"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family. Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram. "He hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem themselves one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... customs, and arts, and institutions, and literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... eloquence,—and of royalty, that we may shun the living and conversing with kings. Nor do they ever name any of those great personages who have intermeddled in civil affairs, but only to scoff at them and abolish their glory. Thus they say that Epaminondas had something of good, but that infinitesimal, or [Greek omitted], for that is the very word they use. They moreover call him iron-hearted, and ask what ailed him that he went marching his army through all Peloponnesus, and why he did not rather keep himself quiet at home with a garland on his head, employed only in cherishing and making much ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic influences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause, primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common apprehensions there are ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the Chancellor, she had not stopped to study from every side the question she had raised. So far, she had merely succeeded in irritating him, and she owed him much more than a pin prick. Such infinitesimal wounds she had contrived to give the man in abundance, during her twenty-two years at the Rhaetian Court; but now, if she hurt him at all, she would like the stab to be ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... use arguments or adjurations to induce Lansing to adopt his suggestion. The man before him was in no mood to balance probabilities against improbabilities. It was enough that the project offered a chance of success, albeit infinitesimal; for on the other hand there was nothing but an intolerable despair, and a fate that truly seemed more than flesh ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... material cause of the world, as clay of a jar, but the illusory material cause, as a rope might be of a snake"; and the spirit of man "is that Spirit, personalised and limited by the power of illusion; and the life of every living spirit is nothing but an infinitesimal arc of the one endless circle of ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... sing you a grand new song evolved from a 'cute young pate, Of a fine old Atom-Molecule of prehistoric date; In size infinitesimal, in potencies though great, And self-formed for developing at a prodigious rate— Like a fine old Atom-Molecule, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... the infinitesimal particles of sachet powder settled in the lining of his nose. He became serious, and was conscious of a growing feeling of dislike; he began to be upset over the whole matter. But his conscience compelled him ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... finished Catherine came forward to the infinitesimal dressing-table, and stood a moment before the common cottage looking-glass upon it. The candle behind her showed her the outlines of her head and face in shadow against the white ceiling. Her soft brown hair was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... success that one step more brought him to it. He was certain that he was very close to the secret. He saw that sulphur had a mysterious power over India-rubber when a union could be effected between the two substances. True, there was an infinitesimal quantity of sulphur in his mail-bags, and they had melted in the shade; but the surface of his cloth, powdered with the sulphur and dried in the sun, bore the sun's heat. Here was a mystery. The problem was, how to produce in a mass of India-rubber the change effected ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... of our making any such attempt, a simple signal would announce our whereabouts and enable the entire flotilla to close in at once upon us; in which case our fate must be certain and speedy. No, I decided, the risk was altogether too great and the prospects of success too infinitesimal to justify ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... these several herbs contains lime, and earthy salts, in a subtle form of high natural sub-division: whilst, at the same time, the law of cure by medicinal similars has established the cognate fact that to those who inherit a strumous taint, infinitesimal doses of these earth salts are incontestably curative. The parents had first undergone a gradual impairment of health because of calcareous matters to excess in their general conditions of sustenance; and the lime proves potent to cure in the offspring ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... occupied by the rich, one cannot quite understand, since the palace is the staple building; but there is no doubt as to where they live now: they live everywhere. The number of palaces which are wholly occupied by one family must be infinitesimal; the rest are tenements, anything but model buildings, rookeries. Venice has no aristocratic quarter as other cities have. The poor establish themselves either in a palace or ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... grounds of practical utility. Beyond and above this range, there is an unlimited realm of truth, the knowledge of which is inestimably precious for the higher culture of the mind and character. In this realm, of which only an infinitesimal portion can be conquered during an earthly lifetime, there is no unfruitful region,—there is no department of nature, of psychology, or of social science, through which the mind may not be expanded, exalted, energized, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... hers, and his eyes to her eyes. Most persons called her eyes golden, but to him they were just yellow. They had an infinitesimal cast, to which nobody ever referred. They were voluptuous eyes. He examined her face. She was still young; but the fine impressive imprint of existence was upon her features, and the insipid freshness had departed. She blinked, acquiescent. Her eyes changed, melting. He could almost ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... find