed in a striking manner; the lava in one part being divided into horizontal laminae, which became in another part split by vertical fissures into five-sided plates; and these again, being piled on each other, insensibly became soldered together, forming fine symmetrical columns. The lower surface of the lava is vesicular, but sometimes only to the thickness of a few inches; ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin

... remaining ones were much larger and expanded horizontally. The same author quotes from M. Desmoulins the case of a species of Orobanche, in which a disjunction of the petals constituting the upper lip took place, thus liberating the style and allowing it to assume a vertical direction. ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... means. Some people are constantly rubbing at their skylights, but if they do not keep their other windows clean also, there will not be much light in the house: God, like his body, the light, is all about us, and prefers to shine in upon us sideways: we could not endure the power of his vertical glory; no mortal man can see God and live; and he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, shall not love his God whom he hath not seen. He will come to us in the morning through the eyes of a child, when we have been gazing all night at ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... how they are arranged. The diagonal stays are, of course, placed as nearly as possible at right angles to the sides of the ship, so as to strengthen them against external pressure and to distribute its force. The vertical stanchions between both tiers of beams and between the lower beams and keelson are admirably adapted for this latter object. All are connected together with strong knees and iron fastenings, so that the whole becomes, as it were, a single coherent mass. ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... midst of such a strange combination of nature and art. Independent of their beauty, they are, perhaps, the most singular falls that are known to exist. The whole country is of trappe formation, and the black rocks rise up strictly vertical. The river, which at the Falls is about one hundred and twenty yards wide, pours over a bed of rock between hills covered with chestnut, walnut, pine, and sycamore, all mingled together, and descending to the edge of the bank; their bright and various foliage ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... apron and fringe stained yellow. 40 7 Background of upper (zig-zag) part of design unstained, but that of lower (rectangular) part and whole of back fold of apron and fringe stained yellow. 41 10 1/2 Faintly tinted broad horizontal and vertical lines and triangles in figure represent yellow stain. No other staining in the apron. 42 6 3/4 Background of design unstained, but back fold end of apron and fringe stained yellow. 43 6 3/4 No background staining in the apron. ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... were heard to tinkle as they fell within the barn. The chagrin of the mortified rifleman was cunningly abated by Peter's declaring that he himself was at fault in confining his master's attention to vertical rather than to horizontal considerations; but while he thus explained away the failure, he winked at the other servants and whispered aside to Plutarch that, though horticulture was his profession, he was a better shot ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... vertical like a rampart wall, and up—up—up that dripping rock clutched the tossing billows like watery arms of sirens. It needed no seaman to prophecy the fate of a boat caught between that rock ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... startling enough from its very suddenness. One of the assistants stepped forward, and, with a quick, careless motion, threw back two folding shutters, that formed the upper part of the coffin lid; the blaze of the vertical sun, on which no living thing could have looked unblinded, fell full on the heavy eyelids, that never shrunk or shivered, and on the bare, upturned features, blanched to the unnatural whiteness only found in corpses from which the life-blood has been drained away. Since then, I ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... But in Canton one almost forgets all that. Imagine a maze of narrow streets, more confused and confusing than Venice; high houses (except in the old city); and hanging parallel to these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs inscribed with huge Chinese characters, gold on black, gold on red, red or blue on white, a blaze of colour; and under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream, yellow faces, black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot or borne on chairs, not a cart or carriage, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... occasion some fine plants, after having been left for 2 hrs. in the gas, were immediately given bits of meat in the usual manner, and on their exposure to the air most of their tentacles became in 12 m. curved into a vertical or sub-vertical position, but in an extremely irregular manner; some only on one side of the leaf and some on the other. They remained in this position for some time; the tentacles with the bits of meat not having at first moved more quickly or farther inwards than the others ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... to get the unwieldy tons of its great bulk into a vertical position—the nose deep in a hole we had dug in the sand and the rest of it supported by the trunks of date-palms ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... dismounted, pulled off his iron-plated gloves, knelt, and was: for humbly taking the Kaiser's hand, to kiss it. Kaiser would not; Kaiser looked thunderous tornado on him, with hands rigidly in the vertical direction. The magnanimous Kurfurst arose therefore; doffed his hat: "Great-mightiest (GROSSMACHTIGSTER) all-gracious Kaiser, I am your Majesty's prisoner," said he, confining himself to the historical. ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... green with a vertical white band (symbolizing the role of religious minorities) on the hoist side; a large white crescent and star are centered in the green field; the crescent, star, and color green are traditional symbols ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than incline. This one—probably some ramification of a road on the plain above—was disagreeable to look at, so vertical was it. From underneath you saw it gain by zigzag the higher layer of the cliff where it passed out through deep passages on to the high plateau by a cutting in the rock; and the passengers for whom the vessel was waiting in the creek must have come ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... of the famous "Lion Gate" at Mycenae, instead of the winged disk, we find a vertical pillar to represent the Mother Goddess, flanked by two lions which are nothing more than other representatives of herself ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... noted that the time constant of a circuit can be reduced either by diminishing the self-induction or by increasing the resistance. In Fig. 54 the position of the time constant for the top curve is shown by the vertical dotted line at 10 seconds. The current will take 10 seconds to rise to 0.634 of its final value. This retardation of the rise of current is simply due to the presence of coils and electromagnets in the circuit; the current as it grows being retarded because it has to create magnetic fields ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... strengthened as it is, by the suitableness of our climate to perfect vision. For in it we have that mean degree of light which is best adapted to the distinguishing of colours, a boundless diversity of hue in nature relieved by those fine effects of light and shade which are denied to more vertical suns, besides those beauties of complexion and feature in our females peculiar to England; respects in which at least our country is not ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... the forest which covers the steep sides of the ever-winding gorge of the Dordogne for many leagues, only broken where the rocks are so nearly vertical that no soil has ever formed upon them, except in the little crevices and upon the ledges, where the hellebore, the sedum, the broom, and other unambitious plants which love sterility flourish where the foot of man ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... possibilities of animal organization, there is a certain monotony of structure in the Radiate plan, in which the body is divided into a number of identical parts, bearing definite relations to a central vertical axis. But while all admit that Vertebrates are highest and Radiates lowest, how do the Articulates and Mollusks stand to these and to each other? To me it seems, that, while both are decidedly superior to the Radiates and inferior to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlight, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton



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