"Disproportionately" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature. He is small for his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... once recognised by the length of the pistil, which is (including the ovarium) fully one-third longer than that of the mid-styled, and more than thrice as long as that of the short-styled form. It is so disproportionately long, that it projects in the bud through the folded petals. It stands out considerably beyond the mid-length stamens; its terminal portion depends a little, but the stigma itself is slightly upturned. ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... reptiles; but it would be an error to admit this consideration. Indeed, the serpents being animals which, in order to hide themselves, have adopted the habit of gliding directly along the ground, their body has lengthened very considerably and disproportionately to its thickness. Now, elongated legs proving disadvantageous to their necessity of gliding and hiding, very short legs, being only four in number, since they are vertebrate animals, would be incapable of moving their bodies. Thus the habits of these animals have been the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... coarse, lank and invariably black. The beard appears late in life, and remains generally scanty. The eyebrows are straight and the iris of the eye is black. The nose is generally short, broad and flat. The hands and feet are disproportionately small, and the body early inclines to obesity. The complexion varies from an almost pale-yellow to a dark-brown, without any red or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... along the lines of the essence of our human natures, which is superstition. The worst of it is I've brought it about. I told the meeting about a stupid argument about the building of the church which Billy and Dy had. Billy wants the tree for a ridge pole, because the church is disproportionately long. Well, I told the folks because I thought they wouldn't hear of the tree being cut. But Mrs. Day rounded on me, and the meeting followed her like a flock of sheep. Still, I wasn't done by that. I've been canvassing the village ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... century, than the general suspicion entertained against anything that passed under the name of enthusiasm. It is not merely that the age was, upon the whole, formal and prosaic, and that in general society serenity and moderation stood disproportionately high in the list of virtues. No doubt zeal was unpopular; but, whatever was the case in the more careless language of conversation, zeal is not what the graver writers of the day usually meant when they inveighed ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the ossifying junction. Exaggerated growth in the length of a bone is rare, and has been observed chiefly in the bones of the leg. Where there are two parallel bones—as in the leg, for example—the growth of the diseased bone may be impaired, and the other continuing its normal growth becomes disproportionately long; less frequently the growth of the diseased bone is exaggerated, and it becomes the longer of the two. In either case, the longer bone becomes curved. An obliquity of the bone may result when one half of the epiphysial cartilage is destroyed and the other half continues ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... traffic will greatly decrease rail traffic and hence the revenue of the railroad; whether the amount of taxes paid by the railroads of the State, part of which is devoted to the upkeep of public highways used by motor carriers, is disproportionately higher than the amount paid ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... deep furrows, whose long beard and hair, partially gray, gave him the appearance of advanced age: nevertheless there was something peculiarly striking in the aspect of the man. His forehead was singularly high and massive; but the back of the head was disproportionately small, as if the intellect too much preponderated over all the animal qualities for strength in character and success in life. The eyes were soft, dark, and brilliant, but dreamlike and vague; the features in youth must have been regular and beautiful, but their contour ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dark office. Surely it was more like the face of a spirit than that of a little human girl, and you would almost have expected it to shine in the dark. When you got used to the light of it, you realised that the radiance poured from singularly, even disproportionately, large blue eyes, set beneath a broad white brow of great purity, and that what at first had seemed rays of light around her head was a mass of sunny gold-brown hair which glinted ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... the sexes. In migratory tribes, as of birds or buffaloes, the males are not observed to slacken or shorten their journeys from any gallant deference to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience that among coursing-dogs and race-horses there is no serious sexual inequality. Aelian says that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she captured a lion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... they were there still, but coupled with pathetic signs of some disintegrating and poisonous influence. The face which once, in its pallid austerity, had not been without beauty, had now coarsened, even in emaciation. The features stood out disproportionately; the hair had receded from the temples; something ugly and feverish had been, as it were, laid bare. And composure had been long undermined. The nurse who had just left ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with these cumbersome contrivances, but he speedily grasped the fact that smaller machines would have been unremunerative, for the simple reason that their carrying power would be disproportionately diminished with diminished size. Moreover, the huge size of these things enabled them—and it was a consideration of primary importance—to traverse the air at enormous speeds, and so run no risks of unanticipated ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the general impression of his diminutiveness and fragility, one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his small wrinkly visage and gentle deep-set eyes." ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... may do harm, and among these is one, the nagah, that dominates the imagination of many Dayak tribes. It appears to be about the size of a rusa, and in form is a combination of the body of that animal and a serpent, the horned head having a disproportionately large dog's mouth. Being an antoh, and the greatest of all, it is invisible under ordinary conditions, but lives in rivers and underground caves, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... several feet high. The golden idols are always hollow; but they exhibit no distinct trace of the soldering. They are of various sizes; some of them weigh three quarters of a pound. Those of silver are always solid. All these images of deities have the same physiognomy, and disproportionately large head. In most instances the head is covered by a peculiar ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... weight enough to carry the election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not follow from small causes,—that is, disproportionately small,—but from adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real miracle lies in that divine ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty—I think she was lame—I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... several other names, which annoyed Sir John Biddell) darkened the painted, royal chamber of death, and suddenly lit up several white, sleeping faces, the ghostly dusk was alive with little gasps. There lay Amenhetep himself, in a disproportionately large sarcophagus of rose-red granite from Suan; and in companion coffins were a woman and a girl, all three brilliantly illuminated. They had the look of the light hurting their poor eyes, and being outraged because, against their will, they ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... case that some probable traces of Deuteronomistic revision were actually to be found in the Priestly Code, we must still ask for an explanation of the disproportionately greater frequency of such traces in JE. Why, for example, are there none of them in the mass of laws of the middle books of the Hexateuch? This is undoubtedly and everywhere the fact, and this must dispose us a priori to attach less weight ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... speech, and especially in the fine line and phrase, so justly but disproportionately prized in the present day. I give ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... century"—should be modified. A sounder conclusion and, in fact, the only one that could be reached through the results established above, would be this: Achievement in those activities represented in "Who's Who in America" is acquired disproportionately by stocks predominantly Teutonic ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... fez. A tunic of the same color, belted tightly to the waist, reached the seat—apparently a box—upon which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left forearm appeared to rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his right hand, which seemed disproportionately long. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Defense Force (LDF) and Ministry of Defense and Public Service over the past five years has focused on subordinating the defense apparatus to civilian control and restoring the LDF's cohesion; the restructuring has considerably improved capabilities and professionalism, but the LDF is disproportionately large for a small, poor country; the government has outlined a reduction to a planned 1,500-man strength, but these plans have met with vociferous resistance from the political opposition and from inside the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... wooden chairs, a square table with clumsy feet, and an open cupboard in which stood a few tin cups, were, the sole furniture of the narrow, disproportionately long room, whose walls were washed with gray. The ceiling, with its exposed beams, was blackened by the pine torches which were often used for lights. Pieces of board were nailed over the defective spots in the floor, and the lines where ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... again, than a long, slim, aesthetic figure with a head-gear so disproportionately large as to suggest a Sandwich-Islander with his head-dress of mats. The "aesthetic craze" has, however, brought in one improvement in costume. It is the epauletted sleeve, which gives expansion ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Mediterranean only on the southern Crimean coast; precipitation disproportionately distributed, highest in west and north, lesser in east and southeast; winters vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold farther inland; summers are warm across the greater part of the country, ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... diminutive as their little world, or were they as disproportionately huge as the lesser attraction of gravity upon the surface of their globe would ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... military class resembled, to a greater or less extent, the monarch himself, in that those parts of their skulls which our phrenologists had designated as the bumps of destructiveness, combativeness and so on were enormously and disproportionately developed. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... excellent curry, was spread on the top of the cabin, and eaten by the captain, engineer, and myself, after which the engineer took me below to arrange for my comfort, and as it was obviously impossible for me to sleep in a very dirty and very small hole, tenanted by cockroaches disproportionately large, and with a temperature of eighty-eight degrees, he took a mattress and pillows upon the bridge, told me his history, and that of his colored wife and sixteen children under seventeen, of his pay of 35 pounds a month, lent ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... before building his villa, but not about farming his property, which he should set about at once. Let him wait until his thirty-sixth year and then build, provided his whole property is under cultivation. So build that neither the villa be disproportionately small in comparison with the farm nor the farm in comparison with the villa. It behooves a slave-owner to have a well-built country house, containing a wine-cellar, a place for storing olive-oil, and casks in such numbers that he may look forward with delight to a time ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... makes its appearance, and warns us of the solemnities to come. Sometimes it is stained yellow, purple, red, green, or striped with various colors; sometimes it is crowned with paste-work, representing, in a most primitive way, a hen,—her body being the egg, and her pastry-head adorned with a disproportionately tall feather. These eggs are exposed for sale at the corners of the streets and bought by everybody, and every sort of ingenious device is resorted to, to attract customers and render them attractive. This custom is probably derived from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... are framed. "Salus reipublicae suprema lex esto" (Let the public weal be the supreme law) is a well known legal principle of Old Rome. But who constituted the Roman Commonwealth? Did it consist of the subjugated peoples, the millions of slaves? No. A disproportionately small number of Roman citizens, foremost among these the Roman nobility, all of whom were supported by the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... walk through—and walk he must, unless carried through on men's shoulders; for neither elephant, horse, nor bullock could ascend over the flight of steps. In all these places the staircases, on the contrary, are as disproportionately small; they look as if they were made for rats to crawl through, while the gateways seem as if they were made for ships to sail under.[12] One of the most interesting sights was the immense swarms of swallows flying round ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the maidenhair-ferns (adiantum), and a huge plant of the elk's horn fern, from New South Wales. It derives its name from the shape of its large fronds. Before us is a quantity of Chinese hydrangeas, remarkable in this case for the small size of the plants, and disproportionately large heads of pink blossoms. Cape pelargoniums, too, are well represented: they are curious plants, indigenous to the Cape of Good Hope; specimens of them are very often sent to this country, with boxes of bulbs, for which the Cape is famous. When they arrive, they look like pieces of deadwood; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... made his way to St. Domingo, and afterwards returned to Spain, to be vexed henceforth by those mean miseries and small disputes which afflicted him for the remainder of his days—miseries the more galling, as they were so disproportionately small in comparison with the greatness of such a man, and with the aims and hopes which ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... the stable-yard when he had come upon that sight,—it was long ago—had gone away terrified and aching with pity for the misery he had surprised. Sir Shawn O'Gara had interfered once to save little Patsy from a beating and had been rewarded disproportionately by a silent ardent devotion, at which no one,—he himself least of all,—had ever guessed. Patsy had liked Mr. Terence Comerford too. He was handsomer, the people thought, than Sir Shawn, being golden-haired, ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... to humour me, however, and disproportionately anxious to amuse me, it was little more than the dry bones of his history, I was able to ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... rolling heavily, was a small steamer. She was stumpy, high bowed, low waisted, with a short black funnel. Her bridge and single deck-house were disproportionately high. She was shabby and rusty. She looked insignificant. She was swept frequently with showers of white spray. On her bow and on her funnel could be seen the white letters and numbers which proclaimed her proper business. She was a trawler. In peace times ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... paintings injured. On the reverse of the last leaf of the Calendar, we read, in roman capitals, the following impressive annotation: DEUM TIME, PAUPERES SUSTINE, MEMENTO FINIS. On the reverse of the ensuing leaf, is a large head of Christ, highly coloured: but with the lower part of the face disproportionately short: not unlike a figure of a similar kind, in the Duke of Devonshire's Missal, described on a former occasion.[176] The crucifixon, on the next leaf but one, is full of spirit and effect. Then commence the Drolleries: or a series of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of opportunity, there still remained a precious balance of advantage in McClellan's hands. Because of its smaller total numbers, the Confederate army was disproportionately weakened by the losses in battle. The Potomac River was almost immediately behind it, and had McClellan renewed his attack on the morning of the eighteenth, as several of his best officers advised, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... concealed by his scowling and bushy eyebrows, are of a quick gray, stern, and penetrating in their general expression, yet, when narrowly observed, putting on an air of vacancy, if not stupidity, that furnishes a perfect blind to the lurking meaning within. His nose is large, yet not disproportionately so; his head well made, though a phrenologist might object to a strong animal preponderance in the rear; his mouth bold and finely curved, is rigid however in its compression, and the lips, at times almost woven together, are largely indicative ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... whose prospects have been clouded originally by the doubts and fears of poverty. And, at all events, the libation of blood in the course of the last war was, we must repeat, on the part of the high aristocracy, disproportionately large. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... he was tall, but disproportionately stout for his height. His face was broad, and his loose double chin gave it a flabby appearance. A pallid complexion and black-grey hair, brushed straightly down where he was not bald, produced an impression of sanctimoniousness which was increased by a fawning manner of speech. Mr Sharnall ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... subject; it should not be merely something attractive attached to the article to catch the reader's notice. In his effort to make the beginning attractive, an inexperienced writer is inclined to linger over it until it becomes disproportionately long. Its length, however, should be proportionate to the importance of that phase of the subject which it presents. As a vital part of the article, the introduction must be so skillfully connected with what follows that a reader is not conscious of the transition. Close coherence ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... are distorted and displaced in accordance with the altered shape of the thoracic and abdominal cavities. The twisting of the spine causes the patient to lose in stature, and the limbs appear to be disproportionately long. In advanced cases the pelvis becomes obliquely contracted—a deformity known ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... volume in the earlier range depends very disproportionately for its interest on the preliminary matter in the form of a Preface or Dedication. In Prefaces, Dedications, Epistles, 1874, the writer drew attention to this point, and furnished a considerable series of such prolegomena ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... our long restriction to house-limits, the heavy limitations of our clothing, and the heavier ones of traditional decorum, have made women disproportionately short-legged. This is a particularly undignified and injurious characteristic, bred in women and inherited by men, most seen among those races which keep their women most closely. Yet when one ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Passenger-pigeon. His eye, with its red circle, the shape of his head, and his motions on alighting and taking flight, quickly suggest the resemblance; though in grace and speed, when on the wing, he is far inferior. His tail seems disproportionately long, like that of the Red Thrush, and his flight among the trees is very still, contrasting strongly with the honest clatter of the Robin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... him a hand, but he refused it disdainfully. He was a young man, of middle height. He wore a close-fitting fur garment. His limbs were quite ordinary, but his trunk was disproportionately long, and he had the biggest and deepest chest that Maskull had ever seen in a man. His hairless face was sharp, pointed, and ugly, with protruding teeth, and a spiteful, grinning expression. His eyes and brows sloped ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... sometimes only the toe. In this case we have more than the mark of the whole foot. How do I account for it? Simply enough. The Colonel's foot slipped sideways. The mark is, you see, exactly the same in length as the others, but disproportionately broad. At the heel and toe it is smudged, and on the inside where the weight was thrown, it is heavier than on the outside. The thing is easy enough to understand. You ought to have been able to deduce it for yourselves. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... window-opening brought an ell of danger. The nave is unusually low and broad, and its buttressed piers are of immense weight, ending severely in a plain, moulded band. On these great piers rest the cross-vaults of the roof and the broad arches of the wall. The north aisle, disproportionately narrow, is a later addition. Behind the altar is a true Provencal apse, shallow and rectangular, and beyond its rounded roof opens the smaller half-dome. Architecturally, this is an interesting interior; but the traveller who has not time to spend in musings will fail to see it in its original ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... then falling on to the bare shaded ground beneath to make a deep-piled carpet. I do not know whether it is a mango tree at all, for I am no botanist: but anyhow the fruit is rather like that of the mango in external appearance, and in internal still more so, for it has a disproportionately large stone. These stones are cracked, and the kernel taken out. The kernels are spread a short time in the shade to dry; then they are beaten up into a pulp with a wooden pestle, and the pulp put into a basket lined carefully with plantain leaves and placed in the sun, which melts ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... him and towards the figure-head, as though he were about to address to it his devotions; he was seen to heave a deep breath; and raised his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily forward on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... of my sort is as ill at ease without his case as he would be without his body; and this little circumstance added disproportionately to my discomfort. With some irritable exclamation on my lips I leaned back in the chair, and once more regarded my environment. It was a rather large room, dim now, and as solitary as a graveyard after twilight. Before me stood the table, an oblong table covered with brown ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... appear, in their present position, nearly unnecessary; 14 and 15, for instance, in Vol. III. These are illustrations of the chapters on the Firmament in the fifth volume; but I should have had the plates disproportionately crowded at last, if I had put all that it needed in that volume; and as these two bear somewhat on various matters spoken of in the third, I placed them where they are first alluded to. The frontispiece has chief reference to the same ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... much about this illustrious man. Their views may be condensed into the following: Yoritomo was short in stature with a disproportionately large head. He had a ringing voice, gentle manners, an intrepid and magnanimous heart, profound insight, and extraordinary caution. The power of imposing his will upon others was one of his notable characteristics, as was also munificence to those that served ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... said that Shelley was too beautiful for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bear this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much as to make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quite disproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by his long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... may say, of a smallish man, grotesquely pot-bellied, with very thin legs and arms. The eyes were disproportionately large and quite circular, with an expression that was at once both impish and pathetic. The ears were immense, and set at right angles to the head; the rest of the features indefinite. He was dressed rather in the fashion ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford
... distribute the work among the respective provinces best qualified to execute it. The task of apportioning the labor was assigned to the local authorities, and great care was taken that it should be done in such a manner, that, while the most competent hands were selected, it should not fall disproportionately heavy on any.27 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... agriculture have been greatly promoted by the Customs' Union, by government aid and model institutions, by the improvements in the post-offices, by the laying of roads and railways. The public burdens and public debts, nevertheless, still remain disproportionately heavy on account of the enormous military force which the great states are compelled to maintain for the preservation of their authority, and on account of the polyarchical state of Germany, which renders the maintenance ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... bitterns have grown smaller and more graceful, with shorter legs and necks, to suit our diminishing rivers and our changed landscape. Quoskh is also, undoubtedly, much smaller than he once was; but still his legs and neck are disproportionately long, when one thinks of the waters he wades and the nest he builds; and the tracks he leaves in the mud are startlingly like those fossilized footprints of giant birds that one finds in the rocks of the Pliocene era, deep under the earth's ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... presented "a quadruped with an amazingly long neck, head like a sheep, bearing two long spiral horns, white as polished ivory, and standing in perpendiculars parallel to each other. Its body was like that of a deer, but its forelegs were most disproportionately long, and its tail, which was very bushy and of a snowy whiteness, curled high over its rump and hung two or three feet by its side. Its colors were bright bay and white, brindled in patches, but of no regular form." This is probably the animal known to us on earth, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... over the ears. There is a scanty moustache and a thin tuft under the lower lip. A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck. The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately bordered, especially at the shoulders. The dimensions of the head and face are disproportionately large as compared with those of the body. In the unique proof copy which belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps (now with his collection in America) the tone is clearer than in the ordinary copies, and the shadows are less darkened by cross-hatching and coarse dotting. The engraver, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... well formed, her bosom full, her stomach somewhat projecting, the thighs poor, the legs slender, the feet small. The men appeared to have a greater disposition to stoutness than the women. Some of the children had disproportionately large stomachs. Both men and women wore copper rings on the legs, the wrists, and the upper arms. On festivals they decorate themselves with iron rings, with which some reminiscence appears to be connected, to judge by the fact that they ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... early opportunity of redeeming his pledge, for on the day following the receipt of his letter a short, well-made woman, dressed neatly in black, with dyed hair, greyish-blue eyes, good teeth, a disproportionately large head and a lively and intelligent expression of face, presented herself at the Prefecture of Police and asked for an ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... look old or grow perceptibly gray. His hair was red and straight, and cut close to his head. He had a long mustache of the same sanguine tint. The sun had brought the blood near the surface of his thin skin, and he looked hot and red, and thoroughly exasperated. His brown eyes were disproportionately angry, considering the slight importance of his enterprise. He was evidently a man of keen, quick temper, easily aroused and nervous. His handsome, well-groomed horse was fractious, and difficult for so impatient a rider to control. His equestrian outfit once ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... central islands of the Pacific Ocean a singular breed of pigs. These are described by the Rev. D. Tyerman and G. Bennett (3/13. 'Journal of Voyages and Travels from 1821 to 1829' volume 1 page 300.) as of small size, hump-backed, with a disproportionately long head, with short ears turned backwards, with a bushy tail not more than two inches in length, placed as if it grew from the back. Within half a century after the introduction of European and Chinese pigs into these islands, the native breed, according ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the art of healing has no more right to employ the time of the ignorant student disproportionately in the pleasant and seductive paths of laboratory experimentation—because some of these may one day lead to pathology or therapeutics—than a guardian has to invest the money of his ward in stocks or securities of equally uncertain ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... Village were not crowded; for the first quarter of a mile they passed hardly more than a dozen. After that, although they became more neighborly, each held itself well aloof. Then came a small church with a disproportionately tall spire, a watering trough, the Town Hall, and "Prout's Store, Zenas Prout 2nd, Proprietor." Here the gray sidled up to the ancient hitching-post. The boy tossed the reins over the dashboard and jumped out. "You don't need to ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... one thing about you that another man dislikes, it disproportionately tinges his entire attitude of mind toward you. On the other hand, if you have one especially likable feature, it tends to lessen the disagreeable impression of things about you that the ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... to some degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ. In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely restful against the serried ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... prevention is procured by the heightening of slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom always greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their own accumulated savings or peculia. Slave prices in fact, whether in ancient Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately to the advantage which the owners could derive from the ownership. "This shows that an element of speculation enters into the valuation of the slave, or that there is a hypervaluation of the slave. This is the central phenomenon of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... spoke to him here; he seemed to read in their faces that he failed to strike in them responsive chords. He was drawn to them: the conviction grew upon him that he did not reach them, and it troubled him, as he thought, disproportionately. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... very unlike poor Coombe Prior; Markham's house—a perfect little snuggery covered all over with choice climbing plants, the smart plastered doctor's house, the Morville Arms, looking honest and venerable, the church, with its disproportionately high tower, the parsonage rather hidden behind it; and, on the opposite side of the road, the park-wall and the gate, where old Sarah stood, in an ecstasy ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood-carving representing a very big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small mountain, and a herd of chamois, disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the mountain, just across the ridge. This always fascinated us; but there was a small chamois kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might come on it and kill it. There was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... demoiselles," by a brother, in the uniform of the Royal Gardes du Corps, whose looks were reported (I think rather mythologically) to be as superb as his attire. In which case he must have been strikingly unlike his sister, who was one of the ugliest women I ever saw; with a disproportionately large and ill-shaped nose and mouth, and a terrible eruption all over her face. She had, however, an extremely beautiful figure, exquisite hands and feet, skin as white as snow, and magnificent hair and eyes; in spite of which numerous advantages, she was almost repulsively ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... would be natural to expect, the States which have been least favored in past appropriations should insist on being redressed in those hereafter to be made, at the expense of the States which have so largely and disproportionately participated, we have, as matters now stand, but little security that the attempt would do more than change the inequality ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... constructing a secure and imposing fortress; without any further regard to the rules or pedantries of architecture. Attached to the main building, which ascended to the height of five stories—and yet did not seem disproportionately high from the extent of its range, were several smaller dependencies—some of which appeared to be framed of wood. The purists of our days, who are so anxious to brush away all the wooden patchwork and little tributary cells that formerly clustered about the ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... weather, while labor and fuel—were greatly economized by the employment to so large an extent of the natural substance. The size and color of the bricks vary. The general shape is square, or nearly so, while the thickness is, to modern ideas, disproportionately small; it is not, however, so small as in the bricks of the Romans. The earliest of the baked bricks hitherto discovered in Chaldaea are 11 1/4 inches square, and 2 1/2 inches thick, while the Roman are often 15 inches square, and only an inch and a quarter thick. The baked bricks of later date are ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... from the number of impressions that his memory has received while it was passing, it follows that, so far as this cause alone is concerned, the earlier part of his day's journey will always seem to have been disproportionately long compared to the latter. It is remarkable, on taking a long half-day's walk, and subsequently returning, after resting some hours, how long a time the earlier part of the return journey seems to occupy, and how rapidly different well-remembered points seem to succeed each other, as ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... give lower and lower candle-power, successively, until the last lamp, or group, would be giving only about two-thirds the light of the first two. In other words, a very slight drop in voltage means a disproportionately great loss in illumination. Hence, by using a primitive system of distribution, such as that shown by Fig. 1, the initial voltage would have to be so high, in order to obtain the proper candle-power at the end of the circuit, that the lamps nearest the generator ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... breeding a very copious and varied bacterial flora, could with advantage be dispensed with. He also has said that man, who could support himself on food easily digestible, has a small intestine which is disproportionately fully developed. Instead of having between 18 and 21 feet of small intestine, man might do with one-third of that length. According to him, there is a disharmony of our food and our digestive system. Referring to such views, and the desire of some surgeons to remove ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... their predilection, that modern discovery is gradually putting the Bible out of date. A feeling, if not a judgment, has in some quarters arisen, that in view of the vastness of creation, the Scriptures ascribe to this globe and its concerns a share of its Maker's interest disproportionately great. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... resistance to disturbing agencies, and a good proportion or balance between the several organs. Each organ must be sound in itself, and its strength must have a due relation to the strength of the other organs. If the heart and the digestive system be disproportionately strong, they will overload and oppress the other organs, one of which will soon give way; and, as the strength of the human body, like that of a chain, is to be measured by its weaker link, one disproportionately feeble organ endangers or destroys the whole. The second requisite ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... this group is the Plesiosaurus, odd Saurian (Figure 2). By its disproportionately long and flexible neck, and its small, flat head, it unquestionably foreshadows the Serpents, while by the structure of the backbone, the limbs, and the tail, it is closely allied with the Ichthyosaurus. Its flappers are, however, more slender, less clumsy, and were, no doubt, adapted to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... pillar. You will better understand how high they must be, when told that, in the southern tower, the space of the upper row is divided into three distinct tiers; and still the windows do not appear disproportionately short. They also are double, and the interior arches are pointed; but the arches, within which they are placed, are circular. In this circumstance lies the principal anomaly in the front of the cathedral; but there is no appearance ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service on the North Sea, and in his opinion it would be years before those waters could again be fished, owing to the immense numbers of still active mines which would render such an attempt disproportionately hazardous. From this point of view, if from no other more disinterested angle, we owe a great and continuous debt to the splendid people of Britain's oldest colony. It was among these white fishermen that I came out to work primarily, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... "Sabre-toothed Tiger" (Machairodus), and they render it certain that the Megalosaur was in the highest degree destructive and carnivorous in its habits. So far as is known, the skin was not furnished with any armour of scales or bony plates; and the fore-limbs are so disproportionately small as compared with the hind-limbs, that this huge Reptile—like the equally huge Iguanodon—may be conjectured to have commonly supported ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... disposition among the people was greatly shaken. This fact has its cause not only in the deep impression which misery made upon their minds, but still more in the circumstance that it was chiefly the godly part of the nation that was carried away into captivity. The disproportionately large number of priests among the exiled and those who returned—they constitute the tenth part of the people—is to be accounted for only on the supposition, that the heathenish conquerors saw that the real essence and basis of the people consisted in the faith in the God of Israel, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... embonpoint which detracted materially from the supple and undulating beauty which had so captivated Claude de Buxieres. The imprisonment of a tight corset caused undue development of the bust at the expense of her neck and throat, which seemed disproportionately short and thick. Her cheeks had lost their gracious curves and her double chin was more pronounced. All that remained of her former attractions were the caressing glance of her eye, tresses still golden and abundant, especially as seen under the close cap of black net, white teeth, and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... proper person to carry their request to the elder. "Wee Andra" the young man had been called in his babyhood, to distinguish him from his father, and he still bore the anomalous title though he stood six-feet-four in his moccasins and was disproportionately broad. But in spite of these physical securities, the young giant flatly refused the doubtful honour of approaching his father on the sore subject; so, after much discussion, the delicate task devolved upon ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... liberal. Most of the wild men had followed Roosevelt, and the most conservative business circles felt at least some relief that there had been no re-entry into the White House of the Rough Rider, with a gift for stinging phrases and a cohort of followers in which the lunatic fringe was disproportionately large and unusually ragged. ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... feet in diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,—and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... gunners were very unskilful. At Surat the viceroy was joined by the squadron under Emanuel de Azevedo, the chief design of this large armament being to destroy four English vessels then in that port. The preparations for this purpose seemed disproportionately large, yet the event proved the contrary. Being come in sight of the English, the viceroy ordered the two pinks with the caravel and other smaller vessels to close with one of the English vessels which lay at some distance from the rest. Having all grappled with the enemy ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... economy depends primarily upon revenues from the oil sector, which contributes practically all export earnings and about one-third of GDP. Per capita GDP is the highest in Africa at $6,700, but disproportionately little of national income flows down to the lower orders of society. GDP growth fluctuates sharply in response to changes in the world oil market; GDP has either contracted or grown very sluggishly since 1992. Import restrictions and inefficient ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of the increasing and excessive dearness of living in France, the beggarly salaries of the poor schoolmasters of a former day, so little worthy of their labours and their social utility, appear even more disproportionately small than they actually were. What is more to the point, the teachers had no pension to hope for. They could only count on a perpetuity of labour, and when sickness or infirmity arrived, when old age surprised them, after fifty or sixty years of a narrow and precarious existence, it ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees visions. He had arms disproportionately ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... as we may call them, are carved of wood, about a foot high, and represent the deceased person in a standing, sitting, or crouching attitude, but commonly with the hands folded in front. The head is disproportionately large, the nose long and projecting, the mouth wide and well furnished with teeth; the eyes are formed of large green or blue beads with black dots to indicate the pupils. Sometimes the male figures carry ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter and woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money; whereas ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... have finished the "Lehrjahre." It is very calm and wise. It is full of Goethe, and therefore leaves behind in its impression that almost indefinite want which his character leaves, a want apparently readily designated. Yet to say his intellect was disproportionately developed leaves us in doubt whether a pure natural growth of the moral nature would have harmonized with his peculiar manifestation of intellect. He is to me as a blind God, made wise by laborious experience, not perpetual sight. He is at least ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... bed of sand and diet to their taste. They are very small, scarcely larger than a cherry-stone. Their shape is extremely curious. The body is dumpy, tapering to an acorn-shaped posterior; the legs are very long, resembling those of the spider when outspread; the hinder legs are disproportionately long and curved, being thus excellently adapted to enlace and press the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... be numbered among the curiosities of nature. They are characterised by the disproportionately large beak. In some species this is nearly a foot in length. The beak has on the upper mandible an excrescence which in some species is nearly as large as the bill itself. The nesting habits are not less curious than the structure of hornbills. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... woman of forty or thereabouts, with a yellow face, very long and disproportionately large for the frail, sickly body it surmounted, and dressed in an unpretending black gown. She wore a sad, submissive look. Her grey eyes bespoke a contrite and fearful heart, the cheeks were pendulous and the loose ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... where both sexes are employed, if the women workers are of equal value with the men in the eyes of the employer, they will receive equal pay; if of less value, then, but only then, proportionately less pay. It is because women have received not proportionately but quite disproportionately less pay that they have been undercutting men, and the Trade Boards are—very gradually, I admit—correcting this error. For well-known historical reasons women have been at an economic disadvantage, and their work has secured ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... metropolis would naturally be the depository of such literary treasures as had escaped the general shipwreck of time and accident. On the whole, the estimate of Gomez would appear much too small, and that of Robles as disproportionately exaggerated. Conde, better instructed in Arabic lore than any of his predecessors, may be found, perhaps, here, as ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... magazines in the country. The welcome they met exceeded even his anticipations. By the very next mail, he received a note from his friend, enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen's inexperience of such matters seemed disproportionately large. "Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder, indeed," wrote the editor. "If she can keep on writing such verse as this, she will make a name for herself. Send us some more: we'll pay her well ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... curiosity the more. Such as observed him closely were struck by an incongruity between his demeanor, which had the ease and grace of a patrician, and certain points of his person. Thus his arms were disproportionately long; and when, to steady himself against the motion of the vessel, he took hold of anything near by, the size of his hands and their evident power compelled remark; so the wonder who and what he was ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... weaned from their instincts. There are in every species biological "sports" and reversions, and there are individuals of this kind among sporting men who are not reached by ordinary social suggestion and stimuli. But granting that what we may call the instinctive interests are disproportionately strong in the sporting class, as compared with, say, the merchant class, yet these instincts are also strongly marked in what may roughly be called the artist class and in spite of a marked psychic disposition for stimuli of the emotional type; and precisely because ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... farm-yard and outbuildings, which irresistibly suggested that it had been recently unpacked and set up from a box of Nuremberg toys. The symmetrical trees, the galleried houses with preternaturally glazed windows, even the spotty, disproportionately sized cows in the white-fenced barnyards were all ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... victim who is the admiration of an enchanted audience pays dear for her success. What result can possibly follow on exertions so ill-proportioned to the resources of the delicate sex? The muscles of the body, disproportionately wearied, are forced to their full power of exertion. The nervous forces, intended to feed the fire of passions, and the labor of the brain, are diverted from their course. The failure of desire, the wish for rest, the exclusive craving for substantial food, all point to ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... this country, but which lends itself excellently to delicate artistic handling, and the creation of that subtle influence which Hamsun's countrymen call stemning, poorly rendered by the English "atmosphere." The epilogue is disproportionately long; the portion written as by another hand is all too recognizably in the style of the rest. And with all his chivalrous sacrifice and violent end, Glahn is at best a quixotic hero. Men, as men, would think him rather a fool, and women, as women, might flush at the thought ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... the year before, and in the prairie-fire the year before that, when so many people were made homeless, and also when fifty men had been injured in one railway accident. On these occasions he gave disproportionately ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... shade, many generations of the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. Along the venerable aisles of the nave and in the transept, are effigies and memorial tablets disclosed in the dim religious light. The chancel is disproportionately spacious and has high stained-glass windows at the sides and end. In front of the altar, beneath slabs of gray stone, are the graves of Shakespeare and his family. The widow, who survived him seven years, lies nearest ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... remembered that a hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant puddles: ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... quantity of stiff and lustrous black brocade, with enhancements, of every description, that twinkled and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points—a couple of mere tiny emergent heads—though the foreground of the ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... in Western Con-naught, seven miles from the nearest railway station. It possesses a single street, straggling and very dirty, a police barrack, a chapel, which seems disproportionately large, and seven shops. One of the shops is also the post office. Another belongs to John Conerney, the butcher. The remaining five are public houses, doing their chief business in whisky and porter, but selling, as side ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... apprehension, between erudition and the unknowable; and it will at the same time serve to illustrate, in somewhat coarse outline, the bent which leisure-class life gives to the cognitive interest. While the belief is by no means confined to the leisure class, that class today comprises a disproportionately large number of believers in occult sciences of all kinds and shades. By those whose habits of thought are not shaped by contact with modern industry, the knowledge of the unknowable is still felt to the ultimate if not the only ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... are interesting and quite disproportionately important because they had such a host of great individuals. How was that possible? ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... recognized as tropical vegetation, mainly by its wild luxuriance. In the center of the rear wall was what seemed to be a giant stone lizard, standing on its hind legs. The one foreleg that showed was disproportionately short. The body, too, was more attenuated than that of any lizard. The thing was headless and the statue, idol or whatever it was, stood on a pedestal, and before that again, seemed to be a slab of stone. Then my attention was caught by the head of the thing, which was to be seen in a corner. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... right kind of sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately short of the long reach. His fiction becomes ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... in the highest natures; and the man who in the best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities which are ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... hog of the ugliest and largest description; tall as a yearling, with an unnaturally large head and dangerous looking tusks, that curved above his savage snout like small horns. There was promise of magnificent power in his immense shoulders, while flanks and hams were disproportionately light. He came out to the open leisurely munching his acorns, or amusing himself by ploughing deep furrows with his nose, and not until within ten yards did he appear to note the presence of a stranger. Suddenly he raised his head and became rigid as though frozen to stone; he was taking an ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... what has already been said in the second chapter and some of the topics introduced are such that they could well have been dealt with in a more relevant manner in connection with similar discussions in the preceding chapters. The extent of this chapter is also disproportionately small, as it contains only 34 sutras, whereas the average number of sutras in other chapters is between 51 ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... very ferret of a man in black, with a parson's bands and neckcloth, a coal-black full-bottomed wig, and under this a white face, rather drawn and haggard, and thin lips perpetually agrin to flaunt two rows of yellow teeth disproportionately large. After him, and the more remarkable by contrast, came a tall, black-faced fellow, very brave in buff-colored cloth, with a fortune in lace at wrist and throat, and a heavily ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... had lasted for a considerable time, and the players were beginning to blow hard, when the ball, kicked by a surprisingly small boy in disproportionately big seal-skin boots, chanced to ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... pounds a year; we saw nothing at a lower price than this, and any house of a better class, standing in a nicely arranged shrubbery, is at least 300 pounds per annum. Cab-hire is another thing which seems to me disproportionately dear, as horses are very cheap; there are no small fares, half-a-crown being the lowest "legal tender" to a cabman; and I soon gave up returning visits when I found that to make a call in a Hansom three or four miles out of the little town cost one pound or one pound ten shillings, even ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... Lady Elphinstone to enter. The first emotion of those who entered this important compartment for the first time was invariably one of disappointment; for the room, although full of machinery, was small— disproportionately so, it appeared, compared with the bulk of the ship and the power required to drive it at the enormous speeds that had been indisputably attained by the Flying Fish. And this emotion was further increased by ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... five feet; it is disproportionately broad across the shoulders, thickly covered with coarse black hair, which is said to be similar in its arrangement to that of the 'Enche-eko'; with age it becomes grey, which fact has given rise to the report that both animals ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... for it trailed ignominiously behind at a distance of fifteen yards, and when our little Panhard began bumbling up the hill with its great follower, it resembled nothing so much as a very small comet with a disproportionately ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Sarre, the Chateau Royal, an enormous brown building with a disproportionately high tower. This hunting-lodge of the King would have been grimly ugly, were it not for its rocky throne, high above the river bed, and its background of glistening white mountains. The huge pile looked like a sleeping dragon with its hundreds ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... General Paul and his staff thought otherwise. They believed that a ceiling must be imposed on the Army's black strength if a rapid and uncontrolled increase in the number of black troops was to be avoided. And it had to be avoided, they believed, lest it create a disproportionately large pool of black career soldiers with low aptitudes that would weaken the Army. Using the quota to limit the number of black troops, they maintained, was not necessarily discriminatory. It could be defended as a logical reading of the Gillem Board's declaration that "the proportion ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... found in Africa. The little Bushmen and Hottentots are low types of the Negrito stock, and they lead us to the lowest men of all, the Akkas of the West Congo region. It is difficult for us to realize how utterly degenerate and apelike these pygmies are. The jaws are disproportionately large as compared with the cranium or brain-case, and project to a degree which brings the skull very close to that of the higher apes; while in mental respects, in the absence of dwellings, and in many other ways they prove to be the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Upper Amazons and other swampy localities of South and Central America. Boys will like to know the origin of their name. Stilts are called zancos in Spanish, and these flies, a species of mosquito, are called sancudos—more properly spelled zancudos—on account of their very long, slender legs and disproportionately small bodies, which remind one of a very small boy on very high stilts. Flies on stilts is a funny idea, but not more funny than the appearance of ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various |
