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Cumulative   /kjˈumjələtɪv/   Listen
Cumulative

adjective
1.
Increasing by successive addition.  Synonym: accumulative.  "The eventual accumulative effect of these substances"



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"Cumulative" Quotes from Famous Books



... them. Notwithstanding Uncle Toby and Maria, who will venture to say that Sterne was noble or virtuous, when he looks over the whole that he has written? But in Shakspere there is no suspicion of a cloven foot. Everywhere he is on the side of virtue and of truth. Many small arguments, with great cumulative force, might be adduced to ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... and private works in this country, and the cumulative testimony of English and French engineers, have demonstrated that the only tile which it is economical to use, is the best that can be found, and that the best,—much the best—thus far invented, is the "pipe, or round tile, and collar,"—and these ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring

... on local and educational matters, spread more and more, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah women voted upon exactly the same terms as men, In Idaho women sat in the legislature. There was much agitation for minority representation. Illinois set an example by the experiment of cumulative voting in the election of lower house members ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last she had repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them. The present seemed enough for her without cumulative hope: usually, even if love is in itself an end, it must be regarded as ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... report. He would not await the positive information that must soon be given out, but applied strong language to acts not yet precisely ascertained; and he mingled with the "Chesapeake" affair other very real, but different and minor, subjects of complaint, seemingly with a view to cumulative effect. He thus made the mistake of encumbering with extraneous or needless details a subject which required separate, undivided, and lucid insistence; while Canning found an opportunity, particularly congenial to his temperament, to escape ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... so. A certain effort, though commonly an inappreciable one, must be required to recognize every vowel and consonant. If, as all know, it is tiresome to listen to an indistinct speaker, or read a badly-written manuscript; and if, as we cannot doubt, the fatigue is a cumulative result of the attention needed to catch successive syllables; it follows that attention is in such cases absorbed by each syllable. And if this be true when the syllables are difficult of recognition, it will also be true, though in a less degree, when the ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer

... plead and excuse and palliate and demonstrate—and all the while the triangular tower in its naked legs and its palpitating chemise brandished its vast fists nearer and nearer, its ghastly yellow lips hurling cumulative volumes of rhythmic profanity, its blue eyes snapping like fire-crackers, its enormous hairy chest heaving and tumbling like a monstrous hunk of sea-weed, its flat soiled feet curling and uncurling ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... the man was more than he could bear. The cumulative force of the reproach of the woman he loved, the confidence of the Viceroy, the rapturous happiness of his best friend, was not to be endured longer. Pleading indisposition, he early begged leave to withdraw from the festivities which succeeded the completion of ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... royalties for the month next preceding. Each monthly payment shall be made under oath and shall comply with requirements that the Register of Copyrights shall prescribe by regulation. The Register shall also prescribe regulations under which detailed cumulative annual statements of account, certified by a certified public accountant, shall be filed for every compulsory license under this section. The regulations covering both the monthly and the annual statements of account shall prescribe the form, content, and manner of certification with respect ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... altogether mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judge books not as dead things, but as living things—things which have an influence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely as expressions of actuality in thought and feeling. Perhaps criticism has a cumulative and final effect; perhaps it does some good we do not know of. It apparently does not affect the author directly, but it may reach him through the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or diminish his audience for a while, until he has thoroughly measured and tested his own powers. If criticism ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... cheap corn operating throughout the world, created a new demand for many kinds of articles; the production of a large number of such articles being aided by iron in some one of its many forms, iron to that extent was exported. And the effect is cumulative. The manufacture of iron being stimulated, all persons concerned in that great manufacture are well off, have more to spend, and by spending it encourage other branches of manufacture, which again propagate ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot

... have not, consistently developed the same fundamental idea of Christian superiority into the lawfulness of making war upon the heathen, and reducing them to the state of domestic animals. If Christianity is to have credit from the former, it must also take the credit of the latter. If cumulative evidence of its divine origin is found in the fact, that Christendom has liberated Christian slaves, must we forget the cumulative evidence afforded by the assumed right of the Popes to carve out the countries of the heathen, and bestow them with their inhabitants on Christian ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... on which we predicate an extreme antiquity for man are necessarily cumulative. It is not from one source alone that we obtain information, but from many. Eminent men in nearly every department of knowledge have lent their aid to the elucidation of this subject. It can only be understood by ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... same incessant repetition of "Haih haih!" that Henry had noticed in the chant at the edge of the woods, but it seemed to give a cumulative effect, like the roll of thunder, and at every slight pause that deep breath of approval ran through the crowd in the Long House. The effect of the song was indescribable. Fire ran in the veins of ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... portion of the area, expect to find the greatest amount of variation and the most numerous anomalies. Dividing the six tribes into two groups, western and eastern, each of three tribes, we find that the cumulative resemblance of the western group to the Arunta is 132, to the Oolawunga 186; the same figures for the eastern group, more remote from the Oolawunga, but practically equidistant with the western group from ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... the lifting power of the planes. The result is that the nose falls slightly. The pilot moves the stick back to lift the nose, and in doing so pulls up his elevators, offering still more resistance to the air, and checking the speed. The effect becomes cumulative; he tries to hold up his machine, and he has stalled. In a last effort to check the spin he kicks on the rudder, and the ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser

... followed by such terribly harassing flights, culminating in purposeless return to London, Paul's dreadful disorder and present helpless mazes seems direct sentence execution upon Pierre Lanier. Are not all these fateful perversities cumulative wrath upon ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... history, many words in praise of beauty, many personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the final word would inevitably be ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater

... of Geology.' Just as Lyell accounted for the huge masses of stratified rocks, the upheaved mountain chains, the deep valleys, and the shifting seas of the earth's surface, by adducing the long-continued cumulative action of causes which are at this present moment in operation and can be observed and measured at the present day: so Darwin demonstrates that natural variation, and consequent selection by "breeders" and "fanciers" at the present day, give rise to new ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... Peep O'Day's carnival of weird vagaries of deportment came at the end of two months—two months in which each day the man furnished cumulative and piled-up material for derisive and jocular comment on the part of a very considerable ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... other was no longer nameless, had the right to the same fine, old name that Alan himself bore, and had too often disgraced, the barrier between him and Tony Holiday was swept away. That was the bitterest drop in the cup. No wonder he hated Dick—hated him now with a cumulative, almost murderous intensity. He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field? It was he—Alan Massey—that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... all this there pressed upon the mind of bishops and deputies a cumulative argument of a wholly different sort. The demand for revision seemed to be closing in upon the Church on converging lines. It was plain that, before long, hands of change must necessarily be laid upon certain semi-detached portions ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... such lengths may a timid man be driven in order to preserve and foster the renown of being a dog of the old sort. All kinds of persons used to hear the barking of the alderman's revolver in his stable-yard, and the cumulative effect of these noises wore down calumny and incredulity. And, of course, having once begun to practise, the alderman could not decently cease. The absurd situation endured. And a coral reef of ball cartridges might have appeared on the surface of ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... Herodias, whose dancing before Herod was so admirably performed that she was suitably rewarded with a testimonial of her step father's esteem. To these examples many more might be added, showing by cumulative evidence that among the ancient people whose religion was good enough for us to adopt and improve, dancing was a polite and proper accomplishment, although not always decorously ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... her mind hard upon growth in some particular direction, you see almost overnight a development fledged to the last tail-feathers and tip of top-knot where there was nothing at all. What miracles can be wrought by an open mind and a keen sense of the cumulative power of the unwasted minute! All this apropos of a very trivial matter, you may be thinking. But, be careful how you judge what is trivial and what important in a universe ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... one mission," he went on. "She arrived at it when she arrived at womanhood. The fashionable age for marriage was fifteen. Civilization has pushed it along to twenty-five. Those ten cumulative years have put a terrific strain on woman. On the whole, she has stood it remarkably well. But as modernity has reduced our animalism, it has increased our fundamental immorality and put a substantial blot on woman's mission as a mission. Woman has had to learn ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... in expression. The Colonel's face is lined with weather, with age, with eating and drinking, and with the cumulative effects of many petty vexations, but not with thought: he is still fresh, and he has by no means full expectations of pleasure and novelty. Cuthbertson has the lines of sedentary London brain work, with its chronic fatigue ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw

... skill whatever. Finally, a shoemaker was interrogated, and his evidence was not the least damning. Martin Guerre, he declared, required twelve holes to lace his boots, and his surprise had been great when he found those of the prisoner had only nine. Considering all these points, and the cumulative evidence, the judge of Rieux set aside the favourable testimony, which he concluded had been the outcome of general credulity, imposed on by an extraordinary resemblance. He gave due weight also to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... cumulative cost had now been incurred, making it imperative to go forward to embarkation with all speed, and primarily, to secure the requisite larger ship. Evidently Weston and Cushman believed they had found one that would serve, when on Saturday, they "took liking," as we have seen, ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... on more personality than the statue has. He can only give that personality expression in a new channel. In the realm of letters, a real transformation scene, rendered credible to the higher fancy by its slow cumulative movement, is the tale of the change of the dying Rowena to the living triumphant Ligeia in Poe's story of that name. Substitution is not the fairy-story. It is transformation, transfiguration, that is the fairy-story, be it a divine or ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... and drew a long breath, and his face became quite red. It was as if the anger in which he could not afford to indulge himself three years before was now working in him with cumulative effect. Wharton, only partially recovered from the shock of Cleggett's sudden arraignment, began to stammer and bluster, using ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... this discourse was delivered on the day of Malachy's death is cumulative. (1) The opening words of Sec. 1, and the closing sentences of Sec. 8 (note "this day"). (2) The statement in Sec. 5, "He said to us, 'With desire I have desired,'" etc., implies that those who tended Malachy in his sickness were present (see Life, ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... reasoning over a number of generations, in a race where alcohol is freely used by most of the population, one seems unable to escape from the conclusion that the effects of this racial poison, if it be such, must necessarily be cumulative. The damage done to the race must increase in each generation. If the deterioration of the race could be measured, it might even be found to grow in a series of figures representing ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... up the Avenue, carrying one of his small leather-bound books to Beth. It was the day after the call of the Grey One there. He had learned to give—which may be made an exquisite art—little things that forbade refusal, but which were invested with cumulative values. Thus he brought many of his rare books of the world to the studio. In them she came upon his marginal milestones, and girdled them with her own pencillings. So their inner silences were broken, and they entered the concourse of ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... and rarely are the catkins injured before late February or early March. Injury may be severe even though the temperatures are not lower than the catkins are thought to endure when in bloom. Apparently the injury may be due to the cumulative effect of dessication throughout the winter months, this effect becoming apparent shortly before the catkins bloom. Catkins forced into bloom prior to late February bloom normally and without ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... forgotten memories they may be called. For they mostly refer to a far period in our lives, to our early years, to days and events that were happy and sad. The events themselves have faded from the mind, but they registered an emotion, cumulative in its effect, which endures and revives from time to time and is that indefinable feeling, that tender melancholy and "divine despair," and those idle tears of which the poet says, "I know not what they mean," which gather to the eyes at the sight of happy autumn fields and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... to ear and eye; and a week fled before the rejoicings were ended and all had passed in procession. Canale surpasses himself here, for he loved State ceremonies; he gives a paragraph to the advance of each gild, its salutation and withdrawal, and the cumulative effect of all the paragraphs is enchanting, like a prose ballade, with a repeated refrain at ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... objects;—nay, far more, for it is as vast as the sum of their relations. So that if (as is apt to be the case) the difficulties of realising this tremendous truth are in proportion to the extent of knowledge and the powers of reflection, the evidence we can perfectly appreciate is cumulative in an equal or still higher proportion. Obvious as are the marks of design in each individual object, the sum of proof is not merely the sum of such indications, but that sum infinitely multiplied by the relations established and preserved ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... seen that the emotional power of the child is strengthened. This has been effected because, in the tale just as truly as in life, action is presented in real situations; and back of every action is the motive force of emotion. This cumulative power of emotion, secured by the child through the handling of tales, will serve daily a present need. It will be the dynamic force which he will require for anything he wishes to accomplish in life. It will give the child the ability to use it in any situation similar to that in ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... organic evolution, and I shall do so by classifying the arguments in a way tending to show their distinct or independent character, and therefore calculated to display the additional force which they acquire from their cumulative nature. ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes

... Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection for his body. Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force. He recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted party frocks or quaintly, infantilely ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... environment are immediately heritable, although the mode of this inheritance was not described; it was simply assumed and taken for granted. Thus the darker color of the skin of tropical human races would be viewed by Buffon as the cumulative result of the sun's direct effects. Lamarck laid greater stress upon the indirect or functional variations due to the factors of use and disuse, and he also assumed as self-evident that such effects were transmissible as "acquired characters." ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... nearly two-thirds that of the EU-25 average. Hungary continues to demonstrate strong economic growth and acceded to the EU in May 2004. The private sector accounts for over 80% of GDP. Foreign ownership of and investment in Hungarian firms are widespread, with cumulative foreign direct investment totaling more than $60 billion since 1989. Hungarian sovereign debt was upgraded in 2000 - together with the Czech Republic, Hungary holds the highest rating among the Central European transition economies. ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... one is so holy that sin does not hurt him, according to Buddhistic belief. The Brahman, on the contrary, was liable to become so holy that he could commit any sin and it did not affect his virtue, which he stored up in a heap by cumulative asceticism.] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... gesticulating witch-doctor and his myrmidons passed on, "but only to become the victims of a more refined and protracted torture at last. Having failed to exhibit any signs of fear in the first instance we are spared to witness the cumulative sufferings of those who are to precede us, in order that by the sight of their exquisite torments our courage may be quelled by the anticipation of our own. I imagine, from what I have read of the customs of this people, that we are about to ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... wastes are badly blighting many streams and rivers or stretches of them. Some smaller watercourses, like historic Antietam Creek below Hagerstown, Maryland, have deteriorated under the influence of discharges from single or limited sources, while larger ones suffer from a cumulative waste buildup in areas of concentrated population or industry. Some twenty miles of both industrial and municipal pollution in the South River Branch of the Shenandoah's South Fork below Waynesboro, Virginia, have done much damage to that legended ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... Camilla was coming down the stairs by the rustling of her silk flounces along the rails of the banisters, like harp-strings; then there was a cumulative whisper and an entrance. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... "Think of it! a whole city wiped out." I lowered my eyes to the goat nibbling beside us. "The courage and energy that rebuilt it is herculean." His enthusiasm was cumulative. "And rebuilt it in practically three years! No wonder you date all things ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray

... terror to the unaccustomed is an ascent by lacets up a very steep side hill. The effect is cumulative. Each turn brings you one stage higher, adds definitely one more unit to the test of your hardihood. This last has not terrified you; how about the next? or the next? or the one after that? There is not the slightest danger. You appreciate ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... refers to is an academic faculty and not the general public. To insure fullest use he goes on to advocate the necessity of a printed catalogue with yearly manuscript supplements to be issued as a cumulative printed supplement every three years. He does not reach the point of proposing a call-number system but stresses the importance of shelf-location guides in the catalogue. He believes in aggressive acquisition policies and the necessity of good faculty-librarian relations, with ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury

... ruin that came upon him in cumulative degree, from year to year, Sutter managed to save, for a period, what is known as Hock farm, a very extensive and valuable estate on the Feather River. This estate he proposed to secure as a resting-place in his old age, and for ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... proofs of his efficiency in the line of the Events' greatest successes, and he wasted no thrill that the sensation in his hands was capable of imparting to his readers. Yet the effect was disappointing, not only in the figure of the immediate sales, but in the cumulative value of the recognition of the fact that the Events had been selected by Northwick as the best avenue for approaching the public. The Abstract, in copying and commenting upon the letter, skilfully ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... off with depressin. The subliminals are still a prime sales-point. All the tickler features are cumulative, Gussy. You're still underestimating the scope ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... number of other words ending in na is very considerable; so considerable that, if it were not for the cumulative evidence derived from other quarters, it would be doubtful whether the na could legitimately be considered as a possessive affix at all. It MAY, however, be so even in ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... per annum, and, of course, if this distress goes on, that rate must be largely increased, perhaps doubled. This shows the amount of pressure which is threatening this immediate district. I have always been of opinion that this distress and suffering must be cumulative to a degree which few people have ever foreseen, because your means of meeting the difficulty will diminish just in proportion as the difficulty will increase. Mr Farnall has told us that one-third of the rateable property will fall out of existence, as it were, and future rates must ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... damnation. In every point in which Pitt had prophesied white the moving finger of history began, from the very day of the Union, to write black. The injury to the whole economic tissue of Ireland was immediate, cumulative, in the end crushing. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... of the form. The state of suffering calls off the vital electricity from its duties in other parts of the organisation, and is attended with other inconveniences, slight indeed in immediate perceptible effects, but so powerful in their cumulative and germinating effects as to lead to results which, were they related, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... cardiac stimulant, caffein may be used in any form of heart failure; the indications for its use are those which call for the employment of digitalis. It is superior to digitalis in never disagreeing with the stomach, in having no distinctive cumulative tendency, and in the promptness of its action. It is pronouncedly inferior to digitalis in the power and certainty of its action, and in the permanence of its influence once asserted. As a diuretic it is superior; it ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... to speak. His amazement, as McTrigger had gone on, was beyond the expression of words. The night held for him a cumulative shock—the discovery that Marette was not dead, but alive, and now the discovery that he, Jim Kent, was no longer a hunted man, and that it was O'Connor, his old comrade, who had run the truth down. With dry lips he simply ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood

... point to note. The "sense of potential and coming integration" is a strong factor of melody. If it cannot be said that the first note implies the last, it is at least true that from point to point the next step is dimly foreseen, and this effect is cumulative. If melody is an ever-hindered striving for the goal, at least the hindrances themselves are stations on the way, each one as overcome adding to the final momentum with which the goal is reached. It is like an accumulation of evidence, a constellation of associations. AB ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... of ethics justifies a falsehood, especially if the end in view should be immediate. He lies to save himself from punishment, and he will make a cumulative lie, building it up from his imagination until even the artistic element is wanting, and his lie becomes a thing of contradictions and absurdities. When questioned closely, or when cross-examined, his imagination gets beyond control, and it is possible that he ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... What has been accomplished in your sympathies by this? 2. b. Has this been through direct statement of things calling for your sympathies, or through "effects"? c. Is the method cumulative and gradual, or direct and insistent? d. Would you say that the method here is objective or subjective? e. What symbols do you find that you have employed largely, and for what purpose have the devices for which two of these stand been employed? f. Would you say ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith

... so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of this period of Benham's life were too complicated and scattered for a cumulative effect. In the background of his mind and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne. They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... daily occurrence, which the repeated reprobation of the Imperial power failed to check or punish. These inflammatory appeals to the ignorance and superstition of the masses, mendacious and absurd in their accusations and deeply hostile in their spirit, could not but work cumulative harm. They aimed at no particular class of foreigners; they were impartial ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... began to rise. One woman's voice first breathed it; other voices mingled with hers till they were all singing. It was a simple, swaying melody in glad cadence. The tree boughs rocked with it on the lessening wind of the summer night, till, with the cumulative force of rising feeling, it seemed to expand and soar, like incense from a swinging censer, and, high and sweet, to pass, at length through the cloudy walls of the world. The music, the words, of this song had no more of art in them than the rhythmic cry of waves that ring on some ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... "Their cumulative effect is certainly considerable, and yet each of them is quite possible in itself. The most unusual thing of all, as it seems to me, is that the lady should be tied ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... institutions—to the simple chamber clock designed for domestic use and to the smaller portable clocks and still smaller and more portable pocket watches. In mechanical refinement a similar continuity may be noted, so that one sees the cumulative effect of the introduction of the spring drive (ca. 1475), pendulum control (ca. 1650), and the anchor escapement (ca. 1680). The transition from de Dondi to the modern chronometer is indeed basically continuous, and though much research ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... known to a life-long dweller. To the sojourner scarcely more will vouchsafe itself than to the passing stranger, and it is chiefly to home-keeping folk who have never broken their ignorance of London that one can venture to speak with confidence from the cumulative misgiving which seems to sum the impressions of many sojourns of differing lengths and dates. One could have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... character of his thought—yet the writing is not, paradoxical as it may seem, unpianistic. The suggestion of orchestral relationships is contained in the massiveness of the harmonic texture, and in the cumulative effect of the climaxes and crescendi. He conveys an impression of extended tone-spaces, of a largeness, complexity, and solidity of structure, which are peculiar to his own music, and which presuppose a rather disdainful view of the limitations ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... walk, and, himself unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to their conversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night under observation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of it upon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can they command the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has a prisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steel walls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... period, have multiplied, and by their multiplication give cumulative confirmation to each other. Even in the lower strata of the Miocene (the middle Tertiary) important discoveries of stone knives and bone-cuttings have been made, as at Thenay, department of Marne-et-Loire, and Billy, department of Allier, France. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... rain in Utah and it did in old Vermont— Result: it costs you fifty more to take a summer's jaunt; Upon the plains of Tibet some tornadoes took a roll— Therefore the barons have to charge a higher price for coal. A street-car strike in Omaha has cumulative shocks— It boosted huckleberries up to twenty cents a box. No matter what is happening it always finds your door— Give us a rest! Let ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... life, or perhaps rather of death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been when I saw them, fewer but not less affecting, all those years ago. It was the same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... English people has elicited the admiration of philosophers and historians because it has been such a gradual and deliberate movement, such a measured and certain progress toward political and social freedom. To those who appreciate the value of unity of action, of the assured fruits of cumulative and consistent action along a given path, change as such