"Fraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dark skins, and that they come from Africa. The analysis of their several origins, and their distribution amongst the separate branches of the African family, would be one of the most difficult feats in minute ethnology; and this would be but a fraction of the investigation. When the several countries which supplied the several victims of the slave-trade had been ascertained, the complicated question of intermixture would stand over; and there we should find lineages of every degree of hybridism—children, whose ancestors originated on different ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... worked as green hand for a dressmaker, for one shilling and sixpence per week—37.5 cents per week, or a fraction over 5 cents per day. However, when the slack season came she was discharged, though she had been taken on at such low pay with the understanding that she was to learn the trade and work up. After that she ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... are completely restricted to the plane of the meridian. Inside the eye-piece of the telescope extremely fine vertical fibres are stretched. The observer watches the moon, or star, or planet enter the field of view; and he notes by the clock the exact time, to the fraction of a second, at which the object passes over each of the lines. A silver band on the circle attached to the axis is divided into degrees and subdivisions of a degree, and as this circle moves with the telescope, the elevation at which the instrument ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... years—ten on nothin', and twenty on sixpences. Well, a hundred sixpences make fifty shillings, and twenty times fifty make a thousand, as all the rent paid in thirty years. If you divide a thousand by thirty, it leaves thirty-three shillings and a fraction"—Joshua calculated like an American of his class, accurately and with rapidity—"for the average rent of the thirty years. Calling thirty-three shillings four dollars, and it's plaguy little more, ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... to tell—numbers and knives. For your sun-scorched Nepenthean, when duly roused, confesses to an expert knowledge of anatomy; he can tell you, to the fraction of an inch, where the liver, the spleen, kidneys and various other coy organs of the human frame are located. Blood, the blood of the Sacred Sixty-three, began to flow. At that sight the women, as their manner ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the enormous quantity of the stuff, and next at its utter and complete revelation of the man. In a flash I realised how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be. And Schofield explained that the work he had brought represented but a fraction of the whole that was at ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... looked at her without the faintest sign of recognition on his face, pausing only for the fraction of a second as a man may when some stranger claims his acquaintance by mistake; then with a murmured "Pardon!" he raised his ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... already on the trail. That had left at sunrise. Its preparations had been simple, and even spare. But it was adequate. Steve and his Indians knew to the last fraction the requirements of a journey such as lay before them. Year in, year out, they were accustomed to preparations for the long trail. This was longer ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... a queer sag in it, up and down in a long curve from one rise to the other. After a time Thorpe became fascinated in watching before him this easy, untiring lope, hour after hour, without the variation of a second's fraction in speed nor an inch in length. It was as though the Indian were made of steel springs. He never appeared to hurry; but neither did ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... poignant sense of the prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds. How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song of Deborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of the lyrics of Sappho ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Britain. The cellular system puts an effective stop to any thing like active hostility to religion; but it is a mistake to argue from this that the criminal is addicted to the exercise of religious sentiments. The family sentiment is also feebly developed; the exceptions to this rule form a small fraction of the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... we are concerned with kinship groups and the marriage regulations based on them. A kinship group, whether it be a totem kin, phratry, class, or other form of association, is a fraction of a tribe; and before we proceed to deal with kinship organisations, it will be necessary to say a few words on the nature of the tribe and the family. In Australia the tribe is a local aggregate, composed of friendly groups ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... half-dozen pupils, and they are carried to a neighboring district.] Farms were abandoned for the fertile fields of the far west, from which wheat can be imported for less than the cost of raising it on the sterile hills and in the short-summered valleys. New England had once claimed a fraction of the great west, as, indeed, had most of the other seaboard colonies. But these claims were surrendered to the general government, as we shall see later, "for the common good," and so her migrants had none other than ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... great part the several millions represented by Group 1 are perhaps more often warring in their aims and desires than acting as one. Never have they acted as one. Organized labor represents but a fraction of labor as a whole. Some more or less spectacular action on the part of capital against labor always tends to solidify the organized workers. They are potentially like-minded in specific instances. Otherwise the interests of the carpenters' union tends to overshadow the interests ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... lasted through six weeks in the Napoleon case, through six days in the English case. Of the French host there had been originally 450,000 fighting men; of the English, exactly that same amount read as the numerator of a fraction whose denominator was 100. Forty-five myriads had been the French; forty-five hundreds the English. And yet so mighty is the power of any thing moral, because shadowy and illimitable, so potent to magnify and unvulgarize any interest, that more books have been written ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... still greater number of such institutions are supported at corporate expense. Considering that the highest value can be derived from their labors only by such a combination as I have described, we may say the result is worth an important fraction of what all the observatories of the world have ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... over her bows and right aft until it reached the front of the poop, against which it broke with terrific violence, smashing in the entire front of the structure, as I judged by the tremendous crashing of timber that instantly followed. Checked for the fraction of an instant by its impact with the poop, the sea piled itself up in a sort of wall, and then came surging and foaming along the deck toward me. I saw that it would inevitably sweep me off my feet, so, to avoid being dashed against the poop rail, I unhesitatingly leapt overboard, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... twist on his opponent. For an instant he partially freed one side. Like lightning Roaring Dick delivered a fierce straight kick at his groin. The blow missed its aim, but Bob felt the long, sharp spikes tearing the flesh of his thigh. Sheer surprise relaxed his muscles for the fraction of an instant. Roaring Dick lowered his head, rammed it into Bob's chin, and at the same time reached for the young man's gullet with both hands. Bob tore his head out of reach in the nick of time. As they closed again Roaring Dick's right hand was free. Bob felt the riverman's thumb fumbling ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... If Ireland had had no wrongs, still two great islands can never be so thoroughly united as a continuous territory can be. On the other hand, in point of language, the discontented part of the United Kingdom is much less strongly marked off than that fraction of the contented part which is not thoroughly assimilated. Irish is certainly not the language of Ireland in at all the same degree in which Welsh is the language of Wales. The Saxon has commonly to be denounced in ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... the stock, after all, remained at a premium of one hundred per cent.; of course, the original proprietors gained one hundred per cent., and those who paid one hundred per cent. premium lost nothing. But these constituted a small fraction of the people who had speculated, and who paid from one hundred to nine hundred per cent. premium. Government, too, gained by reducing interest on irredeemable bonds from five to four per cent., although it lost the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Mr. Stafford's, we set to work on that History of Letter Writing which, what with collecting materials, and making translations, lasted us three years altogether, and was a great resource and pleasure, besides ultimately bringing in a fraction towards the great purpose. Emily has confessed that she worked away a good deal of vague, weary depression, and sense of monotony into those Greek choruses: but to us she was always a sunbeam, with her ever ready attention, and the playfulness which ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... knew, she would listen hard enough to catch. He found too that he liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might have caught as well. For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he would anticipate—by a night-attack, as might be—any forced maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he had just extracted from ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... But just a fraction of a second too soon, Cardegee rolled backward into the hole. Kent held his fire and ran to the edge. Bang! The gun exploded full in the sailor's face as he rose to his feet. But no smoke came from the muzzle; instead, a sheet of flame burst from the side of the barrel near its butt, and Jacob ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... minute aperture I attempted to peer, but whether it was but a fraction of an inch deep or passed completely through the door I could not tell—at least no light showed beyond it. I put my ear to it next and listened, but again my efforts ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... house over her, and a snug little property. A worthy man, a former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with the not insignificant fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their mutual advantage. He came to the village, therefore, where Father Pemberton was very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate disabled colleague. The courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for the good man knew there was no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... the part of the belly which I call the centre, as it is the place where the bridge stands and answers to central node, consequently the middle of the whole construction and of the mass of air: I scrape and level here until I get a fraction, a hair or two less than one-eighth of an inch thick. This I continue along the breast until I arrive at both upper and lower nodal crossings, when I gradually thin off to both ends, the final thickness being at the flat left ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... through Germany on their way to us; so that the fairest way of making a comparison is to take the whole trade in each case. Moreover, this entrepot trade of ours is not in itself a thing to be sneezed at; it contributes a goodly fraction of the wealth of the city of London. In order, however, to complete the picture of our trade with Germany, the following table is appended, distinguishing in each of the ten years under review the home produce exported from the foreign and colonial goods ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... psalms, prayers, and sermons were all translated by me into the language of arithmetic. A good man spoke very feelingly upon the manner in which our cares and perplexities were multiplied by riches. Muttered I: 'That, sir, depends upon whether the multiplier is a fraction or a whole number; for if it be a fraction, it makes the product less.' And when another, lamenting the various divisions of the Church, pathetically exclaimed: 'And how shall we unite these ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the group to the curbing; she saw the young man glance at her with a puzzled expression; then, as he stood aside to allow the lady to enter the motor, he looked again. For the fraction of a second their eyes held each other; then an expression of amused recognition sprang into his face, and Nance met it instantly with a flash ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... Universal Congress of Peace. I hold with Darwin that violent struggle is a law of nature which overrules all other laws; I hold with Joseph de Maistre that it is a divine law; two different ways of describing the same thing. If by some impossible chance a fraction of human society—all the civilized West, let us suppose—were to succeed in suspending the action of this law, some races of stronger instincts would undertake the task of putting it into action against us: those races would vindicate nature's ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical 'working-man'—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the unit Class. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and fractions are combined, the whole number is separated from the fraction with a dash. For example, in Chapter 21: 16 ounces and 2-19/20 drams would translate as 16 ounces and two-and-nineteen-twentieths drams. Incidentally, Livingstone uses British measurements, which sometimes differ ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... consciousness that she was going to do something much more important than merely introducing two strangers to each other. She looked quite anxiously at Brenda, who had turned towards them as they came near, and saw that, just for the fraction of a second, her eyes brightened, and a passing flush deepened the delicate colour in her cheeks. It was almost like a glance of recognition, and yet she had only heard his name two or three times, and certainly ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... was accustomed to handling his narrow craft. Few amateurs could have done better than the present skipper. He knew her good qualities to a fraction, and was also acquainted with the bad ones. Consequently, he was aware just how far he could allow her quarter to face the sweep of wind and waves, without being ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... distant sound of guns long before we got near the front, and he was nervous at going out alone at night about the camp. The men ragged him, but he was such a friendly rascal and so willing to take over others' work that he got along with a fraction of the persecution most of his sort would have had. I wondered sometimes what would happen to the poor little devil when actual fighting came. Would it be 'C'est bien, Mon Capitaine,' at the order to go over the top, ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... will be good enough to believe that while I thus speak of a country,—very much under-peopled by ten millions of souls,—I am referring to the condition of a minute fraction of that population,—of something less than two hundred thousand persons, in whom alone the existence of rights and privileges is by the law recognised. The people,—properly so called,—the peasants who cultivate the soil, the mechanics who construct the dwellings, the artisans who fabricate ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... appreciate the tender mercies of the present or Christian era. Logan watched him, and once when, something that interested him being said, the Father swept the table with his glance without raising his head, a memory for a fraction of a moment seemed to float towards the surface of Logan's consciousness. Even as when an angler, having hooked a salmon, a monster of the stream, long the fish bores down impetuous, seeking the sunken rocks, disdainful of the steel, and the dark wave conceals him; then anon is beheld ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... to the mat with a crash. Fast as was Zerexi, the gladiator from the flagship, Sintris was the merest trifle faster. Like the straightening of a twisted spring of tempered steel that long body uncoiled as they struck the floor, and up under those shielding wings—an infinitesimal fraction of a second slow in interposing—that lithe tail sped. Two lightning loops flashed around the neck of the visitor and tightened inexorably. Desperately the victim fought to break that terrible strangle hold, but every maneuver was countered as soon as ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... which I have been trying on the power of seeds to withstand sea water. I do not know whether it has struck you, but it has me, that it would be advisable for botanists to give in WHOLE NUMBERS, as well as in the lowest fraction, the proportional numbers of the families, thus I make out from your Manual that of the INDIGENOUS plants the proportion of the Umbelliferae are 36/1798 1/49; for, without one knows the WHOLE numbers, one cannot judge how really close the numbers of the plants of the same family are in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... of wild life goes on more or less behind screens—a screen of leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have! The drama of wild life is played ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... but I thought you might like to have my books. Oh, and there's just one other thing. You know, before the end people often lose control over themselves and make absurd requests. Don't pay any attention to them, Eustace. Good-by!" and he held out his hand. Eustace took it. It remained in his a fraction of a second longer than he had expected, and gripped him with a virility that was surprising. There was, too, in its touch ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... the stupid family meals, where everybody is expected to be on time to the minute! My father-in-law pulls out his chair at the dinner-table exactly as the clock is striking one, and if any member of the family is a fraction late all the rest are solemn and strained and nervous until the culprit appears. Peter says the way he used to suffer—he was NEVER ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... have crossed, as the last attack on the left, which was the vital point, had been repulsed. This may be so, in the light of after-consideration, but it was very doubtful at the time, and as Sedgwick had lost a fraction under five thousand men in these operations, and was acting under the false information that additional forces had come up from Richmond, he felt that he had fully borne his share of the burden, and that it was better to place his corps beyond the risk of capture, than ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... toward the material world's progress. Honest labor is the key that unlocks the door of happiness. One of the silliest notions that a young man can get into his head is the idea that the world owes him a living. It does not owe you the fraction of a red cent, young man. What have you done for the world that put it under obligation to you? When did the world become indebted to you? Who cared for you in the years of helpless infancy? Who built the schoolhouse where you got the rudiments of your education? The world was made and equipped for ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... more than ten years in appearance, though her age had been given to us as fourteen. The spindle ankles that she so airily flourished from the sparse concealment of a worn and shadowy calico skirt seemed scarce a fraction more in girth than the slim blue-veined wrists she tossed among the loose and ragged tresses of her yellow hair, as she danced around the room. She was, from the first, an object of curious and most refreshing interest to our family—to us children in particular—an interest, though years and ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... should be required in good English, clear and definite, like the questions. Pupils who say, "An improper fraction is 'where' the numerator is greater than the denominator"; "A compound sentence is 'when' it has two or more independent clauses," should be led to restate their answers in clear and ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... breaking nothing. Having designed locomotives, he knew to the fraction of an inch where the balancing hitch should be made for lifting one. Also machinery, and the breaking strains of it, were as his daily bread. While McCloskey was still prophesying failure, he was giving the word to Darby, the ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... which should be only just cracked, so as to skin well. To attain this end, first, the surfaces of the stones must be level, and the grooves must be exactly right; and, secondly, the upper stone must be hung at the exact distance above the other to the smallest fraction of an inch. The upper millstone is now sometimes balanced with lead, which Tibbald said was not the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... this is true, not only of the Congress and of the Administration, but of all men who at the present day are raised one fraction above the veriest obscurity and completest nothing-ism. You, reader, and series of those whom you daily meet, may fancy that your deeds, speeches, writings, overshadowed as they are by the greater men and events of the day, will be forgotten. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... discussion of the vexed question of the land clause in the Treaty of Waitangi. As a rule civilized nations do not recognise the right of scattered handfuls of barbarians to the ownership of immense tracts of soil, only a fraction of which they cultivate or use. However, from the noblest and most philanthropic motives an exception to this rule was made in the case of New Zealand, and by treaty some sixty to seventy thousand Maoris were given a title guaranteed by England—the best title in ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Lee's army, had hastily abandoned Richmond, fled in great disorder toward Danville, and General Grant's whole army was in close pursuit. Of course, I inferred that General Lee would succeed in making junction with General Johnston, with at least a fraction of his army, somewhere to my front. I at once altered the foregoing orders, and prepared on the day appointed, viz., April 10th, to move straight on Raleigh, against the army of General Johnston, known ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... care if they did; in truth, he rather hoped they would. He could imagine their mortification and disappointment, and since they had gone to dwell with strangers and fight their own people, it was only a fraction of what they deserved. ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... all. Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum;—that the grains and scruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world.—In a word, he would say, error was error,—no matter where it fell,—whether in a fraction,—or a pound,—'twas alike fatal to truth, and she was kept down at the bottom of her well, as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly's wing,—as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... without doubt, provided that this knowledge is not like a thing we possess so much as like a habit we have contracted,—a direction rather than a state: it is, if we will, a certain natural bent of attention. The schoolboy, who knows that the master is going to dictate a fraction to him, draws a line before he knows what numerator and what denominator are to come; he therefore has present to his mind the general relation between the two terms although he does not know either of them; he knows the form without ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... character, and of self-denying love for his fellow-men. Livingstone named after him a river which he supposed might be one of the sources of the Nile, and used ever to speak with great respect of the chief achievement of Mr. Young's life,—filling houses with a clear white light at a fraction of the cost of the smoky ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... daughter, born in May, 1652. The birth of this child may have been connected with the death of the mother in the same or the following month. The household had apparently been peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was given her to understand. She must have become considerably emancipated from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... got the fraction all right, anyhow. A poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... our bosoms.' But there will be no waste by the bestowment of what we cannot take. 'According to your faith, be it unto you.' That is the accurate thermometer which measures the temperature of our spiritual state. It is like the steam-gauge outside the boiler, which tells to a fraction the pressure of steam within, and so the power which can at ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the animal's vertebrae, just behind the ears, stunning the horse and making it helpless for the capture. But necessarily such shots are made from a distance, and little short of a miracle is needed to make the bullet strike true—for a fraction of an inch too low means death. So another laugh of appreciation ran around the barroom at the ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... either side of that line called the ecliptic in which the earth pursues its journey around the sun. It was therefore to be inferred that the new planet need not be sought for outside this zone. It is obvious that this consideration at once reduces the area to be scrutinized to a small fraction of the entire heavens. But even within the zone thus defined there are many thousands of stars. It would seem a hopeless task to detect the new planet unless some further limitation to its position could ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... countries, has gone on, till it found itself unexpectedly manipulating guillotines by its chosen Robespierres, and become a fraternity like Cain's. Much to its amazement! For in fact it is not all nonsense; there is an infinitesimal fraction of sense in it withal; which is so difficult to disengage;—which must be disengaged, and laid hold of, before Fraternity ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... broader ideas to-day—his conceptions are on a far grander scale. He only asks for a fraction of an acre in order to produce sufficient vegetables for a family; and to feed twenty-five horned beasts he needs no more space than he formerly required to feed one; his aim is to make his own soil, to defy seasons and climate, to warm both ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... on the banks of the Euphrates. It first was divided into four Sultanies—namely, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus and Cesarea. These are typified under four angels. Their time was to be 396 years and a fraction—an hour, day, month, and year. Thus, taking a day for a year, 365 for the year, thirty for the month, one for the day, and we have 396. So from the taking of Bagdad by the Turks in 1057, which was the overthrow of the Saracens, until the capture of Constantinople ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... her head unconsciously settling to one side in critical contemplation. Kenkenes, pressing the blade firmly upon the chalk, felt her cheek touch his shoulder for a fraction of a second; his fingers lost their steadiness and direction, but not their strength; the blade slipped, and the fierce edge struck the white hand that ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... for the Martians, doesn't it?" said the Wizard. "I have ascertained the vibration rate of all the materials of which their war engines, whose remains we have collected together, are composed. They can be shattered into nothingness in the fraction of a second. Even if the vibration period were not known, it could quickly be hit upon by simply ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... designed for unmodulated electric impulse transmission. telex - a communication service involving teletypewriters connected by wire through automatic exchanges. tropospheric scatter - a form of microwave radio transmission in which the troposphere is used to scatter and reflect a fraction of the incident radio waves back to earth; powerful, highly directional antennas are used to transmit and receive the microwave signals; reliable over-the-horizon communications are realized for distances up to 600 miles ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... your mother does." The fork shook in her fingers and then dropped upon the plate. She looked up in confusion. Cable's eyes were bent upon her intently and she had never seen so queer a light in them. Scarcely more than the fraction of a second passed before he lowered his gaze, but the mysterious telegraphy of the mind had shot the message of comprehension from one to the other. He saw with horror that the girl at least suspected the true ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a second, while the dreadful spear was poised for its work. Even in that fraction of time I noticed the bunching muscles of the murderer's hairy arm, and then I ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... won't die this time; but he may lie there for some weeks. So far as I can tell the bullet just grazed the spinal cord, and it's the shock of that which makes him so quiet now. A fraction of an inch closer and he would have died or been paralyzed, a cripple, probably for life. At is it, however, barring the possibility of infection, he should pull through. The bullet passed straight through the body without injury to any vital organ, and ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... marked traces of its working in all things. The beauty, the order, the general tendency of all creation accords with the supremacy of the Moral Law over it all. But that is by no means all. We see, and we know that we see, but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. And the result of this partial vision is that, while there is much in things around us which asserts, there is also much which seems to deny altogether any supremacy whatever in the Moral Law. The universe, as we see ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... new to such an affair. I kept my mind upon the change wrought in the Faringfield household, upon the fate of Tom, upon what I imagined would be Philip's feelings; and I had a thought, too, for the disappointment of my old enemy Chubb if I could cap the firing signal with a shot the fraction of a second before my antagonist could. We were to stand with our backs toward each other, at the full distance, and, upon the word, might turn and fire as soon as possible. To be the first in wheeling round upon a heel, and covering the foe, was my one concern, and, as I took my place, I ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the search continued. At intervals and at widely separated points dull explosions took place on the bed of the river, creating smooth, round hillocks that lasted for the fraction of a second and then dissolved into swift-spreading wavelets, stained a dirty yellow by the upheaval of sand and mud, and went racing in ruffles to the banks which they tenderly licked before they died. White-bellied fish, killed ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Siemens machine existed at that time, no doubt the subject would have been further advanced, for it was not merely the cost of the battery which stood in the way, but the inefficient motor, which returned only a small fraction of the power ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... A small fraction of the people in a modern industrial community—one in 30 or 40 or 50—holds the controlling vote in the strategic industrial enterprises, and says the final word on all questions of industrial policy. Their interest ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... single Spanish soldier were left in the whole of South America he would persist in carrying on the contest against Chile to the last drop of blood. When he finished that mad tirade his wife's long white hand was raised, and she just caressed his knee with the tips of her fingers for a fraction ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Leonore, and obtained the bunch. Who dares to say after that that women have no business ability nor shrewdness? It is true that she kissed the fraction returned before putting it in Peter's button-hole, which raises the question which had the best ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... feet around, which gives him very good proportions.[3] His nose taking up one third of his attractive face, and his attractive face taking up one seventh of his attractive body, it must be admitted that the nose of the Sirian is 6,333 feet plus a fraction; which is manifest. ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... wordless cry of fury Black Jack tore his six-shooter from its resting-place. But Slevin's right hand stirred in unison and it moved like light. Owing to the fact that he carried his gun beneath his left armpit he was the first to fire, by the fraction of a second. It was impossible to miss at this distance. Berg went to his knees as if hit by a sledge. But he fired from that position, and his shot caught Slevin as the latter crow-hopped nimbly. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... deteriorated (in point of size) descendants of the monsters of mythology and geology, for nothing could be a more terrible or ferocious antagonist than many of our well-known insects, if sufficiently enlarged. No animal now alive has more than a small fraction of the strength, in proportion to its size, of the minutest spider or flea. It may be that through lack of food, difficulties imposed by changing climate, and the necessity of burrowing in winter, or through ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... at the Kurston mansion, and became a great favorite, and finally the friend and confidant of its master. Gradually, as month after month passed, the business of the Kurston estate came into his hands, and he could have told, to the fraction of a dollar, the exact sum for which ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... purged of dangerous elements. The Lower House contained a small fraction of Protestants just large enough to permit a controversy, and to insure a triumph to their antagonists. The proceedings opened with a sermon from Harpsfeld, then chaplain of the Bishop of London, in which, in a series of ascending antitheses, Northumberland was described ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... Dozier entered, jerked his head squarely to one side, and found himself gazing into the muzzle of a revolver. The astonishment and the swift hardening of his face had begun and ended in a fraction of ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... last words, however, there was not a fraction of that sympathetic pride which the ear expected, but rather ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lips. Nothing more. Jealous as Arthur Welsh was of all who inflicted gay badinage, however gentlemanly, on Maud Peters, he never forgot that he was an artist. Never, even in his blackest moments, had he yielded to the temptation to dig the point of the scissors the merest fraction of an inch into a ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... leaps and lurches, along the highway. Into this bounding receptacle Bellamy interjected his head, his pistol arm, and his pistol; and since his own horse was travelling still faster than the chaise, he must withdraw all of them again in the inside of the fraction of a minute. He did so, but he left the charge of the pistol behind him—whether by design or accident I shall never know, and I dare say he has forgotten! Probably he had only meant to threaten, in hopes of causing us to arrest ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vote to an insignificant fraction which does away with the possibility of absolute Negro control, is not an unmixed evil, as it entirely destroys the foundation of the scarecrow of Negro supremacy, which has been used as a great welding hammer ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing out with all their force when need ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... from generation to generation; his goose is a perennial pun; and his habitual melancholy is derived to this day from the flatulent diet on which he will persist in living—cabbage. He is effeminate, cowardly, dishonest—a mere fraction of a man both in soul and body. He is represented by the thinnest fellow in the company; his starved person and frightened look are the unfailing signals for a laugh; and he is never spoken to but in a gibe ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber[3] of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free[4] and may call a spade a spade.[5] It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friend Dr. Duchat had charge of the new institution of St. Vasili for hopeless idiots, I found a boy of eleven whom they called Stepan Borovitch. Since he was born, he had not seen, heard, spoken or thought. Nature had granted him, it was believed, a fraction of the sense of smell, and perhaps a fraction of the sense of taste, but of even this there was no positive ascertainment. Nature had walled in his soul most effectually. Occasional inarticulate murmurings, and an incessant knitting ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... second blow, Conniston stepped aside swiftly and swung with his right arm, collecting every ounce of his strength and putting it into the blow. Brayley tried to lift his arm to protect himself, but the fraction of a second too late. Conniston's fist landed squarely upon the corner of the foreman's jaw, just below the ear. Brayley's arms flew out, and with a groan driven from between his clenched teeth he ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... He was never what could be called a good man,* though it was said that he could lift ten hundred weight. He puffed forward with a great cudgel, determined to commit slaughter out of the face, and the first man he met was the weeshy fraction of a tailor, as nimble as a hare. He immediately attacked him, and would probably have taken his measure for life had not the tailor's activity protected him. Farrell was in a rage, and Neal, taking advantage ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... taking from one of its dingy compartments the amount of the purchase-money agreed upon, afforded the astonished magistrate a glimpse of additional wealth of which the amount paid seemed but a small fraction. ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... English literature in the earlier years of the nineteenth century was the extraordinary development of the periodical and newspaper press. The eighteenth century was the golden age of pamphlets. When the "governing classes" represented but a fraction of the population, mostly concentrated in London, the practical effect of such political appeals as those issued by Swift or Burke was incredibly great, and not to be measured by their limited circulation. The rise of journalism as a power in politics may be ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the 'world flooded with a blue light, the mother of dawn.' He had been in search of an adventure all his life, 'a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,' and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that morning found him, an inland castaway, 'as strange to his surroundings as the first ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... But then, although he said nothing, any fool of a woman could have seen it as clear as daylight. And she had been planted there like a stuck pig all the time—her ipsissima verba (O Diana distinction of lover's fancy!) and when common sense came to her aid, she just missed him by the fraction of a second.... Yet, after all, my modern Diana—or Andrew's, if you prefer it—had her own modern mode of telling an elderly outsider about her love affairs—the mode of the subaltern from whom is dragged the story of his Victoria Cross. Andrew Lackaday's quaintly formulated idealizations ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the proportion of population in Great Britain, as compared with that of Ireland, only exceeded two to one by an insignificant fraction.] ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... of the white population of the republic. Again, look at another item, and one, be assured, in which we have a great and vital interest; it is that of revenue, or means of supporting government. From official documents we learn that a fraction over three-fourths of the revenue collected for the support of government has uniformly been raised from the North. Pause now while you can, gentlemen, and contemplate carefully and candidly these important items. Leaving out of view, for the present, ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... medicine contained in the grain of powder operated on is carried successively to the billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth, quintillionth, and very often much higher fractional divisions. A dose of any of these medicines is a minute fraction of a drop, obtained by moistening with them one or more little globules of sugar, of which Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Surveyor General as containing 3,600 cubic miles of lava rock above sea-level. Taking the area of England at 50,000 square miles, this mass of volcanic matter would cover that entire country to a depth of 274 feet. We must remember, however, that what is above sea-level is only a small fraction of the total amount, since it sweeps down below the waves hundreds of ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the writer was for some months stationed at South Bend, a thriving little city of northern Indiana, its main population on the one side of the St. Joseph river, but quite a respectable fraction thereof taking its industrial way to the opposite shore, and there gaining an audience and a hearing in the rather imposing growth and hurly-burly of its big manufactories, and the consequent rapid appearance ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... at a gallery where huge casks are poised on massive wooden frames in double tiers one above the other. These cellars are said to be capable of holding upwards of 500 casks, but at the time of our visit there were scarcely half that number, and only a mere fraction of these were filled with wine. The cellars no longer contain any of that archaic wine vintaged in 1546, for which they were formerly celebrated. Indeed, all the historic vintages, once their boast, were removed some years ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... hold upon the artist slipped. For a fraction of a second, his form half straightened and he stood nearly erect; then, as a weed cut by the sharp scythe of a mower falls, he fell; his body whirling downward toward the trees and rocks below. The sound of the crashing branches ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... he start that the heavy goggles slipped a fraction of an inch along his nose, the first time she had ever seen them in any degree misplaced. She was herself sensibly discountenanced by ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... though doubtless all the larger members have been revealed. Even these are but a few hundreds of miles in diameter, while the smaller ones are too tiny for measurement. The combined bulk of these minor planets is believed to be but a fraction of that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... eighteen per cent. The casualties were very much heavier, in proportion to the size of the ships, than those of the leaders of the two columns at Trafalgar.[178] The material injury to hulls, spars, etc., was yet more serious. The English squadron, by this concentration of the enemy upon a small fraction of it, was entirely crippled. Inferior when the action began, its inferiority was yet more decisive by the subtraction of two ships, and Suffren's freedom ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... and for the tiniest fraction of a second they gave themselves to his. Then she dropped ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... other gave an opening. It ought to have worked—it had worked before—but Hopalong was there to win, and without the momentary hesitation of the suspicious fighter he followed the retreat and his hard hand flashed in over the captain's guard a fraction of a second sooner than that surprised gentleman anticipated. The ferocious frown gave way to placid peace and the captain reclined at the feet of the battered victor, who stood waiting for him to get up and fight. The captain lay without a sign ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... corps of the army, or about the value of class standing. I became quite indignant when a distinguished friend rather reproved me for not trying to graduate higher—perhaps in part from a guilty conscience, for it occurred just after we had graduated. I devoted only a fraction of the study hours to the academic course—generally an hour, or one and a half, to each lesson. But I never intentionally neglected any of my studies. It simply seemed to me that a great part of my time could be better employed in getting the education I desired by the study of law, history, rhetoric, ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... disheartening than being obliged to gather results out of the fraction left behind by past plunderers. In these royal tombs there had been not only the plundering of the precious metals and the larger valuables by the wreckers of early ages; there was after that the systematic destruction of monuments by the vile fanaticism of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... little kindness which was shewn her; but at first she kept very much to herself, talking chiefly with the Disagreeable Man, who, by the way, had surprised every one—but no one more than himself—by his unwonted behaviour in bestowing even a fraction of his companionship on ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... formed but a small fraction of the whole. They went down to San Antonio, where the regiment was to gather and where Wood preceded me, while I spent a week in Washington hurrying up the different bureaus and telegraphing my various railroad friends, so as to insure our getting ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... market reports troubled you not. The lawyer was unknown to you; you wanted no advice; you had nought to quarrel about with your neighbour. No riches were yours for the moth and rust to damage. Your yearly income and expenditure you knew would balance to a fraction. Your wife and children were provided for. Your old age caused you no anxiety; you knew you would always have enough to live upon in comfort. Your funeral, a simple and tasteful affair, would be furnished ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... perhaps, and I am not lacking in physical courage; but I have no finesse of intellect. McWhirter, a foot shorter than I, round of face, jovial and stocky, has as much subtlety in his little finger as I have in my six feet and a fraction of body. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was Sabathier.' She seemed to think intensely for the merest fraction of a moment, and turned. 'Honestly, though, I think he immensely ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... their thesis they are sometimes talking about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very small fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to recreations wholly unconnected with love. A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people who like that kind ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... which he must win by making himself interesting, and by maintaining this interest. "The art of tuition," says Ardigo, "consists mainly of this: to know up to what point and in what manner one can maintain the interest of pupils. The most skilful teachers are those who never fatigue one fraction of the pupil's brain, but act in such a manner that his attention, turning now here, now there, may rest itself and, gaining strength, return to the principal argument of the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori |
