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Germ   /dʒərm/   Listen
Germ

noun
1.
Anything that provides inspiration for later work.  Synonyms: seed, source.
2.
A small apparently simple structure (as a fertilized egg) from which new tissue can develop into a complete organism.
3.
A minute life form (especially a disease-causing bacterium); the term is not in technical use.  Synonyms: bug, microbe.



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"Germ" Quotes from Famous Books



... may inquire, what control, salutary or otherwise, we can exercise over the skin in reference to its eruption, by adopting certain methods in medicine and hygeine, during the period of invasion or of precursory fever. To foster the germ of the poison, as yet only affecting the inner surfaces, into efflorescence on the outer or cutaneous one, by hot air, warm and heavy clothes, and cordial drinks, is a practice, which, though at one time advocated on what was thought very sufficient theory, is now abandoned ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... appear to the lay mind that a germ would scarcely care to pick a bone when it had fat meat to feed on, but my own recollections bore out my friend's statements. I remembered a man of my acquaintance, an enormously fleshy and unwieldy man, who, fearing apoplexy, undertook a radical scheme of banting. ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... result of sheer accident. That the accidents of life should harmonize with the immutable decrees of Providence, is the great mystery of an honest and thinking mind. The reading accidentally of a fugitive brochure, thrown upon the table of the public library of Algiers, gave me the germ of the idea, which, fructifying and expanding, ultimately led me to the design of visiting and exploring the celebrated Oasis of Ghadames, planted far-away amidst the most appalling desolations of the Great Saharan Wilderness. This should teach us to lower our ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... general form the cathedral should follow. The disposition of the several parts differed in no wise from that which had been followed during centuries before. The requirements of ritual had decided long since what were those essential features of planning to be insisted upon, for the pattern in germ was shown in the arrangement of the Mosaic Tabernacle. In the earliest plans the same distribution of parts was observed, though at a later date the transept was introduced—an idea which no doubt had its origin in some ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette

... effective presentation in the foreground of such later scenes, by the chapter in the second volume describing the meeting between Lysander and the stern mother of his Spartan chief. In Lysander himself, moreover, we have the germ of a singularly dramatic situation. How would Lysander act in the final struggle which his character and fate are already preparing for him, between patriotism and friendship, his fidelity to Pausanias, and his devotion to Sparta? Is Lysander's father intended for that Ephor, who, in the last moment, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... sophisticated stage in the development of thought, after the rise of the problem of epistemology. But Anaxagoras's sharp distinction between the material of the world on the one hand, and the author of its order and evolution on the other, is in itself worthy of notice. It contains the germ of a recurrent philosophical dualism, which differs from pluralism in that it finds two and only two fundamental divisions of being, the physical, material, or potential on the one hand, and the mental, formal, or ideal ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... inferior to him. This galling thought usually drives him into an attitude of indifference or of openly expressed contempt for his audience. The mood is apparent at the very beginning of the romantic period. The germ of such a feeling is to be found even in so modest a poet as Cowper, who maintains that his brother poets, rather than the unliterary public, should pass upon his worth.[Footnote: See To Darwin.] But the average poet of the last ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... sent forth to find the soil for its coming growth, is dragged by a stout horse to the sea-shore; and as it oscillates from side to side like a balloon trying to walk, I shall say something of its internal constitution, and principally of its germ; for, regarded as the seed of my story, a pale boy of thirteen is the germ of the cart. First, though he will be of little use to us afterwards, comes a great strong boy of sixteen, who considerably despises this mode of locomotion, believing himself quite capable of driving his mother in the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... cheese is apt to be tasteless unless some of the milk flavor cooked out is put back in, as wheat germ is now returned to white bread. Almost every country has a cooked cheese all its own, with or without caraway, such as ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not exist, as a germ at ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... associations and the circumstances in which he found her, vanished as he drew near to the simple, essential womanhood. His heart saw hers and loved it; and he knew that, the centre once gained, he could, as from the fountain of life, as from the innermost secret of the holy place, the hidden germ of power and possibility, transform the outer intellect and outermost manners as he pleased. With what a thrill of joy, a feeling for a long time unknown to him, and till now never known in this form or with this ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... a note verbale handed by the Foreign Secretary to the Papal Nuncio at Berlin. Germany, if this statement is correct, now proposes to spoil the future of Belgium by splitting the nation into two administrative districts, Flemish and Walloon, thus injecting the poison-germ of disunion into the body politic. She also demands "the right to develop her economic interests freely in Belgium, especially in Antwerp," and a guarantee that "any such menace as that which threatened Germany [from Belgium!] in 1914 shall ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... Hence, the primordial cell germ of the Nigritians has no more potency than what is sufficient to form a being with physical power, when its dynamism becomes exhausted, dropping the creature in the wilderness with the mental organization ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... not any other harm occurs. In literature, the great feminine figures, George Sand, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, George Eliot—all were banned and at least one—the first—was out of the pale. Creative thought has in it the germ of masculinity. Genius in a woman, as we usually describe genius, means masculinity, which, of all things, to real men is abhorrent in woman. True genius in woman is the antithesis of the qualities that make genius in man; ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... sincere. Large mute tears trembled in her eyelashes as she sat gazing tenderly at him, and in the depth of her soul the wish awoke that she might have been able to return this great and strong love of his; for she felt that in this love lay the germ of a new, of a stronger and better man. She noticed, with a half-regretful pleasure, his handsome figure, his delicately shaped hands, and the noble cast of his features; an overwhelming pity for him ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... effort, was satisfactory as well to those who dissented as to those who sympathized with its positions and arguments. It was fruitful in ideas and suggestions and we doubt not many a woman, and man too, went home that night, with the germ of more active ideas in their heads than had gathered there for a ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... wizard-legend where the magician is saved from his pact with Satan not so much by the counter-charms of the Church as by the purity and steadfastness of Christian maidenhood, and for this reason I think the poet Shelley is right in regarding this legend as 'the true germ of Goethe's Faust.' It is the story of Cyprian and Justina, who were among the many victims of the persecution of the Christians by Diocletian, about 300 A.D. Cyprian was a sorcerer of Antioch whose diabolical arts failed to overcome the sanctity of Justina. He confessed himself ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... detail, contained many admirable provisions for the security of justice; and, in the degree of civil liberty which it accorded to the Roman inhabitants of the country, far transcended those of most of the other barbarians of the north. [4] In short, their simple polity exhibited the germ of some of those institutions, which, with other nations, and under happier auspices, have formed the basis of a ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... which separates us from it. By the former, we treat each other as associates; by the latter, as strangers, not to say enemies. This distinction, which is constantly met with throughout the three memoirs, contained already, in germ, the idea which gave birth to the "System of Economical Contradictions," which appeared in 1846, the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... Bot. Fr.,' ix, p. 281. The author points out seven grades between complete absence of petals and their presence in the normal number in this plant. See also Gaudin, in 'Koch. Fl. Helv.;' Koch. 'Synops. Fl. Germ.;' Cramer, ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... something to take home with him and wrestle out for himself in spare moments; that is, he would have had but for one thing: As he slowly looked around for his horse he came to himself with a sharp jerk, and hot profanity routed the germ of religion incubating in his soul. His horse was missing! Here was a pretty mess, he thought savagely; and then his expression of anger and perplexity gave way to a flickering grin as the probable solution came to ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... they used supplied fuel to the consuming fire of his imagination. Secondly he began to read books professing to bear upon the mysteries of dreaming and of mental phenomena generally, with the result that every wild imagination of every crank or half-crazy philosopher became a living germ of unrest in the fertilising soil of his disordered brain. Thus negatively and positively all things began to work to a common end. Not the least of his disturbing causes was Saft Tammie, who had now become at ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... comes from God complete in its possibilities, but at the beginning all is in germ. As life progresses, development of these possibilities proceeds, but it is not uniform. The body acquires ability to control the larger muscles before it can adjust the finer and more complex ones, as instanced in the child's ability ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... really started the germ of his life-work, he, like his father, had the idea that he would live to an enormous age; and he was in high spirits about the pecuniary side of his transaction with ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... pool room? Do you know that the only exercise a lot of your poor clerks, assistants and factory workers get is standing around on the street corners, that the only drama and comedy they ever see is in a dirty, stinking, germ-infected, dismal little movie theater in the slums; that the only music they ever hear is in the back room of a Raines Law hotel ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... movement of that day. It is true that a religion need not be a philosophy, but it must not owe philosophy any answer. Small as may be the emphasis that we now lay on the Logos doctrine, in that period it was the centre, the vital germ of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any of the writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church fathers, we shall be surprised to see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) as a fixed point of departure, ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... weak-brained enthusiasts undertook to bring about the millennium, by associating together, cultivating the earth, and "dibbling beans" for the New Jerusalem market, is regarded by our author as the "germ of Quakerism;" and furnishes an occasion for sneering at "my poor friend Dryasdust, lamentably tearing his hair over the intolerance of that old time ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... coarseness. Yet this has not been for lack of material, but of a proper editorial faculty, and from the want of a habitude or a willingness on the part of those who conceive clever things to note them down and give them out in black and white. When "Vanity Fair" first appeared, we thought we saw in it the germ of a journal which might be an exponent of our national spirit of mirthfulness, and we took occasion to say so briefly. We have not been disappointed. The five volumes which have already been published ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... passion of humanity strength enough to make it a living and infallible principle of morality in every man, when we consider, first, what an ardent enthusiasm he demanded from his followers, and secondly, how frail and tender a germ this passion naturally is in human nature. Widely diffused indeed it is, and seldom entirely eradicated; but for the most part, at least in the ancient world, it was crushed under a weight of predominant passions and interests; it had seldom ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... considered efforts have often failed, from a want of strength in those unhappy ones to bear up against the sting of shame and the frigidness of the world, which makes them seek oblivion again in their old excitements,—you will at least leave a germ of love and justice in their hearts, that will prevent their becoming utterly embittered and corrupt." And you may learn the preventives for those yet uninjured. These will be found in a diffusion of ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... of a Millennial reign which is to supersede it, or through the sceptical belief that our religion has only an historic value, and needs remodelling to meet the requirements of advancing civilization. If the latter was the meaning of this utterance of the Franciscan book, the idea was the germ of the modern conception of the function of Christianity in "the education of the race," the first statement of which ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... the eggs are all alike, and the subsequent treatment makes either workers, drones, or queens, and look to analogy for support, we shall find much against, as well as for it. For instance, we find in almost every department of animated nature, that the sex of the germ of a future being is decided before being separated from the parent, as the eggs of fowls, &c. Another fact, some queens (averaging one in sixty or eighty) deposit eggs that produce only drones,[8] whether in worker or drone-cells, proving that sex is decided in this case beyond controversy. ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... went downhill again, always at Guendolen's election; and thus came to the creek, which babbled across the roadway and was overhung with thick foliage that lisped and whispered cheerfully in the placid light of the declining sun. It was there that the germ of As the Coming of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... hard to isolate as a—as a germ," he complained. "I gave up a perfectly good golf game to see you, and as your father generally calls the dog the moment I appear and goes for a walk, I thought ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... lymph. In the end I was able to force the authorities to have the contents of tubes obtained from the same source examined microscopically and subjected to the culture test. They were proved to contain the streptococcus or germ of erysipelas. ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... not supernatural. How shall half-way judge of journey done? Shall this germ and protoplast of being Rest mid-life and say ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman

... whom we will now call Mary Bartley, since everybody but her father, who generally avoided her name, called her so, was a well-grown girl of thirteen, healthy, happy, beautiful, and accomplished. She was the germ of a woman, and could detect who loved her. She saw in Hope an affection she thought extraordinary, but instinct told her it was not like a young man's love, and she accepted it with complacency, and returned it quietly, with now and then a gush, for she could gush, and why not? "Far ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade

... same bird, and bore the egg from which its parent was to have birth. So religions have assumed the guise in turn of self-love, sex-love, love of country and love of humanity, cherishing in each the germ of that highest love which alone is the parent of its last and only ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... preached this doctrine, or the germ of it; there's no telling how much the faithful have added themselves. The local authorities picked him up at once, of course. Apparently they were convinced that he meant it; he was never released. He was put to death, and his body buried ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick

... digested the works entitled Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist,— to such a reader everything in this volume will be perfectly clear and comprehensible. In the attack on Strauss he will immediately detect the germ of the whole of Nietzsche's subsequent attitude towards too hasty contentment and the foolish beatitude of the "easily pleased"; in the paper on Wagner he will recognise Nietzsche the indefatigable borer, miner and underminer, seeking to define his ideals, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... potent attraction of sympathy? I do not mean nearness in the sense of memory or imagination, but that actual propinquity of spirit which I suppose implied in the recognition of Presence. Nor do I refer to any volition which is dependent on the known action of the brain, but to a hidden faculty, the germ perhaps of some higher faculty, now folded within the present life like the wings of a chrysalis, which looks through or beyond the material existence, and obtains a truer and finer perception of the spiritual than can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... line was the comparatively negative one of winning such concessions from the State as would make action possible, the other was personal action to be taken without any State aid or even encouragement. The germ of recovery lay in human nature. If you get poison out of a man's system "the time will come when he himself will think he would like a little ordinary food. If things even begin to be released they will begin to recover." To the question did Chesterton ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... believe that such a scourge as yellow fever could not have been long neglected by medical investigators, and so we find that from the earliest days, when the germ-theory of disease took its proper place in modern science, a search for the causative agent of this infection was ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... "Those holes look sort of chewed through. Whatever did the chewing was also apparently capable of sealing up the portion behind it as it went along. What it did to the men when it got inside we don't know. Mantelish feels we might compare it roughly to the effects of ordinary germ invasion. It doesn't really matter. It ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz

... course. They'd better not be! But—Mrs. Herbert came to see me yesterday afternoon. She wasn't at the luncheon and Grace got the first rap, but most of her hatefulness she took out on you. She's worse than a germ disease. I always feel I ought to be disinfected after I see her. If she were a leper she wouldn't be allowed at large, and she's much more deadly. People like that ought to be ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... Suffice it to say that on the 24th day of June there crept cautiously into the harbor of St. John a little French ship; she was a paltry craft, smaller than many of our coasting schooners, but she carried the germ of an empire for de Monts, Champlain and Poutrincourt, the founders of New France, were on ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... and magnesium, may thus be identified by the colours they produce when incandescent. In this simple observation lies the germ of the modern method of research known as spectrum analysis. We may now examine with the prism the colours of the sun and the colours of the stars, and from this examination we can learn something of the materials which enter into their composition. We are not restricted to the use of merely a single ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... maintaining an existence by its side. This is true not only with regard to that antagonistic principle which is now desperately but hopelessly waging a suicidal war within the bosom of the great republic; but it is equally true with regard to that insidious germ of despotism, which threatens to push its way through the soil of a neighboring country, displacing the free institutions which have long and sadly languished amid the civil wars of a most unhappy people. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... childhood. For He knew as no finite being can, the marvellous powers that sleep in the soul of the young child; the great affections which are to be the foundation of eternal bliss, or eternal pain, that exist in embryo within; the mysterious ideas that lie in germ far down in its lowest depths,—He knew, as no finite creature is able, what is in the child, as well as in the man, and therefore was interested in its being and its well-being. But besides this, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... where—imaginary steps being leisurely ascended—imaginary papers were glanced at, imaginary scandal was discussed with elderly shakings of the head, and—regrettable to say—imaginary glasses were lifted lipwards. Heaven only knows how the germ of this dreary pastime first found way into his small-boyish being. It was his own invention, and he was proportionately proud of it. Meanwhile, Charlotte and I, crouched in the window-seat, watched, spell-stricken, the whirl and eddy and drive of the innumerable snow-flakes, wrapping ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... vault. And yet they were marvellous pioneers, these architects. They had already succeeded in evolving out of the dark, as it were, a number of conceptions which, from the beginning no doubt, slumbered in mysterious germ in the human brain—the idea of rectitude, the straight line, the right angle, the vertical line, of which Nature furnishes no example, even symmetry, which, if you consider it well, is less explicable still. They employed ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... only, perhaps, will she make use of her wings, but then it will be to fly to her lover. It is strange to see so many things—organs, ideas, desires, habits, an entire destiny—depending, not on a germ, which were the ordinary miracle of the plant, the animal, and man, but on a curious inert substance: a ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... nearly ready, proved both toothsome and plentiful. It consisted of lobsters, clams, and muscles, both cooked and raw, ears of green maize roasted in the husk, and no-cake, that is to say, pounded corn mixed with water and baked in the ashes, the germ and animus of hoe-cake, bannocks, Johnnycake, and all the various forms of maize-bread so well ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... Air Force looked up from his wrist-watch. At his side was a peculiar gnomelike figure, a figure with hunched, twisted back and huge, over-heavy head. This was Professor Singe, and from that ridiculous head had come the germ which had finally expanded into the ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... all deliberate men, he was placidly sanguine. Something in the life of savage sport that he had led had no doubt taught him to rely upon his own nerve and capacity more than do most men. It is the indoor atmosphere that contains the germ ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... proven by Villemin in 1865, who by experential infection transmitted tuberculosis from man to animals and from animal to animal. It was in 1882 that Dr. Robert Koch discovered and proved by inoculation experiments that the disease was caused by a specific germ (Fig. 88). Prior to the experiments by Villemin and Koch, the belief was that tuberculosis was due to heredity, unsanitary conditions and inbreeding. Following discovery of the specific germ and conditions favoring its development and spread, numerous scientifically conducted ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... the curtain; maiden speech; outbreak, onset, brunt; initiative, move, first move; narrow end of the wedge, thin end of the wedge; fresh start, new departure. origin &c. (cause) 153; source, rise; bud, germ &c. 153; egg, rudiment; genesis, primogenesis[obs3], birth, nativity, cradle, infancy; start, inception, creation, starting point &c. 293; dawn &c. (morning) 125; evolution. title-page; head, heading; van &c. (front) 234; caption, fatihah[obs3]. entrance, entry; inlet, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... The germ of Jane's unexpected architectural facility was to be found, perhaps, in Susan Bates's table-cloth drawings; and it had developed during her long labors on those big brown sheets which Bingham's young man had brought so many times both to ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... Domestic Science heart failure, yet it must have been altogether sanitary. Nothing about it was tight enough to harbor a self-respecting germ. It was the rise of twenty feet square, built stoutly of hewn logs, with a sharply pitched board roof, a movable loft, a plank floor boasting inch-wide cracks, a door, two windows and a fireplace that took up a full half of one end. In front of the fireplace ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then it must have been rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old, worn-out ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... produced earthly creatures. (Genesis 2:7; 1 Corinthians 15:47) The same holy power, energy, and influence begat the child Jesus, who was born of his mother Mary. Therefore the life of Jesus was without sin or imperfection. The germ of life of him who was born Jesus was transferred from the spirit plane or nature to the human plane ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford

... sense in which the statement that no literary training is required by the student of photoplay writing is true. Provided he is gifted with an imaginative mind and the native ability to see how an idea or a plot-germ would evolve itself into a climacteric and coherent story, and provided he has the dramatic sense, he can actually learn the rules of construction and produce salable photoplays even if he has by no means the literary ability to write a salable short-story. But he must be a person of ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... those flowers. If I had found—well—what I might have found, oh! he should have had the stick or the dog-whip without stint. But one doesn't practise devil-worship with flowers. It seemed to me some craving after beauty was there, as if the poor germ of a soul groped out of the darkness towards what is fair and sweet. I dared not hound it back into the darkness, close down any dim aspiration after God it might have. So I left its pitiful joss-house inviolate, the moan ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... The germ of life sleeps in the aged hills And stately rivets, And wakes into the life our hearts that thrills And in leaves quivers. The universe is one great reservoir From which man draws of thinking ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir

... the circumstances, where the mere fact of being a woman was enough to give her an occult and supreme significance. And she would be enduring which is the essence of woman's visible, tangible power. Of that I was certain. Had she not endured already? Yet it is so true that the germ of destruction lies in wait for us mortals, even at the very source of our strength, that one may die of too much endurance as well as ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... dust. And every one in the crowded compartment was suffering from Chinese colds; we had them too, contracted at Shanghai. And let me tell you that a Chinese cold is something out of the ordinary. Whatever happens here happens on a grand scale, and these colds, whatever the germ that causes them, are more venomous than anything you've ever known. No wonder the railway station looked good to us; no wonder we were glad to be welcomed back to the old hotel, at the end of such ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... And when he drew nigh unto Connactia, two magicians, the sons of Neyll, the one whereof was named Mael, the other Cabhlait, heard of his approach; and they were both bound in the bonds of Satan, nor were they less germane in the exercise of their evil deeds than in the germ of their native generation. These men by their enchantments covered the whole country with thick darkness for three continual days, whereby they hoped to prevent the entrance of Patrick into that place. But the son of light, in whose heart the ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various

... their innocence, to such a degree that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a crime into their establishment as an element of strength. The spirit of the ambush entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823. The Spanish campaign became in their counsels an argument for force and for adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established elrey netto in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king at home. They fell into ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... stockings, shoes, and cap, which he wore at Zaandam, all in the same apartment; his two favourite dogs, his turning-lathe and tools, with specimens of his workmanship; the iron bar which he forged with his own hand at Olonitz; the Little Grandsire, so carefully preserved, as the first germ of the Russian navy; and the wooden hut in which he lived while superintending the first foundation of Petersburg;—these, and a thousand other tangible memorials, all preserved with the utmost care, speak in most intelligible language the opinion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various

... Girl' was exhibited about the same time, containing the germ of that paradoxical Whistlerian humour lately so fully exemplified in various places about London. It was called 'A Little White Girl' in the catalogue, and yet its colour generally was ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... air, breath or spirit; it is also abstract desire, and here we find the teaching of the Rig-Veda in harmony. "Desire first arose in It which was the primal germ of mind, and which sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered in their hearts to be the bond which connects Entity with non-Entity." The corresponding colour of this letter ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... thought that this statement of policy, admirable as it is at first sight, contained in itself the germ of a political heresy of the first magnitude? Yet so it was. The principle of non-interference, here for the first time enunciated and subsequently followed with fatal effect, could not be applied by a nineteenth-century administration ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... According to this abstract definition it may be said of universal history that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that history. The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such—is free; and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... the other hand, length of life furnishes evidence that physical vigor varies according to the degree to which the mothers at least, at the time of a child's conception, have been under the influence of environmental conditions which assist the germ cells in developing into vigorous babies. Many studies of eminent people show that they are uncommonly long-lived. When deaths in war and by accident are omitted, the average length of life of 11,000 ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... a fell disease of this century called 'snobbery of the soul.' Its germ has been virulently developed in modern cultures from the uncomplex bacillus isolated sixty years ago by the late William Makepeace Thackeray. Precisely as Major Ponto, with his plated dishes and stable-boy masquerading as footman, lied to himself and ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... told stories can be made of distinct educative value in the nursery or kindergarten. They give the child a love of reading, develop in him the germ, at least, of a taste for good literature, and teach him the art of speech. If they are told in simple, graceful, expressive English, they are a direct and valuable object lesson in this ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin

... A germ disease highly contagious and one of the most injurious of those which affect dairy cattle. The money-making value of a herd in which the germs of contagious abortion are permitted to exist will be ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.

... sat for a moment motionless and bewildered; the depth of his woes had no doubt destroyed his powers of belief. Though he was eager in pursuit of his military distinction, of his fortune, of himself, perhaps it was in obedience to the inexplicable feeling, the latent germ in every man's heart, to which we owe the experiments of alchemists, the passion for glory, the discoveries of astronomy and of physics, everything which prompts man to expand his being by multiplying himself ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... she was very thoughtful all that day, and during the days which followed, for she had found out the truth about herself, and a little germ that had been growing in her breast, but of which she had thought little till Daniel Barnett came up and spoke, and made her know she had a heart—a fact of which she became perfectly sure, when the news ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn

... words contain the germ of all duties, all virtues, all charities. They have inspired the humble founder of this Institution. To God alone belong the benefits it may confer. Limited, as to the means of action, the founder has wished that the greatest number possible of his brothers should participate in the succor offered. ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... more questions and remained gloomy; absent-minded rather than thoughtful, feeling in his soul a new anxiety as yet undefined, the secret germ ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... against human kindness. Could you choose your seat in the eternal mansions, it would be among the angels that rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. You can distinguish in another the feeblest light of conscience that ever dimly burned, and see in it the germ of a beautiful light, that may one day, by a little fanning and fostering, shine as a star, and shed a vital heat that may set the machinery of the heart in motion to throw off glorious actions. But let not the man that shams ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... The germ of this Act may be found in a despatch from Henry dated 7th October, 1530; that the system of appeals had been subject to gross abuse is obvious from the fact that the Council of Trent prohibited it (Cambridge Modern Hist., ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... order to burn. This was the only preparation for a house between the Moosehead carry and Chesuncook, but there was no hut nor inhabitants there yet. The pioneer thus selects a site for his house, which will, perhaps, prove the germ of a town. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... ears, laid along the ground, have signalled the royal approach. Ten thousand times ten thousand voices sound the notes of preparation. Everywhere there is hurrying and scurrying. Every tiny, sleeping germ of animal and vegetable life springs to its feet, wide awake, and girded for the race. Now you must be wide awake too, or you will be ignominiously left behind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... the Lord, long ago and from ancient times, had formed such a resolution regarding His people. These words can be referred only to the threatenings of the Pentateuch, which a short-sighted criticism endeavoured to ascribe to a far later period, without considering that the germ of this knowledge of the future is found in the Decalogue also, the genuineness of which is, at present, almost unanimously conceded: "In order that thy (Israel's) days may be long in the land which the Lord ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... approbation of a beloved wife, was well received. Others, with indomitable zeal, took up the work, and finally, after a succession of disappointments and discouragements from causes within and without, the Woman's College, on North College avenue, Philadelphia, starting from the germ of his thought, entered on the career of prosperity it is so well entitled to receive. Though never at any time connected with the college, he regarded its success with the most affectionate interest, considering ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... were a number of monkeys, upon which the fly was being tried. They were in various stages of the disease, but it seemed impossible to tell whether their illness was due to the sleeping sickness germ or was due to tick fever, a common malady among monkeys. In one of the rooms of the laboratory there were natives holding little cages of tsetse flies against the monkeys, which were pinioned to the floor by the natives. The screened cages were held close to the stomach ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... though the germ and type of capitals, is itself (except under some peculiar conditions) both ugly and insecure; b is the first type of capitals which carry light weight; c, of capitals which ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... with Lord Warburton; but if she desired the assurance she felt herself by no means at liberty to provoke it. The girl's father would have qualified this as rank treachery; and indeed Isabel knew that if Pansy should display the smallest germ of a disposition to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... farmer so to maintain his soil that the pore-space is large enough to give him the best results, not only for the storage of moisture, but for the growth and development of roots, and for the entrance into the soil of air, germ life, and other forces that aid in making the soil fit for the habitation of plants. This can always be best accomplished, as will be shown hereafter, by deep plowing, when the soil is not too wet, the exposure ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe

... And there is no more sure foundation for this much-needed House of Praise than the Catholic Church,—the word 'catholic' being applied in its widest sense, meaning a 'Universal' answering to the needs of all;—and I am willing to maintain that the ROMAN Catholic Church has within it the vital germ of a sprouting perfection. If it would utterly discard pomp and riches, if it would set its dignity at too high an estimate for any wish to meddle in temporal or political affairs, if it would firmly trample down all superstition, idolatry and bigotry, and 'use no vain repetition as the heathen ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... attention to that period of Dickens' life which he spent in the blacking factory, with its crude noise, its blatant vulgarity, its vile language that left the small boy Dickens' sick, but with a sickness that discovered his literary genius. The factory was the germ that made the great writer. Chesterton is a true critic of Dickens because he has this somewhat singular insight of seeing the importance of the early miseries of Dickens' life with regard to their influence on his literary output and his queerly favoured delineation of common folks, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... fables. His great charm to me is his style, which is singularly rich and chaste. But I've no doubt whatever, myself, that a great deal of this ancient lore, which we have been accustomed to regard as so much sciolism, not to say pure nonsense, had a germ of truth in it, and that truth I believe we are gradually beginning to re-discover. You see, one mustn't always take the formulas employed by these old writers in their literal sense. Many were purely symbolic, and concealed occult meanings. Now ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks are immune to several germ-infections that ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly—very suddenly—this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... in its main outlines as it still exists; that is, a king, a legislative body representing the people, and a judicial system embodying the germ, at least, of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... other the military functions. This second form began to manifest itself in the Lower Status of barbarism after confederacies were formed, and it became definite in the Middle Status. The office of general, or principal military commander, was the germ of that of a chief executive magistrate, the king, the emperor, and the president. It may be called a government of two powers, namely, the council of chiefs and the general. The third stage was the government of a people or nation by a council of chiefs an assembly ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... higher order, where in his very games the boy learns to exercise presence of mind, daring, and self-command. In our streets and play-grounds, where the humblest or the proudest are at their sports, the germ of the manly spirit is discernible in emulous contention as to who shall bear and forbear, remain at his post, give and take, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... combining, condensing, developing and multiplying the rich products of his research with marvellous facility and skill; now pondering fondly over some piece of exquisite loveliness, brought from an unknown recess, now tracing out the hidden germ of the eldest, and most barbaric theories, and now calling fantastic spirits from the vasty deep, where they have slept since the dawn of reason. The term 'myriad-minded' which he has happily applied to Shakspeare, is ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... finger, and did stir The sleeping soil to effort; whereupon The seed made roots like webs of gossamer, Shot up a stem, and flourished leaf and flower. Now look, O sweet! see what your eyes have done With just one ray of their mysterious power Upon the germ of my heart's passion thrown! Through all my frame steal roots of pure desire: My dreams are blooms that shake ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... the wind of heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does so under the prophetical management of the meteorological office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot be captured by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I should turn ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... fact, try to understand anything of what was happening to her. She was by no means sure that she liked it, but was stiffened into a stubborn resistance to any doubts by the unvoiced objection to it all at home. With an instinct against disproportion, perverse perhaps in this case, but with a germ of soundness in it, she felt confusedly and resentfully that since her home circle was so patently narrow and exaggerated in its standard of personality, she would just have to even things up by being a little less fastidious than was her instinct; and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... controversy which has obtained during the last four decades there has emerged an element of truth—for there lurks a germ of truth in most errors—which has gained almost universal recognition among contemporary men of science, namely, the doctrine of Descent. The fact that living organisms form an ascending series from the less perfect to the more perfect; the further fact that they also form a series ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... no means diminished the weight. He feared that Madame de Cintre was irretrievably lost; and yet, as he would have said himself, he didn't see his way clear to giving her up. He found it impossible to turn his back upon Fleurieres and its inhabitants; it seemed to him that some germ of hope or reparation must lurk there somewhere, if he could only stretch his arm out far enough to pluck it. It was as if he had his hand on a door-knob and were closing his clenched fist upon it: he had thumped, he had called, he had pressed the door with his powerful knee and shaken ...
— The American • Henry James

... which does not lie perdu in the breast of someone of the company. There is often no willing deception; peradventure, no fooling at all: but as you cannot draw water from a dry well, neither can you get a message except the germ of it broods within some soul with which ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various

... summed up in a sentence from Dr. Clouston's Hygiene of Mind: "Play is the real work of children." Froebel calls activity of sense and limb "the first germ," and "play-building and modelling the tender blossoms of the constructive impulse"; and this, he says, is "the moment when man is to be prepared for future industry, diligence and productive activity." ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... interests and things which makes Paris at once a paradise and a hell, quite quelled Lisbeth Fischer. She gave up all idea of rivalry and comparison with her cousin after feeling her great superiority; but envy still lurked in her heart, like a plague-germ that may hatch and devastate a city if the fatal bale of wool is opened in ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ, beautiful. "There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm not a fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know what it means. With you I can do it—I'll go as far as you demand or as you will yourself. Without you—I'll be hanged! And ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... Conversed: one said, "His daughter's prayer prevailed!" The second, "Who may know the ways of God? For this, may many a heart one day rejoice In hope! For this, the gift to many a man Exceed the promise; Faith's invisible germ Quickened with parting breath; and Baptism given, It may be, by ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere

... told us, was the commander of the forces of the palace, and as men from the further cities of Okar—and especially Illall—were less likely to be tainted with the germ of intrigue which had for years infected the household of Salensus Oll, he was sure that we would be welcomed and few questions ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... at all pretty, and one would throw it away as of no account, if he did not know of the precious little germ and its possibilities hidden away inside. We know how, when the warm sunlight shines upon the spot where it has been put away in the earth, when the dews and soft rains fall upon it, something begins to happen down there in the dark; the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... hatred is only a disease; but as sure as man is the standard of all things, to this day all my endeavors to find it have been in vain. Meanwhile I have kept my own house on such a footing that it has become a stronghold of love; in its atmosphere hatred cannot grow, but is nipped in the germ. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... past—barely three months back; or away forward, years, in the future. The present with this dark cruelty of a decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible. He realised now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had at first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt there were two camps, his mother's and his—Fleur's and her father's. It might be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and enmity, but dead things were poisonous till time had cleaned them away. Even ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... of the intellect,—the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion.... These expansions, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.... ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... germ of a thought, which, however, was destined to mull around in his conscious and subconscious mind until it resulted ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... philosophy, too, in showing how carefully we should sift misfortune to the dregs, and ascertain what of benefit we might rescue from the dross, is not to be denied; and the more we reflect on it, the more should we see that the germ of all real consolation is intimately bound up ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... replied. "All love is instinct in the germ. Can you define the yearnings that the mother feels toward her child, the tie that binds son to father? Then you can define the sentiment that attaches me to the land from whose breast I have drawn life. The love of country ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... its appearance. It was at the commencement of September (1899), too late to admit of the seeds ripening before winter. An inspection of the younger heads was made, which revealed three heads with some few rays in the midst of the disk on one plant, the result of the efforts of four years. Had the germ of the mutation lain hidden through all this time? Had it been present, though dormant in the original sample of seed? Or had an entirely new creation taken place during my continuous endeavors? Perhaps as their more ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... thirty or forty yards from the Germ trench in this bit," said Courtenay. "Here, carry my periscope, and when I'm talking to some of the men just take ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... the physical but in the spiritual constitution that the real basis of his character, his health, and longevity is to be found, for the primitive germ or protoplasm of man cannot be distinguished from that of a quadruped or bird. It is the invisible and incalculable life element that contains the potentiality or possibility of existence as a quadruped or a man, as a virtuous or vicious, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various

... acting in simplicity, from a germ of the Divine life within, or am I shaping my path to obtain some immediate result of expediency? Am I endeavoring to compass effects, amidst a tangled web of foreign influences I cannot calculate; or am I seeking simply ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... attributes emotions to plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect. She would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... "is father of the man;" thus calling into conscious notice the fact, else faintly or not at all perceived, that whatsoever is seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing fruit, must have prexisted by way of germ in the infant. Yes; all that is now broadly emblazoned in the man once was latent—seen or not seen—as a vernal bud in the child. But not, therefore, is it true inversely, that all which prexists in the child finds its development in the man. Rudiments ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... Calhoun, sheltered by noble trees, stands on an elevated swell of a grand range of mountain land, and it was there that his prolific genius ripened for those burning displays of thought which drew to him the affections of admiring thousands. Henry Clay undoubtedly felt the germ of his future greatness while sauntering, in his boyhood days, through the wild and picturesque slashes of Hanover. Webster, born amid the rugged hills of New Hampshire, drew the delightful relish of rural life, for which he is so celebrated, from ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen

... plant causes a very nasty sore, the chancroid, which often destroys much flesh and causes buboes. The germ can be carried on the fingers to any part of the body. When the chancroid is healed and the bubo becomes a scar the disease ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... of 1826 Lamb published, in "Blackwood's Magazine," a little drama in one act, entitled "The Wife's Trial." It was founded on Crabbe's poetical tale of "The Confidant;" and contains the germ of a plot, which undoubtedly might have been worked out with more effect, if Lamb had devoted sufficient ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:— 1. Homer, who, in spite of Pope, and all the learned uproar of centuries, has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds, is the true and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as history, which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature, that our best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, and in Greek. English history is best known through Shakspeare; how much through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... house—was opened by another sad faced woman. What a place to seek the secret of life in! Lovelily enfolds the husk its kernel; but what the human eye turns from as squalid and unclean may enfold the seed that clasps, couched in infinite withdrawment, the vital germ of all that is lovely and graceful, harmonious and strong, all without which no poet would sing, no martyr burn, no king rule in righteousness, no geometrician pore over the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... and they began working with nuclear energy and developed reaction-drive spaceships. But they'd concentrated so on the inorganic sciences, and so far neglected the bio-sciences, that when they launched their first ship for Venus they hadn't yet developed a germ ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper

... fantastical manner that can be imagined. It seems as if the author had ventured everything that occurred to him in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression—taken the first word that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new cluster of images—a hint for a new excursion of the fancy—and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... those of Champlain. The momentous change in trimming sails, already referred to, came first, when Fletcher succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before. There can be no doubt that the lateen sail, which goes back at least to the early Egyptians, had the germ of a fore-and-after in it. But the germ was never evolved into a strong type fit for tacking; and no one before Fletcher ever seems to have thought it possible to lay a course at all unless the wind was somewhere ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood

... threshold of that gate; they share together the supreme rule, temporal and spiritual; there is still embosomed in them all the voice yet silent, that soon will sound, from one tongue, over all the world, and the dormant germ of that authority which will soon again be concentrated in one man alone. To-day they are all equal; perhaps to-morrow one will sit enthroned, and all the rest will kiss his feet; one will be sovereign, the others his subjects; one the shepherd, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... within its breast the very germ Of Change; and how should this be otherwise? That violent things more quickly find a term Is shown through Nature's whole analogies;[728] And how should the most fierce of all be firm? Would you have endless lightning in the skies? Methinks Love's very title says enough: How should ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... But on the main issue he took, or thought he took, a practical view. A man in love cannot soberly analyse his own psychological state, and Lawrence did not know that he had fallen in love with Isabel at first sight or that the germ of matrimonial intentions had lain all along in his mind. Here and now he believed that he first thought ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... occasioned by an early and imprudent marriage, had done their best to crush it out of existence. Nevertheless, the memory of that time remained, and being freshly stirred by the contemplation of his young friend's forlorn state, it united itself with the stronger germ of sympathy, and blossomed out into a generous proposal that Haydn should continue to occupy a corner of his garret until such time as he ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham

... the influence of Ericsson's work still lives in the modern battleship, and while in our modern designs we have gotten far away from the essential features of the monitor type, yet it is not too much to say that the germ of the modern battleship is in many ways found in the "Monitor," especially as expressed in terms of concentration of heavy gun-fire and localized protection of gun positions; and in more ways than may be suspected, the influence of Ericsson and of his work had its part in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... prevent this realization, however, the craving: lying back of the fancy must be diverted to a more practical channel—the normal solution—or the fancy must persist in spite of its impracticability. This latter process is the germ of the psychosis. But not its development. A certain compromise may be reached—he who digs for gold in his back-yard is not so crazy as he who reaches out his hand for the moon. Nor is the paranoic who chooses to put his interpretation on the surliness of his employer as far estranged ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... he would know all about life even though he died for it. Unfortunately, under the terms of the existence of mortals one decision is not enough. We must keep reaffirming decisions if they are to hold. Even in Eden there was the germ of a new threat to degrade Adam and Eve back to innocence. When they ate the apple an amoeba in a distant corner of the Garden shuddered and began the long and difficult process of evolution. To all practical purposes John S. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... founded simply on their power to maintain it. In them for the first time we detect the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own instincts. Often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture. But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way compensated, a new fact appears in history—the State as the outcome of reflection and calculation, the State as a work of art. This new life ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... frame, the very image of Dicky Donovan, as in my mind I perceived him; and when I first saw him I was almost thunderstruck, because he was to me Dicky Donovan come to life. There was nothing Dicky Donovan did or said or saw or heard which had not its counterpart in actual things in Egypt. The germ of most of the stories was got from things told me, or things that I saw, heard of, or experienced in Egypt itself. The first story of the book—'While the Lamp Holds out to Burn'—was suggested to me by an incident which I saw at a certain village on the Nile, which I will ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the Little Folk—we! Too little to love or to hate. Leave us alone and you'll see How we can drag down the State! We are the worm in the wood! We are the rot at the root! We are the germ in the blood! We are the ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling

... Fitzgerald. Well, I believe that crime to have been premeditated, and that the man who committed it was mad. He is, no doubt, at large now, walking about and conducting himself as sanely as you or I, yet the germ of insanity is there, and sooner or later he will ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... Herculean labour of my tedious progress through these books, few of which afford the germ of a single idea, I have often wished that the authors of them had been satisfied with giving us the results of their own practice and experience, instead of idly perpetuating the errors, prejudices, and plagiarisms of their ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... young people just out of school and college stand tiptoe on the threshold of active life, with high ideals and glorious visions, full of hope and big with promise, but many of them will very quickly catch the money contagion; the fatal germ will spread through their whole natures, inoculating their ambition with its vicious virus, and, after a few years, their fair college vision will fade, their yearnings for something higher will gradually die and be replaced ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... were luckier—I mean by birth, by possession of constitution and stamina. Why, Dick buried his three mates and two engineers at Guayaquil. Yellow fever. Why didn't the yellow fever germ, or whatever it is, kill Dick? And the same with you, Mr. Broad- shouldered Deep-chested Graham. In this last trip of yours, why didn't you die in the swamps instead of your photographer? Come. Confess. How heavy was he? How broad were ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... leading articles. For her I will write the long dreamed-of poem in twenty-four parts. For her I will besiege the private dens of my friends the booksellers. Dear, helpless little atomy! infinitesimal object of love! bud, germ, seed, blossom, tidbit, morsel, mannikin, tomtit, abbreviation, concentration, quintessence! tiny multum in parvo! charming diamond edition! thou small, red possibility! weeping promise of glad days to come! For thee will I put ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... and one as faithfully representative as he was to-day. But totally another; men changed, evolved, progressed. Jasper Penny was convinced that it was a progression; but in a broad manner beyond all hope of his comprehension, and entirely outside dogmatic good and evil. The germ of it must have been in him from the first; his burning necessity for Susan, he told himself, had been born in him, laid dormant until, yes—it had been stirred into activity by Essie Scofield, by the revulsion which had followed ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... growing hard and ungenerous. And then the vulgarity, the irreverence: they are almost identical, I think. One grows very sick and sorry at times amidst the cruelty and the baseness that threaten to destroy one's courage and one's hope. I know that human nature has in it a germ of nobility that will save it, in the long run, but meanwhile things seem sadly out ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... numbers of "The Germ" had been printed, and then the venture had sunk into the realm of things that were, weighted with a debt of one hundred twenty pounds. Of the fifty-one contributions to "The Germ" twenty-six had been by the Rossettis. Dante Gabriel, always a bit superstitious, felt sure that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... social sphere. No doubt the truth was that success sweetened his character, and developed, as is so often the case, those possibilities of his better nature which a fruitless struggle would have kept in the germ or altogether crushed. His excellent wife influenced him profoundly; at her death the work was continued by the daughter she left him. The defects of his early education could not of course be repaired, ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... IV, but how little lasting that had been is amply demonstrated by the fact that no such crushing defeat had ever been inflicted upon Scotland as that of Flodden, in which the King and the great part of his nobles perished. Perhaps it was the germ of the design to attract the lesser country into the arms of the greater by friendship rather than to set her desperately at bay against all peaceful influences, which had prevented the successful army from taking advantage of the victory; but certainly through all the distracted ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... religion, as well as in myths of the deity. This, too, refers to the deification of sex. O'Brien, in the Round Towers of Ireland states: "The lotus was the most sacred plant of the Ancients, and typified the two principles of the earth fecundation,—the germ standing for the lingam; the filaments ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II

... boats come and go, for every way is open at thy appearance, the fish of the river leap before thee as soon as thy rays descend upon the ocean." It is not without reason that all living things thus rejoice at his advent; all of them owe their existence to him, for "he creates the female germ, he gives virility to men, and furnishes life to the infant in its mother's womb; he calms and stills its weeping, he nourishes it in the maternal womb, giving forth the breathings which animate all that ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Freedom, on the bitter blast The ventures of thy seed we cast, And trust to warmer sun and rain To swell the germ, and fill the grain. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... funnel-shaped; very long, superior, withering and of a fine orrange colour. five stamens and one pistillum; of the first, the fillaments are capillare, inserted into the corolla, equal, and converging; the anther ovate, biffid and incumbent. with rispect to the second the germ is roundish, smoth, inferior pedicelled and small; the style, long, and thicker than the stamens, simple, cylindrical, smooth, and erect, withering and remains with the corolla untill the fruit is ripe. stigma simple obtuse and withering.- the fruit is a berry about the size ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... that the germ within the hen's egg remembers having made itself into a chicken on past occasions, or that each one of 100,000 salmon germs remembers to have made itself into a salmon (male or female) in the persons of the single pair ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler



Words linked to "Germ" :   bodily structure, microorganism, taproot, inspiration, body structure, anatomical structure, structure, complex body part, micro-organism, muse



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