seems fraught with danger. Nor is it specific dangers they fear so much as the loss of moral fiber, the scattering of energies, the waste and futility that are frequently the net result of casual driftings with every wind that ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... the longer one. Within a still briefer cycle a similar unfolding takes place in the individual rapidly, swiftly, with all the force of its past behind it. These forces that manifest and unveil themselves in evolution are cumulative in their power. Embodied in the stone, in the mineral world, they grow and put out a little more of strength, and in the mineral world accomplish their unfolding. Then they become too strong for the mineral, and press on into the ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... upon my spirits. The cumulative effect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey was heavy upon my soul. With my abounding animal health and great physical energy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event. I had the Irish faculty of seeing some gleam ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... this convergence upon what were substantially the same broad facts, showed itself in hundreds of depositions, the truth of those broad facts stood out beyond question. The force of the evidence is cumulative. Its worth can be estimated only by perusing the testimony as a whole. If any further confirmation had been needed, we found it in the diaries in which German officers and private soldiers have recorded incidents just ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... output declined by 3%-5% annually during 1989-92 because of systemic problems and disruptions in socialist-style economic relations with the former USSR and China. In 1992, output dropped sharply, by perhaps 7%-9%, as the economy felt the cumulative effect of the reduction in outside support. The leadership insisted on maintaining its high level of military outlays from a shrinking economic pie. Moreover, a serious drawdown in inventories and critical shortages in the energy sector have led to increasing interruptions in industrial production. ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... there took place in Toledo, counting only the people with the italicized the, forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons, male and female, twelve teas, four stag dinners, two weddings, and thirteen bridge parties. It was the cumulative effect of all this that moved Perry Parkhurst on the twenty-ninth day ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... had a long and a slowly cumulative influence, and a small number of young and powerful champions of the idea of popular education as a public charge began, early in the nineteenth century, to urge action and to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... experts, and financial experts. They were the cream of business and professional intellect of the country. Under their driving stimulus shells and munitions began to pour out at an enormous rate. It was a cumulative production, and the high-water mark was not reached for many long months, but when it had been attained the production rate of shells ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... language is extraordinary, and he is remarkable for the cumulative power with which he adds clause to clause and sentence to sentence, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... of the armchair marked in a vast hollow the cumulative ponderosity of the pillars of Church and School who were wont to sit in it. Sabre seated himself on the arm. "Was it about this ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... With all this cumulative experience, as Jimmie says, "of how to misbehave in shops," we got back to London, where I could bring it into play, and in a manner avenge myself ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... almost never believe me when I first explain the idea of food combining. They think if it goes in one end, comes out the other, and they don't feel any unpleasant symptoms in between, then it was digested. But bad food combinations have a cumulative degenerative effect over a long period of time. When the symptoms arrive the victim never associates the food combination with the symptom because it seems to them that they've always been ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... standing, his heart racing, the blood pounding through his veins. It is jumpy work, and is very hard on the temper. In the natural reaction from being startled into fits one snaps back to profanity. The cumulative effects of the epithets hurled after a departing and inconsiderately hasty rhinoceros may have done something toward ruining the temper of the species. It does not matter whether or not the individual beast proves dangerous; he is inevitably most startling. I have ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... "know him," as the phrase is, "at home." Till one reached the Sixth Form these social and official encounters with Butler were one's only opportunities of meeting him at close quarters; but every Sunday evening we heard him preach in the Chapel, and the cumulative effect of his sermons was, at least in many cases, great. They were always written in beautifully clear and fluent English, and were often decorated with a fine quotation in prose or verse. In substance they were extraordinarily ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... to the arm of his chair. No, there was no tremor there—mentally he might be near the breaking point, his nerves raw and on edge; but physically, outwardly, he gave no sign of the strain that, cumulative in its anxiety, had increased hourly, it seemed, in the three days that had passed since the night he had so narrowly escaped the trap laid by that unknown master criminal, whose cunning, power and malignant genius was dominating and making itself felt in ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... drew near for us to go back, I began to experience a feeling of depression. While I had not noticed it before, I suppose the cumulative effect of the experiences of the last eight months was beginning to tell on me. I noticed that Bouchard appeared to be in about the same condition. He would sometimes sit for an hour or more, in our room at the Cecil, gazing into space, never uttering a word. Poor boy, while ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride

... 'orses, nor race 'orses nor cart 'orses, nor Suffolk punches—' began Vessons whose style was cumulative, and who, when he had made a good phrase, was apt to work it to death like any other artist. 'Oh, you're drunk, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... every-day matters of the still real existence of the power of this magic was the first step in the rebuilding of Lady Anstruthers. To realise that the wonderful and yet simple necromancy was gradually encircling her again, had its parallel in the taking of a tonic, whose effect was cumulative. She herself did not realise the working of it. But Betty regarded it with interest. She saw it was good for her, merely to look on at the unpacking of the New York boxes, which the maid, sent for from London, brought down ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... though possibly not more significantly, occupied. She was doing her best to evade the wild onslaught of a young man in glasses who had been wanting to marry her for a considerable period, and had now broken all bounds in a cumulative attempt to inform her ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... had made a long, hard fight only to lose in the end, and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragement and final hopelessness that had been his father's lot, was passing slowly from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid its green grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him. It stood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father's labor. It should have belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already grasped too much. For thirty years ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... de Tecle in his interest. From that moment the realization of his ambitious dreams seemed assured, for he was not ignorant of the incomparable value of woman's assistance, and knew all the power of that secret and continued labor, of those small but cumulative efforts, and of those subterranean movements which assimilate feminine influence with the secret and irresistible forces of nature. Another point gained-he had established a secret between that pretty woman ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... be said for such an hypothesis? Here, probably, is its charm, and its strong hold upon the speculative mind. Unproven though it be, and cumbered prima facie with cumulative improbabilities as it proceeds, yet it singularly accords with great classes of facts otherwise insulated and enigmatic, and explains many things which are thus far utterly inexplicable upon ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... not at all. For hours after he reached his room in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... wise as that of the dinner at Dilly's: what is distinctive of genius is the power to convey the general feeling of the interlocutors, to suggest a dramatic effect, an artistic whole, as Boswell does, by the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors. The triumph in each case is one not of opportunities but of the subtlest ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... do not combine well, still if they are eaten in moderation they do but little harm. If we overeat, the evil results are bound to manifest, no matter how good the food, though it sometimes takes years before they are perceptible. The effects are cumulative. Each day there is a little fermentation with absorption of the poisonous products. Each day the body degenerates a little. The time always comes when the body can continue its work no longer, and then the individual must choose between reform ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... in themselves everything annoying, and to cherish both in themselves and each other everything pleasing. While each should draw on his love to neutralize the faults of his friend, it is suicidal to draw on his friend's love to neutralize his own faults. Love should be cumulative, since it cannot be stationary. If it does not increase, it decreases. Love, like confidence, is a plant of slow growth, and of most exotic fragility. It must be constantly and tenderly cherished. Every noxious and foreign element must be carefully removed from it. All sunshine, and sweet airs, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... methods. Measurement in scientific research. Science develops from centres. Science and democracy. The study of the biological and physical sciences. The evolutionary theory. Science and war. Scientific progress is cumulative. The trend of scientific ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... startling in the next paragraph will be the revelation of his mistake. Hence no novelty in the words or in their arrangement is allowed to distract our attention from the dominant thought. The sentences are made to look and sound alike and to be alike that their effect may be cumulative. The principle of Parallel Construction, the principle that sentences similar in thought should be similar in form, is ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... think, Goethe more than any other man of letters—certainly more than any other of the present century—in having done work which is very frequently, if not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that his work shall be known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it repeats itself on each occasion with a slight difference, and though there may now and then be the same faults to be noticed, they are almost invariably accompanied, not merely by the same, but by ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac

... simplicity, and his bare conclusions can be written on a single page, the power of the man is due altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... of Thomas Hobbes. He had not the chivalry of Herbert; the vivacity of Raleigh; the cumulative power of Bacon; or the winning policy of Locke. If his physical deformities prevented him from being as daring as Vane, he was as bold in thought and expression as either Descartes, or his young friend Blount. He gave birth to the brilliant constellation ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... utmost chance of gaining an early success. Judging from the increased effect of the bombardments before the last two attacks on facilitating the Infantry advance I am led to hope that this success would not be long delayed under the cumulative effect of unremitting bombardment. If, therefore, any change in the general situation should make it possible to allow me temporary preferential claim to all the ammunition I should like, I would ask for the following amounts to be here by 1st August, in addition to those accompanying the troops ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... world. The vehicle—a dirty old barouche—was within sight, and was being slowly prepared by an elderly laborer. Contemptible details these, to make part of a history; yet the turn of most lives is hardly to be accounted for without them. They are continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive. Even philosophy is not quite free from such determining influences; and to be dropped solitary at an ugly, irrelevant-looking ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... glooming over his wrongs, and neither heard nor wanted to hear. Having for his legacy a temper cumulative in its heat, he was coming rapidly to the point where he, too, started home, and left no word or message behind; a trivial enough incident in itself, but one which opened the way for some misunderstanding and fruitless speculation upon ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... progressing along ethical as well as physical lines. To the teachings of Jesus, once considered perfection, have been added many newly discovered principles of value, for knowledge is cumulative. All the best thoughts of the ages are ours forever, no matter who first originated or ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd

... I go (always, other things being equal) for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, that have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear Professor over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... by this proof of the cumulative speed of falling bodies. He came down and coolly set about his preparations for the descent of the gorge bottom. He unlashed the bundle and divided its contents. This done, he took a vertical measurement by going out ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... the hands holding that paper to the binnacle light—large hands, heavy and muscular but tremulous with drink and nervous reaction from the long strain and cumulative horror of the cruise then ending. Their aim would not be good, except by accident. None the less, if the report were unfavourable, their first gesture would be toward the holster, signalling to Lanyard that the moment had come to initiate ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... cumulative discontents of the tribe were near the crisis, earnestly fostered by the French on the western boundaries, that vast domain then known as Louisiana, toward whose siren voice the Cherokees had ever lent a willing ear. The building by the British government, two or three years later, of those great ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... is undoubtedly the most important aid and, if persisted in from year to year, may answer for its control, as its effects are cumulative, yet it is clear that other control measures should also be employed. In all cases which have come under observation the insects have always been found most abundant in orchards which are in sod or are poorly cared ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... known among the Navajo Indians that the root of this plant, when eaten, acts as a powerful stimulant; but the better class among the tribe look upon it with disfavour, as its use often leads to madness and death. The effect of the poison is cumulative, and the Indians under its influence, like the Malays, run amuck and try to kill everybody ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... to which scientific method has hitherto been applied, are therefore unscientific, or sure to disappear under scientific investigation. I hold that the existence of a Creator and Ruler of the Universe can be logically deduced from first principles, as well as justly inferred from cumulative evidences of overwhelming weight. The existence of something in Man that is not merely corporeal, of powers that can act beyond the reach of any corporeal instruments at his command, or without the range of ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg



Words linked to "Cumulative" :   cumulative preferred, accumulative, cumulate, cumulative preferred stock, cumulative vote, additive



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