"Polar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... three major continents on Lakos, but only one of them was inhabited or habitable, the other two being within the large northern polar cap. The activities of The Worshipers of the Flame were centered about the chief city of Gio, Fetter had told us, and therefore we were in position to ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... met at a dinner in Washington the famous Norwegian arctic explorer, Nansen, himself one of the heroes of polar adventure; and he remarked to me, "Peary is your best man; in fact I think he is on the whole the best of the men now trying to reach the Pole, and there is a good chance that he will be the one to succeed." I cannot give the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... "What is this all round?" "Thick drugget, sir; they nail it round in winter to keep the cold out."—Thank Heaven, it is only nailed at the bottom. Suffocation began; down goes my window. Presently a sixteen-stone kind of overgrown Pickwickian "Fat Boy," sitting opposite me, exclaims aloud, with a polar shudder, "Ugh! it's very cold!" and finding I was inattentive, he added, "Don't you find it very cold?" "Me, sir? I'm nearly fainting from heat," I replied; and then, in charity, I lent him a heavy full-sized Inverness plaid, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... is a permanent magnet, A, movable around a vertical axis, i. Four spiral springs, f, whose tension may be regulated, permit of centering this latter piece in such a way that when the current is traversing the spirals of the polar bobbins it is equally distant from the four poles, n, s, s', and n'. Under such circumstances it is evident that a difference in the power of attraction of these four poles, however feeble it be, will result in moving the magnet, A, in one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... which it was at first enshrined by rushing out at the mouth. The shrieks of pigs were trifles to the yelling of that Eskimo child's impatience. The caterwauling of cats was as nothing to the growls of his disgust. The angry voice of the Polar bear was a mere chirp compared with the furious howling of his disappointment, and the barking of a mad walrus was music to the roaring ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... loud and clear, as if they had great news to tell the world. What noise is that besides the bells? And look, oh, look! who is that striding up the room with a great basket on his back? He has stolen his coat from a polar bear, and his cap, too, I declare! His boots are of red leather and reach to his knees. His coat and cap are trimmed with wreaths of holly, ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... the reporter. "The cable-car, for instance, and the dollar bill, not to mention the croton bug and the polar bear. But, pardon me, I interrupt the flow of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... their infirmities should be treated with consideration; but to show them great reverence is extremely ridiculous, and lowers us in their eyes. When Nature made two divisions of the human race, she did not draw the line exactly through the middle. These divisions are polar and opposed to each other, it is true; but the difference between them is not qualitative merely, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... was beautiful in itself, though one soon got tired of it. But when that day vanished and the long Polar night began, then began the kingdom of beauty, then they had the moon sailing through the peculiar silence of night and day. The light of the moon shining when all was marble had ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... isn't polar bears, or hot volcanic grottoes: Only find out who it is that writes those ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... off if you don't get off of your own accord," roared the Polar Bear, bracing up, and removing the icicle from his nose he shook ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... Deerslayer's polar star. He ever kept it in view, and it was nearly impossible for him to avoid uttering it, even when prudence demanded silence. Judith read his answer in his countenance, and with a heart nearly broken by the consciousness of undue ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... a third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite polar forces is the type of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... weather. Our rigging, at this time, was so loaded with ice, that we had enough to do to get our topsails down, to double the reef. At seven o'clock in the evening, in the longitude of 147 deg. 46', we came, the second time, within the antarctic or polar circle, continuing our course to the S.E. till six o'clock the next morning. At that time, being in the latitude of 67 deg. 5' S., all at once we got in among a cluster of very large ice islands, and a vast quantity ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... make a rug Almost as white as snow; But if he gets you in his hug, He rarely lets you go. And Polar ice looks very nice, With all the colors of a pris-sum; But, if you'll follow my advice, Stay home and learn ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... heavens in southern latitudes cannot fail to attract attention because of the different arrangement of the stars. People living in the northern hemisphere have never seen the southern cross, nor the great fixed stars, Canopus or Achernar; and those below the equator have never viewed the polar star, and do not know the beauty ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... originally out of the best parts of venison and buffalo-meat. This is boiled, and packed into skin bags; then melted fat is poured in, so as to fill up all the chinks and form a thick layer over the surface. It is now made of beef packed in canvas bags, and is much used by polar expeditions and ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... have thought of offering to kiss the polar star as Gerald, and she was suffered to pass on unmolested to Mrs. Hardcastle, who stood just beyond, looking fagged and jaded, and as if she were heartily thankful that in all his life Dick could never come ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... take in the sledge then. On it was a roll of bear skins—Bram's blankets. One was the skin of a polar bear. Near these skins were the haunches of caribou meat, and so close to him that he might have reached out and touched it was Bram's club. At the side of the club lay a rifle. It was of the old breech-loading, single-shot ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... since the voyagers sailed from their native shores. The enterprise has failed—the Arctic expedition is lost and ice-locked in the Polar wastes. The good ships Wanderer and Sea-mew, entombed in ice, will never ride the buoyant waters more. Stripped of their lighter timbers, both vessels have been used for the construction of huts, erected ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... follows that the error of the planimeter is less than 0.1 per cent. and that of the integraph about 0.5 per cent. Obviously we could make this error much less if we excluded small areas measured with large polar distances, or such polar distances that the cross bar must be shifted. Excluding such cases, we see that the accuracy of the integraph scarcely falls behind that of the planimeter and is quite efficient for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... varies with the climate he inhabits. This in turn is because his diet varies in differing latitudes. The farther south he ranges, the more of a vegetarian he becomes. Consequently, he is not so ferocious. The great white polar bear is largely carnivorous, so he is a creature not to be trifled with; while on the other hand, the little African sun bear is a rollicking, social, good-natured little chap, weighing many times less than ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... her head on a cushion filled with aromatics blended by the pontiffs; he had even employed baaras, a fiery-coloured root which drives back fatal geniuses into the North; lastly, turning towards the polar star, he murmured thrice the mysterious name of Tanith; but Salammbo still ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... namely, of a bat taking to feed on the ground, or anyhow, and anywhere, except in the air. I am bound to confess I do know one single such fact, viz. of an Indian species killing frogs. Observe, that in my wretched Polar Bear case, I do show the first step by which conversion into a whale "would be easy," "would offer no difficulty"!! So with seals, I know of no fact showing any the least incipient variation of seals feeding on the shore. Moreover, seals wander ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... phrenologist—a tall man, with a gaunt face and long gray hair. He had been a lion once, but was now out of date. There were also present Mrs. Blenkin, a comparatively new soprano, having seen only two seasons; Lieutenant Wray, a lion just caught, or rather polar bear, having only then returned from a trip to the arctic regions, in which his ship had covered itself with glory; a young lady who had written a novel, and another who had written a poem, both unpublished, but both understood to be of a mysterious ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... land for it, would place a Bible in every family on the earth, and establish a school in every village; and that the talent which intemperance consigns each year to infamy and eternal perdition, would be sufficient to bear the Gospel over sea and land—to polar snows, and to the sands of a burning sun. The pulpit must speak out. And the press must speak. And you, fellow-Christians, are summoned by the God of purity to take your stand, and cause your ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... easily explain exchanges which we know to have repeatedly taken place between America and Europe, but they are not proved thereby, since most of these exchanges can almost as easily have occurred across the polar regions, and others still more easily by repeated junction ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... flocks, the influence of the revolving seasons of the year, and the successive garniture of the firmament upon the labors of the husbandman, upon the seed time and the harvest, the blooming of flowers, the ripening of the vintage, the polar pilot of the navigator, and the mysterious magnet of the mariner—all, in harmonious action, stimulate the child of earth and of heaven to interrogate the dazzling splendors of the sky, to reveal to him the laws of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... her. "I know the feeling very well. I've had it myself, not here, but up where the rivers run into the Polar Sea. The vastness oppressed. I wanted the company of men and to see the things man had made. I was awed by the world lying just as it came from the hand of God. The wilderness seemed to press in on me. That's ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... discovery of a northeast passage, Jacob van Heimskirck sailed into the Arctic and wintered in Nova Zembla; Henry Hudson, in quest of a route northwestward, explored the river and the bay that bear his name and died in the Polar Seas. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... as I believe, actually took place during the Glacial period, I assumed that at its commencement the arctic productions were as uniform round the polar regions as they are at the present day. But the foregoing remarks on distribution apply not only to strictly arctic forms, but also to many sub-arctic and to some few northern temperate forms, for some of these are the same on the lower mountains and on the plains ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... book had not pleased McLeod particularly. He had never had any strong desire for fame, but if it had come as a result of his work in zoology and the related sciences he would have accepted the burden. If his "The Ecology of the Martian Polar Regions" had attracted a hundredth of the publicity and sold a hundredth of the number of copies that "Interstellar Ark" had sold, he would have been gratified indeed. But the way things stood, he ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the thick layer of snow and ice that enveloped him he had to work naked like a tropical negro or an Indian stoker on a Red Sea steamer; and in this Alpine world, where everything outside reminds one of the polar climate, he sweltered as in a caldron and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... I began to look at the misshapen moon, which had four horns, through the vaguely transparent walls of this polar house. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 16th of February, the Resolute cast anchor near Greenwich. She was a screw propeller of eight hundred tons, a fast sailer, and the very vessel that had been sent out to the polar regions, to revictual the last expedition of Sir James Ross. Her commander, Captain Bennet, had the name of being a very amiable person, and he took a particular interest in the doctor's expedition, having been one ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Ned Land acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions of ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... There are polar oceans, lakes and rivers. One low mountain chain follows the equatorial belt about two thirds around ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert
... them to a university, where they would be under professors so 'unprejudiced' as to have no definite views on religion. Bailly argued that the bishop could not mean what these words seemed to imply, as the logical conclusion would be to wait till Canada was cleared right up to the polar circle. In the end the committee made three very sanguine recommendations: a free common school in every parish, a secondary school in every town or district, and an absolutely non-sectarian central university. This educational ladder was never set up. There was nothing to support ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... diminution in the volume of the sea proportioned to the amount of its water thus permanently locked up in the Arctic and Antarctic ice-cellars; while, in the warm periods, the greater or less disappearance of the polar ice-cap implies a corresponding addition of water to the ocean. And no doubt this reasoning must be admitted to be sound in principle; though it is very hard to say what practical effect the additions and ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... "Four polar bears and a seal," Roy answered; "no sooner said than stung. Our young hero is the camp cut-up. You fellows ought to be glad he won't be up on the hill with you. ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Tom, after all," reported Beverly. "A pretty tall berg it seems to be, with an extensive ice-floe around it as level in spots as a floor. I thought I saw something move on it that might be a Polar bear, caught when the berg broke away from its Arctic glacier. We will pass directly over, and may be able to feel ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... might be great!" cries Campbell. "None think the great unhappy but the great," says Young. They deserve their unhappiness. It is the mess of pottage to obtain which they have sold everything. Fame has always seemed to the philosopher like some mountain in a polar clime—cold, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... a long one. It was dated at Liverpool, and it announced his embarkation for America in two hours' time. He had heard of a new expedition to the Arctic regions—then fitting out in the United States—with the object of discovering the open Polar sea, supposed to be situated between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla. It had instantly struck him that this expedition offered an entirely new field of study to a landscape painter in search of the sublimest aspects of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... to stop, and still harder to control. Whether they date from our driving back by the polar ice-sheet, together with our titanic Big Game, the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the sabre-toothed tiger, from our hunting-grounds in Siberia and Norway, or from recollections of hunting parties pushing north from our tropical ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... away behind them, a lace of crimson lights in the night. He glimpsed the gleam of the giant waterway that encircled the city completely, one that was fed by other canals from far away that emptied into it, the great city's vital water-supply brought thus from this world's melting polar snows. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... demarcation between main or southern Newfoundland and the long finger of land jutting northward, which at Cape Bauld splits the polar current, so that the shores of the narrow peninsula are continuously bathed in icy waters. The country is swept by biting winds, and often for weeks enveloped in a chilly and dripping blanket of fog. The climate at the north end of the northward-pointing finger is more severe than on the Labrador ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... two years, Earth time. We went through some tight places together. I remember our experience, shortly after I took over the Ertak, on the monstrous planet Callor, whose tiny, gentle people were attacked by strange, vapid Things that come down upon them from the fastness of the polar cap, and— ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... a well-turned quatrain, said of Burns that he 'pass'd through life ... a brilliant trembling northern light,' but that 'thro' years to come' he would shine from far 'a fix'd unsetting polar star.' It will be remembered that, in another quatrain, Lord Erskine besought his contemporaries to 'mourn not for Anacreon dead,' for they rejoiced in the possession of 'an Anacreon Moore.' James Smith wrote of Miss Edgeworth that her work could never be anonymous—'Thy writings ... ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... finished like a hotel with veneered panels, which already showed signs of wear. Imitation antique chairs stood about, and in front of the fireplace, which was certainly never intended to contain a fire, was spread a somewhat moth-eaten polar bear skin. Still it was grand after a fashion, and the old man in his hand-me-downs ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of the polar twilight. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... published, is, indeed, a Reform Number; for all the papers, save one, relate to some species of reform or improvement.—Thus, we have papers on Captain Beechey's recent Voyage to co-operate with the Polar Expeditions—Population and Emigration—the notable Conspiration de Babeuf—the West India Question—and last, though not least, "the Bill" itself. We have endeavoured to adopt from the first paper, some particulars of a spot which bears high interest for every lover of adventure; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... ended and the sermon began, every power of his mind was strained to its utmost capacity, and he listened as if for life. The buried germs of desires and aspirations of which he had never dreamed were quickened into life with the rapidity of the outburst of vegetation in a polar summer. Words and phrases which had hitherto seemed to him the utterances of fools or madmen, became instinct with a marvelous beauty and a wondrous meaning. They flashed like balls of fire. They pierced like swords. They aroused like trumpets. Such was the susceptibility of this great soul, and ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... island floating free, Sea-whale on whose back are riding, Loathsome goblins of the sea. Heyd a snowy pelt, doth cover, Figure like a polar bear; Ham hath wings which, waving ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... spent the evening thinking about them, Blake and his comrades camped at sunset in a belt of small spruces near the edge of the open waste that runs back to the Polar Sea. They were worn and hungry, for the shortage of provisions had been a constant trouble and such supplies as they obtained from Indians, who had seldom much to spare, soon ran out. Once or twice they had feasted royally after shooting a big bull moose, but the frozen meat they were able ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... it's just a splendid young animal to look at, you want, I daresay it would be safer to import a polar bear from ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... of ice glazing the circumference of the pole for leagues and leagues; but then I also knew that, though first the brig and then my boat had been for days steadily blown south, I was still to the north of the South Shetland parallels, and many degrees therefore removed from the polar barrier. Hence I concluded that what I saw was land, and that the peculiar crystal shining of it was caused by ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... tendency to become irascible in argument, or while defending himself; "true for ye, Mister Dale, but they was alarms for all that, false or thrue, was they not now? Anyhow they alarmed me out o' me bed five times in a night as cowld as the polar ragions, and the last time was a raale case o' two flats burnt out, an' four hours' ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... think it but the work of a moment to fit out an expedition, but this is not so, especially when you know not whether your exploring party is speeding to Central Africa or merely to the world of icebergs and the Polar bear. ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... the worst temper of any cat I know. 14. He thinks Gettysburg has the prettiest girls of any town of its size. 15. The proposed method of Mr. F.G. Jackson, the English arctic explorer, appears to be the most practical and business-like of any yet undertaken for exploring the polar regions. ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, while we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south.... Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both poles. We know that, whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... forces limited to the locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one geologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicular structure ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Arthur. A perfectly equipped army could be seen by all on the fields of Nippon, Hokkaido and Kiushiu, and the fleet was surely not hidden from view. It was the world's own fault that it could not interpret what it saw, that it imagined the little yellow monkey would never dare attack the clumsy polar-bear. Because the diplomatic quill-drivers would only see what fitted into their schemes, because they were capable only of moving in a circle about their own ideas, they could not understand the thoughts of others, and the few warning ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... on the steps nearest below me, and presently, beginning where I had begun with Sidney, I went on to point out the polar constellations and to relate the age-worn story of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, Andromeda ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... beginning on the lockers and the drawers, the watch reported icebergs on both bows—and, what was more to the point, coveys of Polar bears on the icebergs. I grasped a rifle or two, and hastened on deck. The spectacle was indeed magnificent—it generally is, with icebergs on both bows, and these were exceptionally enormous icebergs. But I hadn't come ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... small by half, accordin' to my notions, and I have seen a few whalers in my day. Them bow-timbers, too, are scarce thick enough for goin' bump agin the ice o' Davis' Straits. Howsom'iver, I've seen worse craft drivin' a good trade in the Polar Seas." ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... man fascinated her. It was as if some strange cold creature had walked up out of a polar sea to come on board ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... in the northern part of the heavens. Pointers, two stars of the group called the Dipper, in the Great Bear. These stars and the Polar Star are nearly in the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... characterized by continuous darkness, cold and stable weather conditions, and clear skies; summers characterized by continuous daylight, damp and foggy weather, and weak cyclones with rain or snow Terrain: central surface covered by a perennial drifting polar icepack that averages about 3 meters in thickness, although pressure ridges may be three times that size; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight line movement from the New Siberian Islands (Russia) to Denmark Strait (between ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... about 7,660 miles, and the planet shows no measurable departure from the globular form, though we can hardly doubt that its polar diameter must really be somewhat shorter than the equatorial diameter. This diameter is only about 258 miles less than that of the earth. The mass of Venus is about three-quarters of the mass of the earth; ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the earth will be upset as an ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... One day a polar bear came to the hut and thrust his head right through the window. They were all much frightened, and the mother gave the boy his bow and arrows and told him to ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... of winter were to continue unmitigated from year to year, without the genial influence of summer, the human race, as is apparent in polar regions and upland mountainous districts, ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... sailed in by the English or French Pioneers in the Sixteenth Century Frontispiece Icebergs and Polar Bears Indians hunting Bison Indians lying in wait for Moose Caribou swimming a River Great Auks, Gannets, Puffins, and Guillemots Scene on Canadian River: Wild Swans flying up, disturbed by Bear ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes have room for all positive qualities, even those which ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... endlessly, that the very superabundance of the resulting ideas makes us doubt the 'objective' pre-existence of their models. It would be plainly wrong to suppose a God whose thought consecrated rectangular but not polar co-ordinates, or Jevons's notation but not Boole's. Yet if, on the other hand, we assume God to have thought in advance of every POSSIBLE flight of human fancy in these directions, his mind becomes too much like a Hindoo idol with three heads, eight arms and six breasts, too much ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... moments stood beside them a half-dozen brawny men, with their legs and chests bare. The beach on which they stood glared white in the yellow light, giving the effect of a landscape in Polar seas. One or two solitary headlands loomed gloomily up, covered with snow. In front, the waters at the edge of the sea broke at their feet in long, solemn, monotonous swells, that reverberated like thunder,—a death-song for the work going on in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... portion of the nuclear base which is extruded from the impregnated ovum is known as the "directive bodies" or "polar cells"; there are many disputes as to their origin and significance, but we are as yet imperfectly acquainted with them. As a rule, they are two small round granules, of the same size and appearance as the remaining ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... snowstorm the next day that I expected to see him plowin' his way home again. Poor old Jed! I wonder where he is tonight? Let's see; six years ago, that was. I wonder if he's been frozen to death or eat up by polar bears, or what. One thing's sartin, he ain't made his fortune or he'd have come home to tell me of it. Last words he said to me was, 'I'm a-goin', no matter what you say. And when I come back, loaded down with money, you'll be ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... are long; Men are weak, but Man is strong; Since the stars first curved their rings, We have looked on many things; Great wars come and great wars go, Wolf-tracks light on polar snow; We shall see him come and gone, This second-hand Napoleon. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... who made a lifelong study of Mars, maintained that there are hundreds of straight lines drawn across the surface of the planet, and he claimed that they are beds of vegetation marking the sites of great channels or pipes by means of which the "Martians" draw water from their polar ocean. Professor W. H. Pickering, another high authority, thinks that the lines are long, narrow marshes fed by moist winds from the poles. There are certainly white polar caps on Mars. They seem to melt in the spring, and the dark fringe ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... and pink flamingoes, Birds of Paradise, frail as fair; Monkeys talking a hundred lingoes, Ring-tailed lemur and Polar bear— Somehow our grief was not profound When they passed to the Happy Hunting Ground; Deer and ducks and yellow dog dingoes Croaked, but we did ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... "Seasons with the Sea-Horses;" and I have no doubt that I shall find much interesting from so careful and acute an observer as yourself. (120/1. "Seasons with the Sea-Horses; or, Sporting Adventures in the Northern Seas." London, 1861. Mr. Lamont (loc. cit., page 273) writes: "The polar bear seems to me to be nothing more than a variety of the bears inhabiting Northern Europe, Asia, and America; and it surely requires no very great stretch of the imagination to suppose that this variety was originally created, not as we see him now, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... climate on variation has been studied to especial advantage in North America, owing to its great extent, and to the fact that its territory ranges from the polar to the tropical regions, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. As respects climatic variation in birds, Professor Baird first took up the inquiry, which was greatly extended, with especial relation to the formation ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... attempted impresses me as more bold, if so bold, as this exploit of entering into the consciousness of a besotted spirit, and stirring that spirit to frame a system of theology. Nansen's tramp along the uncharted deserts of the Polar winter was not more brilliant in inception and execution. Caliban is a theorist in natural theology. He is building a theological system as certainly as Augustine or Calvin or Spinoza did. This poem presents that satire which ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... described the country of the Golden Horde, whose khans were then holding Russia in subjection; and he had gathered some accurate information concerning Siberia as far as the country of the Samoyeds, with their dog-sledges and polar bears.[332] ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... and 130 degrees west]); Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (limits sealing); Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (regulates fishing) note: many nations (including the US) prohibit mineral resource exploration and exploitation south of the fluctuating Polar Front (Antarctic Convergence) which is in the middle of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and serves as the dividing line between the very cold polar surface waters to the south and the warmer ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... in 1818 that the young lieutenant first set sail for the Polar Sea, as second commander of the Trent, under Captain Buchan. The aim was to cross between Spitzbergen and Greenland; but the companion vessel, the Dorothea, being greatly injured by the ice, the two had to return to England, after reaching the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... from the strange islands of the tropics, your tea from the secret villages of the Empire of the Dragon. That this room might be furnished, forests may have been spoiled under the Southern Cross, and leviathans speared under the Polar Star. But you yourself—surely no inconsiderable treasure—you yourself, the brain that wields these vast interests—you yourself, at least, have grown to strength and wisdom between these grey houses and under this rainy sky. This city which made you, ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a hunter unless in self-defense, or when driven by hunger to fall upon everything which comes in its way. Dr. Kane, the great arctic traveller, says he has himself shot as many as a dozen bears near at hand, and never but once received a charge in return. The hair of the polar bear is very coarse and thick, and white like the snow-banks among which it lives. Its favorite food is the seal, which abounds in the northern regions; it will also eat walrus, but as that animal is very strong, ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... water is evaporated faster than anywhere else, so that there the sea is salter and has more lime in it than elsewhere. Besides that it is hotter. Of course, that being the case, its weight is different from the waters of the cold polar seas, so it is bound to move away an' get itself freshened and cooled. In like manner, the cold water round the poles feels obliged to flow to the equator to get itself salted and warmed. This state of things, as a natural consequence, causes commotion in the sea. The commotion ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... calls their 'talons.' In a black bear these are always short. In a grizzly they are always long—they get them up to four and one-half inches, and I believe some of your Kadiaks have even longer claws. Colors grade, but claws don't. I even think the polar bear is a grizzly of the North—white because he lives on snow and ice, and with a snaky head because he has to swim. But his ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... include walruses and whales; fragile ecosystem slow to change and slow to recover from disruptions or damage; thinning polar icepack ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... nobler part, I from these thoughts would rest. If ever aught of sweet my heart has known, Remembrance wakes its charms, while, tempest tost, I mark the clouds that o'er my course still frown; E'en in the port I see the storm afar; Weary my pilot, mast and cable lost, And set for ever my fair polar star. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Uhlans that we fully expected to find them, with their pennoned lances and their square-topped schapskas, lurking behind every hedge, and when they did not come spurring out to intercept us we were greatly disappointed. It was like making a journey to the polar regions and seeing no Esquimaux. The smart young cavalry officer who bade us good-bye at the Belgian outposts, warned us to keep our eyes open for them and said, rather mournfully, I thought, that he only ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... skim the prairies and leap the mountains, and roam over the ocean like the wandering albatross. To-day we shall breathe the warm, spicy breath of the tropic islands, and to-morrow we shall sight the white gleam of the polar ice-pack. When the storm gathers we shall mount above it, and looking down we shall see the lightning leap from cloud to cloud, and the rattling thunder will come upward, not downward, to our ears. When the world below is steeped in the shadows ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... thawed snow forms the constant drink of the inhabitants during winter; and the vast masses of ice which float on the polar seas, afford an abundant supply of fresh water to ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... none given, nothing but the monotonous beat of the paddles and the roar of the wind, and the crew were all under shelter, for it was no longer a question of seamanship, but of steam-power; only the commander pacing the bridge to and fro, like a polar hear in a cage, and the engineers changing their watch, broke the monotony of the merciless blue day, for, except a little flying scud, the sky was as blue as on a ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... atonement for the sins of my youth. I have reached my fortieth year—and that one purpose is before me for the rest of my days. Sufferings and dangers which but few men undergo awakened my conscience. My last exercise of the duties of my profession associated me with an expedition to the Polar Seas. Our ship was crushed in the ice. Our march to the nearest regions inhabited by humanity was a hopeless struggle of starving men, rotten with scurvy, against the merciless forces of Nature. One by one my comrades dropped and died. Out of ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... oscillation of the liquid which might be started would gradually die away under the influence of friction, however small. If now we impart to the whole mass of liquid a small speed of rotation about some axis, which may be called the polar axis, in such a way that there are no internal currents and so that it spins in the same way as if it were solid, the shape will become slightly flattened like an orange. Although the earth and the other planets are not homogeneous ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... will briefly and in a very general way describe for you the south polar region, which, I feel certain, Pym and Peters reached, and where they resided for somewhat more than one year. Here is a map which I have with some care drawn from rough sketches jotted down as I sat on ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... idea, a grand idea, but one very painful in its beauty, crept into his mind. Even though these diamonds should melt away, and become as nothing, there was his own income, fixed and sure as the polar star, in the consolidated British three per cents. If he really loved this girl, could he not protect her from poverty, even were she married to a John Gordon, broken down in the article of his diamonds? If he loved ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... the truly blest! Calm sheltered haven of eternal rest! Thy sons ne'er madden in the fierce extremes Of fortune's polar frost, or torrid beams. If mantling high she fills the golden cup, With sober selfish ease they sip it up; Conscious the bounteous meed they well deserve, They only wonder "some folks" do not starve. The grave sage hern thus easy picks his frog, And ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... do not detract from the massive coherence of his doctrine. He remains the frankest, the most vivid, and the most powerful exponent of a theory of government which has waged eternal conflict with its polar rival, the Liberal theory, in the evolution of the Empire. The theory, of course, extends much farther than the bi-racial Irish case, to which Fitzgibbon applied it. It was used, as we shall see, to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada and South Africa, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... represent "Christ crucified between two thieves." The Hindoos have their sacred Sanscrit, and so of the rest. The benumbed and frozen mind of the Esquimaux, amidst the fat seals, blubber, and seas of oil in which it revels and swims, when anticipating the joys of the polar heaven, makes the tongue involuntarily speak in genuine Esquimauxan gibberish. It is, however, not surprising that the language in which a people first receives the rudiments of its religion should be ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... prone in flight He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing, Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan Winnows the buxom air; till within soar Of towering eagles, to all the fowls he seems A Phoenix, gazed by all; as that sole bird When, to enshrine his relics in the Sun's Bright temple, to Egyptian ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... extremely low in the scale apparently display a certain amount of reason. No doubt it is often difficult to distinguish between the power of reason and that of instinct. For instance, Dr. Hayes, in his work on 'The Open Polar Sea,' repeatedly remarks that his dogs, instead of continuing to draw the sledges in a compact body, diverged and separated when they came to thin ice, so that their weight might be more evenly distributed. This was often the first warning which the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Polar star requires half a century to reach our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we should ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... curves of its shells. The cabin seemed formed by the secretions of his being. It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on approaching the polar seas. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... division,—not of primary bodies (those idols of the modern atomic chemistry), but of causes, as Sir T.B. rightly expresses them,—that is, of elementary powers manifested in bodies. Let mercury stand for the bi-polar metallic principle, best imaged as a line or 'axis' from north to south,—the north or negative pole being the cohesive or coherentific force, and the south or positive pole being the dispersive ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... grand piano, and at the other end of the room a heavily carved screen of some black wood, picked out with ivory. The screen was overhung with a canopy of silken draperies, and formed a sort of alcove. In front of the alcove was spread the white skin of a polar bear, and set on that was one of those low Turkish coffee tables. It held a lighted spirit-lamp and two gold coffee cups. I had heard no movement from above stairs, and it must have been fully three minutes that I stood waiting, noting these details of the ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... operation, and Nugent places himself where her eyes will first fall upon him, instead of on his disfigured brother. Beginning with this, he personates Oscar until Lucilla again loses her sight. He then yields her to his brother, joins an Arctic exploring expedition, and perishes in the Polar ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... annually frozen over for several months in winter. In that case, the primitive people may, as Mr. Prestwich hints, have resembled in their mode of life those American Indians who now inhabit the country between Hudson's Bay and the Polar Sea. The habits of those Indians have been well described by Hearne, who spent some years among them. As often as deer and other game become scarce on the land, they betake themselves to fishing in the rivers; ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... that is splitting asunder?... You may command what is opposed to nature, but you will not be obeyed. You will multiply evil-doers and the unhappy by fear, by punishment, and by remorse; you will deprave men's consciences; you will corrupt their minds; they will have lost the polar ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Teachings, again on all-fours with modern Science, inform us that living forms had their beginning in water. In the slimy bed of the polar seas the simple cell-forms appeared, having their origin in the transitional stages before mentioned. The first living forms were a lowly form of plant life, consisting of a single cell. From these forms were ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... freedom, such as belongs to Spirit only. The universal Idea exists thus as the substantial totality of things on the one side, and as the abstract essence of free volition on the other. This reflection of the mind on itself is individual self-consciousness—the polar-opposite of the Idea in its general form and therefore existing in absolute limitation. This polar-opposite is consequently limitation, particularization for the universal absolute being; it is the side of the definite existence, the sphere of its formal reality, the sphere of the reverence ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of an American piano is a continual act of defensive warfare against the future inroads of our climate,—a climate which is polar for a few days in January, tropical for a week or two in July, Nova-Scotian now and then in November, and at all times most trying to the finer woods, leathers, and fabrics. To make a piano is now not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... majesty unruffled, and its great out-stretched wings as motionless as on a still, sunny day. Its strength of flight is marvellous, and is said to be superior to that of any other bird. Sailors have captured these royal inhabitants of southern polar regions, and marked their glistening breasts with spots of tar, that they might distinguish them and determine their power of endurance; and in several instances the same bird has followed a ship under full ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... five hundred feet above sea-level when the clouds broke up, and from this great height I looked down upon what seemed to be the margin of the polar world. It was intensely cold, but the sun shone with dazzling glare, and the wilderness of snowy peaks came out like a grand and jagged ice-field in the far south. Halos and peculiarly luminous balls floated through the color-tinged and electrical air. The horizon had ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the differences to be; and for a very obvious reason. The inequalities of the earth's surface, her mountain-barriers protecting whole continents from the Arctic winds, her open plains exposing others to the full force of the polar blasts, her snug valleys and her lofty heights, her tablelands and rolling prairies, her river-systems and her dry deserts, her cold ocean-currents pouring down from the high North on some of her shores, while warm ones from tropical seas carry their softer influence to others,—in short, all the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... superabundance of either of these emanations for its own domestic consumption. The solar population may have no more sunshine than we do, and may have even that mitigated with the luxury of ice-creams, if not with that of arctic explorations and polar bears. Whether they have as good opportunities as we for astronomical observations is a little doubtful; but their thermological studies must flourish abundantly, to say nothing of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... She has six children, three sons and three daughters. These live in the sky. The eldest son is the Day; another is the Sun; another is Night. The eldest daughter is the Morning Star, called "The Woman who Wears a Plume"; another is a star which circles around the polar star, and she is called "The Striped Gourd"; the third ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... emanating from the poles look precisely like the "lines of force'' surrounding the poles of a magnet. It will be noticed in this photograph that the corona appears to consist of two portions: one comprising the polar rays just spoken of, and the other consisting of the broader, longer, and less-defined masses of light extending out from the equatorial and middle-latitude zones. Yet even in this more diffuse part of the phenomenon one can detect the presence of submerged ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... another schooner had been cast ashore. It was blowing hard, as it usually does where the Polar ice comes down into the Behring Sea. They'd been shooting seals. We meant to bring the men off if we ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... seats under the pendent boughs, and with here and there a pretty marble statue gleaming through the green and glossy leaves. One might almost have imagined one's self in the 'land of the cypress and myrtle' instead of our actual whereabout upon the polar banks of the Neva. Wandering through these mimic groves, or reposing from the fatigues of the dance, was many a fair and graceful form, while the brilliantly lighted ballroom, filled with hundreds of ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... few months, Janet Bagley had changed from a frightened and belligerent mother-animal to a cheerful young prospective wife. The importance of the change lay in the fact that it was not polar, nothing reversed; it was only that the emphasis passed gradually from the protection of the young to the development of Janet ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Cabots set out on a second voyage to the west. They reached the gloomy cliffs of Labrador[9] on the northeastern coast of America, and they passed many immense icebergs. They saw numbers of Indians dressed in the skins of wild beasts, and polar bears white as snow. These bears were great swimmers, and would dive into the sea and come up with a large fish in their claws. As it did not look to the Cabots as if the polar bears and the icebergs would guide them ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... awning of enchanted splendour weaves, Of maples, amber, purple and rose-red, And droop-limbed elms down-dropping golden leaves. With still half-fallen lids he sits and dreams Far in a hollow of the sunlit wood, Lulled by the murmur of thin-threading streams, Nor sees the polar armies overflood The darkening barriers of the hills, nor hears The north-wind ringing with ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... succession, "the Alcove of White Roses," "the Birth of Gems," and other rooms of great gorgeousness. One room is the "Palace of the North," which is apparently made entirely of ice, and out of the wall of which is issuing a polar bear. In the pleasure grounds is a "baronial hall," one hundred feet long, fifty broad, and thirty high; and besides this an enormous tent, called "the Encampment for all Nations." Here, at a table four hundred feet long, fifteen hundred persons can be dined at a cheap rate. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... perpetuated in every part of our globe, even in places which seem the least suited to organised existences. And the same infinite power and wisdom which has fitted the camel and the ostrich for the deserts of Africa, the swallow that secretes its own nest for the caves of Java, the whale for the Polar seas, and the morse and white bear for the Arctic ice, has given the proteus to the deep and dark subterraneous lakes of Illyria—an animal to whom the presence of light is not essential, and who can live indifferently ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the picture, of course; but here's the other, as the world sees it. You're a sort of popular hero—African traveller, war correspondent, writer of books. Polar explorer, and I don't know what besides, though you can't yet be anywhere near thirty-five. You've got the figure of a soldier, and just the sort of dark, unreadable face that women rave about. What does money matter with a chap like that? Nothing. I wonder you've managed to escape the matchmaking ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... not go. She seemed to shrink from meeting her former friends; and at last, acting upon Griswold's advice, I placed her in the Asylum, going myself hither and thither like a feather tossed about by the gale. Griswold was my ballast, my polar star, and when he said to me, buy a house and have a home, I answered that I would; and when he told me of Grassy Spring, bidding me purchase it, I did so, although I dreaded coming to this neighborhood ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... smiting her small knees, and rising, 'this is not business. Come, Steerforth, let's explore the polar regions, and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... sin, sickness, and death was revealed,—a revelation that beams on mortal sense as the midnight sun shines over the Polar Sea. ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... 17 (AP): Planes sent out to search for the missing polar submarine Peary have returned without clue to the mystery of is disappearance. The close search that has been conducted through the last two weeks, involving great risks to the pilots, has been fruitless, and authorities ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... average child, and does not prevent its imagination from filling in the details later. For instance, it would be quite impossible for the average child to get an idea from mere word-painting of the atmosphere of the polar regions as represented lately on the film in connection with Captain Scott's expedition, but any stories told later on about these regions would have ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... pass through life with your eyes turned toward some polar star, while you tread with indifference over the rich ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... bird life, no signs of life appeared, except a small fox, and a Polar bear. The latter put in an appearance just after we had returned on board at three o'clock in the morning, and the circumstances attending his slaughter, which were about as enlivening as shooting a sheep, put an end to this ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse |
