"Geometrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and his heart was a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; for the bit of glass which was in his eye ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... lift our eyes to the rude but shapely cone before us,—massive in its materials and fabric, and yet constructed with some degree of mechanical skill,—to come to the conclusion that the Nuraghe are works of a very early period, just when rude labour had begun to be directed by some rules of geometrical art. But, in examining the details, we find little or nothing to assist us in forming any clear idea of the period at which they were erected, or the purpose for which they were designed. There are not the slightest vestiges of ornament, any rude sculpture, any inscriptions. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... print portraying a blue sea, spread with rank upon rank of accurately measured waves, each with its tiny cap of foam, stretching without diminution to the horizon, upon which was perched a full-rigged ship, a geometrical triumph; and from this vessel came by small-boat to the strand a company of accurately moulded, accurately featured, accurately tailored fellows, pulling with perfect accuracy in every respect. I shall never forget the geometrical gentleman upon that geometrically tempestuous sea, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... examined the square shadows cast by the piles of timber. The ground looked like a chess-board, with black and white squares clearly defined by alternate patches of light and shade. The sawyers' tressels in the centre of the plot threw long, narrow fantastic shadows, suggesting some huge geometrical figure, upon a strip of bare grey ground. The rest of the yard, the flooring of beams, formed a great couch on which the light reposed, streaked here and there with the slender black shadows which edged the different ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... transmitted to a later generation in a dish known as "mincemeat a la Matius" (minutal Matianum).[148] He passes out of the pages of history in the writings of Pliny the Elder as the man who "invented the practice of clipping shrubbery."[149] To him, then, we perhaps owe the geometrical figures, and the forms of birds and beasts which shrubs take in the modern English garden. His memory is thus ever kept green, whether in a way that redounds to his credit or not is left for ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... the money at the sight of his lost love, whose preciousness in his eyes was increasing in geometrical progression with each new incident that reminded him of their hopeless division. Brimming with the subtilized misery that he was capable of feeling, he followed the opposite way towards ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... been shaped in the past, Art tells us how it should be shaped in the future. Professor Geddes, in fact, envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and aesthetic perceptions. For the human shell is not merely geometrical and architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities; it holds and expresses all those differences by which we are exalted above the bee or the beaver. It is coloured with our emotions and ideals, and contorted with all the spirals of our history. And all these manifestations of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... 16). But one can easily imagine that once the idea of Number became associated with that of the knowable in things, a wide field of detailed development and experiment, so to speak, in the arcana of nature, seemed to be opened. Every arithmetical or geometrical theorem became in this view another window giving light into the secret heart of things. Number became a kind of god, a revealer; and the philosophy of number a kind of religion or mystery. And this is why the {26} second grade of disciples were called Mathematicians; ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... calculus of to-day. The conceptions of geometry have likewise evolved until to-day mathematicians speak of configurated bodies in fourth and higher dimensions of space, which are beyond the powers of perception, even though in a sense they exist conceptually. The behavior of geometrical examples in one dimension leads to the characteristics of bodies in two dimensions. Upon these facts are constructed the laws of three-dimensional space which serve to carry mathematical thought to the remoter conceptual spaces of which we have spoken. It may seem that we are ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... quietly writing here at eleven o'clock last night when old Prudence Baldwin, his housekeeper, last saw him. Afterward Dr. Herrick appears to have diverted himself by taking away the mats and chalking geometrical designs upon the floor, as well as by burning some sort of incense in ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... barometers were broken at an early stage of the expedition; the height however of some principal points had been previously obtained, and is marked on the chart; these in two instances were verified by geometrical measurement, and the difference was found to be too trilling to be noticed. The conveyance of such delicate instruments is always attended with great risk, and in our case peculiarly so, our means being only those of horseback. I am afraid that a method of constructing ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... open. He slipped through, and found himself in a splendid hall, far more splendid, he feared, than the forest, there was so much more gilding everywhere, and even the floor was made of great coloured stones, fitted together into a sort of geometrical pattern. But the little Infanta was not there, only some wonderful white statues that looked down on him from their jasper pedestals, with sad blank eyes and ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... phases; in a given volume, matter ought so to arrange itself that the total sum of free energy has a minimum value. Thus, in order to elucidate all questions relating to the number and qualities of the phases into which the substance divides itself, we are led to regard the geometrical surface which for a given temperature represents ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... by the inconceivably momentous relations subsisting between our own and other planets and their common centre; amidst whose sublime and solemn phenomena science has most clearly discovered that everything is accurately adjusted by geometrical precision of force and movement; where the chances of error are infinite, and the proofs of intelligence, therefore, equal. These proofs of design in each fragment of the universe, and in all combined, are continually further multiplied by every fresh discovery, whether in the minute or the vast—by ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... hand of nature. The hard, level, sandy beach, swept clean and smooth by the ceaseless action of the tides, stretched out far as the eye could reach in one long, bold, monotonous line. Like the whole coast of Flanders and of Holland, it seemed drawn by a geometrical rule, not a cape, cove, or estuary breaking the perfect straightness of the design. On the right, just beyond high-water mark, the downs, fantastically heaped together like a mimic mountain chain, or like tempestuous ocean-waves suddenly changed to sand, rolled wild and confused, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Spenser a central artistic motive of the piece. The eclogues are arranged with no small skill and care on somewhat of an architectural design, or perhaps we should rather say with somewhat of the symmetry of a geometrical pattern. This will best be seen in a brief analysis of the several eclogues, 'proportionable,' as the title is careful to inform us, 'to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... [Greek: diagraphein], to mark out by lines), a figure drawn in such a manner that the geometrical relations between the parts of the figure illustrate relations between other objects. They may be classed according to the manner in which they are intended to be used, and also according to the kind of analogy which we recognize between the diagram and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... attitude. Philo is not original in his views concerning numbers, not above nor below the loose thinking of his age. He accepts unquestioningly the potency of seven, because of its marvellous mathematical properties, ratios, etc., its geometrical efficacy, and because of the seven periods of life from infancy to old age, of the seven parts of the body, the seven motions, the seven strings of the lyre, the seven vowels, and the very name, which is ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... assumed to eyes that watched over the trembling interests of man. The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... At 32 deg. Fahrenheit, and far below that temperature, oxygen and hydrogen are elastic gaseous bodies, whose particles tend to rush away from one another with great force. Water, at the same temperature, is a strong though brittle solid, whose particles tend to cohere into definite geometrical shapes, and sometimes build up frosty imitations of the most complex forms of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... IRREGULAR SHAPES.—These Blocks are made up of geometrical figures, cut with mathematical precision from fine maple wood. They are very instructive, and are often used in schools for drawing exercises and geometrical illustrations. They will make finished architectural designs, such ...
— The Nursery, January 1877, Volume XXI, No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... be doubted that MR. WILKINSON has traced with singular acumen the manner in which the spirit of geometrical research was diffused amongst the operative classes, and the class immediately above them—the exciseman and the country schoolmaster. Still it is not to be inferred, that even these classes did not contain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... question before me, I must say a word of the road that I shall traverse. When Pascal approached a geometrical problem, he invented a method of solution; to solve a problem in philosophy a method is equally necessary. Well, by how much do the problems of which philosophy treats surpass in the gravity of their results those discussed by geometry! How much more imperatively, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... thought that, by imagining the existence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter, and another between Venus and Mercury, he might be able to attain his object; but he found that this assumption afforded him no assistance. Kepler then imagined that as there were five regular geometrical solids, and five planets, the distances of the latter were regulated by the size of the solids described round one another. The discovery afterwards of two additional planets testified to the absurdity of this speculation. A description of these extraordinary researches was published, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... wandered back to bygone times, while I, not wishing to interrupt her, had taken the poker in my hand and with it was tracing geometrical figures in the peat-ash on the hearthstone. So absorbed was I in my circles and pentagons that I did not notice that Grannie had stopped short in her story, and was taking a lively interest in what I was doing. It was ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... points. This dome we understand to be the complement or completing part of a correspondent dome on the other side of the world. It follows that we are in the heart of a hollow sphere of loveliest blue, spangled with light. Now the sphere is the one perfect geometrical form. Over and round us then we have the one perfect shape. I do not say it is put there for the purpose of representing God; I say it is there of necessity, because of its nature, and its nature is its relation to God. It is of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... terms employed, the more I am satisfied that they have entirely and radically different meanings in the minds of those who use them. Yet they deal with them as if they were as definite as mathematical quantities or geometrical figures. What would become of arithmetic if the figure 2 meant three for one man and five for another and twenty for a third, and all the other numerals were in the same way variable quantities? Mighty intelligent correspondence business men would ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... then," I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses—almost like geometrical figures. Nothing more." ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Science of Calculation, and then his Analysis Demonstrated; but I never went far enough thoroughly to understand the application of algebra to geometry. I was not pleased with this method of performing operations by rule without knowing what I was about: resolving geometrical problems by the help of equations seemed like playing a tune by turning round a handle. The first time I found by calculation that the square of a binocular figure was composed of the square of each of its parts, and double the product of one by the other; ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... a stick, and drew in the sand the geometrical problem of which he had spoken. It is one of the simplest. No sooner had he done so than the Martians set ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... Mayence, and at Strasbourg, were at work upon a machine which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions. Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441. Schoeffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to such perfection that books were soon printed ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... time, he had thought, and be bored during the wasting, by studying grammar if one could already talk intelligibly to people? And why should one not revel in complicated problems of figures and geometrical designs that really took some hard thinking to work out, if hard thinking was just ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... designed by H. Woodyer, Esq., in the Geometrical style of Decorated architecture, and comprises a nave and aisles 60 feet long and 50 feet in width, a handsome chancel, a south porch, and tower 80 feet high. It is built in the ornamented parts and internally of Bath stone, the exterior being the gritstone of the neighbourhood. The ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... thought that the Essay on 'Population' had not confuted them. Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German statistic, and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground, namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional nutriment only in arithmetical ratio—and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise. I have here ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... thus the object which is the sum total of objects situated in an event as thus inter-related is a mere abstract concept. Again a right-angle is a perceived object which can be situated in many events; but, though rectangularity is posited by sense-awareness, the majority of geometrical relations are not so posited. Also rectangularity is in fact often not perceived when it can be proved to have been there for perception. Thus an object is often known merely as an abstract relation not directly posited in sense-awareness although ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... have happened more happily. You would say there was in that place Plato's academy; but I do his house an injury in comparing it to Plato's academy, where there were only disputations of numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes of moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school or university of Christian religion; for, though there is none therein but readeth and studyeth the liberal sciences, their special care is piety ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... marvellous sky, a sort of limpid sapphire, set in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by those audacious slender towers. We are in the religious East of olden days and we feel how the mystery of this magnificent court—whose architectural ornament consists merely in geometrical designs repeated to infinity, and does not commence till quite high up on the battlements, where the minarets point into the eternal blue—must cast its spell upon the imagination of the young priests ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... mosque of Barkuk in the cemetery of Kait Bey, are instances of the second and more matured style of the period. The simple plain ashlar masonry still predominates, but the wall surface is broken up with sunk panels, sometimes with geometrical patterns in them. The principal characteristics of this second period are the magnificent portals, rising sometimes, as in the mosque of sultan Hasan, to 80 or 90 ft., with elaborate stalactite vaulting at the top, and the deep stalactite cornices which crown the summit of the building. The decoration ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... histories, whose figures never project, whose colours are separate as those in a mosaic. The Giottesque frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague figures dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples; their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths; cover the walls, the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures, outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being stencilled, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... popular historian would have us believe one spent his entire life in chopping down acorn trees and the other splitting them up into rails. Washington could not tell a story. Lincoln always could. [Laughter.] And Lincoln's stories always possessed the true geometrical requisites, they were never too long, and never too broad. [Laughter.] He never forgot a point. A sentinel pacing near the watchfire while Lincoln was once telling some stories quietly remarked that "He had a mighty powerful memory, but an ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... more probable by the existence of a specifically Islamic concentration on the astrolabe, and on its planetary companion instrument, the equatorium, as devices for mechanizing computation by use of geometrical analogues. The ordinary planispheric astrolabe, of course, was known in Islam from its first days until almost the present time. From the time of al-Biruni (ca. 1000)—significantly, perhaps, he is well known for his travel account of ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... had had the utmost tangibility in the mind of Dalton. He had all along represented the different atoms by geometrical symbols—as a circle for oxygen, a circle enclosing a dot for hydrogen, and the like—and had represented compounds by placing these symbols of the elements in juxtaposition. Berzelius proposed to improve upon this method by substituting for the geometrical symbol the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... he looked so masterful and independent that she hadn't the courage. It gave her quite a thrill as he took her hand and led her out through the low window to the great stone terrace. They passed down the terrace steps into a garden ablaze with tulip beds in geometrical patterns; at the foot ran a yew hedge, and beyond it, in a side-walk, they came upon a scullion boy chasing a sulphur-yellow butterfly. The Grand Duke forgot his fine manners, and dropped his bride's hand to join in the chase; but ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sensible degree. The obvious explanation is, that the conditions of life have been very favorable, and that there has consequently been less destruction of the old and young, and that nearly all the young have been enabled to breed. In such cases the geometrical ratio of increase, the result of which never fails to be surprising, simply explains the extraordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion of naturalized productions in their ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Huxley defines his use of the word "archetype" at page 50: "All that I mean is the conception of a form embodying the most general propositions that can be affirmed respecting the Cephalous Mollusca, standing in the same relation to them as the diagram to a geometrical theorem, and like it, at once, imaginary and true.") (in your sense, for I detest the word as used by Owen, Agassiz & Co.) of each great class, I cannot doubt, is one of the very highest ends of Natural History; and certainly most interesting to the worker-out. Several of your remarks have ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... definite decision is arrived at. Hence, although the planning of a novel must be left to the individual author, the structure of a short-story may be considered as a matter impersonal and absolute, like the working out of a geometrical proposition. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... was appropriately called, was more often a farmhouse industry, which accounts for its narrow limits, since, with choice of material, even a small familiarity with geometrical design might bring good results. It might have easily become good domestic art. Geometrical borders in two colors would have taken their place in decorative work, and the applied work, so often ventured upon, ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... individual, had not been already in itself a character, and had not constituted a well-marked distinct personality, almost unique in kind, Moore would have been at variance with the most profound moralists, who agree that human nature never has the simplicity of a geometrical figure, and that, in reality, characters always are mixed, complicated, composed of opposite elements of incompatible inclinations and passions. For Moore appears to think that men are almost always swayed by one chief passion, round which, as round a pivot, life ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... of the Lady Chapel contains a central window of three lights and geometrical tracery, with a lancet window on the right and left. The mouldings of these side windows are not exactly alike, that on the right (of the spectator) being extremely plain, while the other is supported by slender shafts, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... sufficient to contain the multitude thereof? At present all the collections of the Museum, books, etc., occupy only forty acres on the soil, and an average of two hundred feet towards the sky. But even these outlines indicate a block of space which under geometrical increase would in the shortest of geological periods make a more complete conquest of the earth than has ever been made by fire or water. To say nothing of the sorrows of the composition of these new literary stores, how is man, whose years are threescore-and-ten, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... arrangement is independent of all the others; for it is based upon taking St Paul's as a centre, and drawing circles around this at a definite number of miles' radius; and the metropolis is thus made expansible on geometrical principles. Then the parliamentary limit is sui generis; for the metropolis here comprises the City of London, the city of Westminster, the borough of Southwark, and the five modern boroughs of Marylebone, Finsbury, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, and Lambeth—a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... barbarism, but dominant, triumphant, issues forth from darksome crypts and soars upward,—elevates her vaulted roofs. "The Oriental ogive appears.... The architects heap arcade on arcade, ogive on ogive, pyramid on pyramid, and give to all geometrical symmetry and artistic grace.... The Greek column is there, but dilated to colossal proportions, and exfoliated in a variegated capital." The old Roman arch disappears, and the pointed arch is substituted,—graceful and elevated. The old Egyptian obelisk appears in the spire ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive of the situation, not communicably. The most vivid and persistent was a triangle. Interpret who may. The one beheld the two pass from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... LAND, EGYPT, NUBIA, &c.; Digby Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (of both of which the lithographic stones will be destroyed during the progress of the sale); Digby Wyatt's Metal Work, and its Artistic Design; Kirby Wyatt's Geometrical Mosaics of the Middle Ages; Darrell's China, India, and the Cape, coloured and mounted; Nash's Mansions of England in the Olden Time; Gruner's Specimens of Ornamental Art; Muse Royal (picked proofs before the letters); Richardson's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... minutely and truthfully some years ago; he showed quite clearly,—and although he was much abused for his conclusions at the time, they have never yet been disproved and never will be—he showed that in consequence of the increase in the number of organic beings in a geometrical ratio, while the means of existence cannot be made to increase in the same ratio, that there must come a time when the number of organic beings will be in excess of the power of production of nutriment, and that thus some check must arise to the further increase of those organic ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... diagonally, hung with red and amber bulbs. Around the chimneys had been massed evergreen trees in tubs, hiding their brick-and-mortar ugliness, and among the trees tiny lights were strung. Along the parapet were rows of geometrical boxwood plants in bright red crocks, and the flaps of a crimson and white tent had been thrown open, showing lights within, and rugs, wicker chairs, ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with respect to a conic would remain tangent to another cubic curve. This is not the case, however, and the investigations of Poncelet and others to determine the class of a given curve were afterward completed by Pluecker. The notion of geometrical transformation led also to the very important developments in the theory of invariants, which, geometrically, are the elements and configurations which are not affected by the transformation. The anharmonic ratio of four points is such an invariant, since it remains unaltered ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... pen and ink and paper; the papers were scribbled over with beginnings of plans of action, rough drafts of proclamations and manifestos. Most of these were scratched out, as their futility became evident, and the rest of the sheet covered with absent-minded geometrical designs, as the writers sat despondently listening while Minister after Minister proposed chimerical schemes. I took one of these scribbled pages, in the hand writing of Konovalov, which read, "The Provisional Government appeals to all classes ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... found in text and reference books, as well as the geometrical diagrams used in mathematical and scientific works, are made by what is known as the ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... northeastern blast, to be a whirlwind; and the beautiful hues of the iris, bright with hope and promise, play upon the melting clouds in the segment of a circle. The eagle soars toward the heavens in curves, as though measuring the angles of distant objects by geometrical figures; and the drunkard, when unable longer to control his movements, describes a curvilinear path as he reels homeward from his revels, and waits at his bed-side to catch hold of a post as it "comes round again." Those German principalities which are ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... England, provided only that behind the eye which looks there is something to which a landscape of that peculiar character answers. There is, for example, the wide, dome-like expanse of the sky, there is the distance, there is the freedom and there are the stars on a clear night. The orderly, geometrical march of the constellations from the extreme eastern horizon across the meridian and down to the west has a solemn majesty, which is only partially discernible when their course ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... not bring you back to the starting point. Other poets still adhere to form, though the pattern must be elaborate enough to hide its scheme from the casual reader, and sufficiently elastic to provide space for sentiment and pathos. In his sixty-eighth poem Catullus employs what might be called a geometrical pattern, in fact a pyramid of unequal steps. He mounts to the central theme by a series of verses and descends on the other side by a corresponding series. In the sixty-fourth poem, however, the epyllion ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... our picture are geometrical figures, nevertheless geometry can obviously say nothing at all about their actual form and position. The network, however, is purely geometrical; all its properties can be given a priori. Laws like the principle of sufficient ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... prerogative, which the king offered on June 23, went far; but the people demanded surrender in regard to privilege. The Assembly, submitting to the geometrical reasoning of Sieyes and to the surprise of the Tennis Court, had frightened him into an alliance with the nobles, and he linked his cause to theirs. He elected to stand or fall with interests not his own, with an order ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... is the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of man: does it suit his nature in general?—does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?" He could not bear to think of having legislative or political arrangements shaped or vindicated by a delusive geometrical accuracy of deduction, instead of being entrusted to "the natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, generally fall into ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Pointed arches. Pillars with detached shafts. Moulded or carved capitals. Narrow and high pointed windows. Later period—Geometrical trefoil and circular ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... For he was, in his own eyes, a humble plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind of sacredness that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase. It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee, what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a shilling to the sight. It was in the air that he lived in—that all ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... site where had been the hive of huts wrapped in the green arms of the banana plantation, laboured under the incandescent sun gangs of prisoners under armed guards upon the building of larger huts laid out in streets, broad and geometrical, lined with correct ditches for drainage. Around the outskirts here and ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... and the rows of lights should have been parallel—should never have met—and now they met at an angle inside the black hull of the ship. There was nothing else to indicate she was injured; nothing but this apparent violation of a simple geometrical law—that parallel lines should "never meet even if produced ever so far both ways"; but it meant the Titanic had sunk by the head until the lowest portholes in the bows were under the sea, and the portholes in the stern were lifted above the normal ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... well to remark that a strategic point is not necessarily a geometrical point; an entire province, or a considerable portion of a geographical frontier, is, in military language, sometimes denominated a point. In the same way, strategic lines, instead of being mathematical lines, are frequently many ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... forth the Geometrical Distribution of Foliage, Flowers, Fruit. &c., with 20 Original Designs for decorating Cornices, Spandrils, Crosses, Corbels, Capitals, Bosses, Panels, &c. By W. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... It now remains for me to show what course is marked out for us by reason, which of the emotions are in harmony with the rules of human reason, and which of them are contrary thereto. But, before I begin to prove my Propositions in detailed geometrical fashion, it is advisable to sketch them briefly in advance, so that everyone may more readily ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... De Candolle's war of nature,—seeing contented face of nature,—may be well at first doubted; we see it on borders of perpetual cold{54}. But considering the enormous geometrical power of increase in every organism and as every country, in ordinary cases must be stocked to full extent, reflection will show that this is the case. Malthus on man,—in animals no moral [check] restraint ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... observed that these different orders are not to be understood precisely as the geometrical figures indicate them. A general who would expect to arrange his line of battle as regularly as upon paper or on a drill-ground would be greatly mistaken, and would be likely to suffer defeat. This is particularly true as battles are now fought. In ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... prepared to climb into the narrow bedstead, which he shared with his brother Laurens. He was now in a tranquil frame of mind. He didn't even have any desire to romp with Laurens, who, without laying claim to geometrical knowledge, usually managed to find the ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat, your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but the geometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturb your "philosophic proposition." The point is, I love that in you more than I love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as something apart from our relationship offends me, excites forebodings. ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... may almost say the feeling for amusement, that inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become at any rate, with this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there is an unfailing charm in walking past them while they lift their great acres of geometrical mosaic higher in the air than you have time or other occasion to look. You greet them from the deep street as you greet the side of a mountain when you move in the gorge—not twisting back your head to keep looking at ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... to measure, and draw a pen line with some steadiness (the geometrical exercises for this purpose being properly school, not University work), you shall have a series of studies from the plants which are of chief importance in the history of art; first from their real forms, and then from the conventional and heraldic expressions ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... interpreting more complex thought-forms and mental states. The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, and those of private investigators as well, have shown us that a picture of a complicated geometrical design held in the mind of one person may be carried to and received by the mind of another person, who reproduces the design on paper. In the same way, complicated thoughts have been transmitted and received. But these are only exceptional cases. In many cases this sense seems almost dead ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... halls, libraries, galleries filled with family portraits; elaborate, formal bedrooms where famous sovereigns had slept, all roped off and carpeted with canvas strips to protect the floors. Through mullioned windows we caught glimpses of gardens and geometrical parterres, lakes, fountains, statuary, fantastic topiary and distant stretches of park. Maude sighed with admiration, but did not covet. She had me. But I was often uncomfortable, resenting the vulgar, gaping tourists with whom we were herded and the easy familiarity of the guides. These ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Every phrase in his letter seemed, to Bernard, to march in stout-soled walking-boots, and nothing could better express his attachment to the process of reasoning things out than this proposal that his friend should come and make a chemical analysis—a geometrical survey—of the lady of his love. "That I shall have any difficulty in forming an opinion, and any difficulty in expressing it when formed—of this he has as little idea as that he shall have any ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... know Esperanto it may seem a dark saying that language riders can be worked out in the same way as geometrical ones. To understand this some knowledge of the language is necessary (for sample problems see Appendix A, p. 200). But for the sake of making the argument intelligible it may here be stated that one of the labour-saving, vocabulary-saving devices of Esperanto is the employment of a number ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... or harass their minds with unaccustomed investigations. We shall, therefore, attempt to show the weakness of the elliptical arch, by arguments which appeal simply to common reason, and which will yet stand the test of geometrical examination. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... I had seen, a disquieting idea forced itself upon me in a geometrical form. It seemed to me that the activity and prosperity of the subjects of the Pope were in exact proportion to the square of the distance which separated them from Rome: in other words, that the shade of the monuments of the eternal city was noxious to the cultivation ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... line is the characteristic of the various and beautiful figures which are seen on a genuine note. This line is produced by what is called the Geometrical Lathe. The patterns made by the geometrical lathe are of every variety of form. They are not engraved directly upon the bank-note plate, but on pieces of soft steel plate, which are afterwards hardened. The impressions are then transferred to a soft steel roller, which, ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... method employed to dispell the illusion. It was suggested that, at the moment of the appearance of the phenomenon, the child be requested to fixate the end of the father's index finger which was revolved, in the air, to form various geometrical figures. This had the desired effect. Clearly we have here a case of the object altering its apparent size without altering its distance. Under normal conditions a change in size is followed by a corresponding change in the distance. It is probable that we have here inadequate convergence ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Chief?" enquired Malcolm Sage, who had discarded the paper-knife and was now busy drawing geometrical figures with the thumb-nail of his right hand upon the ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... handed one to Coronado, and led the way into the silent Casa de Montezuma. They were in a hall about ten feet high, fifteen feet broad, and forty feet long, which evidently ran across the whole front of the building. The walls were hard-finished and adorned with etchings in vermilion of animals, geometrical figures, and nondescript grotesques, all of the rudest design and disposed without regard to order. A doorway led into a small central room, and from that doorways opened into three more rooms, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... may consist of a spherical lens ground with annular rings. In the next section refracting prisms may be used and in the outer section reflecting glass prisms are employed. The various elements are carefully designed according to the laws of geometrical optics. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... perplexity was a part of the old problem of evil: that what daunted her was the old paradox that has confronted mankind since before the time of Job. She understood dimly that the lines between good and ill do not converge any more than unmoral geometrical parallels; but she still felt that it must be possible to limit the consequences of wrong-doing to the evil-doer so that the innocent ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... out at twilight the first Sunday in April, about the time the cutworms go to roost, and take a sharp-pointed stick. We draw lines in the ground with this stick, preferably in a pleasant geometrical pattern that will confuse the birds and other observers. It is important not to do this until twilight, so that no robins or insects can watch you. Then we go back in the house and put on our old trousers, the pair that has holes in each pocket. We fill ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects, glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... right hand, represents Christ with only St. John and Judas and a third disciple whose action is precisely that described in No. 666, Pl. 4. It is hardly necessary to observe that the other sketches on this page and the lines of text below the circle (containing the solution of a geometrical problem) have no reference to the picture of the Last Supper. With this figure of Christ may be compared a similar pen and ink drawing reproduced on page 297 below on the left hand; the original is in the Louvre. On this page again the rest of the sketches have no ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... chess, the war-lord's tactical plan, the evolution of a geometrical theorem, the devising of a great business campaign, the elimination of waste in a factory, the denouement of a powerful drama, the overcoming of an economic obstacle, the scheme for a sublime poem, and the convincing siege of an audience may—nay, indeed must—each be conceived ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... show some realistic motives, such as the fish, birds, and flowers in Fig. 23, No. 1; the snake and lizard in No. 2; the man in No. 5; but the strictly geometrical is dominant in nearly every case. Probably the most typical of this class of work is shown in Nos. 3 and 4 and Fig. 22, Nos. 1, 2, and 3. It should be noted, however, that, where one decorated object is seen, many more entirely plain will be found. In short, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... had left no instructions about me. So for two hours I sat in the waiting-room, balancing my cap on my knee, and trying to work up the spots on the dingy wall-paper into geometrical figures. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... can be no denial of the fact that Space is a constituent of the external world, it would seem to follow that those who hold Sensation to be the only source of our Knowledge must be obliged to affirm the possibility of sensations of Space. Mach indeed claims to distinguish physiological Space, geometrical Space, visual Space, tactual Space as all different and yet apparently harmoniously blended in our Experience. He is, however, sadly wanting in clearness of statement. He never tells us when and where exactly we do have a sensation of Space. ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... soul-history, a sketch of the affecting drama of a man who attains to the conquest of himself, with Bonaventura all this interior action disappears before divine interventions; his heart is, so to speak, the geometrical locality of a certain number of visitants; he is a passive instrument in the hands of God, and we really cannot see why he should have been chosen rather ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... be; Some with the quadrate, some triangle fashion, Some circular, some oval in translation; Some perpendicular in longitude; Some like a thicket for their crassitude; That heights, depths, breadths, triform, square, oval, round, And rules geometrical in Beards ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... to be hoped, on the way to free itself finally from the ugliness of "carpet bedding"—when plants are largely grouped and massed instead of being placed in alternate kinds at regular intervals in geometrical patterns. Present day taste with its appreciation of garden colour, of masses and groups of particular kinds, instead of isolated plants dotted about with irritating regularity, is found beautifully exemplified in the numerous beds ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... fortuitous, but systematic, the atoms forming different compounds by varying their arrangement. But still this is only an hypothesis, wholly gratuitous; an hypothesis which explains nothing, and has not even the merit of being logical. Why does a purely NUMERICAL or GEOMETRICAL difference in the composition and form of atoms give rise to PHYSIOLOGICAL properties so different? If atoms are indivisible and impenetrable, why does not their association, confined to mechanical effects, leave them unchanged in essence? Where is ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... geometrical calculations, and then, by the aid of a barometer, when an ascent has been made. The column of mercury in the instrument falls in proportion as the barometer is carried up the mountain, because the air which presses upon the mercury reservoir ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... in the course of years raised above the caverns which concealed Egypt's mysteries. Everything was gradually accumulated in these underground store-houses,—the engraved talismans, the slabs of stone on which were deeply carved the geometrical and astronomical sciences; indestructible glass chests containing papyri, on which were written the various discoveries made in beneficial drugs, swift poisons, and other medicines. And among these many things were thirty great jars ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... at which a loan increases, accelerating in geometrical progression as time passes. Any loan will double itself at three per cent. in twenty-three and a half years; at seven per cent. in ten and a fourth years, and at ten per cent. in seven and a third years. One dollar loaned for one hundred years, at three per ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... is fully developed geometrical Decorated work. It is loftier than the transepts, and its roof is low pitched. The main part of the rebuilding seems to have been done between 1298 and 1320. The indenture for glazing the great west window is still extant, ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... and from ideas and numbers to persons,—from the heavens to man, from astronomy to physiology; he confuses, or rather does not distinguish, subject and object, first and final causes, and is dreaming of geometrical figures lost in a flux of sense. He contrasts the perfect movements of the heavenly bodies with the imperfect representation of them (Rep.), and he does not always require strict accuracy even in applications of number and figure (Rep.). His mind lingers around the forms of mythology, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... discoveries, some very interesting researches have been made in Egyptian paleography in what is known as the signary.* We reach signs which seem to be disconnected from the known hieroglyphs, and we are probably touching on the system of geometrical signs used from prehistoric to Roman times in Egypt, and also in ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... against,—the least sign of hesitation or uncertainty,—the very danger every European with knowledge of the situation had dinned in our ears. Everybody declared that difficulties were sure to grow on our hands in geometrical proportion to our delays; and it was perfectly known to the respective branches of our Government primarily concerned that while the delay went on it was in neglect of a ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... invention. One pattern follows another with infinite diversity. Even the alcoves, and there are nine, are covered each with different designs, so that the mind is bewildered by their graceful ingenuity. All kinds of geometrical figures are used, enlacing with graceful intricacy, intersecting, combining and dissolving; conventional foliage and fruit, Arabic inscriptions. An industrious person has counted more than one hundred and ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... elevation, which speaks volumes in their behalf. We anticipated at the close of the last Convention, a larger representation and an increased number of delegates; we were not deceived, the number has been tenfold. And we have a right to expect that future Conventions will be increased by a geometrical ratio, until we shall present a body not inferior in numbers to our State Legislatures, and the phenomenon of an oppressed people, deprived of the rights of citizenship, in the midst of an enlightened nation, devising ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... gravest consideration. Nor should it escape our careful notice that the regulations on which all the laws of matter operate, are established on a rigidly accurate mathematical basis. Proportions of numbers and geometrical figures rest at the bottom of the whole. All these considerations, when the mind is thoroughly prepared for them, tend to raise our ideas with respect to the character of physical laws, even though ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... dedicated—one to S. Faith and S. Thomas the Apostle, one to our Lady of Bolton and the other to our Lady of Houghall. The north transept is closed by a large window, which is the work of Prior Fossor, probably about the year 1362. The window is of six lights, and the head contains late geometrical tracery. The architectural feature of this window, especially for its date, is the transom which crosses the mullions, and which is not visible from the exterior. Below the transom is a second inner set of mullions supporting a small gallery, by means of which ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... attendance in the sick-room. There being little or nothing to do, she seemed to spend her time smoothing the wrinkles from the counterpane. Louise lay under a field of virgin white, folded back at an angle of geometrical exactness, and necessitating a readjustment every time ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... We are all now convinced of the existence of America; and so, some three or four hundred years back, was Christopher Columbus—but nobody else. Alone, he proved that mighty continent so probable, from geometrical measurements, and the balance of the world, and tides, and trade-winds, and casual floatsams driven from some land beneath the setting sun, that he was antecedently convinced of the fact: and it would have been a shock to his reason, as well as to his faith, had he found himself able ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... taken from Dr. Oudemann's determinations given in a valuable paper on Mars issued from Mr. Bishop's observatory. But instead of calculating Mars' presentation by the formulae there given, I found it convenient rather to make use of geometrical constructions applied to my 'Charts of the Terrestrial Planets.' Taking Maedler's start-point for Martial longitudes, that is the longitude-line passing near Dawes' forked bay, I found that my results agreed pretty fairly with those ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... sometimes danced along the floor, more commonly sailed gently along, or "moved as if borne on gently heaving waves." This sort of thing was repeated during six weeks. One piece of wood "came from a distant corner of the room towards me, describing what may be likened to a geometrical square, or corkscrew of about eighteen inches diameter.... Never was a piece seen to come in at the doorway." Mr. Bristow deems this period 'the most remarkable episode in my life.' (June 27, 1891.) The phenomena 'did not depend on the presence ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang |
