"Conformation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is of a timid nature, and poorly furnished with means of defence; though when compelled to resist, it tears furiously with its forepaws, and strikes forward very hard with its hind legs. Notwithstanding its unfavourable conformation for such a purpose, its swims strongly; but never takes to the water unless so hard pressed by its pursuers as to be left without all other refuge. The noise they make is a faint bleat, querulous, but not easy to describe. They are sociable animals and unite in droves, sometimes ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... rocked as he swung his body hastily about, and gazed intently in the direction indicated. Land! of course it was land; land already so close at hand, his eyes could trace its conformation—the narrow strip of sand beach, the sharp bluff beyond, the fringe of trees crowning the summit. He rubbed his eyes, scarcely able to credit his sight, half believing it a mirage. Yet the view remained ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... for a moment supposed that our Women are destitute of affection. But unfortunately the passion of the moment predominates, in the Frail Sex, over every other consideration. This is, of course, a necessity arising from their unfortunate conformation. For as they have no pretensions to an angle, being inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the Isosceles, they are consequently wholly devoid of brain-power, and have neither reflection, judgment ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful stock as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race. In the case of no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white" man may be of any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless variety of cranial measurement and physical characteristics. A "yellow" man is perhaps an even ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... In Bunyan's case, so warm was his imagination, that every clear perception was sure to be instantaneously sounding in his ear, or standing out a bright vision before his admiring eyes. This feature of his mental conformation has been noticed already; but this may be the proper place to allude ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... everything, and take her stand upon that. So our god, or gods rather, till we were twelve years old, were hell, the rod, the ten commandments, and public opinion. Yet under them, not they, but something deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it natural character, conformation of the spirit,—conformation of the brain, if you like, if you are a scientific man and a phrenologist. I never yet could dissect and map out my own being, or my neighbour's, as you analysts do. To me, I myself, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... meaning of the word. We say things feel hard or soft, the varying density of the objects being the cause of the varying sensations they awaken. Smoothness and roughness are varying outlines of surface, existing as physical conformation; the pleasurable or disagreeable sensations awakened in us by contact being due to the greater or less irritation of the nerves of feeling that attrition with it occasions. Motion is absolutely necessary to give ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... scarcely here advert to the great similarity in design and conformation which existed between these ancient rites and the third or Master's degree of Masonry. Like it they were all funereal in their character: they began in sorrow and lamentation, they ended in joy; there was an aphanism, or burial; a ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... the shape of the head, peculiar conformation of the ears, and other "stigmata," science long ago demonstrated that these are ordinarily ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... straggling village of Baume, and there the stupendous natural fortifications of cliff and rock come to an end. Nothing finer in the way of scenery is to be found throughout the Jura than this, and it is quite peculiar, being unlike any other mountain conformation I have ever seen, whilst the narrow winding valley of soft gold-green is in beautiful contrast with the rugged grandeur, not to say savageness, ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... from those presented by the maps of the physical portion of a more ancient geography. Importance of the eruption of quartzose, porphyry with reference to the then existing configuration of continental masses. Individual conformation in horizontal extension (relations of articulation) and in vertical elevation (hypsometrical views). Influence of the relations of the area of land and sea on the temperature, direction of the winds, abundance or scarcity of organic products, and on all meteorological ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... which we are lies between three large rivers, and, owing to the conformation of the country and the winding of the rivers, its fourth side is a narrow neck of land not more than a mile and a half wide. Here there is a very lofty and rugged range, and it is the spot agreed on as ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... explain now a little about the physical conformation of Mercury—the "lay of the land," so to speak—in order that the events I am about to describe may be more readily understood. It has already been made clear by Bob Trevor, I believe, that Mercury revolves on its axis only once during the time of its revolution around the sun. Thus, just as a ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... one from the other, he was quite surprised to find that, in the grub of the Oryctes, the same system was concentrated into a short chain of ganglia in juxtaposition. His was the surprise of the anatomist who, studying the organ qua organ, sees for the first time an unusual conformation. Mine was of a different nature: I was amazed to see the precision with which the paralysis of the victim sacrificed by the Scolia, a paralysis so profound in spite of the difficulties of an underground operation, had guided my forecast as to structure when, anticipating ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... having been executed, and the drum, A, continuing to revolve, the punches rise a little owing to the conformation of the cam-wheel, and through the action of the springs, b, and allow the moistener to move forward to dampen the little circles which remain at the orifice of the punches. The moistener or dampener is a sort of pad equal in length to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small Moss irresistibly caught my eye; and though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and fruit, without admiration. Can that Being (thought I) who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... cranial conformation differs, according to Montano, from that of the Manbo only in one particular, namely, in the straightness of the middle part of the antero-posterior curve of the cranium. In other respects his cranium is similar to that of the Manbo. The face is oval rather than lozenge-shaped and ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... curvature of the spine with the convexity forwards, is chiefly met with in the lumbar region as an exaggeration of the natural curvature. A minor degree of lordosis sometimes occurs as a peculiarity in the conformation of the individual and may be present in several members of the same family; also in street-hawkers and others who carry weights suspended in front of them; in very obese persons; in those who suffer from large abdominal tumours, such as fibroids; and in pregnant women. In its more ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... which you get into it and get out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception made of the Cathedral close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in color and general conformation very like a Quakeress's bonnet, up in a shady corner,"—we pass in succession the Guildhall, the City Clock, Richard Watts's Charity, the College Gate (Jasper's Gatehouse), Eastgate House (the Nuns' House), and, nearly opposite ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... take exception to my taste; but, I ask, does the modern round hat, whatever the insignificant variations of its form, possess either quality? No, not a jot of it. One would think, by our pertinacious adherence to the head-ach giving, circular conformation, that we wished to show our anger at the Almighty for not shaping our caputs like cylinders. In fine, though the parson's and the quaker's hat has each its several merits, commend me to the fan-tailed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... abounds throughout the region, which is the parent of numerous streams, as the northern Nahr-el-Kebir, which flows into the sea by Latakia, the Nahr-el-Melk, the Nahr Amrith, the Nahr Kuble, the Nahr-el-Abrath, and many others. From the conformation of the land they have of necessity short courses; but each and all of them spread along their banks a rich ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... respect to the countries which they had visited, and Caesar called together as many of them as he could find, when he had reached the northern shores of France, to inquire about the modes of crossing the Channel, the harbors on the English side, the geographical conformation of the country, and the military resources of the people. He found, however, that the merchants could give him very little information. They knew that Britain was an island, but they did not know its extent or its boundaries; and they could tell ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... from work, even where the subject does not take thought of the matter and studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and mastery. Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure in this way persisted in through several generations will leave a persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the person, and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But all the suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the proficiency in decorum that comes by the way of passive habituation, may be further improved upon by taking thought and assiduously acquiring the marks ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... cast not the least disparagement upon them. I enjoy them. Frequently the hand of the master architect of golf is visible where one observes how shrewdly and exactly the hazards have been placed, and the peculiarities of the conformation of the country turned to the utmost account when useful, or cunningly dodged when it has been considered that they could be no good to the golfer. Without a doubt, generally speaking, those courses are the best which have ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... supposes this tribe to be peculiar to America, but in this he is certainly mistaken; and probably, as Pallas has observed in his Zoology, the Phalanger itself is a native of the East Indies, as the animal which was caught by Mr Banks resembled it in the extraordinary conformation of the feet, in which it differs from animals of every ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... was not visible till they were close upon it, on account of the conformation of the land; but when they did come in sight, the scene was so curious that they halted with cocked pieces, gazing down from the rocks at ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... allow that there are places in which accumulations of ice naturally exist, and where the ice moves away less rapidly than in other parts. By looking at the chart, and taking into consideration the geographical conformation of such spots, the cause will ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... condition on exposed slopes, where there is a free upward sweep to leeward, it is tossed back into the sky, and borne onward from peak to peak in the form of banners or cloudy drifts, according to the velocity of the wind and the conformation of the slopes up or around which it is driven. While thus flying through the air, a small portion makes good its escape, and remains in the sky as vapor. But far the greater part, after being driven into the sky again and again, is at length locked ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... approaching these little mountain lakes, with the extensive preparation that is made for them in the conformation of the ground. I am thinking of a depression, or natural basin, in the side of the mountain or on its top, the brink of which I shall reach after a little steep climbing; but instead of that, after I have accomplished the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... that a first class dog in every respect mated with a number of equally well bred typical bitches would produce on an average a comparatively uniform type of pups. Nothing could be further from actual results. The same dog bred, say to four females practically alike in style, size, conformation, color and markings, and from common ancestry, will give perchance in one litter two or three crackerjacks, and the other three will contain only medium pups. This same thing will occur every time the ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... chapar-ktiana, I get the shayird to pilot me into and round about the fortress. It is rapidly falling to decay, but is still in a sufficiently good state of preservation to show thoroughly its former strength and conformation. The fortress is a decidedly massive building, constructed entirely of mud and adobe bricks, a hundred feet high, of circular form, and some two hundred yards in circumference. The disintegrated walls and debris of former towers form a sloping mound or foundation about fifty ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... considered Romans; but, with that exception, a relationship with every population of the British Isles has been claimed for them. As Germans on the strength of Tacitus' description of their physical conformation of the Caledonian, and as Germans on the strength of the supposed Germanic origin of the Belgae, the Picts have been held the ancestors of the present Lowland Scotch. They have been considered Scandinavians also. On the other hand, they have been made Gaels, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... latter simile, if less poetic, gave a better idea of the conformation of the fortified hill, with the gum-coloured outline of all that was left of a Moorish wall skirting its side. The tooth is hollow, but the hollow is plugged with the best Woolwich stuffing, and potentially it can bite and grind and macerate, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... of the engine in determining the conformation of cut-off cams; manner of finding essential points of drawings ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... not far to seek. The physical conformation of no other continent is so unfavorable for exploration and development. Africa's straight coast-lines, affording little shelter to the primitive ships of early mariners, repelled the enterprising Phoenicians and other seafarers in their eager search for new lands worth colonizing. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... conformation of the place, it was quite impossible for us to descend in front where pressure had made the snow hard as stone, we were obliged to risk a march over the looser material upon its flank. As there was nothing to be gained by waiting, off we ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... entirely constructed of sun-dried mud bricks, now quite soldered together by age and reduced into a compact mass. A few of the more important dwellings have two storeys, and all the buildings evidently had formerly domed roofs. In order that the conformation of each house may be better understood, a plan of one typical building is given. On a larger or smaller scale they all resembled one another very closely, and were not unlike the Persian houses ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... its adaptation to the expression of the features of the wearer. The small, or moustache a la chinoise, should only appear in conjunction with Tussaud, or waxwork complexions, and then only provided the teeth are excellent; for should the dental conformation be of the same tint, the mustachios would only provoke observation. The German, or full hearth-brush, should be associated with what Mr. Ducrow would designate a "cream," and everybody else a drab countenance, and should never be resorted to, except in conformity with regimental requisitions, or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... a reader any accurate presentation of the picture, which the writer has in his mind's eye. She was dark. Hair, brows, eyes, and complexion, were all dark; and the contour of the face was of the long or oval type of conformation—very delicate—transparently delicate—more so, the Englishman thought, not without a pull at his heart-strings, than was quite compatible with a due daily supply of nourishment. Still she did not look unhealthy. At seventeen a good deal of pinching may be undergone ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... and the idea of associating it with men more than women would occur to no one but a professor of history. It strikes us merely as the only natural and convenient solution of the dress necessity, which is essentially the same for both sexes, since their bodily conformation is on the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... powers in man, which I know, that are conversant about external objects, are the senses; the imagination; and the judgment. And first with regard to the senses. We do and we must suppose, that as the conformation of their organs are nearly or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same, or with little difference. We are satisfied that what appears to be light to one eye, appears light to another; that what seems sweet to one ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... informants say; others say that each inhabitant remains there at the same age as he was when he quitted the world above. This latter view is most like the South West one. The former is possibly only an attempt to make Srahmandazi into a heaven in conformation with Christian teaching, which it is not, any more than it is ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... features which are produced by habits and sentiments, no two persons were less alike. Nature seemed to have intended them as examples of the futility of those theories which ascribe every thing to conformation and instinct and nothing to external circumstances; in what different modes the same materials may be fashioned, and to what different purposes the same materials may be applied. Perhaps the rudiments of their ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... convey some feeble notion of the three Causses just named, two of which belong to the Lozere. The Causse Noir is partly in the Aveyron. Their extraordinary conformation must be seen and studied by all who would familiarize themselves with ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... I said, was to ascertain how to best protect ourselves from like dangers. We then proceeded to discuss the physical conformation of our country. It is a vast table-land, situated at a great height far above the tropical and miasmatic plains, and surrounded by mountains still higher, in which dwell the remnants of that curious white race first described by Stanley. The only access to our region from ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... that the spirit of poetry, which, though imperishable, migrates, as it were, through different bodies, must, so often as it is newly born in the human race, mould to itself, out of the nutrimental substance of an altered age, a body of a different conformation. The forms vary with the direction taken by the poetical sense; and when we give to the new kinds of poetry the old names, and judge of them according to the ideas conveyed by these names, the application which we make of the authority of classical ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... about as much at ease in his clothing as a dry almond in its shell. A long, dark, yellow coat usually hung about the calves of his legs, which were covered with long, blue woollen stockings, and looked more like vine-poles than human legs; a conformation which furnished daily jokes for the other servants, to which the old man deigned no response save a disdainful smile, grumbling through his teeth, "Menials, peasants without education." This latter speech expressed the late gardener's scorn, for it had been his greatest grief to pass for an uneducated ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Paradoxical as it sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon principality of AElle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see only the handicraft and interaction of human beings—Euskarian and Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman—a closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... maxim, "Life is short and art is long." He divides the causes of disease into two principal classes,—the one comprehending the influence of seasons, climates, and other external forces; the other including the effects of food and exercise. To the influence of climate he attributes the conformation of the body and the disposition of the mind; to a vicious system of diet he attributes innumerable forms of disease. For more than twenty centuries his pathology was the foundation of all the medical sects. He was well acquainted with the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... leaneth but little on any subtleties of speech. Let the man be placed in an attitude of ease; one in which nature may not be fettered by restraint. The conformation of the whole head is remarkably aboriginal, but the distinction of tribes is not to be sought in these general delineations. The forehead, as you see, neighbors, is retreating and narrow, the cheek-bones, as usual, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... extinct mylodon. Some time afterwards, the discovery of another carapace under similar conditions added weight to Ameghino's supposition.[110] In the midst of the pampas, those vast treeless plains, where no rock or accident of conformation affords shelter from heat or cold or a hiding-place from wild beasts, man was not at a loss; he hollowed out for himself a hole in the earth, roofing it over with the shell of a glyptodon, and securing a retreat where he could be safe at ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... on his boots the fat man drew them back of the rungs of his chair. This attention to personal details of his conformation was embarrassing. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... dark triangular figures upon a light ground. The general grouping is in three horizontal or encircling bands agreeing with or following the foundation coil. Details are governed by the horizontal and the oblique structure lines. The vertical construction lines have no direct part in the conformation of the design excepting in so far as they impose a stepped character ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... by Captain Flinders, that three of the English Company's Islands which were examined, slope down nearly to the water on their west sides; but on the east, and more especially the south-east, they present steep cliffs; and the same conformation, he adds, seemed to prevail in the other islands.* If this structure occurred only in one or two instances, it might be considered as accidental; but as it obtains in so many cases, and is in harmony with ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... seemed to describe a big loop, I had left it three days before, seeing plainly by the conformation of the country that we should strike it again sooner or later. We were marching once more by compass. My men, who had no faith whatever in the magnetic needle, were again almost paralysed with fear that we might not encounter the stream again. A thousand times a day they accused me of foolishness ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... homespun, does his configuration materially change, there yet remaining, and boldly refusing to be disguised, that face so full of penetration, and those features so sharp. The waggishly inclined have identified them with the wizardry of dividing storm currents. Nevertheless, of this lean conformation, which is better within than the world without is in general willing to admit, is Smooth particularly proud. In manner, Smooth is piquant; and being an acknowledged member of the fast school—that is, a disciple of manifest destiny in particular ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Dandie Eassil-gate, Dandie Wassil-gate, Dandie Thumbie, and Dandie Dumbie. The two first had their names from living eastward and westward in the street of the village; the third for something peculiar in the conformation of his thumb; the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... best that could have been adopted. It is true that this boundary would have included some districts which had taken no share in the national struggle, and would have excluded others which had taken an active part in the war; but still it was the most proper. The natural conformation of the line gave it a special political recommendation; and where boundaries do not coincide with some great natural features, but are lines arbitrarily laid down, they tend to tempt an usurper by the dangerous facility which they offer to violation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... dark and grey columns, converging westward by sure degrees, advance without opposition. They glide on as if by gravitation, in fluid figures, dictated by the conformation of the country, like water from a burst reservoir; mostly snake- shaped, but occasionally with batrachian and saurian outlines. In spite of the immensity of this human mechanism on its surface, the winter landscape wears an impassive look, as ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... teeth looked yellowish. He glanced at Alexandra sullenly, blinked as if he had come from a dark place, and one eyebrow twitched continually. She felt at once that this interview was a terrible ordeal to him. His shaved head, showing the conformation of his skull, gave him a criminal look which he had not had during ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... light became stronger and soon they could make out the conformation of the rock walls they were passing at such a snail's pace. Layers of vari-colored rock showed here and there, and, at one point there was a stratum of gold-bearing or mica-filled rock that glistened with a million reflections and re-reflections. The air grew warmer and more humid ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... of his companions offered more or less analogy to that of the tiger, the vulture, or the fox, the form of his retreating forehead, and his bony, lank, and protruding jaws, supported by a neck of immense length, resembled entirely the conformation of a serpent's head. Total baldness increased this resemblance still more, for, under the rough skin of this reptile-shaped forehead, could be distinguished the slightest protuberances, the smallest ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... likely to check them. Many children who would be loath to torture a large animal, such as a cat, a dog, or a bird, feel no compunction at ill-using a fly, because it appears to them so insignificant an animal; but had they once witnessed, by means of a microscope, the wonderful and perfect conformation of the insect, I am persuaded they would be less inclined to make ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... conformation of the three skulls, it would appear that No. I, was that of the most intelligent person of the three and No. III of the least No. II ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall
... not less determined, and not less remarkably fulfilled, occurred some years before to Dr. Madden, who travelled pretty much in the same route as Lord Lindsay. The doctor, as a phrenologist, had been struck with the very singular conformation of a skull which he saw amongst many others on an altar in some Syrian convent. He offered a considerable sum in gold for it; but it was by repute the skull of a saint; and the monk with whom Dr. M. attempted to negotiate, not only refused his offers, but protested that even for the doctor's sake, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... no change of conformation to note, except that the intestinal tube is naturally much longer than ours, on account of the difference of food: as a general rule, it is ten or twelve times the length of the body. The sheep, who is able to pick up a living in the poorest pastures, is indebted for ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... ice-crusted declivity, feet foremost;—the lower or nether extremities go first, and the head behind: it follows its tail, instead of being followed by it; and this curious peculiarity in its mode of progression, though, of course, on the whole, the mode best adapted to its conformation and instincts, sometimes proves fatal to it in calm weather, when not a ripple breaks upon the pebbles, to warn that the shore is near. An enemy appears: the creature ejects its cloud of ink, like a sharp-shooter discharging his rifle ere he retreats; and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... which men appear so vain?" exclaims Flechier. "If considered according to its nature it is a fire which sickness and an accident most sensibly puts out; it is a delicate temperament, which soon grows disordered; a happy conformation of organs, which wear out; a combination and a certain motion of the spirits, which exhaust themselves; it is the most lively and the most subtile part of the soul, which seems to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... tendencies of obscure, as well as we do those of celebrated individuals, we should probably, discover that this weakness was much more prevalent than is generally supposed. We have no great difficulty in understanding how a fanciful notion of this kind should attach itself to minds of a certain conformation, or be even generated by them, and that it should exercise a considerable, though unseen influence over the secret convictions of men of ability, and of women of vivid religious emotions; but we do not so readily ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Isabella now found herself enclosed with a being, whose history had nothing to reassure her, and the fearful conformation of whose hideous countenance inspired an almost superstitious terror. He occupied the seat opposite to her, and dropping his huge and shaggy eyebrows over his piercing black eyes, gazed at her in silence, as if agitated by a variety of contending feelings. On the other side sate Isabella, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... allied to them. This argument, doubtless, might be pressed further, and made to prove much more. It would be eminently desirable that other things besides reading, writing, and arithmetic could be made necessary to the suffrage; that some knowledge of the conformation of the earth, its natural and political divisions, the elements of general history, and of the history and institutions of their own country, could be required from all electors. But these kinds of knowledge, however indispensable to an intelligent use of the suffrage, are not, in this ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... these efforts will be unavailing—that the African is a degraded member of the human family—that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy. In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... sculptor calls attention to the eminently ecclesiastical character of the hand of Cardinal Manning. It is in every respect the hand of the ideal prelate. Yet its every attribute is common to one hand, and one hand only, in the whole collection, that of Mr. Henry Irving, the actor. The general conformation, the protrusion of the metacarpal bones, the laxity of the skin at the joints, are ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... him in "the world." His son Lord Randolph, too, I saw once at Court at Peterhof, and once again at the Winter Palace of the Tsar. I noticed in their great stature, shaggy heads of hair, ears of a very peculiar conformation, and a certain aggressiveness of demeanour—a strong ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... these grey walls, which though so thick, Might have from time acquired some slight defect; Who after rummaging the Abbey through thick And thin, produced a plan whereby to erect New buildings of correctest conformation, And throw down old—which ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... reformed to my right and rear, my division was at length drawn through the cedars and debouched into an open space near the Murfreesboro' pike, behind the right of Palmer's division. Two regiments of Sill's brigade, however, on account of the conformation of the ground, were obliged to fall back from the point where Woodruff's brigade of Davis's division had rallied after the disaster of the early morning. The division came out of the cedars with unbroken ranks, thinned by only its killed and wounded—but ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... in Oceanica. Before setting out on his exploring expedition into the interior he tried to interest the government in a plan for cisterns to supply the city with water—a project easy of execution from the natural conformation of the locality. But his scheme received no encouragement from the old-fogyish authorities. They were at that moment entertaining one which for simplicity reminded Garnier of the egg problem of Columbus. This was to distill the sea-water. He made ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... would be necessarily conceived of as a part or essence of the horse and his life, not in the way we think of them, as qualities appertaining to the horse on account of the strength of his muscles and the conformation of his limbs. When names were devised for these qualities, they would be something equivalent to horsey or horse-like. The association of qualities with animals is still shown in such words as asinine, owlish, foxy, leonine, mulish, dogged, tigerish, and so on; but since the inferiority ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... command an army, or govern a state. An ourang-outang may eat, and drink, and dress, and move like a man; but he could never write an ode, or learn to relinquish his own good for the good of his species. The human conformation, however it may be altered by the operation of physical or moral causes, differs from that of all other beings, and on this ground, the negro's claim to be ranked as a man, is universally allowed ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... upwards from the dazzle. It cannot be ice! 'tis too mighty a barrier. Surely no single iceberg ever reached to the prodigious proportions of that coast. And it cannot be an assemblage of bergs, for there is no break—it is leagues of solid conformation. Oh yes, it is land, sure enough! some island whose tops and seaboard are covered with snow. But what of that? It may be populated all the same. Are the northern kingdoms of Europe bare of life because of the winter rigours?' And then thought to myself, if that island have natives, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... in review all the classes, all the orders, all the genera and species of animals which exist, and make it apparent that the conformation of individuals and of their parts, their organs, their faculties, etc., is entirely the result of circumstances to which the race of each species has ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... different purpose.—A Southern paper, however, has gone one step beyond that of the Massachusetts paper, and denies the merit claimed for the service rendered by saying that it was the result of accident, growing out of the peculiar conformation of the ground on which the regiment rallied and that it was necessary for the safety of the regiment, being like the act of a man who leaps from a burning ship and ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... expressions for the primary and necessary ideas, which seldom alter in any people; in the next, there is a high degree of improbability in supposing a rude dialect to supplant a substantial portion of a more polished one; and, thirdly, we must not overlook the collateral evidence of the similarity of conformation pervading the entire race from Polynesia to the archipelago—distinct alike from the Caucasian and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... the boat—or at the foot of the slide, as the conformation of the landing indicated—heavy cotton-hook in hand, they watch the descending bale, as it bounds fiercely toward them; and just at the right moment two men, with infinite dexterity of hand and certainty of eye, strike their hooks firmly into the bagging—holding on to the plunging ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... south-western points of the compass. Indeed, it is a fact well known to mariners, that all the heavy seas from those quarters come uncontrolled upon these rocks, and break on them with the utmost fury. The particular conformation of the rocks also tends to augment the force and height of the seas, for they not only stretch across the channel in a north and south direction to the length of above one hundred fathoms, but they lie in a sloping manner toward the south-west quarter. The effect ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... anything but the smallest canoes. The only thing remarkable about it is that it abounds in crocodiles, but not one hippopotamus was seen; which may be taken as another evidence of its shallowness. The bays to the east of the Rusizi are of the same conformation as those on the west. Carefully judging from the width of the several bays from point to point, and of the several spits which separate them, the breadth of the lake may be said to be about twelve or ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Guthrie now conversed in low tones. Once in a while I could catch a scrap of the conversation—"not an epileptic," "no abnormal conformation of the head," "certain mental defects," "often the result of sickness ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... Occasional specimens, with all their characteristics in full and vigorous development, may still be met, but these are merely isolated survivors of a once widespread family. The Americans that one meets to-day in Europe, both those who travel and those who reside there, are of a different conformation and belong to a different type. The crudeness which so shocked Europeans in their predecessors they have, with characteristic adaptability, readily and gracefully outgrown. But whether they have improved in other respects, and whether, on other grounds, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... ethnology as a physical science may indeed strengthen his conclusions by evidence of other kinds, evidence from arms, ornaments, pottery, modes of burial. But all these are secondary; the primary ground of classification is the physical conformation of man himself. As to language, the ethnological method, left to itself, can find out nothing whatever. The science of the ethnologer then is primarily physical; it is historical only in that secondary sense in which paleontology, and geology itself, may fairly be called historical. It arranges ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of handsome and healthy offspring when the husband and wife differ, not only in mental conformation, but in bodily construction. A melancholy man should mate himself with a sprightly woman, and vice versa; for otherwise they will soon grow weary of the monotony of each other's company. By the same rule should the choleric and ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... statements and rumours of lunar convulsions have successively, during the last hundred years, obtained credence, and successively, on closer investigation, been rejected. The subject is one as to which illusion is peculiarly easy. Our view of the moon's surface is a bird's-eye view. Its conformation reveals itself indirectly through irregularities in the distribution of light and darkness. The forms of its elevations and depressions can be inferred only from the shapes of the black, unmitigated shadows cast ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... alone to meditate on a better conformation of himself to Society, looked out of nine windows in succession, and appeared to see nine wastes of space. When he had thus entertained himself he went down-stairs, and looked intently at all the carpets on the ground-floor; ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... conformation of the Roman empire, while it facilitated in many respects its growth and final settlement under the dominion of the Capitol, led by a process not less certain, and still more rapid, to its ruin, when that empire was fully extended. If any one will look at the map, he will see that the Roman ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Germans was very difficult owing to the peculiar conformation of the course of the river Scheldt at the point of attack. This made especially difficult the laying of concrete foundations for the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... administration of justice. Doctor Peets will be glad to exhibit this memento mori to all who care to call. Doctor Peets, who is eminent as a phrenologist, avers that said skull is remarkable for its thickness, and that its conformation points to the possession by Bear Creek, while he wore it, of the most powerful natural inclinations to crime. From these discoveries of Doctor Peets, the committee which suspended this felon to the windmill ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with the peculiar conformation of Cape Cod. It juts out into the Atlantic like an immense elbow, and, indeed, is understood to be modelled after the brawny arm of the gallant CHARLES SUMNER. Vessels passing between ports on the western ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... are more or less superior or inferior to one another precisely as they approximate to or recede from the typical standard in color and form, due allowance being made for age and sex. The standard is an oily, shining black, and as far as the conformation of the head and face is concerned and the relative proportion of nervous matter outside of the cranium to the quantity of cerebral matter within it, is found between the simiadiae[257] and the Caucasian. Thus, in the typical negro, a perpendicular line, let fall from ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of her obtaining a pension from the king, and of the necessity there was for her to do something to earn a living. Baletti answered that he would be happy to do anything, and when he had examined the figure and the general conformation of the young girl he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... as to the relationship of the New Zealanders to the numerous other tribes of the same complexion, by whom nearly all the islands of the South Sea are peopled, and who, in physical conformation, language, religion, institutions, and habits, evidently constitute ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... difficult thing in education, to proportion a child's vocabulary exactly to his knowledge, dispositions, or conformation; our management must vary; some will acquire words too quickly, others too slowly. A child who has great facility in pronouncing sounds, will, for that reason, quickly acquire a number of words, whilst those ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... As the seat of all the greatest disturbances, this part naturally manifests the greatest number of anomalies, which extend from the external conformation of the brain-case to ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... man, his bodily conformation, and his degree of skill must always be taken into account. When the instructor is demonstrating the combinations, feints, returns, and parries the rapidity of his attack should be regulated by the skill of the pupil ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... idle question. "Forms of government," somebody has said, "are like shoes—that is the best form which best fit the feet that are to wear them." Shoes are to be fitted to the feet, not the feet to the shoes, and feet vary in size and conformation. There is, in regard to government, as distinguished from the state, no antecedent right which binds the people, for antecedently to the existence of the government as a fact, the state is free to adopt any form that it finds practicable, or judges the ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... seconds into a dip where the watchers could not see it, then it appeared again at the head of the second and longest slope, of which the angle was very steep. Down this the stone rushed like an arrow from a bow, till it reached the narrow waist of the bridge, whereof the general conformation bore some resemblance to that of a dead wasp lying on its back. Indeed, from where Leonard and Juanna stood, the span of ice at this point seemed to be no thicker than a silver thread, while Otter and the stone might have been a fly upon the thread. Now of a sudden Leonard distinctly ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... risking their lives and unhurriedly pushing forward through the thickest of the fire to the spots where men had been seen to fall. At times they would creep on hands and knees: would always take advantage of a hedge or ditch, or any shelter that was afforded by the conformation of the ground, never exposing themselves unnecessarily out of bravado. When at last they reached the fallen men their painful task commenced, which was made more difficult and protracted by the fact that many of the subjects had fainted, and it was hard to tell whether they were alive ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... which I have named are modifying causes which tend to counteract, or rather to deflect and direct currents in their flow. Besides which, the rotation of the earth, the action of the winds, and the conformation of continents and islands, have a powerful influence on currents, so that some flow at the bottom of ocean, some on the surface, some from east to west or west to east, or aslant in various directions, while, where currents meet there is deflection, ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... general conformation of the ground, it is sometimes absolutely necessary to adopt such a grade as is shown in Fig. 19,—even to the extent of bringing the drain down a rapid slope, and continuing it with the least possible fall through level ground. When such changes must be made, they should ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... No conformation of words will charm the ear unless they bring silent thoughts of corresponding sweetness to the mind; nor could the most sonorous, vapid verses be changed into poetry if they were set to the music of the Spheres. It is scarcely ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... hat, full of days, or mayhap years, and of services. His breeches were of the homeliest thickset; and he also wore a pair of large leather gaiters—such as are very common among farmers and peasants in Kent and Sussex. Though the conformation of his figure was not powerful, yet it was muscular and wiry, and he appeared in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... bore an accidental character. Eendrachtsland was discovered by accident in the year 1616, and after that time a number of Dutch ships unexpectedly touched at those shores, thus continually shedding additional, though always imperfect light on the question of the conformation of the coast-line. How was it, we may ask, that it was especially after 1616 that this coast was so often touched at, whereas there had never been question of this before that time? The question thus put admits ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... are accounted most excellent eating. They resemble, in their conformation but not in their color, our flounders or flat-fish, which some of you may have caught, and many of you have eaten. These fish lie on one side, at the very bottom of the water in which they live, and consequently one ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... Canadian—free, unaffected, honest and sincere. His bushy iron-gray hair, his keen gray eyes, his healthy florid color, and the well-trimmed black moustache, which gave his face an unusually youthful appearance for a man of his age, went with a fine stalwart physique and a general bodily conformation apparently in keeping with the ideas of early rising, cold ablutions and breakfasts of oatmeal porridge that the ingenuous mind is apt to associate with Scotch descent and bringing-up. His daughter was a very beautiful girl. Born in the shadow of the pines, she had been educated successively ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... priest was remarkably unprepossessing—his shaven skull was so low and narrow in the front as nearly to approach to the conformation of that of an African savage, save only towards the temples, where, in that organ styled acquisitiveness by the pupils of a science modern in name, but best practically known (as their sculpture teaches us) amongst the ancients, two huge and almost preternatural protuberances ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... stage was pretty general, led by the individual aforesaid, who lectured and preached, rather than conversed. Few subjects were untouched by his eloquence; he spoke with equal ease on a difficult point in theology, and on the conformation of the sun. He lectured on politics, astronomy, chemistry, and anatomy with great fluency and equal incorrectness. In describing the circulation of the blood, he said, "It's a purely metaphysical subject;" and the answering remark, "It is the most purely physical," made him vehemently ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... plants and animals and their products consists in assessing the attributes against a scale of perfection. Thus, if "form" or "conformation" is worth 10 points in the hundred (by the estimation of good authorities), the judge must decide whether the particular animal before him merits 6 or 7, more or less. So if "flavor" in an apple is considered to be worth 20 points of the hundred, the judge makes up his mind what ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... some rich mines near here soon. Stay; it can do you no harm. I will tell you something: three days ago I followed up the river, and about twenty miles above this spot I became attracted by the conformation of the country, and remarked it as being very similar to some very famous spots in South America. 'Here,' I said to myself, 'Maximilian, you have your volcanic disturbance, your granite, your clay, slate, and sandstone upheaved, and seamed with quartz;—why should you not discover here, what ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... too well to eat, is certain; but that his sensuality shortened his life, will not be hastily concluded, when it is remembered that a conformation so irregular lasted six-and-fifty years, notwithstanding such pertinacious ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... bade him look through. What he saw was like the vision of a new world, by the opening of some unsuspected window in a familiar dwelling-place. He looked out upon a long-drawn valley of singularly cheerful aspect, hidden, by the peculiar conformation of the locality, from all points of observation but this. In a green meadow at the foot of the steep olive-clad rocks below, the novices were taking their exercise. The softly sloping sides of the vale lay alike in full sunlight; and its distant opening ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with blue-stockings, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is the great event of the voyage. It is always rough there, from the peculiar conformation of the land, and the conflict of the waters from the Gulf of Georgia, and other inlets, with the ocean-tides. Our captain had been sailing on this route for fifteen years, but said he had never seen a worse sea than we encountered. We asked him if he did not consider the Pacific a more uncertain ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... there were three main factors over which the gilt cap at Pretoria had no control, and which dished this, as they have dished ninety-nine out of every hundred of schemes which were undertaken during the guerilla war. The first of these three lay in the fact that the strategy was a conformation to the enemy's movements. This naturally gave him time to think and to develop his counter-move, with all advantages in the balance. No. 2 is to be found in the timidity of certain of the column commanders. Men who proverbially take every opportunity ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... distribution of the reef-building corals, but there are some very interesting and singular circumstances to be observed in the conformation of the reefs, when we consider them individually. The reefs, in fact, are of three different kinds; some of them stretch out from the shore, almost like a prolongation of the beach, covered only by shallow water, and in the case of an island, surrounding it like a fringe of no considerable breadth. ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... that children, when left free, may put themselves into bad positions, and make movements liable to injure the proper conformation of their limbs. This is one of the weak arguments of our false wisdom, which no experience has ever confirmed. Of that multitude of children who, among nations more sensible than ourselves, are brought up in the full freedom of their limbs, not one is seen to wound ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... another the objects of beauty that make grand the environs of that noble Bay, open to her astonished eyes, she contrasts them favorably or unfavorably with some familiar object in Charleston harbor. There is indeed a similarity in the conformation. And though ours, she says, may not be so extensive, nor so grand in its outlines, nor so calm and soft in its perspective, there is a more aristocratic air about it. Smaller bodies are always more select and respectable. The captain, to whom she has put an hundred and one questions which ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... perhaps, to notice the particulars, as to physical conformation, in which the Indian differs from ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... character and course, and coeval or anterior in date, to that which has left like indications in so many parts of the Eastern hemisphere. There the records are more scattered and more varied, as from the size and conformation of the continents and the greater diversities of climate we might have expected them to be; and those at least of a later period are, from the nature of the case, more easy of interpretation in the light of legend, tradition and written history. But the general features ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... went into Holland by the railway. It was a long time before Rollo learned that in travelling from one European country to another, he was not to expect any visible line of demarcation to show the frontier. Boys at school, in studying the shape and conformation of different countries on the map, and seeing them marked by distinct colored boundaries, are very apt to imagine that they will see something, when travelling from one country to another, to show them by visible signs when ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... right of a native Roman. The man or the city that was honored with this right, was civitate donatus cum suffragio, adopted a citizen of Rome, with the right of giving suffrage with the people in some cases, as those of conformation of law, or determination in judicature, if both the Consuls were agreed, not otherwise; wherefore that coming to little, the greatest and most peculiar part of this privilege was, that who had borne magistracy (at least that of oedile or quoestor) in any Latin city, was by ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... wants that degree of finish and grouping equal to the rest. Shakspeare sometimes has this want in common with others; but in this play he has lost none of his force and propriety of character—here all continue to speak the language of their conformation, and lose none of their original importance. Barry was an actor that, in this particular, kept pace with the great poet he represented—he supported Othello throughout with unabating splendor—his ravings over the dead body of the innocent Desdemona, his reconciliation with Cassio, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... Foetus, designed to demonstrate that the human embryo receives the rational soul on the third day after conception and to discuss at length such subjects as the efficient cause of embryogeny and the proposition that the conformation of the fetus is a vital, not a natural, action. Various expressions of Aristotelian and scholastic biology were clearly abroad during the first half of the seventeenth century, and there is reason, then, for Digby's attack upon Aristotelian ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... a strange, critical entrance into another world, which she was destined to know and to love. The pines were big, brown-barked, seamed, and knotted, with no typical conformation except a majesty and beauty. They grew far apart. Few small pines and little underbrush flourished beneath them. The floor of this forest appeared remarkable in that it consisted of patches of high silvery grass and wide brown areas of pine-needles. These manifestly ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... so with the nose; the ancient Huns during the age of Attila were accustomed to flatten the noses of their infants with bandages, "for the sake of exaggerating a natural conformation." With the Tahitians, to be called LONG-NOSE is considered as an insult, and they compress the noses and foreheads of their children for the sake of beauty. The same holds with the Malays of Sumatra, the Hottentots, certain Negroes, and the natives of Brazil. (71. On the Huns, Godron, 'De l'Espece,' ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... all places. The structure necessarily varied according to the nature of the ground, being high wherever the ground without was such as to give the enemy an advantage in an attack, and lower in other situations, where the conformation of the surface was such as to afford, of itself, a partial protection. It is not, perhaps, impossible that, at some particular points—as, for example, across glens and ravines, or along steep declivities—the walls of Babylon may have been raised even to the very extraordinary ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... situation. The elbow was to a certain extent protected by the possession of a degree of fixity somewhat resembling that already mentioned in the case of the hip-joint, although here depending on the conformation of the bones alone. I think this explained the absence of free effusion in many cases of fracture of the humeral shaft, but when the latter affected the lower third effusion into the elbow was ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... the whole of the surrounding area was also at some time a sea, though volcanic action has since altered its surface conformation, and in places it bears evidence of having been covered with lava. It is not unusual on our world for volcanoes to burst up from under the sea, so even the evidence of volcanic action does not, as some seem to think, negative the possibility of water ever existing here; and it may ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering results, that you could only have guessed at any known animal as the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be more one of general expression than of definable conformation. But what increased the gruesomeness tenfold was that, from constant domestic, or indeed rather family association with the goblins, their countenances had grown in grotesque resemblance to ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... district was among them, until one day when the company after a fierce charge found itself hugging the ground in a wide field, on the far side of which the enemy—infantry and artillery—was posted in force. Lying down they were pretty well protected by the conformation of the ground from the artillery; and lying down, the infantry generally, even with their better guns, could not hurt them to a great extent; but a line of sharp-shooters, well placed behind cover of scattered rocks on the far side of the field, could reach them with their long-range ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... unlimited expenditure of broken English, that I obtained from the consul at Alexandria a certificate declaring me to be an Indo-British subject named Abdullah, by profession a doctor, aged thirty, and not distinguished—at least so the frequent blanks seemed to denote—by any remarkable conformation of eyes, nose, or cheek. For this I disbursed a dollar. And here let me record the indignation with which I did it. That mighty Britain—the mistress of the seas—the ruler of one-sixth of mankind—should charge five shillings ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Portuguese; Doudo, in that language, being a fool or lumpish stupid person. And, besides that name, it bore that of Toelpel in German, which has the same signification. The Dod-aers of the Dutch is most probably a vulgar epithet of the Dutch sailors, expressive of its lumpish conformation and inactivity. Our sailors would possibly have substituted heavy-a——. I find the Dodo was also called the Monk-swan of St. Maurice's Island at the commencement of last century. The word Dronte is apparently neither Portugese nor Spanish, though ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... any mental inferiority: there is little or no relation between conformation of skull and mental qualities, and it is a great mistake to make hasty inferences from physical to mental traits. Bean and Mall have made studies directly on the brain, but it is not possible to draw any sure conclusions from ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... conformation of the brain, and the general character of its different regions. It is important that he should as soon as possible begin the study of heads, and learn to judge correctly their development. When he can do this, he has an inexhaustible source of knowledge continually ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... what it was that made her think him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She failed. He wasn't at all handsome in the smug fashion associated with the popular interpretation of that term; his features were engagingly irregular of conformation, but the impression they conveyed was of a singular strength together with as rare a fineness of spirit. A mobile and expressive face, stamped with a history of strange ordeals; but this must not be interpreted as meaning that it was haggard or prematurely ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... an issue of Colonia, a magazine published by the Colonial College, Hollesley Bay, Suffolk. He declares that "the great advantage of Rhodesia as an agricultural country is the facility with which irrigation can be carried on; the conformation of the land is undulating, and even the so-called 'flats' are intersected in all directions by valleys, each of which possesses its watercourse, so that by the simple expedient of throwing a dam across these valleys, water ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... important thing from a soldier's point of view. Pay was drawn from the Field Cashier, and distributed for the first time in France. Next came the notification that in conformation with the policy of re-forming the 33rd and the 2nd Divisions by forming brigades, each consisting of two new battalions and two regular battalions, the 99th Brigade was to lose the 17th and 24th Battalions Royal Fusiliers, ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... of the shell of the purple mollusk resembles the sea in color; its bodily conformation is like that of a fish; it rises once in seventy years; its blood is used to dye wool purple, and therefore this color ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... Blanche's portrait of the Spanish painter explains other things. There is the physique of a man who can work many hours a day before an easel; there are the penetrating eyes of an observer, spying eyes, slightly cruel; the head is an intellectual one, the general conformation of the face harmonious and handsome. The body is that of an athlete, but not of the bull-necked sort we see in Goya. The temperament suggested is impetuous, controlled by a strong will; it has been fined down by study and the enforced renunciations of poverty-haunted youth. Above all, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... pachydermatous as any rhinoceros or behemoth. One other corporeal fact I could not help observing, was, that his cheeks rose at once from the collar of his green coat, his neck being invisible, from the hollow between it and the jaw being filled up to a level. The conformation was just what he himself delighted to contemplate in his pigs, to which his resemblance was greatly increased by unwearied endeavours to keep himself close shaved.—I could not help feeling anxious about his son and Jane Rogers.—He gave a quantity of gossip about ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... description—a phrenologist or physiognomist would have hung him at once. It is fortunate for some men that these sciences are not more extensively understood, or a great many persons would suffer for their natural and cerebral conformation. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... hastily climbing up the side of the canyons, beyond the reach of the roaring waters, and of others being overwhelmed and drowned. Such a flood, caused by a cloud-burst, may have buried the alleged Gunsight Lead and have changed the conformation of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... streams in deserts. Many, on the other hand, which in the distance seem insignificant, are really heavy rain, however local; these are the gray wisps well zigzagged with lightning. The darker ones are torrent rain, which on broad, steep slopes of favorable conformation give rise to so-called "cloudbursts"; and wonderful is the commotion they cause. The gorges and gulches below them, usually dry, break out in loud uproar, with a sudden downrush of muddy, boulder-laden floods. Down they all go in one simultaneous ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... the window and stole a quick look at the gable-end where, earlier in the evening I had seen peering out at me an old woman's face. Conceive my astonishment at finding the spot still lighted and a face looking out, but not the same face, a countenance as old, one as intent, but of different conformation and of a much more intellectual type. I considered myself the victim of an illusion; I tried to persuade myself that it was the same woman, only in another garb and under a different state of feeling; but the features were ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... From the general conformation of the parrots, as well as the arrangement and strength of their toes, they climb very easily, assisting themselves greatly with their hooked bill, but walk rather awkwardly on the ground, from the shortness ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... 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 of national conformation. ...
— Some Observations on the Ethnography and Archaeology of the American Aborigines • Samuel George Morton
... mountains in its neighbourhood, likewise appear to be of volcanic origin, and to have been upheaved somewhat in the same manner as Jorullo. Although the aspect of the mountains of Auvergne indicates so clearly their having been active since the surrounding country acquired its present general conformation, neither history nor tradition has preserved any ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... as animals. The latter, however, have no consciousness anterior to their physical births, and very little, indeed, for some time afterwards; whereas a different law prevails as respects us; our mental conformation being such as to enable us to refer our moral existence to a period that embraces the experience, reasoning and sentiments of several generations. As respects logical inductions, for instance, the linum usitatissimum draws as largely on the intellectual ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... for this purpose are those the conformation of whose face and head gives ample room for the development of the olfactory apparatus, and these are the different species of hounds; but a systematic education, and too often a great deal of unnecessary ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... country. They readily saw that rapid and reliable passenger facilities, and the rapid and regular transmission of commercial and diplomatic intelligence would give to British merchants and to British statesmen the certain control of commerce, and the conformation of the political destinies of many of the smaller nations of ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... there was ever any tendency to derangement in his mental conformation, on this point alone could it be pronounced to have manifested itself. In the early part of my acquaintance with him, when he most gave way to this humor, I have known him more than once, as we have sat together ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... claims of phrenologist and palmist. The former had a very respectable start in the work of Broca and Gall[1] in that the localization of function in the various parts of the brain made at least partly logical the belief that the conformation of the head also indicated functions of character. But there are two fatal flaws in the system of phrenological claims. First, even if there were an exact cerebral localization of powers, which there is not, it would by no means follow that the shape of the head ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... men, as they increase, can keep together, will, in the rude state of knowledge in which reliance for subsistence must be principally upon the spontaneous offerings of nature, very largely depend upon climate, soil, and physical conformation. Where much animal food and warm clothing are required; where the earth seems poor and niggard; where the exuberant life of tropical forests mocks barbarous man's puny efforts to control; where mountains, deserts, or arms ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... from the Anglo-Saxon in his physical conformation, by his black skin, his curly hair, his flat nose and broad flat foot. Nor is he less distinctly marked by his mental characteristics. Content to repose on the bosom of his mother terra firma, he is ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... as they neared an open bluff where the beetling rocks jutted out like a promontory above the sea of foliage below. They might judge of the long curvature of the conformation of the range just here, for on the opposite height was visible at intervals the road they had traveled, winding in and out among the trees, ascending the mountain in serpentine coils; they beheld the Cove beneath from a new angle, and further ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... geographical, and applied from time immemorial to the persons living in those valleys of Piedmont which have ever formed part of the Italian territory, and are not to be confounded with the Swiss Canton de Vaud, bearing a name so like because of the similarity of geographical conformation. ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... are a masther mind, Heller, an' ought to been in howly ordhers. An' that brings me to another idee av high importince. There should be somebody to run about with howly wather an' exthrame unction, an' the like. Now that business wouldn't shuit me pheesical conformation, an' nayther would it shuit the character I have to bear. It's betther that you should do the outside trampin', Heller. Ye know the tradditions an' docthrines av the Church well enough, an' y' are a dab at Latin. As for yer not bein' av ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various |