that both these anatomists do not agree, Hunter stating that its usual seat is just in front of the bulb, while Home regrets, as it were, to be obliged to differ from "his immortal friend," and avers its seat to be an infinitesimal degree behind the bulb. Sir A. Cooper again, though arguing that the most usual situation of stricture is that mentioned by Hunter, names, as next in order of frequency, strictures of the membranous and prostatic ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... was announced that the train was snowbound was weeping and shivering by turns. It was cold—so cold that the snow which came sweeping and swirling with the wind was like granite-dust; it clicked, clicked, clicked against the glass—a bombardment of untold billions of infinitesimal projectiles fighting to break in. In the edge of the forest it was probably forty degrees below zero. Within the coaches there still remained some little warmth. The burning lamps radiated it and the presence of many people added to it. But it was cold, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Holloway's pills. These are most useful to an explorer, as, possessing unmistakeable purgative properties, they create an undeniable effect upon the patient, which satisfies him of their value. They are also extremely convenient, as they may be carried by the pound in a tin box, and served out in infinitesimal doses from one to ten at a time, according to the age of the patients. I had a large medicine chest, with all necessary drugs, but I was sorely troubled by the Arab women, many of whom were barren, who insisted upon my supplying them with ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... the local word for 'truck'—paying in kind instead of in money. You see, the butties and the owners between them used to own the public-houses and the provision-shops, and the amount of coin of the realm the men got in wages in the bad old times was infinitesimal. They were expected to drink the butty's beer, and consume the butty's provisions—at the butty's prices, of course—and the butty kept the accounts. Oh! it was an abomination! but of course it was done away ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... having the spite of the nobler serpent without his venom,—poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag. Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger. It was noted that the old people retained their hearing longer than in other places. Some said it was the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to the habit of keeping their ears open whenever they were walking through ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the engines went on at an unvarying tempo. There was the slight, almost infinitesimal tremor of their vibration. The electric light in the cabin wavered rhythmically with its dynamo. From the open porthole came the sound of washing water. Now and then a disconnected sound of laughter or of speech came down from the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... general scheme that is the real obstacle to any material improvement in our mathematical teaching. Professor Perry, in his opening address to the Engineering Section of the British Association at Belfast, expressed an opinion that the average boy of fifteen might be got to the infinitesimal calculus. As a matter of fact the average English boy of fifteen has only just looked at elementary algebra. But every one who knows anything of educational science knows, that by the simple expedient of throwing overboard all that non-educational, mind- sickening and complex rubbish ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... when I saw God standing with a rod in one hand and a sugar-cake in the other—just punishment and rewards to all eternity. Then I thrust Him from me, because He seemed to me so unjust—and at last He vanished, melting into the solar systems on high, and all the infinitesimal growths here on the earth below. What was my life, what were my dreams, my joy or sorrow, to these? Where was I making for? Ever and always there was something in me saying: He IS! But where? Somewhere beyond ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... with a wonderful appearance of interest to county matters, i.e., to minute scandal and infinitesimal politics; to the county cricket match and archery meeting; to the past ball and the ball to come. In the drawing-room, when a cold fit fell on the coterie, she would glide to one egotist after another, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... said this, we ought perhaps to quote the opinion (1903), on the other side, of Mr. A.P. Sinnett, ex-editor of one of the leading Indian newspapers, and, as a theosophist, very unlikely to be prejudiced in favour of Britain. He insists "that loss of life in famine time is infinitesimal compared with what it used to be." "As for impoverishment," he goes on to say, "we have poured European capital into the country by scores of millions for public works and the establishment of factories, and we have enriched India instead of impoverishing it to an extent that ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Ben will judge for himself,' she said, reddening; thankful all the same to remember that among her uncle's reticent, old-fashioned ways none was more marked than his habit of destroying all but an infinitesimal fraction of his letters. 'He read all those speeches of yours, last year. You'll have to think—how you're going to get ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of which they had been drinking were made of some elegant porcelain, the teapot and cream-jug were of chased silver and as delicate in their sway. The remnant of food consisted of morsels of French roll which had not even been allowed to crumble themselves in a disorderly fashion, and of infinitesimal pats of butter. If the morning meal of the two ladies had been as unsubstantial as the appearance of the fragments indicated, it must be presumed that they intended to lunch early. The countess herself was arrayed ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... He asked a multitude of questions, most of them pointless, some naive, and Melinda dug into her infinitesimal fund of knowledge and gave. The little man scribbled furiously, ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... he knew was death though he had no name for it, and his immature defenses sprang into action, tried in vain to block the memory, to thrust Death back into its Pandora's Box. He impeded the flood by an infinitesimal fraction of a second, and then full awareness came and with it an understanding of the terrible thing that had happened, the thing that he?—yes, ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... continued the young man, as if he scarcely heard Lady Audley's interruption—"that wonderful fabric which is built out of straws collected at every point of the compass, and which is yet strong enough to hang a man. Upon what infinitesimal trifles may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable heretofore to the wisest upon the earth! A scrap of paper, a shred of some torn garment, the button off a coat, a word dropped incautiously from the overcautious lips of guilt, the fragment ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... alive. The natives—or rather the French half-breeds—were made trappers and voyageurs before the English conquest of the province. But for that preparation they might have gone the way of our Indians under Anglo-Saxon pressure. Climate also favored them. Only an infinitesimal fraction of British America is capable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... time, as you say, a beautiful Queen of the fifteenth century, while travelling through a forest, came upon a roving band of gypsies. So great was her beauty that the gypsy chief gave to her a necklace of precious jade, upon each bead of which had been tooled a crown, so infinitesimal as to be seen only through a strong lens. The chief told the fair Queen that the necklace brought good fortune to whosoever possessed it. But so proud was the young Queen of the precious beads and the good fortune that was to be hers that she ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... the yellows, and the vivid greens. Beyond were the mountains in their glory of volcanic rocks, rich as the tapestry of a Florentine palace. And, modifying all the others, the tinted atmosphere of the south-west, refracting the sun through the infinitesimal earth motes thrown up constantly by the wind devils of the desert, drew before the scene a delicate and gauzy veil of lilac, of rose, of saffron, of amethyst, or of mauve, according to the time of day. Senor Johnson discovered that looking at the landscape upside down accentuated the colour ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... not progressing smoothly; the priest would come forth as usual with a smiling, placid countenance, my brother with a black scowl on his face, and gaining his room, he would hurl his books down and protest in violent language that the O'Keefe was a perfect fraud, that he knew as much of the infinitesimal calculus as a gaucho on horseback or a wild Indian. Then, beginning to see it in a humorous light, he would shout with laughter at the priest's pretentions to know anything, and would say he was only fit to teach babies just out of the cradle to say their ABC. He only wished the priest ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... which separate the Oriental from the Occidental mind are infinitesimal as compared with the likenesses which unite them. This is a fact that needs to be emphasized, for many writers on Japan seem to ignore it. They marvel at the differences. The real marvel is that the differences are so few and so superficial. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... first place, the world, as it seems, is just as much bad as good, and whether Good or Bad predominate I cannot say. And in the second place, even of what Good there is—and I do not under-estimate its worth—it is but an infinitesimal portion that I am capable of realizing, so limited am I by temperament and circumstance, so bound by the errors and illusions of the past, so hampered by the disabilities crowding in from the future. For though, as I think, the older I get the more clearly I recognize what is good, and the more ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... charitable folks, Dr. Stewart," cut in Susan coldly. "Maybe it is infinitesimal to you whether we pay or not, but't ain't to us. We ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... I have made of it is to put it carefully away among other treasured objects, picked up at odd times in out-of-the-way places. It may be that some minute mysterious insect or infinitesimal mite—there is almost certain to be a special walnut mite—has found an entrance into this prized nut and fed on its oily meat, reducing it within to a rust-coloured powder. The grub or mite, or whatever it is, may do so at its pleasure, and flourish and grow fat, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... study, he paused for an infinitesimal length of time on the threshold, as if conscious of something being amiss, then went into the room beyond, and, without a glance in the direction of the rug, which had been carefully relaid on ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... after the manner of his kind. Occasionally, when a blood-curdling screech from his antagonist rang upon his eardrums, the cub would stop a moment and gaze pensively through and beyond the end of the wood shed, as if, indeed, from far off, a certain sound, made filmy and infinitesimal by distance, had reached him. Then he would smile deprecatingly to himself, as if to say, "How ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Achorutes, it may be found in the segment just before the spring-bearing segment, and situated on the median line of the body. It consists (Fig. 163) of two squarish valves, from between which projects a pair of minute tubercles, or blades, with four rounded teeth on the under side. This pair of infinitesimal saws reminds one of the blades of the saw-fly, and I am at a loss what their use can be unless to cut and pierce so as to scoop out a shallow place in which to deposit an egg. It is homologous in situation with the middle pair of blades which composes the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... customs and respectable manners,—we have far more need to tell orderly, respectable moral men—'My brother, that thing that you have is worth nothing, as settling your position before God'; than to stand up and thunder about crimes which half of us never heard of, and perhaps only an infinitesimal percentage of us have ever committed. All sin separates from God, but the thing that makes the separation permanent is not the sin, but the ignorance of the sin. Self-righteousness, aye, and pride of wisdom, they—they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in the appearance of the railway carriage, was there the slightest sign of struggle or even of resistance. Only the look in the poor woman's eyes spoke of sudden terror, of the rapid vision of an unexpected and violent death, which probably only lasted an infinitesimal fraction of a second, but which had left its indelible mark upon the face, otherwise so ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... it at all," Mangan said, frankly. "People will think the book has something to do with the American civil war. However, don't take my opinion at all. My connection with literature is almost infinitesimal—I'm merely a newspaper hack, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind was ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... than a mere habitation—stood on the same site in the twelfth century, a work which, under the energies of Philippe Auguste, in 1204 began to grow to still more splendid proportions, though infinitesimal one may well conclude as compared with the mass which all Paris knows to-day under the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... afflicted. They are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hard necessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placed somewhere else; but although I say they are in great numbers, they are an infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population. Their bane is not, in its highest form, that of the average American who has no choice of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem, one must begin at once to distinguish. It is the problem of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... appeared. She was a pretty baby—at least, all the women-kind said so, from Mrs. Jessop down to Jael, who left our poor house to its own devices, and trod stately in Mrs. Halifax's, exhibiting to all beholders the mass of white draperies with the infinitesimal human morsel inside them, which she vehemently declared was the very image of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... It is in reality even more insidious, being a stepping-stone to vice, a gradual initiation into desperate play. Just as addiction to absinthe is imbibed by potions quite innocuous in the beginning, so the new Casino at Nice schools the gamester from the outset, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees preparing him for ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... on either side of which are little dwellings. Each of these is occupied by a nice little old woman, who has two rooms, very minute and cosy, with a little supply of faggots close at hand, and all the dignity of a householder, although the occupant only of an infinitesimal toy house within a house. How do they agree, one wonders, these little old ladies of a touchy age under their ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... people ask me for advice, as I feel so certain that my advice will not be taken. Man is an animal that has to learn his lesson by hard experience in battling with the storms of life. Thus the world is always in disorder and always ignorant, for those who know are always in an infinitesimal proportion ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for men to sit with their heads bare in our churches, while women must wear bonnets, is based on this ancient custom of the Nazarine. But as fashion is gradually reducing the bonnet to an infinitesimal fraction it will probably in the near future be dispensed with altogether. A lady in England made the experiment of going to the established church without her bonnet, but it created such an agitation in the congregation ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... attainment, I should be forced to share its fame with a hundred other workers, who had lent me, unasked, their aid. The distance between the person who uttered the last word, and him who said the next to the last, was infinitesimal, and this close proximity annoyed me. I longed for some brilliant occasion to surpass all my contemporaries in one great bound; an opportunity to bestow on science and humanity some unique benefit that could never be compared with those accumulated by lesser men. One day, revolving many things ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... sank into the state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp; surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks and my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields and slums, passed before my eyes. How can ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... must tumble back on the earth, or it must start outwards. Now which course was the moon to adopt? The case is analogous to that of an egg standing on its end—it will inevitably tumble one way or the other. Some infinitesimal cause will produce a tendency towards one side, and to that side accordingly the egg will fall. The earth-moon system was similarly in an unstable state, an infinitesimal cause might conceivably decide the fate of the system. We are ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... there had sprung up an odd sort of friendship. He meant business; but he would, I knew, be genuinely sorry if I came to harm. And I could see that he was quite sincere in his belief that I was in a tight corner and that my chances against the Combine were infinitesimal. I imagine that, with victory so apparently certain, he had had difficulty in persuading his allies to allow him ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... waned. For the waning life, there was no interval of waxing. Slowly, steadily, by infinitesimal degrees, Leo Frazer was sinking down into the Valley of the Shadow. Once the head surgeon had stepped behind the screens and bent over the bed. Only Ethel had seen the brief contraction of his brows; but no one of them was deceived by his cheery ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... method of delay and litigation had been further discounted, for everybody except Mr. Dillon, by the fact that in the classic case—Adams v. Dunseath—tried out in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's panacea, Adams, after repeated lawsuits, improved his financial position by an infinitesimal sum per annum without becoming an owner of his farm. It was also agreed that the Estates Commissioners appointed to administer the Act, should be administrative officials under the Government, and ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... having been cast, in the same infinitesimal whispers we made our arrangements, which were few and simple. They amounted to this—that we were to creep on to the men and each of us to kill that one who was opposite to him, I with the axe and Hans with his knife, remembering ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... adopted this principle before the year 1895, but few, if any, during the past fifteen years. The experience of Massachusetts, where sentiment was strongly for it, shows that the women take very little interest in the matter; an infinitesimal percentage of the total female population voting upon election day, even when a prominent woman was the leading candidate for ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... moved—haltingly and slowly, it is true, and with frequent stoppages. None the less, we moved; progress was definitely being made in the direction of the seaboard, and in contemplation of this fact one found an infinitesimal measure of consolation, gleaming, so to speak, against a dark cloud of forebodings, like one lone starry orb in a storm-envisaged firmament. During the early part of our journey I could not fail to give heed to the amazing attitude maintained by the young ladies. ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... great inventions, all the great discoveries, made! How like the egotism of the infinitesimal mind of the human race that ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... became slower for a more concentrated brooding upon this slanderous old man who took advantage of his position to poison his daughter's mind against the only one of her suitors who cared in the highest way. And upon this there came an infinitesimal consolation in the midst of anguish, for he thought of what Herbert had told him about Mr. Newland Sanders's poems to Julia, and he had a strong conviction that one time or another Mr. Atwater must have spoken even more disparagingly of these poems and their author than ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... religion as you (for the special glory of his Creator, I suppose, and the honor of your species) can wish him to have been. Well, man began by being a polytheist, and very gradually emerged out of that pleasant condition —or rather an infinitesimal portion of the race has emerged out of it, into the better forms of idolatry—(poor wretch!), and from thence to monotheism; that, in short, his polytheism is not the corruption of his monotheism, but his monotheism an elevation ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... stepped aside from the trail, feeling his way, and leaned his back against a huge birch-tree. The ragged, ancient, sweet-smelling bark felt familiar and friendly to his touch. Here he stood, sniffing the still air with discrimination, testing with initiated ears every faint forest breathing. The infinitesimal and incessant stir of growth and change and readjustment was vaguely audible to his fine sense, making a rhythmic background against which the slightest unusual sound, even to the squeak of a wood-mouse, or the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... that the Government refused the offer of the coloured people in deference to the wishes of a section of the white people of the Union; but judging from the African Press, that section, although somewhat noisy, was an infinitesimal one. This section, as is shown from the extract below, also discussed the voyage of the Indian troops to Europe. The 'East Rand Express', a paper published in one of the most important ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... at war the individual unit does not count. To himself he may be of prime importance and first consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm—an infinitesimal, utterly inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought. Thus we diagnosed their mental poses. Along toward five o'clock a goodish string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars seven hundred ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... the last drop of gasoline was gone. But the motor had served its purpose. It had run manfully on an almost infinitesimal consumption of gasoline for eight days. It had not missed an explosion save when its wiring was wetted by spray. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... spray. Two things especially struck the observers: the water made but little curve or sweep on passing over the edge, and then rushed down to the abyss at almost lightning speed, shivering itself to infinitesimal particles on striking any rock or projection at the side. Its behaviour was, of course, due to its weight, and to the fact that on Jupiter bodies fall 40.98 feet the first second, instead of sixteen feet, as on ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... in an electro-magnetic medium. It would possess elasticity, compressibility, inertia, and, further, would possess a certain amount of mass. That mass might be infinitely small, but nevertheless it would possess mass of an infinitesimal order. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... suspended millions and billions and trillions of miles in space; then turn the eye yonder and see that infinitesimal point of vegetation, earth—a speck, countless multitudes of which heaped and piled together would form but a point compared with ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... sporadically, and for a minute or two, bringing conscience to bear, and being very uncomfortable sometimes when you do. But as for recognising the mystic solemnity of all these days of yours in that they are welded together, and are all tending to one end, and that each passing moment contributes its infinitesimal share to the awful solemn whole—that has seldom entered your minds, and for a great many of you it has never had any effect in restraining or stimulating or regulating ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... is perpetrated; in substance it remains the same. Primary Schools will not accomplish much in eliminating crime. The merely intellectual training received in these institutions has little salutary influence upon conduct. Nothing can be mope deplorable than that sectarian bickerings, respecting infinitesimal points in the sanctions of morality, should result in the children of England receiving hardly any moral instruction whatever. Conduct, as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold has so often told us, is three fourths of life. What are we to think of an educational system which officially ignores ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... Professor J.H. Poynting, in his lecture to the British Association at Cambridge in 1904, says: "The surface of the earth receives, we know, an amount of heat from the inside almost infinitesimal compared with that which it receives from the sun, and on the sun, therefore, ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... argued that nothing in nature is ugly, and that the word was introduced to express what is merely an inability on the part of mankind to perceive the beauty which constitutes nature; and it certainly is possible that, were man endowed with the mind of God, instead of with only some infinitesimal and mysterious emanation of it, he would find all things in creation, all art included, beautiful. The author of the Book of Genesis asserts that when God had finished making the world He looked upon ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... as that of the dinner at Dilly's: what is distinctive of genius is the power to convey the general feeling of the interlocutors, to suggest a dramatic effect, an artistic whole, as Boswell does, by the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors. The triumph in each case is one not of opportunities but of ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... force of gravity, and whatever the size of two particles may be, they mutually attract each other. The earth attracts the moon; the moon attracts the earth. A stone thrown up into the air exercises an infinitesimal force upon the earth; so in the social system every individual, however small and insignificant he may be, exercises some attractive force upon his neighbour. There is no one in the world who does not exercise some influence for good or for evil ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... liable to fatal attacks. But while large doses of alcohol are, of course, more obviously injurious, it would be absurd to imagine that lesser quantities are entirely without influence in the same direction. It has, indeed, been shown by Dr. Ridge, that even infinitesimal quantities of alcohol, such as one part in 5,000, cause a more rapid multiplication of the bacillus subtilis and other bacilli of decomposition, while, by the same quantities, the growth of both animal and vegetable protoplasm is retarded. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... reply, but words were hard to find. As he stood silent a voice behind him cried, "Why, if it isn't Infinitesimal James!" and there she was, with her shining hair and laughing eyes. He ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... experience of the working of the changed law, scarcely any benefit appears to have been obtained, beyond the meager concession that the heavy payments demanded, for an English patent may be made in installments instead of lump sums. Against this infinitesimal concession had to be set a number of disabilities which did not formerly exist, such as compulsory licenses, which disinclined the capitalist to invest in inventions, attempts to assimilate the provisional specification to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... he is going, man feels himself of supreme importance, and certainly is of interest—to himself. Let us hope that he has indeed a potency and importance out of all proportion to his somatic insignificance. We know of toxins of such strength that an amount too infinitesimal to be gauged may kill; and we know that "the unit adopted in certain scientific work is the amount of emanation produced by one million-millionth of a grain of radium, a quantity which itself has a volume of less than a million-millionth of a cubic ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... speck of something in motion, is an immense mass-meeting. Look sharper, and you will see a mite brandishing his mandibles in an excited manner. That is the great Mr. Soandso, defining his position amid tumultuous and irrepressible cheers. That infinitesimal creature, upon whom some score of others, as minute as he, are gazing in open-mouthed admiration, is a famous philosopher, expounding to a select audience their capacity for the Infinite. That scarce discernible pufflet of smoke and dust is ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... A star appeared, and another, and another. They sparkled amid the yards and rigging of the two coal brigs lying alangside, as if they had been tiny lamps suspended in the ropes. The masts rocked sleepily to the infinitesimal flux of the tide, which clucked and gurgled with idle regularity in nooks and ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... a window, it gave no light. And illusions came to Lieutenant Fevrier, such as will come to the bravest man so long as he listens hard enough in the dark—illusions of stealthy footsteps on the floor, of hands scraping and feeling along the walls, of a man's breathing upon his neck, of many infinitesimal noises and movements ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... over its vast extent. So we, in life, "where men sit and hear each other groan," believe that the world is some dreadful mistake, full of meaningless anguish. This is because we are in the midst of it all: we can not see far: the nearest objects, though infinitesimal in size, loom enormous, as with the palm of your hand you can cut off the sun. But if we could only see the end from the beginning, if we could get the angel's view-point, the final result would be beauty. Browning is not satisfied ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... looked into blackness at first, and yet I thought that I could detect a mystic commotion of the invisible particles at which I was staring. I made no doubt that, if I waited, in due season the promise would be fulfilled. After a period of expectancy which I could not measure, infinitesimal sparks darted hither and thither, and there was a slight crackling sound. I concentrated my attention on what I was about to see; and in a moment more ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... in their action, and thus, even if infinitesimal doses be swallowed each day, there is a certain amount of storage in the tissues (though a certain percentage of the poison is being constantly eliminated), and at last ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... foreign country, because he moves among people most of whom have an affection for England almost as deep as his own, while all are courteous enough to respect his prejudices. This class is large in actual numbers, no doubt, but in proportion to the whole American people it is infinitesimal, and would be a mere featherweight in the scale at any moment of crisis. Its voice is clearly audible in literature and even in journalism, but at the polls it would be as a whisper to the thunder of Niagara. The traveller who has "had a good time" ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... powers, she did not even languish to any perceptible degree. Nevertheless, the detriment was there, a steadily cumulative factor, and at the end of any given period of pressing the commerce of the nation, emasculated by these continuous if infinitesimal abstractions from its vitality, was substantially less in bulk, substantially less in pounds sterling, than if it had been allowed to run ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... segregation of industries has come an almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as possible each man should carry through one entire operation. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... humanity, are repellant to the ethical sense; and that those who persistently advocate them as beneficial to human or animal life MUST JUSTIFY THEIR CLAIMS BY RESULTS.... Even admitting that experiments on animals have contributed to the relief of human suffering, such measure of relief is infinitesimal compared with the pain which has been ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... top, he daubs the head of the person three times with it. Then he rests the end of the notched stick against the man's head and rasps three long strokes from end to end, throwing out his hand far into the air after each stroke. The dust produced by the rasping, infinitesimal though it be, is powerful in giving health and life. Now he turns toward the rising Sun, holding out his implements to him; and, quickly rubbing up and down a few times at the lower end of the notched stick, he makes a long stroke from ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... crushing and smashing every thing in its path—eternally splintered and scattered a wood pile at the foot of the hill, and then sprang from the high bank clear over a dray in the road—the negro glanced up once and dodged—and the next second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame cooper-shop, and the coopers swarmed out like bees. Then we said it was perfectly magnificent, and left. Because the coopers were starting up the hill ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... originally. But even if this lessening in the intensity of the signals exists independently of hypnosis, it is the latter that has shown us how easily neglect of this factor may lead to erroneous conclusions being drawn. The suggestibility of the hypnotic makes these infinitesimal signals specially dangerous in his case. But when once this danger was recognized, greater attention was paid to this source of error in non-hypnotic cases than before. It is certain that many psychological experiments are vitiated ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... other things are produced as a result of an alloying or compounding of the parts of these three together. In this theory of the threefold division of the primitive elements lies the earliest germ of the later distinction (especially in the Sa@mkhya school) of pure infinitesimal substances (tanmatra) and gross elements, and the theory that each gross substance is composed of the atoms of the primary elements. And in Pras'na IV. 8 we find the gross elements distinguished from their subtler natures, e.g. earth (p@rthivi), and the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the night wore on. Sometimes she stole to the window, and looked out on the sleeping city, on the peaceful Arno which was bathed in silvery moonlight, and on the old, irregular houses, thinking what struggles and agonies this place had witnessed in past times, and realizing what an infinitesimal bit of the world's sufferings she was called to bear. Sometimes she lighted a candle and read, sometimes prayed, but for the most part just lay still, silently enduring, learning, though she did not think it, the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... your plate, or glass, a pinch of powder, or a few drops from a vial in his pocket The contents of this vial were never the same, for the doctor made new scientific discoveries each week, but in general bicarbonate, alkalies, and arsenic (in infinitesimal doses fortunately) made the base of these medicaments. Jack submitted to these preventives, and did not venture to say that he thought they tasted very badly. Occasionally the other professors were invited, and everybody drank the health of the little De Barancy, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Hassan Bogdanoff had been at the banquet, too; on a world of lizard-faced silicate-eaters, the social difference between a human general and a human aircar-driver was almost infinitesimal. He'd have to talk to Barney Mordkovitz, too; when word of events at Konkrook got out among the local geeks, as it probably ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... to a common ancestor. [Footnote: Conversations-Lexikon, (Leipzig, 1866,) 8 Band, art. HOHENZOLLERN. Carlyle's History of Friedrich II., (London, 1858,) Book III. Cli. 1, Vol. I. p. 200.] And yet on this most distant and infinitesimal relationship the French pretension is founded. But audacity changes to the ridiculous, when it is known that the Prince is nearer in relationship to the French Emperor than to the Prussian King, and this ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... candle, and became So absorbed, that his old clock made him wince Striking the hour a moment since. Its echo, only half apprehended, Lingered about the room. He ended Screwing the little rubies in, Setting the wheels to lock and spin, Curling the infinitesimal springs, Fixing the filigree hands. Chippings Of precious stones lay strewn about. The table before him was a rout Of splashes and sparks of coloured light. There was yellow gold in sheets, and quite A heap of emeralds, and steel. Here was a gem, ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... the steer fall. He went down heavily, the impetus of his charge proving his undoing; he struck heavily on head and shoulder, grunting dismally, his hind quarters rising in the air, balancing there for an infinitesimal space and then following ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to him now he did not for an instant believe, but there remained the chance—the slender, infinitesimal chance—that she might ask him to go to her. More than a flying visit she would know he could not manage. His work was his living, and hers. But so much Nick's powers of persuasion might one day accomplish though he would not allow himself to contemplate the possibility, ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... billionth fraction of an inch; and he would never risk the possibility of being publicly mortified by his ward's failure. He dreads humiliation of any kind, far more than cholera or Asiatic plague, or than even the eternal loss of that infinitesimal microscopic bit of flint, which he is pleased in facetious ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... The enemy will succeed in penetrating the impregnable fortress; each foe has his special tactics, contrived with appalling skill. See, an egg is inserted by means of a probe beside the torpid larva; or else, in the absence of such an implement, an infinitesimal grub, an atom, comes creeping and crawling, slips in and reaches the sleeper, who will never wake again, already a succulent morsel for her ferocious visitor. The interloper makes the victim's cell and cocoon his own cell and his own cocoon; and next year, instead ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his, and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet, infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth. He found the place and threw himself down. Why, here were green boughs under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty—it was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... happy ever since," she said, "although sometimes I've felt quite miserable. Do you see the difference, or does it sound nonsense? Let me explain. I've only felt miserable, but I was happy. Gladys, I do believe it's It. It does make one feel so infinitesimal, and ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... object between his thumb and forefinger, "is the finest cambric needle. I will take upon the point of it an invisible portion of the substance I speak of." Here he carefully picked out a pill from the basin, and as carefully placed it upon the table, where he detached an infinitesimal atom of it and held it up on the point of the needle. "This particle," he said, "is so small that it cannot be seen except with the aid of a microscope. I will now place needle and all on the machine and touch ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... of the earth? And how could he see? Is it possible? Hm..." continued Raskolnikov, turning cold and shivering, "and the jewel case Nikolay found behind the door—was that possible? A clue? You miss an infinitesimal line and you can build it into a pyramid of evidence! A fly flew by and saw it! Is it possible?" He felt with sudden loathing how weak, how physically weak he had become. "I ought to have known it," he thought with a bitter ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... There seem to be, for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand the anaemically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... through the dreadful loom is the overflowing future poured back into the capacious reservoir of the past. All the active element lies in that infinitesimal now. The future is not except by relation; the past is not at all, and the present but a sign of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... comfortable of sleeping-places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled over his nose. There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now and again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound—carefully recorded for this exact purpose—the feel of the ship would have ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... perhaps, less effective than those of star-clouds, because the central condensation of stars in them is so great that their light becomes blended in an indistinguishable blur. The beautiful effect of the incessant play of infinitesimal rays over the apparently compact surface of the cluster, as if it were a globe of the finest frosted silver shining in an electric beam, is also lost in a photograph. Still, even to the eye looking ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute to them any great power of vision. Besides, what good would those short-sighted lenses be in the absence of light, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre |
