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Anomalous   /ənˈɑmələs/   Listen
Anomalous

adjective
1.
Deviating from the general or common order or type.



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"Anomalous" Quotes from Famous Books



... into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... Leavenworth has got into her present difficulty by not telling all that was required of her. Mary Leavenworth—but I cannot speak of her till I know what you have to divulge. Her position, as well as that of her cousin, is too anomalous for either you or me to discuss. What we want to learn from you is, how you became connected with this affair, and what it was that Hannah knew which caused her to leave New ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green

... studies went abroad, and presently fossil bones poured in from all sides, and Cuvier's conviction that extinct forms of animals are represented among the fossils was sustained by the evidence of many strange and anomalous forms, some of them of gigantic size. In 1816 the famous Ossements Fossiles, describing these novel objects, was published, and vertebrate paleontology became a science. Among other things of great popular interest the book contained the first authoritative description of the hairy elephant, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... certain branches of the Civil Law had been absorbed by the Clerics, who were charged with converting their functions into an elaborate machinery for extorting fees; and on the Criminal side, what was known as Benefit of Clergy, as well as the rules of Sanctuary, had become not merely anomalous but an actual encouragement to crime. Any criminal or accused person who succeeded in reaching Sanctuary was safe from the secular arm; and any one who could produce evidence, even of the flimsiest character, that he ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... during that memorable night of 22 June, of which so much has already been said. And, for my part, I attribute the anomalous conduct of which I was guilty on that occasion to the unusual frame of mind in which I found myself on my return home. I had dined with some friends at the Cascade restaurant, and, the entire evening, whilst we smoked and the orchestra played melancholy waltzes, we talked ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc

... patience, and recommend patience to others, and, with the racer in the Tragedy, look forward steadily and hopefully to the event, [greek: to telei pistin pheron], when, as we trust, all that is inharmonious and anomalous in the details, will ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... every particular, whether of form, quality, or active power, that presents itself in this system of motion and of life; and which, without a proper attention to this character of the system, might appear anomalous and incomprehensible. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... accomplishment of it. A nation of women, we may confidently say, is as much a chimera, as a nation of two-headed men; and that individual has little acquaintance with herself that knows not, there is an insuperable objection to so anomalous an occurrence. With whatever abuses of authority, therefore, the other sex may be chargeable, it is not to be denied, that they assert their superiority on the ground of natural constitution, and that they cannot be considered as usurpers. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... the great ligneous plants which never obtain the same size in our climate. But among the dicotyledonous vegetables there is none that merit the attention of naturalists as the creeping ligneous plants known as so much lianes. Almost all these plants present a remarkable structure, more or less anomalous, which may throw a light on the mode of increase and nourishment of vegetables. Samples of these fruits, collected by MM. Gaudichaud, Perrottet, Guillemin, Melinon, have already suggested valuable ideas. But there are yet ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various

... of death. As the great continent of Australia became known, it was found that the great mass of its mammalia, from the gigantic kangaroo to the pigmy, mouse-like potoroo, belonged to this singular order. The order contains a most anomalous set of animals, some being exclusively carnivorous, some chiefly subsisting on insects, while others browse on grass; and many live on fruits and leaves, which they climb trees to procure; a smaller portion subsisting on roots, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... Russian usage, in so reckless and wholesale a fashion as to be no longer of value as archaeologic records. In the staircase leading to the galleries are some further wall-paintings, said to be contemporaneous with the building of the cathedral; the date, however, is wholly uncertain. These anomalous compositions represent a boar-hunt and other sports, with groups of musicians, dancers, and jugglers, intervening. In accord with the secular character of the subjects is the rude naturalism of the style. Positive knowledge as to date being wanting, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... is soft," said Ralph Flare. "She has brightened many a bit of Belgian pike road, and the brown turban on her head is in clever contrast to the silver shimmer of her hairs. How anomalous are life and art! How unconscious is this old lady of the narrow escape she is making from perpetuation! Doubtless she works afield beside that old Jacques Bonhomme, and drinks sour wine or Normandy cider on Sundays. That may ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... finance, and government circles,—namely, Mademoiselle de Fontaine, Madame Jules, and Madame Rabourdin, whose beauty, dress, and manners were sharply defined in this assemblage,—all the other women wore heavy, over-loaded dresses, and offered to the eye that anomalous air of richness which gives to the bourgeois masses their vulgar aspect, made cruelly apparent on this occasion by the airy graces ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... moreover, under the impression that he suffered from a gigantic, monstrous tooth. Of the two idiosyncrasies, the latter alone made his lunacy discernible,—too many individuals being affected with the other symptom to render it an anomalous feature of the human mind. My friend was in the habit of protesting that this enormous tooth increased periodically and threatened to encroach upon his entire jaw. Tormented, at the same time, with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... well known, however, that any hereditary peculiarity—as a supernumerary finger, or an anomalous shape of feature, like the Austrian lip—is wont to show itself in a family after a very wayward fashion. It skips at its own pleasure along the line, and, latent for half a century or so, crops out again in a great-grandson. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... uneasily round, as though expecting some new horror. No child for her to cling to and strive for. No husband to watch for and anticipate every wish. A poor, timid, nervous old maid, thrown adrift in her old age upon a strange sea of anomalous wonders. Every old favourite prejudice torn up by the roots. All old formulas of life scattered to ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... He gave no explanation of his failure to see the celebration at Bala Bala and the ruins of Susa, which Ganz supposed to be the chief objects of his excursion. Yet he found himself looking with a new eye at the anomalous exile whom the Father of Swords called the prince among the merchants of Shuster, noting the faded untidy air as he had never noted it before, wondering why a man should bury himself in such a hole as this. Was one now, he speculated, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... of these two girls in this earthy family was anomalous. Leonora, the older sister, was like a water-lily in a pool of ooze and slime, delicately floating on the stagnant waters without a visible stain at a single point of contact. She had the Ellwell features, regular, angular, prominent; with her father's high forehead and finely tapering hands, ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick

... these, can afford any serious obstacle to the perfect security of the church, and the permanent union of that establishment with the state? The fact is, that the existing laws have not only failed completely in answering their intended purpose, but they are anomalous and absurd—anomalous in their origin, absurd in ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... your brother "watchmen," Althorp, Milton, and the like, I begin sometimes to apprehend that you too may be among the fallers off. Lord Lansdowne tells me, however, you continue quite staunch, and for his sake I hope so.' But Lord John was not a 'faller off.' His eyes were fully open to the anomalous position in which he in common with other members of the party of reform had been placed under Canning and Goderich. Relief, however, came swiftly. Lord Goderich, after four months of feeble semblance of authority, resigned, finding it impossible to adjust differences. As a subaltern, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid

... received him was an anomalous hermitage, for in spite of the generous comfort it reflected, there broke out here and there jarring notes from many survivals of the old order; things from which she refused to be parted. Upon a mantel over which hung a Gobelin tapestry stood ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... such as to require the most skillful treatment by the President; during several critical weeks one error of judgment, a single imprudence, upon his part might have proved fatal. For the condition was anomalous and perplexing, and the conflict of opinion in the State had finally led to the evolution of a theory or scheme of so-called "neutrality." A similar notion had been imperfectly developed in Maryland, when her legislature declared that she would take no part in a war. The ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... somewhat anomalous circumstance that the first decided step in repressing the arrogant claims of the Papal See was taken by a monarch whose singular merits have been deemed worthy of canonization by the Roman Church. Louis the Ninth had witnessed with ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... go hand in hand with Austria and the Catholic Church; and the warmth with which he not infrequently supports his opinion against me in discussion, I can regard only as a proof of the sincerity of his political convictions. It is certainly, however, an anomalous thing that a Protestant sovereign, who at this moment is in conflict with Catholic bishops, is represented in the Confederacy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... aspect of an elective judge is that he is in an anomalous position. If he plays politics, endeavors to make friends either by his decisions on the bench or obeying the mandates of a superior political boss as to appointment of referees and receivers, he immediately becomes a corrupt judge. The stench of his unjust decisions will sooner or later come to ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells

... the few weeks that had elapsed since their marriage, and with many of them she appeared to be on terms of easy camaraderie. Every day during the week scores of visitors had dropped in to see her and to chat familiarly—all sorts of strange men and women that seemed to flock round her, anomalous citizens of Bohemia, vague hangers-on of the theatrical cosmos; all that strange melange of the happy-go-lucky, the eccentric, the ill-balanced, the blackguardly, the unprincipled, the hapless, the shiftless, ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... Martin's brain. It had made his blood race several times before, but he had thrown it aside because, during all their talks and walks, Joan had never once looked at him with anything but the eyes of a sister. As his wife he could free her, lift her out of her anomalous atmosphere and take her to the city to which her face was always turned. But he lacked the courage to speak and continued to hope that some day, by some miracle, she might become less superlatively neutral, less almost boyish in her way of treating him. He threw ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... interval between Clive's first and second administration, an interval which has left on the fame of the East India Company a stain not wholly effaced by many years of just and humane government. Mr. Vansittart, the Governor, was at the head of a new and anomalous empire. On one side was a band of English functionaries, daring, intelligent, eager to be rich. On the other side was a great native population, helpless, timid, accustomed to crouch under oppression. To keep the stronger race from preying ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... m) are at present inexplicable. So are the double forms of the Imperative, namely the one in r, and the one in e. It may, however, be remarked, that wherever the Imperative ends in e, the Preterite has the form in m; thus, pid-e dig, pid-ema dug. The only exception is the anomalous form peneingodgi dived. This prepares the future grammarian for a division of the ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... 10: This anomalous privilege was exercised by the Directors in consequence chiefly of what they considered Lord Ellenborough's overbearing demeanour in communication with them, his too aggressive policy, and his theatrical ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... Papacy only grew as the years went by; and at the very moment that heretics were suffering for a denial of the mass, others were suffering by their side for a denial of the supremacy. But strange and anomalous as its system seemed, the drift of Henry's religious government had as yet been in one direction, that of a return to and reconciliation with the body of the Catholic Church. With the decision of the Council and the new attitude of the Emperor this drift was suddenly arrested. It was ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... they might. The servants received her with their usual respectful manner and wondering looks; but when she turned back to ask some question, she saw them whispering together with an unusual appearance of excitement. Her cheeks glowed with a consciousness that her anomalous position was well calculated to excite their curiosity; and she turned away, thinking how different it had been with her mother,—how sheltered and protected she had always been. She remembered how very rarely her father left home, and how he always hastened to return. She stood awhile ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... It was an anomalous relation which bound them together, as is often the case at some period during the development of a passion, and most often when the absence of obstacles makes the growth of affection slow and regular. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is, divided into many systems, each revolving round its several suns, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital city, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... this time, at peace in Europe, although the troops of both nations were about to engage in conflict, in the forests of America. Their position there was an anomalous one. England owned the belt of colonies on the east coast. France was mistress of Canada in the north, of Louisiana in the south, and, moreover, claimed the whole of the vast country lying behind the British colonies, ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty

... shall explain nothing, at present. Permit me to point out that your position here—like mine—is, to say the least, anomalous." The random stroke told, as he could tell by the instant contraction of her eyes of a cat. "It would be best to defer explanations till a more convenient time—don't you think? Then, if you like, we can chant confidences in an antiphonal chorus. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... his congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The coincidence was tempting; here were many abuses centring about one abuse; here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous power. He had not far to go to find the idea that female government was anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable and incapable, played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European history; and yet their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... tenor, and they have a sort of dialogue (measure 66). Then the soft melody again. In the first editions of this work the da capo was not marked, and for about forty years critics gave themselves headaches in trying to explain why Chopin invented a new form of this anomalous construction,—a first part in the key of C-sharp minor; a second part in the key of D-flat major. "Where," they asked, "was the unity?" And by way of emphasis they spelled the word Unity with a capital initial. At last, however, some Solomon among editors affixed the missing letters "D. C.," ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... asseveration of "rights," which our fathers had won for us, and we had no time to spare for their compensating duties. This misguided apotheosis of what we considered freedom and broad-mindedness, produced the most startling and anomalous situations in our national life, including the almost incredible fact that, while nominally at peace with the world, the State was being bitterly warred against by cliques and ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... Mr. Glaisher had found much that was anomalous in the way of the winds, and in other elements of weather. He was destined to find much more. It had been commonly accepted that the temperature of the air decreases at the average rate of 10 degrees for ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... all your undertakings. Let us see now: A collection of fugitive pieces; but noyour fugitive poetry is apt to become stationary with the bookseller. It should be something at once solid and attractivenone of your romances or anomalous noveltiesI would have you take high ground at once. Let me see: What think you of a real epic?the grand old-fashioned historical poem which moved through twelve or twenty-four books. We'll have it soI'll supply ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... direction. This direction, both in Europe and North America, agrees generally in a marked manner with the course taken by the erratic blocks in the same district. The boulder clay, when it was first studied, seemed in many of its characters so singular and anomalous, that geologists despaired of ever being able to interpret the phenomena by reference to causes now in action. In those exceptional cases where marine shells of the same date as the boulder clay were found, nearly all of them were recognised as living species— a ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... the more imperatively necessary to apply this rule to the Spanish American Republics, in consideration of the frequent and not seldom anomalous changes of organization or administration which they undergo and the revolutionary nature of most of these changes, of which the recent series of revolutions in the Mexican Republic is an example, where five successive revolutionary governments have made their ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson

... title of one of the nostrums, "How to kill a Fellow quickly"! We never doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion for such a recipe, but wondered at her frankness, and at her attending to these anomalous necessities in such a methodical way. The truth is, we had read amiss, and the Queen had spelt amiss: the word was "Fellon,"—a sort of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... freshman and sophomore years. And this has become true of other universities. It would seem inevitable that the bachelor's degree will finally be granted at the end of the Junior College and some other degree, perhaps the master's, which has an anomalous place in American education in any case, at the end of the Senior College. This has, in fact, been suggested by President Butler. The University of Chicago has also struck out in another new direction. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... sleeping with like soundness two or three hours after dinner. How long it would be before the recovery of his complete original strength and natural physical tone, personal experience does not enable me to say. His condition, both in itself and as relates to others, is meanwhile most strange and anomalous. He looks, probably, better than ever in his life before. In sufficiently full flesh, with ruddy cheeks and skin clear as a healthy child's, the beholder would pronounce him in the height of health and vigor, and would ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... fashion, he deforms his art. We all know that ghastly type; it is more absurd even than the figure which is really of the world, which was born and bred in it, and conceives of nothing outside of it, or above it. In the social world, as well as in the business world, the artist is anomalous, in the actual conditions, and he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... ambition to play at keeping mimic armies in their pay, and to ape the greater military sovereigns, by encouraging French literature only, and the French language at their courts. It was this latter propensity which had generated the anomalous macaronic dialect, of which we have already spoken as a characteristic circumstance in the social features of literary Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. Nowhere else, within the records of human follies, do we find a corresponding case, in which the government ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... what kind of traditional views the former had been trained to receive concerning the inferiority of the coloured race, we cannot wonder that the planters, and those who were with them, should have been appalled at the outlook. The situation became more anomalous, or even dangerous, through the mistakes of the Northern politicians, quite as much as through any want of charity, whether real or imaginary, on the part of the Southern statesmen. There were wounds ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike

... conditions, it was natural that Vibart should see a good deal of the young lady, and before he was aware of it he had drifted into the anomalous position of paying court to the daughter in order to ingratiate himself with the father. Miss Carstyle was beautiful, Vibart was young, and the days were long in his aunt's spacious and distinguished house; but ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... a disease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a man's talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... distinguished from the peculiarities of the several sects, drew to themselves the affection and devotion of Christian hearts to a degree which, to those who highly valued these distinctions, seemed to endanger important interests. And, indeed, the situation was anomalous, in which the sectarian divisions of the Christian people were represented in the churches, and their catholic unity in charitable societies. It would have seemed more Pauline, not to say more Christian, to have had voluntary societies for ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... the house of Nassau-Siegen, the ancestors of the present Dutch royal family. That the authority of the States-General and States-Provincial should from time to time come into conflict with that of the stadholder was to be expected, for the relations between them were anomalous in the extreme. The Stadholder of Holland for instance appointed, directly or indirectly, the larger part of the municipal magistrates; they in their turn the representatives who formed the Estates of the Province. But, as the stadholder was the servant of the Estates, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point. Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... given above. Only a full acquaintance with the Tchiglit language would justify one in giving definite meanings to these words, or in asserting that an error had been made in the numerals. But it is so remarkable and anomalous to find the decimal and vigesimal scales mingled in this manner that one involuntarily suspects either incompleteness of ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... slid down to the deck once more, and somehow the thought of his anomalous position on board the schooner did not trouble the middy for the time being, for he was seaman enough to be intensely interested in their position, and as eager as ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn

... these lakes have no obvious connection with the river, it becomes probable that they are the remains of what the surface was before the fluviatile process began to carry off its waters. I had no difficulty in referring to an early system of this kind other lakes which we had seen elsewhere, the anomalous peculiarities of which were equally remarkable. Among these were Cudjallagong and others adjacent; Waljeers; the two smaller on the Murrumbidgee named Weromba; also Lake Benanee and Prooa its neighbour; in all which the peculiarities accorded with ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... what, meantime, was the master of the house himself? Reader, he was one of those anomalous practitioners in lower departments of the law who—what shall I say?—who on prudential reasons, or from necessity, deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of too delicate a conscience, (a periphrasis which might be abridged ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey

... what I mean when I speak of the anomalous condition of women in these days. I would point out, as a primary source of incalculable mischief, the contradiction between her assumed and her real position; between what is called her proper sphere by the laws of God and Nature, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... "provocquer"] the two first, Jean or Jehan and Galliot, were the most celebrated. [final period missing or invisible] the motto "ardentes juvo," [illustration text has "audentes"] examples of the Strasburg printers [here and below, anomalous spelling with one "s" unchanged] their very elaborate "Elsssische Bchermarken bis Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts," [missing period in "18.", present in earlier citation] Berthold Rodt of Hanau, one of Fust's workmen [Fst's] probably that ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... time when we must give to our South American brothers unstinted support. They have attained political freedom, but they have not yet gained religious freedom. Nothing can be more anomalous than a State with political freedom fostering a State religion that is desperately and unscrupulously intolerant. No genuine Republic can support a State religion. The two will not live together. One or the other must go, as the history of France will abundantly substantiate. One ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray

... institutions, and you throw the blame upon 'Fate.' You lay down rules it is impossible to comprehend, much less to obey; and you call each other monsters, because you cannot conquer the impossibility! You invent all sorts of vices, under pretence of making laws for preserving virtue; and the anomalous artificialities of conduct yourselves produce, you say you are born with; you make a machine by the perversest art you can think of, and you call it, with a sigh, 'Human Nature.' With a host of good dispositions struggling at your breasts, you insist ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... outside of his home, once under the immediate influence of that home's particular mistress he became as meek as a lamb. Koay was an unusually tall woman for an Indian,—she overtopped her husband by nearly a head; and the result of this anomalous difference in size was that Hoshkanyi felt very much afraid of her. Koay had a temper of her own, besides, which temper she occasionally displayed at the expense of the little tapop's bodily comfort. Among the Pueblo Indians the wife is ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... to the opinion of some Oxford horse-dealer, delivered with insolent familiarity—here were the men who drunk out of a fox's head, and recounted imaginary runs with the Heythrop. Happy was he amongst them, and a positive hero for the day, who could boast a speaking acquaintance with any of those anomalous individuals, at present enshrouded in great-coats, but soon to appear in all the varieties of jockey costume, known by the style and title of "gentlemen riders;" who could point out, confidentially, to his admiring companions, "Jack B——," and "Little ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... a powerful impetus would be given to it, and a stunning blow at the same time inflicted on northern prejudice against a colored complexion. I therefore endeavored to instil hope and courage into his mind, in order that he might dare to engage in a vocation so anomalous and responsible for a person in his situation; and I was seconded in this effort by warm-hearted friends, especially by the late General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Mr. JOHN A. COLLINS, whose judgment ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... "liquid" verbs (not derivatives in άνω, which is merely strengthened for άω) this is a liquid; in "pure" verbs it is absent, so that the root appears to end in a vowel, etc. Very many verbs seem to be anomalous in some of their forms in consequence of deriving these from an obsolete kindred root. The lexicon ...
— Greek in a Nutshell • James Strong

... may be termed an unnatural tendency toward poor blood during infancy and childhood. The explanation of this anomalous condition is, that the tax or strain put upon the blood to provide for the growth of the child is severe, and is in addition to the great demands made upon it in the exercise of its regular duties. We must, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... different plant organs, he showed that the cells on two sides are unequally influenced, on account of different external conditions, and contract unequally, and hence the various movements are produced—that the many anomalous effects, hitherto ascribed to 'specific sensibilities,' are due to the 'differential sensibilities'—differential excitability of anisotropic structures and to the opposite effects of external and internal stimuli—that ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... the present rather anomalous form of the Bank of England's Weekly Return was also laid down. It shows, as all men know, two separate statements; one of the Issue Department and the other of the Banking Department. The Issue Department's statement shows the notes issued as a liability, and ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... did we feel ourselves to be already at home, in anticipation, that our plain supper of hard bread and salt beef was barely touched; and many on board, to whom this was the first voyage, could scarcely sleep. As for myself, by one of those anomalous changes of feeling of which we are all the subjects, I found that I was in a state of indifference, for which I could by no means account. A year before, while carrying hides on the coast, the assurance that in a twelvemonth ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... anomalous as the facts may seem, John Wilkes Booth was the sole projector of the plot against the President which culminated in the taking of that good man's life. He had rolled under his tongue the sweet paragraphs of Shakspeare ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... ports they were joined by Captain John Saris, with four ships, belonging to the company's eighth voyage, who agreed to lend his forces for whatever the combined fleets undertook, if granted a third of the profits for the benefit of his particular set of subscribers. All this anomalous confusion between the various interests within the same body corporate could have but one issue. The rival commanders took to quarrelling over the disposition of the hundred thousand pieces-of-eight which Middleton hoped to squeeze out of the Governor of Mocha for outrages upon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... law"; it would have been more correct to have said that the southern section of the party had deserted in a body and gone over to the Democratic party. National politics were thus left in an entirely anomalous condition. The Democratic party was omnipotent at the South, though it was afterward opposed feebly by the American (or "Know Nothing ") organization, and was generally successful at the North, though it was still met by the Northern Whigs with vigorous opposition. Such ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... peaceful little hamlet, situated on the lower benches of the canon, well up out of the river bottom, and is entirely devoted to horticulture. One has read of birds building their nests in the muzzles of old and disused cannon; even that does not suggest a more anomalous association of ideas than the spectacle of a vine-clad cottage shaded by fig trees, basking peacefully in the sun, so close to what was at one time a veritable maelstrom of human passions. So far as the new Coloma is concerned, Marshall's ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley

... Bud-variation I will discuss some singular and anomalous cases, which are more or less closely related to this same subject. I will begin with the famous case of Adam's laburnum or Cytisus Adami, a form or hybrid intermediate between two very distinct species, namely, C. laburnum and purpureus, the common and purple laburnum; but as this tree has ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... thing this would seem to be an impossibility, remembering that it is a cardinal principle of eclipses, both of the Sun and of the Moon, that the three bodies must be in the same straight line in order to constitute an eclipse. The anomalous spectacle just referred to is simply the result of the refraction exercised by the Earth's atmosphere. The setting Sun which has actually set has apparently not done so, but is displaced upwards by refraction. On the other hand, the rising Moon which has not actually risen is displaced ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers

... and the most practical shrewdness combined with tender and passionate emotion (d. 1854). Those of Charles Lamb (d. 1835) it is impossible to describe intelligibly to those who have not read them. Some of his scenes are in sentiment, imagery, and style the most anomalous medleys by which readers were ever alternately perplexed and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... understood by men born and bred out of England, it is the system under which titles and property descend together, or in various lines. The jurisdiction of our Courts of Law is complex, and so is the business of Parliament. But the rules regulating them, though anomalous, are easy to the memory compared with the mixed anomalies of the peerage and primogeniture. They who are brought up among it, learn it as children do a language, but strangers who begin the study in advanced ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... book which is beautiful or useful in its own language, is desirable to translate. Some depend so much upon the genius of the language and the mentality of their native country that they simply evaporate in translation; others appeal so markedly to national points of view that they seem anomalous in other languages, as a good deal of our present-day English writing would appear in French. It has also to be impressed on translators that their responsibility is great; that it takes laborious persistence to make a really good translation, doing justice to both sides, giving ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... they are the fathers, there are those to be found, even in that heterogeneous mass of licentious monsters, who are true to their pledges. But as the woman and her children are legally the property of the man, who stands in the anomalous relation to them of husband and father, as well as master, they are liable to be seized and sold for his debts, ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft

... of the rmur, having apparently missed the point in the saga, assumes that, when Hjalti asks for the king's sword, it is because he has no weapon of his own. Hence, without realizing, apparently, the anomalous situation in which he places Hjalti, who is now strong and courageous, he represents him as taking part in the bear hunt empty-handed, though there is no indication that Hjalti thinks that he can cope with the animal ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson

... feeling rather than tender mercy has been noticed. But even if so, it cannot be wondered at, so cruel were the Chinese assailants when they had the upper hand. The occasion has been altogether anomalous, and it is only at the parting of the ways the difference of view comes in. That what was done merited almost wholesale punishment is a view most will agree in—eyes turned to the past—but when discussion tries to argue ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... as well as circumscribed its civil administration of affairs—required a change in the management of the Education Department. He, therefore, in 1869 and 1872, urged upon the Government the desirability of relieving him from the anomalous position in which he found himself placed under ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... A new and anomalous class of men gradually grew out of this trade. These were called coureurs des bois, rangers of the woods; originally men who had accompanied the Indians in their hunting expeditions, and made themselves acquainted with remote tracts and tribes; and who now became, as it were, peddlers ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... "Stella! Great Scott, no! She doesn't care the toss of a halfpenny for him. I know that now. She only accepted him because she found herself in such a beastly anomalous position, with all the spiteful cats of the regiment arrayed against her, treating ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... but between prose and verse. High and passionate thoughts, true poetical feeling and expression may and do exist in prose, but their most natural and characteristic expression is in verse. The old question has been lately reopened, however, by the anomalous form called 'free-verse.' Only the name is new; the thing itself is, at its best, but a carefully rhythmed prose printed in a new shape: an effort to combine in an effective union some of the characteristics of spatial rhythm with the ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... Turkish finances, for the maintenance of troops from time to time on the Servian frontier, to counteract revolutionary propaganda, her influence throughout her Slavish provinces is much weakened. Although in a position as anomalous as it must be unpalatable, the Ottoman Government deserves credit for abstaining so entirely from any species of interference in the internal affairs of the country; for be it remembered that the province is still tributary to the Porte. The hattischeriff of 1834, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... Havana was captured and held by the English, under the Duke of Albemarle, but was restored to Spain, after a brief occupancy, in 1763. The first grand impulse to the material prosperity of the city, anomalous though it may seem, was given through its capture by the British. It is true that the victors seized everything by force, but they also taught the listless people how to repair their losses, and how to multiply prosperity. The port of Havana, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... 25 [The title of this Ode is printed in anomalous small capitals on both the Latin and the English sides] Donec Lucicer aureus [text unchanged: probably "Lucifer"] Silvarumq; super colla comantium, [comantnium] Magnorumq; salit terga cacuminum, ac [cacumium] ac [These words ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski

... than Phratries. Anomalous Phratry Areas. Four-class Systems. Borrowing of Names. Eight-class System. Resemblances and Differences of Names. Place of Origin. Formative Elements of the Names: Suffixes, Prefixes. Meanings of the ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... removed, the weight of the remaining masses, pressing unequally on the inferior beds, would, when these were soft (as the Neocomian marls), press them up into arched conditions, like those of the floors of coal-mines in what the miners called "creeps." Many anomalous positions of the beds of Spatangenkalk in the district of the Lake of Annecy were in all probability owing to this cause: they might be studied advantageously in the sloping base of the great Rochers de Lanfon, which, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... now describe the mode of cultivating these anomalous islands, floating as it were in the ocean, and deriving benefit both from it and the mighty river itself, whose offspring they are. Should the river during the high season have thrown up a bhull, the Zemindar ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, is so much waste and extravagance. Not only does it bring in no practical return, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. Schools and colleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural social conditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespread misery among the unsuitably educated, must be ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... situation even more anomalous to Ronsdale and the less patiently to be borne, was that Sir Charles understood and sympathized with his desires and position in the matter. And why not? Ronsdale's father and Sir Charles had been old and close friends; there were reasons ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... of his early boyhood. We take him up in the following legend at a period of advanced youth, when we find him living with his grandmother. And at this time he possessed, although he had not yet exercised, all the anomalous and contradictory powers of body and mind, of manship and divinity, which he afterward evinced. The timidity and rawness of the boy quickly gave way in the courageous developments of the man. He soon evinced the sagacity, cunning, perseverance, and heroic courage ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft

... to have gone up with the cost of living," remarked Miss Kendall, as the waiter disappeared as silently as he had responded to the bell. It was a phrase that stuck in my head, so apt was it in describing the anomalous state of things we found ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... and through the gauze-like fabric, he perceived the outlines of a perfect shape. His vague wonderment, concerned itself now with the ivory, jewel-laden hands. His condition differed from the normal dream state, in that he was not entirely resigned to the anomalous. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... apparently insignificant strangers to the rights of citizenship of the solar system. The disturbance of their motions by their giant neighbours afforded a more accurate knowledge of the Jovian mass, which Laplace had taken about 1/50 too small; the anomalous character of their orbits presented geometers with highly stimulating problems in the theory of perturbation; while the exigencies of the first discovery had produced the Theoria Motus, and won Gauss over to the ranks of calculating astronomy. Moreover, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... of patriotism! William B. Reed to declaim upon honor and patriotism! For the chimney-sweep to prate of cleanliness would not be more anomalous. With what grace does the defence of the United States Bank come from this "McDonough" of the Chronicle, when we know him to be the veriest lick-spittle that Nicholas Biddle, in his day of pride and power, ever retained ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various

... country is crossing a stream, a deep and muddy one which divides its former prestige from its future hopes and prospects. The wise and foolish members of the party are at loggerheads. Both have taken into their confidence an anomalous contingent which is neither in sympathy, nor even in alliance with them as regards principles. The Mugwumps, so called, whose only recommendation in politics is, that they have a well-filled purse and know how to use it to bolster up what they are ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various



Words linked to "Anomalous" :   anomaly, anomalous communication, anomalousness, abnormal, unnatural



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