Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Artificial   Listen
adjective
Artificial  adj.  
1.
Made or contrived by art; produced or modified by human skill and labor, in opposition to natural; as, artificial heat or light, gems, salts, minerals, fountains, flowers. "Artificial strife Lives in these touches, livelier than life."
2.
Feigned; fictitious; assumed; affected; not genuine. "Artificial tears."
3.
Artful; cunning; crafty. (Obs.)
4.
Cultivated; not indigenous; not of spontaneous growth; as, artificial grasses.
Artificial arguments (Rhet.), arguments invented by the speaker, in distinction from laws, authorities, and the like, which are called inartificial arguments or proofs.
Artificial classification (Science), an arrangement based on superficial characters, and not expressing the true natural relations species; as, "the artificial system" in botany, which is the same as the Linnaean system.
Artificial horizon. See under Horizon.
Artificial light, any light other than that which proceeds from the heavenly bodies.
Artificial lines, lines on a sector or scale, so contrived as to represent the logarithmic sines and tangents, which, by the help of the line of numbers, solve, with tolerable exactness, questions in trigonometry, navigation, etc.
Artificial numbers, logarithms.
Artificial person (Law). See under Person.
Artificial sines, Artificial tangents, etc., the same as logarithms of the natural sines, tangents, etc.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Artificial" Quotes from Famous Books



... to the affairs of this world, integrity hath many advantages over all the fine and artificial ways of dissimulation and deceit; it is much the plainer and easier, much the safer and more secure way of dealing in the world; it has less of trouble and difficulty, of entanglement and perplexity, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... the whole of the royal party proceeded to the wide plain which lies to the east of Fontainebleau, in the centre of which the Due de Sully had caused a castellated building to be erected, which was filled with rockets and other artificial fireworks, and which was besieged, stormed, and taken by an army of satyrs and savages. This spectacle greatly delighted the Court, while not the least interesting feature of the exhibition was presented by the immense concourse of people (estimated at upwards of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... state of the world a policy of Thibet may be carried out in some obscure corner, but it cannot be done in a great tract of country which lies right across the main line of industrial progress. The position is too absolutely artificial. A handful of people by the right of conquest take possession of an enormous country over which they are dotted at such intervals that it is their boast that one farmhouse cannot see the smoke of another, and yet, though their numbers are so disproportionate to the ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle

... new code follows what the German jurists call the Pandekten system. It is divided into five general parts. Part I is called "S[o]soku," or General Laws, and deals with persons, natural and artificial, as the subjects of rights; with things as the objects of rights; and with juristic acts as setting rights in motion. One cannot help being astonished at and gratified with the remarkable extent to which Prof. Holland's views as expressed in ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... ease and he spoke as a man who had nothing to say. Gloom darkened the North as a consequence of these unfortunate speeches, for they expressed an optimism which we cannot believe he really felt, and which hurt him in the estimation of the country. "There is no crisis but an artificial one," was one of his ill-timed assurances, and another, "There is nothing going wrong.... There is nothing that really hurts any one." Of his supporters some were discouraged; others were exasperated; and an able but angry partisan even went so far ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings, but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... gold, in texture soft as silk. A band of gold forms the girdle of her ruby-coloured velvet robe, which descends to the wrist, and there reveals the small white hand and tapering fingers of patrician beauty. All this may captivate the fastidious noble; but, to men less artificial in their tastes and habits, could such a woman be better than a statue—and could love, the strongest of human passions, be ever more to her than a short-lived ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... failures, have brought us to the edge of a precipice. We must prevent, if we can, those mistakes and failures for them. The remedy for unhappy marriages, for all mistaken, selfish and artificial relationships in life is a preventive one. My plan is that we try to educate ourselves together, take advantage of the accruing knowledge that is helping men and women to cope with the problems, to think straight. We can then ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and that famine is at hand. The Polynesians met this emergent danger with various expedients of activity and prevention. A way was found to preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty feet in depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am told, in the Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and cannibalism. Among the Hawaiians—a hardier ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... certainly the very highest disclosed to the human spirit. And the method of attaining this result was the process, also often and widely misunderstood, of culture. This word carries with it the implication of natural, vital growth, but it has been confused with an artificial, mechanical process, supposed to be practised as a kind of esoteric cult by a small group of people who hold themselves apart from common human experiences and fellowships. Mr. Symonds, concerning whose representative character as a man ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... the words of our present Mark, "And he cometh into a house" (iii. 19). But what conceivable motive could "Mark" have for omitting it? Holtzmann has no doubt, however, that the "Sermon on the Mount" is a compilation, or, as he calls it in his recently-published Lehrbuch (p. 372), "an artificial ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... it is the denial of teleology that he regards as the fatal element of Mr. Darwin's theory. "According to us," he says, "the true stumbling-block of Mr. Darwin's theory, the perilous and slippery point, is the passage from artificial to natural selection; it is when he wants to establish that a blind and designless nature has been able to obtain, by the occurrence of circumstances, the same results which man obtains by thoughtful and well calculated industry." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... "Arizona" in clothes to suit recent Mexican complications, and called his play "Rio Grande," he found he had lost the early sincerity of "Alabama," and his raciness was swamped in an apparent sophistication which only added to his artificial method of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas

... all much struck with the extraordinary regularity of the terraces, which, with almost artificial parallelism, swept round the base of the limestone cliffs and hills of North Devon. That they were ancient tidal-marks, now raised to a considerable elevation above the sea by the upheaval of the land, I was the more inclined to believe, from the numerous fossil shells, crustacea, and ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn

... eyes, according to Balzac, were her great beauty, and all her expression was in them, otherwise her face was stupid; but with her splendid black hair and her complexion—olive by day and white in artificial light—she must have been a striking and picturesque figure. Later on Balzac appears to have partly reconciled himself to her moral irregularities, on the convenient ground that she, like himself, was an exceptional being; and we hear of several visits he ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... enough: a biological phenomenon that had its growth, its maturity, its decay. Death was no mystery, pain no punishment, nor sin anything but the survival of lower attributes from a prior phase of evolution, or not infrequently the legitimate protest of the natural self against artificial social ethics. It was the creeds that tortured things out of their elemental simplicity. But for him the old craving persisted. That alone would do. God, God—he was God-intoxicated, without Spinoza's calm or Spinoza's certainty. Justice, Pity, Love—something that understood. He knew it was ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Without any artificial aid, I got a splendid night's rest last night, and consequently am very much freshened up to-day. Yesterday I had a fine walk by the sea, and to-day I have had another on ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... this right by constructing enormous piers for the foundations, which they built up from the slopes of the mountain or from the bottom of the valley as circumstances required: the space between this artificial casing and the solid rock was filled up, and the whole mass formed a nearly square platform, from which the temple buildings were to rise. Hiram undertook to supply materials for the work. Solomon had written to him that he should command "that they hew me cedar ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... to be furnished by the various mnemonic systems may now be briefly considered. These methods of supplying the defects of a naturally weak memory, or of strengthening a fairly good one, are one and all artificial. This might not be a conclusive objection to them, were they really effective and permanent helps, enabling one who has learned them to recall with certainty ideas, names, dates, and events which he is unable to recall by other means. Theory apart, it is conceded that a system ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... The old Tory party dwindled and its platform disappeared. Yet a strong Opposition is essential to the proper working of the British system of parliamentary government; if it did not exist, it would have to be created. No artificial effort, however, was now needed to produce it. A Liberalism or a Liberal-Conservatism which stood still as time marched by soon ceased to be true Liberalism; and new groups sprang up, eager to press forward at ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... so far, at least, as trusting in my medicine goes; yet, how cruel an argument to use, with this afflicted one here. Is it not for all the world as if some brawny pugilist, aglow in December, should rush in and put out a hospital-fire, because, forsooth, he feeling no need of artificial heat, the shivering patients shall have none? Put it to your conscience, sir, and you will admit, that, whatever be the nature of this afflicted one's trust, you, in opposing it, evince either an erring head or a heart amiss. Come, own, are ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... very primitive conditions under which cave dwellers lived, as denoted by the artificial objects which they left, and the low mentality indicated by the skulls, Mr. W.H. Holmes suggests that a careful and extended study of these abodes may disclose a culture lower than that prevailing among out-door dwellers in the same localities. As no effort would be required to secure ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... sworn, deposes and says that she is over twenty-one years of age and engaged in the employment of making artificial flowers; that in the year 1881 the defendant induced her to leave her home in New York and journey with him in the West under a promise of marriage, representing himself to be a traveling salesman employed by a manufacturer ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train

... Negro and the slave might well have given cause for concern. Above what was after all only an artificial barrier spoke the call of race and frequently of kindred. Sometimes at a later date jealousy arose when a master employed a free Negro to work with his slaves, the one receiving pay and the others laboring without ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... emanated unduly from the feature that there was probably more shillings to the square inch of me than there were shillings to the square inch of them. Nor yet was it any manner of palpable warm-heartedness or other natural virtue. But it was a perfect artificial virtue; it was drill, plain, simple drill. And now was I glad of their drilling, and vividly approved of it, because I saw that it was good for me. Whether it was good or bad for the porter and the cabman I could not know; but that point, mark you, came within ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... startling of these marvels, I well remember, was the Cowgate, with its rows of lamps extending beneath the South Bridge, and seen through the iron balustrades! This was perfect enchantment to some of us; and I don't believe I have ever seen any scene of artificial magnificence, since I first looked down on the Cowgate, that made so strong an impression on me, as a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... Hellar, "it is the natural mind of man! Scepticism, which is the basis of scientific reasoning, is an artificial thing, first created in the world under the competitive economic order when it became essential to self-preservation in a world of trade based on deceit. In our new order we have had difficulty in maintaining enough of it for scientific purposes even in the intellectual ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... 'the confidence of the Crown,' God knows! No MINISTER, NO FRIEND, EVER possessed it so entirely as this truly excellent Lord Melbourne possesses mine!" A pang shot through her—she seized a pen, and wrote upon the margin—"Reading this again, I cannot forbear remarking what an artificial sort of happiness MINE was THEN, and what a blessing it is I have now in my beloved Husband REAL and solid happiness, which no Politics, no worldly reverses CAN change; it could not have lasted long as it was then, for after all, kind and excellent ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... fades has been the dream of poets from Milton's day; but seeing one, who loves it? Our amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower - stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average farmhouse mantelpiece. Here it forms the most uncheering of winter bouquets, or a wreath about flowers made from the lifeless hair ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... them. If there are nearly virgin resources in God, there are also deep unused treasures of potentiality in men. There are in them excellences and simple heroisms which make plain that Christianity is no artificial thing superimposed on human nature, but is the laying bare and setting free of its inmost native quality. There is everywhere about, over here, a diffused Christianity in men who are better than they know. It seems like so much material that needs but a spark to set it ablaze. May there be ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot

... belonged To a most yearning and bewildered brain: There was such desolation in the work; And through its utter failure the thing spoke With more of human message, heart to heart, Than all these faultless, smirking, skin-deep saints, In artificial troubles picturesque, And martyred sweetly, not one curl awry.— Listen; a clumsy knight, who rode alone Upon a stumbling jade in a great wood Belated. The poor beast, with head low-bowed Snuffing the ground. The rider leant Forward to sound the marish with his ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various

... Beauty voiced his sense of the divine immanence in every part of the cosmos, and emphasized the doctrine that animals, because they unhesitatingly follow the promptings of Nature, are more lovely, happy, and moral than Man, who should learn from them the individual and social virtues, abandon artificial civilization, and follow instinct. Brooke, in the prologue of his Gustavus Vasa, shows that he foresaw the political bearings of this theory; it is, in his opinion, peculiarly a people "guiltless of courts, untainted, and unread" that, illumined by ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... as blocking some of the staircases to train the girls for an emergency. It was being planned, just about the time College Hall burned, to have a fire drill there with artificial smoke, to test the girls. The system is still being constantly changed and improved. On Miss Davis's desk, the night of the fire, was the rough draft of a plan by which property could be better saved in case of fire, without more danger ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse

... flinging of the polished pebble of Republican idealism into the artificial lake of eighteenth century Europe produced a splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned ten thousand men. What would happen if a star from heaven really fell into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... use this language, and to command himself as he did so, was a surprise to Piers. Nothing he disliked more than personal altercation; he shrank from it at almost any cost. But the sight of Daniel, the sound of his artificial voice, moved him deeply with indignation, and for the first time in his life he spoke out. Having done so, he had a pleasurable sensation; he felt ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... the means of living decently. This consummation is coming about with the fatality of a natural law, and the utmost the wisest of governments can do is to direct it through pacific channels and dislodge artificial obstacles ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... forcee" whose waters are taken from the Theols, was constructed in former times, when the town was flourishing, for the use of manufactories or to flood the moats of the rampart. The "Riviere forcee" forms an artificial arm of a natural river, the Tournemine, which unites with several other streams beyond the suburb of Rome. These little threads of running water and the two rivers irrigate a tract of wide-spreading meadow-land, enclosed on all sides by little yellowish or white terraces dotted with ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... a great curiosity. They consist of many small enclosures, each about twenty feet by forty or fifty, made of bamboo, which are placed on the bank of the river, and partly covered with water. In one corner of the enclosure is a small house, where the eggs are hatched by artificial heat, produced by rice-chaff in a state of of fermentation. It is not uncommon to see six or eight hundred ducklings all of the same age. There are several hundreds of these enclosures, and the number ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... regularly, having, myself, fixed the times, saying that I would show my pupils that I could be confined myself to system, as well as they. At first, I experienced a little inconvenience, but this soon disappeared, and at last the hours and half hours of our artificial division, entirely superseded, in the school-room, the divisions ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... can do in school comes later in life than the period of which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother and sister. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... lost after she struck adrift, had I not discovered her present berth. There she was, however, with land virtually all round her, a good bottom, plenty of water, and well moored. As I have said already, she could not be better secured in an artificial dock. In the midst of the Pacific, away from all custom-house officers, in a recently discovered and uninhabited island, there was nothing to fear. Men sleep soundly in such circumstances, and I should have been in a deep slumber in a minute after I was in my berth, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... Europeans except a few traders at the port are jealously excluded, many hundreds of square miles of irregularly undulating country have been so skillfully terraced and levelled, and so permeated by artificial channels, that every portion of it can be irrigated and dried at pleasure. According as the slope of the ground is more or less rapid, each terraced plot consists in some places of many acres, in others of a few square yards. We saw them in every state of cultivation; ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... attitudinize, pose; flirt a fan; overact, overdo. Adj. affected, full of affectation, pretentious, pedantic, stilted, stagy, theatrical, big-sounding, ad captandum; canting, insincere. not natural, unnatural; self-conscious; maniere; artificial; overwrought, overdone, overacted; euphuist &c 577. stiff, starch, formal, prim, smug, demure, tire a quatre epingles, quakerish, puritanical, prudish, pragmatical, priggish, conceited, coxcomical, foppish, dandified; finical, finikin; mincing, simpering, namby-pamby, sentimental. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... common clay. This long and awful pause in the affairs of life was intolerable to the two people now walking softly through the paths of the little wood, where the moonbeams shone through the trees; to the son, because he was of an impatient nature, and could not endure the artificial gloom which was thus forced upon him. He had felt keenly all those natural sensations which the loss of a father calls forth: the breaking of an old tie, the oldest in the world; the breach of all the habits of his ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... straight before him. The most extraordinary thing about the man was, that he was contorting his face into the most fearful and astonishing grimaces that ever were beheld. Nature's handiwork never was disguised with such extraordinary artificial carving, as the man had overlaid his countenance ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... is based largely on tourism (including gambling), and textile and fireworks manufacturing. Efforts to diversify have spawned other small industries—toys, artificial flowers, and electronics. The tourist sector has accounted for roughly 25% of GDP, and the clothing industry has provided about two-thirds of export earnings. Macau depends on China for most of its food, fresh water, and energy imports. Japan and Hong Kong are the main suppliers of raw materials ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... schist, coal measures, limestone, travertino, infusorial deposit); metamorphosed rock, which contains also, together with the detritus mica schist, and more ancient metamorphic masses. Aggregate and sandstone formations. The phenomenon of contact explained by the artificial imitation of minerals. Effects of pressure and the various rapidity of cooling. Origin of granular or saccharoidal marble, silicification of schist into ribbon jasper. Metamorphosis of calcareous ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... literally, being at home on a specified afternoon with the blinds and curtains drawn, the room lighted as at night, a fire burning and a large tea-table spread in the dining-room or a small one near the hearth. An afternoon tea in summer is the same, except that artificial light is never used, and the table is ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... Caesar's court with wonderful persistence; he recalled Caesar's complaints that he was forced to describe a burning city without having seen a real fire; his contemptuous answer to Tigellinus, who offered to burn Antium or an artificial wooden city; finally, his complaints against Rome, and the pestilential alleys of the Subura. Yes; Caesar has commanded the burning of the city! He alone could give such a command, as Tigellinus alone could accomplish it. But if Rome is burning ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... to the old. The impending reorganization of governments to protect the smaller capitalists from the large (through better control over the banks, railroads, trusts, tariffs, and natural resources) will furnish the first condition, the natural exhaustion or artificial restriction of immigration now imminent together with the introduction of "scientific management," the second. From a purely business standpoint the greatest asset of the capitalists' government, its chief natural resource, the most ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... ceremonies had been performed in honour of the shepherds' god, Bir-ap-pa, certain consecrated things were carried by the priest, and others by his wife, to a particular tank, or artificial lake, where special washings and other purifying ceremonies had to be performed. The shepherds and their relations were accompanied by musicians, dancing-girls, religious beggars, and many others. They also had a Brahman to perform the appointed purifying ceremonies at the tank. ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson

... skill, read one word or letter of it; but it is use. But he says that the best light for his life to do a very small thing by (contrary to Chaucer's words to the Sun, "that he should lend his light to them that small seals grave"), it should be by an artificial light of a candle, set to advantage, as he could do it. I find the fellow, by his discourse, very ingenuous; and among other things, a great admirer and well read in all our English poets, and undertakes to judge of them all, and that not impertinently. Well pleased ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... nothing. But to have one's illusions destroyed—that is really almost more than one can bear. I really don't exaggerate," she insisted. "It seemed to freeze my very beliefs in me—the more so that when we worked in winter Peter Ivanovitch, walking up and down the room, required no artificial heat to keep himself warm. Even when we move to the South of France there are bitterly cold days, especially when you have to sit still for six hours at a stretch. The walls of these villas on the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... voice of birds. Here must thou, together with thy uterine brothers, offer libations of water to thy forefathers and the gods. And, O ruler of earth! O scion of Bharata's race! having visited it and Sikataksha also, thou shalt repair to the Saindhava wood, and behold a number of small artificial rivers. And O great king, O scion of Bharata's race! thou shalt touch the waters of all the holy lakes and reciting the hymns of the god Sthanu (Siva), meet with success in every undertaking. For this is the junction, ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... is, so there is. You are for beauty as nature made her, hey! No artificial graces, no cosmetic varnish, no beauty ...
— St. Patrick's Day • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... mad as to boil their greens with brass halfpence, in order to improve their colour; and yet nothing is more true — Indeed, without this improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit. They are produced in an artificial soil, and taste of nothing but the dunghills, from whence they spring. My cabbage, cauliflower, and 'sparagus in the country, are as much superior in flavour to those that are sold in Covent-garden, as my heath-mutton is to that of St James's-market; which in fact, is neither lamb ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... this shoal and the town; and here the Danes had arranged their line of defence, as near the shore as possible: nineteen ships and floating batteries, flanked, at the end nearest the town, by the Crown Batteries, which were two artificial islands, at the mouth of the harbour—most formidable works; the larger one having, by the Danish account, 66 guns; but, as Nelson believed, 88. The fleet having anchored, Nelson, with Riou, in the AMAZON, made his last examination of the ground; and about one o'clock, returning to his own ship, ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey

... well for the traveler of the nineteenth century to protest against the artificial and unromantic guidance of the railway: he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and recesses which he would never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... sincerity of this friendship, and the less they believed in it the more eloquently they declaimed as to its ardor and eternity. Each one thought to himself, "I will enjoy and profit by the fruit of this friendship, I will yield up the blossoms only." The blossoms, alas! were artificial, without odor and already fading, though at the first glance they ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... present for the bird but when he opened it, he found a box. Inside the box was an artificial nightingale, brilliantly ornamented with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. As soon as this artificial bird was wound up, its tail moved up and down, and shone with silver and gold. It sang very well, too, in its ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

... in the centre of the valley is the cottage of the noble proprietor, accessible only by one narrow pathway which winds through hillocks and passes various rivulets on rustic bridges. The grounds about the cottages are tastefully laid out in shrubberies, flower-knots, green pastures, and artificial lakes. That which constitutes the chief feature of beauty in other landscapes, namely, an extensive prospect, is wanting here. From the cottage, or any part of the grounds, you can only command a view of the limited demesne, and the craggy and bleak mountain ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... manner, forming a wooded vista, terminated in the distance by the arched aqueduct which carries the water across several deep valleys from the bents near Belgrade to Constantinople. These bents are large reservoirs, resembling artificial lakes, bordered by thick woods, groves, and pasture land, and converting their immediate vicinity into a beautiful and luxuriant landscape, while all around ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... selection of the strongest and ablest, but after it becomes a caste, the individuals are selected on account of hereditary social position and not primarily on account of ability. Now biological experiments show that although artificial selection may be carried to a point where animals will breed true to a characteristic to within 90 per cent, yet if selection is stopped, and the descendants of the selected individuals are allowed to breed freely among themselves, they will in a very few generations ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner

... the great need of the common people was food. The city had to rely mainly on imported corn, and the price of this at times became prohibitive owing to scarcity—sometimes the result of piracy and the dangers of the sea, but often caused by artificial means owing to the merchants "cornering" the supply—and it was necessary for the State, through the Emperor, to intervene to make regulations and to distribute the grain free or below its market value. It has been computed that about 50,000 strangers lived ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... that inexhaustible volubility of contempt, which rages through the controversial writings of the lesser poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the roar of his Homeric or Rabelaisian laughter to a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle. This "News from Hell, brought by the Devil's Carrier," and containing "The Devil's Answer to Pierce Penniless," might have miscarried by the way without much more loss than that of such an additional proof as we could have been content to spare of Dekker's ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... subordinate roles assigned to them in The Strayed Reveller. A true dramatist would hardly have committed so flagrant a blunder. Merope is written in imitation of the Greek tragedians. It has dignity of subject, nobility of sentiment, and a classic brevity of style; but it is frigid and artificial, and fails in the most essential function of drama—to stir the reader's emotions. Empedocles on Etna, a half-autobiographical drama, is in some respects a striking poem. It is replete with brilliant passages, and contains some of Arnold's best lyric verses and most beautiful ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... times, saying that I would show my pupils that I could be confined myself to system as well as they. At first I experienced a little inconvenience; but this soon disappeared, and at last the hours and half hours of our artificial division entirely superseded, in the school-room, the divisions of the clock face. I found, too, that it exerted an extremely favorable influence upon the scholars in respect to their willingness to submit ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott

... heaho, hoho! Hoho, hoho, hoho, hoho! Hoheo, haho, haheo, hoho!' And that was the end of the first act. It was all so artificial and stupid that I had great difficulty in sitting it out. But my friends begged me to stay, and assured me that the second ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... produced by the P. marsupium, Roxb., but the Philippine product, especially that of the second and third species, has for a long time been exported to Europe under the name of "red astringent gum" or "kino." This name is given to the sap of these trees dried without the aid of artificial heat. The bark is the part which produces it and the following extractive process is employed in Madras: a vertical incision is made in the trunk and lateral incisions perpendicular to it and a receptacle is placed at the foot of the tree. This soon fills and when the gum is sufficiently ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera

... Mrs. Belloc. "It ought to be, with all the time and money I've spent on it. My, how New York does set a woman to repairing and fixing up. Nothing artificial goes here. It mustn't be paint and plumpers and pads, but the real teeth. Why, I've had four real teeth set in as if they were rooted—and my hips toned down. You may remember what heavy legs I had—piano-legs. Look at 'em now." Mrs. Belloc ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... Technique.—His Success.—It is not to be wondered at, then, that Galds found himself hampered by the time limit of the play. He uttered now and then rather querulous protests against the conventions (artificial, as he regarded them) which prevented him from developing his ideas with the richness of detail to which he was accustomed.[3] Such complaints are only confessions of weakness on the part of an author. One has only ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... feathers fluttering for an opportunity to fly away No one has ever been able to find out what her thoughts were Pass half the day in procuring two cakes, worth three sous She was of those who disdain no compliment Such artificial enjoyment, such idiotic laughter Superiority of the man who does nothing over the man who works Terrible revenge she would take hereafter for her sufferings The groom isn't handsome, but the bride's as pretty as a picture The poor must pay for all ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger

... sort of great-uncle, I imagine," answered the other, laughing; then his rather rambling eye rolled round the ordered landscape in front of the house; an artificial sheet of water ornamented with an antiquated nymph in the center and surrounded by a park of tall trees now gray and black and frosty, for it was in the ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... the beauty of motherhood, and the two are always in harmony. Here, then, is a proper subject for modern Madonna art, a field which has scarcely been opened by the artists of our own day. Such pastoral Madonnas as have been painted within recent years are all more or less artificial in conception. Compared with the idyllic charm of the sixteenth century pictures, they seem like pretty scenes in a well-mounted opera. We are ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... city. She was taken to Drury Lane, the Covent Garden theatres, and to other places of amusement, but she could not "like plays." She saw some good actors; witnessed "Hamlet," "Bluebeard," and other dramas, but confesses that she "cannot like or enjoy them"; they seemed "so artificial." Then she somewhat oddly says that when her hair was dressed "she felt like a monkey," and finally concluded that "London was not the place for heartful pleasure." With her natural, sound common sense, her discernment, her intelligence and purity ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... valleys to compare with that of the Susquehanna. In point of picturesque scenery and modern alteration attained by the unceasing labor of man, the antithesis between the natural and the artificial is pronounced in many respects; especially at that place in the river where it runs through the steep banks on which is situated the thriving city of Wilkes-Barre. Here may be seen the majestic hills standing as sentinels over the marts of men that crowd the river edge. The verdure of these ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... palm-trees and whipping them until they confessed,—the discovery was revealed, and Brugsch Bey, having gone up the Nile to the place indicated, was taken to what appeared to be a well; and, having been let down into it by ropes, found himself in a sort of artificial cavern, not beautified and adorned like the royal tombs of that region, but roughly hewn in the rock. It was filled with sarcophagi, and at first sight of them he was almost paralyzed. For they bore the names of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... sending the freezing mixture in all directions.] This other bottle is also broken; although the iron was nearly half-an-inch thick, the ice has burst it asunder. These changes always take place in water: they do not require to be always produced by artificial means,—we only use them here because we want to produce a small winter round that little bottle, instead of a long and severe one. But if you go to Canada, or to the North, you will find the temperature there out of doors will ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday

... her soft, artificial laugh. "She is Sir Eustace Studley's sister. Rather peculiar, I believe, even eccentric. But I understand they are ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... ascend the throne when the Augusti resigned after twenty years' reign. The scheme worked temporarily for greater efficiency, but ended in civil war as the claims of natural heirs were set aside in favor of an artificial dynasty. At the same time the system bore heavily upon the people and the prosperity ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... be achieved without forcing language into such uncongenial forms as to produce an artificial effect, painfully reminding you, at every step, of the labor it cost? And here we come to the question of fact; for if Mr. Longfellow has succeeded, the answer is evident. We purpose, therefore, to take a few test-passages, and, placing the two translations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... Inn divided Nancy's time to the practical exclusion of all other interests. She had, without realizing her processes, taken into her life artificial responsibilities in almost exact proportion to the normal ones of any woman who makes the choice of marriage rather than that of a career. She was doing housekeeping on a large scale,—she had a child to care for, and she felt that she had entirely disproved any lingering feeling in the mind of ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... isolated hill crowned with clumps of noble trees, while sparkling brooks and rills seemed to cool the air, while they refreshed our sight, their murmuring sound reaching constantly our ears. Many of the rills were artificial, leading from one rice field to another. The industrious inhabitants were guiding their ploughs or otherwise in their fields, while here and there a grove of fruit-trees, with cocoa-nuts, areca palms, and clusters of bamboos rising among them, showed the situation ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... will. Left to herself, she would not have come within sixty miles of the place. London supplied all that she demanded from life. She had been born in London; she had lived there ever since—she hoped to die there. She liked fogs, motor-buses, noise, policemen, paper-boys, shops, taxi-cabs, artificial light, stone pavements, houses in long, grey rows, mud, banana-skins, and moving-picture exhibitions. Especially moving-picture exhibitions. It was, indeed, her taste for these that had caused ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... that his nature poetry was instinct with human poetry, with his human poetry, with mine, with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to have been his finest praise, what is always the praise of poetry when it is not artificial and formal. I ought to have said, as I had seen, that not one of his lovely landscapes in which I could discover no human figure, but thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... eye which is in that highly sensitive condition which is obtained by long continuance in darkness. The frequent withdrawal of the eye from the dark field of the telescope, and the application of it to reading by artificial light, is very prejudicial to its use for the more delicate purpose. John Herschel, no doubt, availed himself of every precaution to mitigate the ill effects of this inconvenience as much as possible, but it must have ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... pointed towards him with his bunch of keys, and cried out in his shrill, querulous voice: "And this witness, gentlemen of the jury, who roams about mysteriously at night in strange gardens, and finds out all sorts of psychological and artificial subterfuges to hide the tender motive of his nightly excursions, can you put any reliance upon him when he says he suddenly saw a shadow appear and disappear? Shadows which, to put it mildly, can only originate in his overheated ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann

... laid out my treasured keepsakes. In my nervous energy, nothing was forgotten. I took pains that my clothes against the wall should hang in straight rows, that the folded ones should lie in neat piles in my pretty Chinese trunk, and that the bunch of artificial flowers which I had always kept for a top centre mark, should be exactly in the middle; finally, that the gray gauze veil used as a fancy covering of the whole should be smoothly tucked in around the clothing. This ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

... idea he proceeded to carry it out with considerable finesse. An ordinary schemer would have been content to work with a savage hound. The use of artificial means to make the creature diabolical was a flash of genius upon his part. The dog he bought in London from Ross and Mangles, the dealers in Fulham Road. It was the strongest and most savage in their ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... and probably venturing to pinch her cheek or pat her on the shoulder into the bargain, accepted the situation with another type of smile—the Smile-that-children-expect. As a matter of fact, children hate it. They see through its artificial humbug easily. They prefer a solemn and unsmiling face invariably. It's the latter that produces chocolates and sudden presents; it's the stern-faced sort that play hide-and-seek or stand on their heads. The Smilers are bored at heart. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... to the superior economy of coal gas, as compared with oils and tallow, for the purposes of artificial illumination, Murdock mentioned the subject to Mr. James Watt, jun., during a brief visit to Soho in 1794, and urged the propriety of taking out a patent. Watt was, however, indifferent to taking out any further patents, being still engaged in contesting with the Cornish ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... us of a painful experience which he has had in consequence of his efforts to practise war-time economy in the matter of dress. The other evening, after going to bed at dusk in order to save artificial light, he was rung up by the police at 1 A.M. and charged with showing a light. It appears that he had gone to bed with his blind up, after throwing his well-worn trousers over the back of a chair, and that the rays of a street lamp had caught the glossy sheen of this garment and been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various

... imitated a herd of kangaroos, one man beating time to them with a club on a shield, and two others, armed, followed them and affected to steal unnoticed upon them to spear them. As soon as these pretended kangaroos had passed the objects of their visit, they instantly got rid of their artificial tails, each man caught up a lad, and, placing him upon his shoulders, carried him off in triumph to the last scene of this ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... just gone down; the artificial lights of the temple had not yet been turned on. Overhead, the great storm-cloud hung portentously, even more ominous than in the brighter light. The huge waterspout columns, the terrific size of the auditorium, were none the less impressive for the incalculable horde that filled ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... passed and repassed. Congressmen by the hundreds came and went. Administration leaders tried to conceal under an. artificial indifference their sensitiveness to ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... seditious preacher, who affected low popularity, went about the country and inculcated on his audience the principles of the first origin of mankind from one common stock, their equal right to liberty and to all the goods of nature, the tyranny of artificial distinctions, and the abuses which had arisen from the degradation of the more considerable part of the species, and the aggrandizement of a few insolent rulers.[**] These doctrines, so agreeable to the populace, and so conformable to the ideas of primitive equality which are engraven ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... glance clashed with the woman's; and of a sudden the paint upon her cheeks and lips stood out as starkly artificial as carmine splashed upon a whitewashed wall. At the same time he flashed a like warning to his two followers at the next table; and the legs of their chairs grated on the tiled flooring as they shifted position, making ready for the signal ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... under which it lives as a true expression of its peculiar genius and will? Does the State, of which it forms a part, exist by its consent, or has it been imposed upon it by some alien authority or nationality? Is it a territorial unity, or has it been split up into sections by artificial frontiers? All these questions must be answered before we can say of any nationality that it is also a nation. The "national idea," therefore, which has been one of the chief factors in modern history, is essentially an idea of development. Its root is the conception of nationality, that is ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... happiest of his life. That it should be spent in solitude, seemed to him most natural. It would have been abnormal to him to seek companionship in an hour of exaltation: desecration to drown the pure delights of the intellect in the artificial ecstasy of alcohol. No. He sat quietly in his leathern chair, or paced rapidly about the room, occasionally seating himself at the piano and rippling off portions of the work that was to be judged at last by the dread tribunal, whose final verdict was not to be reversed: the supreme ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... were regularly inflated for two hours with a pair of bellows. Suspended animation returned. The ass held up her head and looked around, but the inflating being discontinued she sunk once more in apparent death. The artificial breathing was immediately recommenced, and continued without intermission for two hours more. This saved the ass from final dissolution: she rose up and walked about; she seemed neither in agitation nor in pain. The wound through which the poison entered was healed without ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the lower house. The thing ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... four, five, six, and seven fathoms over. Also, a discovery of divers islands which after proved to be hills and hammocks, distinct within the land. This day there came unto the ship's side divers canoes, the Indians apparelled as aforesaid, with tobacco and pipes steeled with copper, skins, artificial strings and other trifles to barter; one had hanging about his neck a plate of rich copper, in length a foot, in breadth half a foot for a breastplate, the ears of all the rest had pendants of copper. ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various

... favourite dream, in all ages, to have a church of one pattern. Uniformity, that is, all of one shape. God does not make the trees which bear the same kind of fruit of one shape. You can make artificial flowers by the shipload, all one tint, but the bees won't come round your ship when you unload it! In a town where I have preached many a time, there is a place of worship at each end. As you come from the railway station, there is one which begins the town—a Baptist Chapel, ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness

... long separation, they both fall on their knees and bend the face to the earth, and this ceremony they repeat two or three times. Surely we may differ here with the sentiment of Montaigne, and confess this ceremony to be ridiculous. It arises from their national affectation. They substitute artificial ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... the incomprehensible obsession, uneasy as at something of which he only waited the passing, resentful because of the discomfort this caused him, unable to break through the artificial restraint that enveloped his spirit, lifted his eyes suddenly, dead and ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White



Words linked to "Artificial" :   artificial pacemaker, conventionalised, artificial intelligence, painted, semisynthetic, artificial language, artificial insemination, imitative, stilted, artificial joint, coloured, stylised, staged, celluloid, arranged, unreal, cardboard, natural, hokey, man-made, colored, imitation, artificial satellite, contrived, simulated, conventionalized, Jarvik artificial heart, bionic, counterfeit, dummy



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org