"Vertical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was equally a coxcomb. In his style of tattooing, for instance, which seemed rather incomplete; his marks embracing but a vertical half of his person, from crown to sole; the other side being free from the slightest stain. Thus clapped together, as it were, he looked like a union of the unmatched moieties of two distinct beings; and your fancy was lost in conjecturing, where roamed the absent ones. When ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... another of those interesting plants which go to sleep at night. Some members of the genus erect one half of the leaf and droop the other half until it becomes a vertical instead of the horizontal star it is by day. Frequently the leaflets rotate as much as 90 degrees on their own axes. Some lupines fold their leaflets, not at night only, but during the day also there is more or less movement in the leaves. Sun dial, a popular name for the wild lupine, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... as, it were, under the shadow of Erebus, the great Antarctic volcano, and on this never-to-be-forgotten night the Southern Lights played for hours. If for nothing else, it was worth making such a sledge journey to witness the display. First, vertical shafts ascended in a fan of electric flame, and then the shafts all merged into a filmy, pale chrome sheet. This faded and intensified alternately, and then in an instant disappeared, but more flaming lights ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... wave, that it cannot be ascertained as yet, what are the magnitudes of such elements as inertia and friction, and how they are to be corrected for, so as to predict the time and velocity of the current from observations of the vertical rise and fall. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... so that a certain space was left between the different coils. These loose rolls, of course, occupied much space and could be put into the tar only in a standing position, because in a horizontal one the several coils would have pressed together again. The loose roll was therefore slipped over a vertical iron rod fastened into a circular perforated wooden foot. The upper end of this iron rod ended in a ring, in which the hook of a chain or rope could be fastened. With the aid of a windlass the roll was raised or lowered. When placed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... shaft worked on a ball and socket joint so that it could be used for both steering and driving purposes. It was in fact the tail of the Flying Fish. Steering in the air was effected by means of a vertical fin placed ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... not touching him, and facing to the front, with her shoulders at right angles to his side. She now places her right hand, with the whip in it, on the upper crutch, and raises her left foot about twelve inches from the ground, while keeping the leg, from knee to ankle, in a more or less vertical position (Fig. 67). The whip should be held as in this illustration, so as to avoid alarming the horse. The gentleman who is to put her on her horse, places himself close to, and in front of her, bends down, and places the palm of one ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... the South Seas; groups richly imaginative, expressing types of Oriental, Occidental, Southern and Northern land and sea life. The interrupted outer circle of water motifs represent Nereids driving spouting fish. Vertical zones of writhing figures ascend the sphere at the base of the Victor. Across the upper portions of the sphere, and modeled as parts of the Earth, stretch titanic zoomorphs, representing the Hemispheres, East and West. The spirit of the Eastern Hemisphere is conceived as feline and characterized ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... an outer courtyard. It is a three-lift telescopic one; the lowest lift being 200 feet, the middle lift 197 ft. 6 in., and the top lift 195 ft. in diameter. The height of each lift is 40 feet. The several lifts are raised in the usual way; and they all work in a circle of 24 vertical U-shaped channel irons, fixed in the wall of the house by means of 13 supports placed at equal distances from the base to the summit (as shown in Fig. 2). When the gasholder is perfectly empty, the three lifts are inclosed, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... where there are no blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful, sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... called a "string light," viz., a piece of gaspipe with fishtail burners at frequent intervals, connected with the permanent gas arrangements of the house by a piece of india rubber tube, and fixed in a vertical position behind each side of the temporary proscenium, will be found very effective; one or the other set of lights being turned up, as may be necessary. Where a green or red light is desired, the interposition of a strip of glass of that ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... the entrance, is a vertical shaft, 90 feet, that we put down to pick up the old Pine-Knot lead. It's from the foot of that the new gallery, the lower level, starts. It slopes off just under the old lead—so—330 feet, there's a fault, ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... it must be understood, gives no adequate idea of the local intricacy of the system, while at the same time it is precisely this intricacy, both vertical and horizontal, that increases the cost and difficulty of making roads, and that has served in the past to keep the ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... parts of Africa. Snow never falls, but thin ice is often formed during the night. During the spring heavy dews fall, and strong winds set in from the west. These gradually become heated by the increasing radiation of the earth, as the sun becomes more vertical ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... abreast, in the east, its length does not exceed six miles. Its southern rim is formed by the slope of a timbered mesa, and that slope is partly overgrown by shrubbery. The northern border constitutes a line of vertical cliffs of yellowish and white pumice, projecting and re-entering like decorations of a stage,—now perpendicular and smooth for some distance, now sweeping back in the shape of an arched segment. These cliffs vary in height, although nowhere ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... do next. His size seemed stationary. Beyond our bars we could see the distant circular walls as though this were some giant crater-pit in which Polter was standing. Then I thought I recognized it—the round, nearly vertical pit into which Alan had plunged his hand and arm. Above us then was a gully, blind at one end. And above that, the outer surface, the summit of the ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... supporting-column was clouted; but when they thought all was secure, Mr. Wardrop decreed that the noble patchwork would never support working engines; at the best, it could only hold the guide-bars approximately true, he deadweight of the cylinders must be borne by vertical struts; and, therefore, a gang would repair to the bows, and take out, with files, the big bow-anchor davits, each of which was some three inches in diameter. They threw hot coals at Wardrop, and threatened to kill him, those who did not ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... weighed 7.0 grams; No. 45062 captured on April 4 contained one embryo 22 mm. long. It was common to see several bats of this species, not in a cluster but with a few inches of space between any one bat and its neighbors, on the vertical screens that covered the airways beneath the eaves of the buildings. A colony was established in Zetek House (a trail-end house on the western side of the Island), and several individuals often were seen in the Tower House. As many as 50 individuals could be found at the Van Tyne ...
— Seventeen Species of Bats Recorded from Barro Colorado Island, Panama Canal Zone • E. Raymond Hall
... often happens, the peat is so soft in the wet season as to break on the vertical walls of a ditch and fill it, at the same time dislocating the mass and spoiling it for cutting, it is best to carry down the ditch in terraces, making it wide above and narrow ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... a sewing-card to do. I made the first row of vertical lines and let her feel it and notice that there were several rows of little holes. She began to work delightedly and finished the card in a few minutes, and did it very neatly indeed. I thought I ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Demonstrations and Distinctions, irresistibly suggests that the collection must in his time [1284-1331] have occupied a special room, of which the two Demonstrations represent the two sides. The Distinctions would be narrow vertical divisions of these, and each of them would have its numerous subdivisions into Gradus. As the best English equivalent of Demonstratio I would suggest the word Display,' which fairly gives the idea of a wall-surface covered with books; and I ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... have the pleasure of dancing with her. This form of address he never varied. To his surprise, she made some difficulty about granting the favor, and eventually offered him "the second extra." He bowed. Before he could resume a vertical position a young man came up, remarked that he thought this was his turn, and bore Alice away. Lucian smiled indulgently, thinking that though Alice's manners were wonderfully good, considering her antecedents, yet she occasionally betrayed a lower tone than that which he sought to exemplify ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... his vertical shaft, and was laying the oak limbs against it, when a girl of about eighteen came along the road from the south, and clambered over the stile that led to the charcoal pit. She was followed by a sheep-dog, small and ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... rain had fallen, and the wind had not risen in the least. But this state of things was of short duration; before long the cataracts of the sky burst forth, and came down in vertical streams. As the large drops fell splashing into the lake, fiery sparks seemed to fly out ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... to overhang the waters, was broken by their incessant lashing for century upon century. The waves, like furious blue bulls, charged, frothing with anger, against the rock, wearing deep caverns, which were prolonged upward in the form of vertical cracks. This age-long battle was destroying the coast, shattering its stony armor, scale by scale. Colossal wall-like fragments loosened. They first separated by forming an imperceptible crevice which grew and grew ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not look out the ports at all. He watched the screen before him. There was a vertical line across the side of the lighted disk. A blip moved downward across it, showing their height in thousands of miles. After a long time the blip reached the bottom, and the vertical line became double and another blip began to descend. It measured height in hundreds of miles. A bright ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a modified US coat of arms in the center between the large blue initials V and I; the coat of arms shows a yellow eagle holding an olive branch in one talon and three arrows in the other with a superimposed shield of vertical red and white stripes below ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... found in the ruins of Persepolis, and now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is about seven inches high, barrel-shaped, and covered with inscriptions in the cuneiform character, disposed in vertical lines, and affording a positive example of an indented surface produced by mechanical impression. Such cylinders are supposed to have been memorials of matters of national or family importance, and were in early ages, as we ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... dug out of this estuarine silt [of the valley of the Clyde], and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost, as if it had sunk in a storm.... Almost every one of these ancient boats was formed out of a single oak-stem, hollowed out by blunt tools, probably stone axes, aided by the action of fire; a few were cut beautifully smooth, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... secured by means of a window-board. This is a board the edge of which rests on the edge of the window-sill, the ends being attached firmly to the window-frame. It affords a vertical surface three or four inches high and situated three or four inches in front of the window, so as to deflect the cold air upward when the window is slightly opened. The air will then reach the breathing-zone, instead of flowing on to the floor and ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... clinging creepers, the shelves and faults in the strata here and there deeper down, and then lower and lower still the gaps and hollows whence stalwart trees had risen from seeds dropped or hidden by some bird—trees which had grown out almost horizontally, and then curved up into their proper vertical position, to rise up and up as the years rolled on, though now they looked ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... 139 pages of reading text, 8 full-page colored illustrations, 4 full-page black and white illustrations, and 65 part-page illustrations in black and white, or silhouette; and equipped with reading and writing lessons in the latest vertical script, ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... suspended in the room running from one end of it to the other, and returning many times, making a length of seventeen hundred feet. The two ends of the wire were connected with an electro-magnet fastened to a vertical wooden frame. In front of the magnet was its armature, and also a wooden lever or arm fitted at its extremity to hold a lead-pencil.... I saw this instrument work, and became thoroughly acquainted with the principle ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... sparkle free, and he waxed hotter at the north pole to which he had voluntarily exiled himself, than, considering the general temperature of the room, it would have been reasonable to become under the vertical ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... is a mass of sandstone superincumbent upon a quartzose basis and intersected by nearly vertical veins of white quartz, the surface of which was in a crystallized state. The floor of the cavern was covered with heaps of water-worn fragments of quartzose rock, containing copper pyrites, in some of which the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... sails, oars, and rudders, and carrying several passengers. The method by which the vacuum was to be obtained was by connecting each globe, fitted with a stop-cock, to a tube of at least thirty-five feet long; the whole being filled with water; when raised to the vertical position the water would run out, the stop-cocks would be closed at the proper time, and the vacuum secured. It does not seem to have entered the head of this philosopher that the weight of the surrounding atmosphere would crush and destroy his thin exhausted ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... being separated by a vertical dash, to avoid confusion. The German, inverting the process, turns to hisdictionary, and finds Der Krieg ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... He would do his best to inscribe a circle and then emboss it with perfectly upright hair, as though the person in question had just been perusing the most stirring of penny-dreadfuls. Then he would put in two dots of eyes, and one abbreviated and vertical line for the nose, and another elongated and horizontal line for the mouth, and arms with extended and extremely elocutionary fingers, to say nothing of extremely attenuated legs which invariably toed-out, to make more discernible the silhouette of the ponderously booted ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... His remarks, those of Morga, and those of other historians argue a considerable amount of culture among the Filipino peoples prior to the Spanish conquest. A variety of opinions have been expressed as to the direction of the writing. Chirino, San Antonio, Zuniga, and Le Gentil, say that it was vertical, beginning at the top. Colin, Ezguerra, and Marche assert that it was vertical but in the opposite direction. Colin says that the horizontal form was adopted after the arrival of the Spaniards. Mas declares that it ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... consist of a vertical eddy of north- east air, without any mixture of south-west air; in that case the barometer continues above 30, and the weather is dry or frosty for four ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... cargo of 15 bombs in a distance of a few hundred yards, taking no lives and doing little material damage. Since then, several big craft have appeared at night, but have always been frightened away by the searchlights and the fire of the small vertical guns which have ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... up with it. All this while the deer had kept along the base of the cliffs, and the hunters as they ran after it could not help noticing the immense precipice that towered above their heads. It rose to the height of hundreds of feet, in some places with a slanting face, but generally almost as vertical as a wall. The chase of the wounded stag, however, occupied too much their attention to allow of their observing anything else very minutely; and so they pressed on without halting anywhere—except for a moment ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... spectacle was novel enough to justify his coming nearer. Suddenly she withdrew into the wood; he lost sight of her; she was gone. He remembered, however, that Flip was still to be seen, and as the steep trail was beginning to tax all his energies, he was fain to hurry forward. The sun was nearly vertical when he turned into the canon, and saw the bark roof of the cabin beyond. At almost the same moment Flip appeared, flushed and panting, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... by the heat of fusion were created by the expansive power of heat acting from below, we should expect to find every species of fracture, dislocation, and contortion in those bodies, and every degree of departure from a horizontal towards a vertical position. And this is just what we do find. From horizontal, the strata are frequently found vertical; from continuous, broken, and separated in every possible direction; and from a plane, bent and doubled. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... morning, after a fatiguing walk from point to point, occasionally crossing from one islet to the others in the boats, the party collected under a projecting rock, which screened them from the rays of the vertical sun, and the repast, which had been brought from the ship in the morning, was spread before them. The party consisted of Captain M—-; Pearce, the master; the surgeon, who had accompanied them to explore the natural productions of the reef; and the confidential ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... straight lines. In our own country we have the Tyneside and Craven faults in the North of England, which are 30 miles long and often 20 yards wide; but even more striking is the great Cleveland Dyke—a wall of volcanic rock dipping slightly towards the south, but sometimes being almost vertical, and stretching across the country, over hill and dale, in an almost perfect straight line from a point on the coast ten miles north of Scarborough, in a west-by-north direction, passing about two miles south of Stockton and terminating about six miles north-by-east of Barnard Castle, a distance ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... steel and concrete of the dock and lined with hard-packed bumper-layers of hemp and fibre. High into the air extended the upper half of the ship of space—a sullen gray expanse of fifty-inch hardened steel armor, curving smoothly upward to a needle prow. Countless hundred of fine vertical scratches marred every inch of her surface, and here and there the stubborn metal was grooved and scored to a depth of inches—each scratch and score the record of an attempt of some wandering cosmic body to argue the right-of-way with the stupendous mass of that ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... squares now occupied by the men and the other four vacant horizontal lines between them are called RANKS. The vertical lines of squares running perpendicularly to the ranks are called FILES. The oblique lines of squares, that is, lines which connect squares of the ...
— Chess and Checkers: The Way to Mastership • Edward Lasker
... scientific. He is the legendary featherless biped, the zoon politikhon of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the homo economicus of the Manchester school, the homo sapiens of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is to say, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... wheel, or the blow of a horse's hoof; and, as might have been foreseen, they became very uneven after a short use, and had no recommendation except their cheapness and their exemption from noise. The fibre was vertical, and at first no grooves were introduced; they, of course, became rounded by wearing away at the edge, and as slippery as the ancient granite. The Metropolitan Company took warning from the defects of their predecessor, and adopted the patent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... is, however, possible to find verbal equivalents for the character of the main types of lines. Horizontal lines convey a feeling of repose, of quiet, as in the wall-paintings of Puvis de Chavannes; vertical lines, of solemnity, dignity, aspiration, as in so much of the work of Boecklin; crooked lines of conflict and activity, as in the woodcuts of Durer; while curved lines have always been recognized as soft and voluptuous and tender, as in Correggio and Renoir. The supposition that the curved ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the sporangia are surrounded in whole or in part by a vertical, elastic ring (annulus) reminding one of a small, brown worm closely coiled (Fig. 4). As the spores mature, the ring contracts and bursts with considerable force, scattering the spores. The spores of the different genera mature at different times ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... natural to suppose that this circumstance would operate upon the ramified vessels of the lids, so as to draw them up, and allow the rain to replenish the pitchers. Mr. Brown also, who had an opportunity in 1801 of examining plants fully grown, supposes it probable that the vertical or horizontal positions in which the opercula were remarked, are determined by the state of the atmosphere, at the same time that he thinks it possible that the fluid may be a secretion of the plant. The several dead insects that were observed within the vases of cephalotus were very possibly ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... part of the flame, but should be submitted to the heat gradually. If the substance is of such a nature that it will sublime at a low heat, the tube should be held more horizontal, while a higher heat is attained by bringing the tube to a more vertical position. ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... of the theory of descriptive geometry. Descriptive geometry is concerned with the representation of figures in space of three dimensions by means of space of two dimensions. The method commonly used consists in projecting the space figure on two planes (a vertical and a horizontal plane being most convenient), the projections being made most simply for metrical purposes from infinity in directions perpendicular to the two planes of projection. These two planes are then made to coincide by revolving the horizontal into the vertical about ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... towards the valley, but there were several bridges leading across the valley, as if it had been a river. Beyond the valley were to be seen the backs of the houses in High Street, which looked like a range of cliffs, divided by vertical chasms and seams, and blackened by time. At one end of the hill was the castle rock, crowned with the towers, and bastions, and battlemented walls of the ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... paper, largely and in immaculate vertical penmanship, entitled "Friendship," Lilly, the tourniquet twist at her heart, sitting by. Her name was read later among the honorable five, true to manner, Mr. Lindsley seeming to ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of this skull is the well marked central vertical frontal ridge and some tendency to angularity of the vertex. In the whole this skull is of a more refined type than the others and suggestive of some fair intellectual development of the individual. There ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall
... his centre of gravity. Bisected, upper Giles would have outweighed three lower Giles. But this very disproportion enabled him to do feats that would have baffled Milo. His brawny arms had no weight to draw after them; so he could go up a vertical pole like a squirrel, and hang for hours from a bough by one hand like a cherry by its stalk. If he could have made a vacuum with his hands, as the lizard is said to do with its feet, he would have gone along a ceiling. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... China and lasted long, for Sutras in Uigur were printed at Peking in 1330 and Uigur manuscripts copied in the reign of K'ang Hsi (1662-1723) are reported from a monastery near Suchow.[467] I am informed that a variety of this alphabet written in vertical columns is still used in some parts of Kansu where a Turkish dialect is spoken. Though Turkish was used by Buddhists in both the east and west of the Tarim basin, it appears to have been introduced into Khotan only after the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... The vertical error, however, depends more on the weight of the arrow, on the feathering, the holding time, the maintainance of tension, and on the release ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... speculates upon what would be the consequences of one good bump from the wheel of a mule cart. Down below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look far too small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a fallen man of letters. And at the high positions they are too used to the vertical life to understand the secret feelings of the visitor from the horizontal. General Bompiani, whose writings are well known to all English students of military matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is making of a great mountain ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... length, but with it no change in my perilous position. The light only showed me my island prison, but revealed no way of escape from it. Indeed, the change could not be called for the better, for the fervid rays of an almost vertical sun poured down upon me until my skin blistered. I was already speckled by the bites of a thousand swamp-flies and mosquitoes, that all night long had preyed upon me. There was not a cloud in the heavens to shade me; and the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... 547. When the sun is in the Southern tropic 36 deg. distant from the zenith, the thermometer is seldom lower than 72 deg. at Gondar in Abyssinia, but it falls to 60 or 53 deg. when the sun is immediately vertical; so much does the approach of rain counteract the heat of the sun. Bruce's Travels, Vol. 3. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... labor. Lots of labor," Conn said. "It's a couple of hundred feet below the surface; from the plans, I'd say they just dug a big pit, built the headquarters in it, and filled it in. There are two entrances, a vertical ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... stared, an open gap without recourse. He made two by grace of the janitor's having swabbed his broom a little closer to the wall. His muscles began to wobble and waver: in his proportions, he'd made two-hundred feet of almost vertical ascent. ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... off from the main cavity only two main tubes, instead of four like the others; but each of these tubes divides and subdivides in four branches as it approaches the periphery. From the eight branches produced in this way there arise vertical tubes extending in opposite directions up and down the sides of the body. Along these vertical tubes run the rows of little locomotive oars, or combs, as they have been called, from which these animals derive their name of Ctenophorae. The rapid motion of these flappers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... those Etesian winds, or melting of snow in the mountains under the equator (for Jordan yearly overflows when the snow melts in Mount Libanus), or from those great dropping perpetual showers which are so frequent to the inhabitants within the tropics, when the sun is vertical, and cause such vast inundations in Senegal, Maragnan, Oronoco and the rest of those great rivers in Zona Torrida, which have all commonly the same passions at set times: and by good husbandry and policy hereafter no doubt may come to be as populous, as well tilled, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... is not high enough;" and he proceeded to increase the pressure by operating an apparatus of mercury in long vertical tubes acted upon automatically by a weight lever which stood near the coil. In a few moments the sound of the discharge again began, and then I made my first acquaintance with ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... and the colouring of Alma Tadema, might possibly realise this agony of the Athenian captives in the stone quarries. The time of day chosen for the picture should be full noon, with its glare of light and sharply defined vertical shadows. The crannies in the straight sides of the quarry should here and there be tufted with a few dusty creepers and wild fig-trees. On the edge of the sky-line stand parties of Syracusan citizens with their wives and children, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... common, which again divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine Gothic—and whose importance Lord Lindsay too lightly passes over in the general description, couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, "the vertical principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal." We have already alluded to the great school of color which arose in the immediate neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble throughout North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the admission of undecorated ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at Venice, in conjunction with Jupiter. He accordingly took as good an observation as could be done with the naked eye and found that conjunction at six o'clock A.M. Of the same day, the two bodies appearing in the same vertical line in the sign of Taurus. The date was thus satisfactorily established, and a calculation of the longitude of the house was deduced with an accuracy which in those circumstances was certainly commendable. Nevertheless, as the facts and the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... would drop, the expanded wings would be brought into a slanting condition over a smaller area of supporting air, and the whole apparatus would tend to glide downwards in that direction. The projection of a small vertical plane upon either side would make the gliding mass rotate in a descending spiral, and so we have all the elements of a controllable flight. Such an affair would be difficult to overset. It would be able to beat up even in a fair wind, and then it would be able ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... this his mechanical burglar detector," continued Kennedy. "As you see, this frame carries two dynamometers of unequal power. The stronger, which has a high maximum capacity of several tons, is designed for the measurement of vertical efforts. The other measures horizontal efforts. The test is made by inserting the end of a jimmy or other burglar's tool and endeavouring to produce impressions similar to those which have been found on doors or windows. The index of the dynamometer moves in such a way as to make a permanent record ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... portion above. The lower third, or desert portion of the basin, is but little above the level of the sea, though here and there ranges of mountains rise to an altitude of from 2,000 to 6,000 feet. This part of the valley is bounded on the northeast by a line of cliffs, which present a bold, often vertical step, hundreds or thousands of feet to the table-lands above. On the California side a vast desert stretches westward, past the head of the Gulf of California, nearly to the shore of the Pacific. Between the desert and the sea a narrow belt of valley, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... noted that the time constant of a circuit can be reduced either by diminishing the self-induction or by increasing the resistance. In Fig. 54 the position of the time constant for the top curve is shown by the vertical dotted line at 10 seconds. The current will take 10 seconds to rise to 0.634 of its final value. This retardation of the rise of current is simply due to the presence of coils and electromagnets ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... right of the fire-place recess, round another smaller shoulder of rock, was a perfectly vertical wall of smooth stone terminating just above our reach at an opening three yards wide or more. The top of the wall of rock at the bottom of the opening was almost as straight as ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... see the interior of the pit, which, being in the side of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost corner the square outline of a van appeared, with its back towards him. A light came from the interior, and threw a moving shadow upon the vertical face of gravel at the further side of the pit ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... invisible towards the lower part. Soon after the sea below resumes its natural state, and the tube is drawn, by little and little, up to the clouds, where it is dissipated. The same tube would sometimes have a vertical, and sometimes a crooked or inclined direction. The most rational account I have read of water-spouts, is in Mr Falconer's Marine Dictionary, which is chiefly collected from the philosophical writings of the ingenious Dr Franklin. I have been told that the firing of a gun will dissipate ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... some hours of walking with not a little of uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh intolerable. I was on a hard dusty glaring road, shut in by dusty hedges on either side. Not a breath of air was stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud appeared. If the vertical sun had poured down water instead of light and heat on me my clothing could not have clung to me more uncomfortably. Coming at length to a group of two or three small cottages at the roadside, I went into one and asked for something to quench my thirst—cider or milk. There was only ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... end of another hour of hard riding they were forced to slacken their pace. In front of them the ground could be seen, in the light of a fast disappearing moon, to be gradually rising. Another mile or two and vertical walls of rock rose on each side of them; while great ravines, holding mountain torrents, necessitated their making a short detour for the purpose of finding a place where the stream could be safely forded. Even then it was not ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... while riding along such a forest, by the side of some running brook, and while my horse was feeding I have almost fallen asleep under the soothing influence which such an atmosphere produces upon a traveler, heated by fast riding under a vertical sun. It is one of those happy sensations that can not well be described, nor can it be appreciated by those who have not experienced it. Poets have exhausted their power in painting the beauties of scenes ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... the "Philosophic sans Pretention" is a view of a flying-machine. In the midst of a frame of light wood sits the operator, steadying himself with one hand, and with the other fuming a cremaillere, which appears to give a very quick rotatory movement to two glass globes revolving upon a vertical axis. The friction of the globes is supposed to develop electricity to which his power ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... light-horse-men—self-disciplined and eager to obey—took up their dressing. The overhanging cliff of sandstone hid the moon, but here and there there was a gleam of eyeballs in the dark—now man's, now horse's—and a sheen that was the hint of steel held vertical. No human being could have guessed the length of the gorge nor the number of the men who waited in it, for the restless chargers stamped in inch-deep sand that deadened sound without seeming ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... for a moment, looking at it. It was readable, in the sense that she had set up a purely arbitrary but consistently pronounceable system of phonetic values for the letters. The long vertical symbols were vowels. There were only ten of them; not too many, allowing separate characters for long and short sounds. There were twenty of the short horizontal letters, which meant that sounds like -ng or -ch or -sh were single letters. The odds ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... alone he will allow himself to be deeply impressed, it is very certain he will have few save painful impressions. Or take another illustration—an artist the other day told me that he had noticed that one could almost always trace a faintly ruled vertical line on the paper which the greatest of all modern draughtsmen used. Ingres, then, with all his freedom, vivacity, and accuracy of control over the point he employed to draw with, still found it useful to have a straight ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... or, more correctly, of 25.488 inches; and he has pointed out that in the construction of the body of the Great Pyramid, the architect built 10 feet or 10 cubits of horizontal length for every 9 feet or 9 cubits of vertical height; while in the construction of the inclined passages the proportion was adhered to of 9 on the incline to 4 in vertical height, rules which would altogether simplify the building of such ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... attains a depth of two hundred feet where that takes its plunge, and in the distance of half a mile from that point to the verge of the lower fall, it rapidly descends with the river between walls of rock nearly six hundred feet in vertical height, to which three hundred and twenty feet are added by the fall. Below this the wall lines marked by the descent of the river grow in height with incredible distinctness, until they are probably two thousand feet above the water. There ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... and intelligent purpose had developed in her face. There were signs of a spiritual transformation in her, and a steadfast, fine and humble determination that nothing could shake could be discerned in her. There was a small vertical line between her brows which gave her charming face a look of concentrated thought, almost austere at the first glance. There was scarcely a trace ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... features grew disarranged and one-sided, whilst the heads of a few who had dined with extreme thoroughness were somehow sinking into their shoulders, the corners of their mouth and eyes being bent upwards by the subsidence. Only Henchard did not conform to these flexuous changes; he remained stately and vertical, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... columns bear legendary decorative motifs of the transition of plant to animal life in the forms of tortoise and other shell motifs;—kelp and its analogy to the prehistoric lobster, skate, crab and sea urchin. The water-bubble motif is carried through all vertical members which symbolize the Crustacean Period, which is the second stratum ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... astonishing thing from the standpoint of the current theories is that these conformable relations of incongruous strata are often repeated over and over again in the same vertical section, the same kind of bed reappearing alternately with others of an entirely different "age," that is, appearing "as if regularly interbedded" (A. Geikie) with them, in a manifestly undisturbed ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... gravity. That means that the edge of the joint must be uppermost and the crack to be filled must not lie horizontal, but at the greatest slant possible. Better than any degree of slant would be to have the line of the joint vertical. ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... found that I was not alone; a man was riding close to me on a horse; he was fantastically dressed, more so than usual for that time, being striped all over in vertical stripes of yellow and green, with quaint birds like exaggerated storks in different attitudes counter-changed on the stripes; all this I saw by the lantern he carried, in the light of which his debauched black eyes quite flashed. On he went, unsteadily rolling, ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... a height of seventeen Neapolitan palms (nearly fifteen feet) from the level of the ground, were discovered four skeletons together in an almost vertical position. Twelve palms lower was another skeleton, with a hatchet near it. This man appears to have pierced the wall of one of the small chambers of the prothyrum, and was about to enter it, when he was smothered, either by the falling in of the earth or by the mephitic exhalations. It has ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... grey and deserted loomed the barrier so cunningly devised as to be almost indistinguishable at a distance of fifty yards. Snow lay upon its top, and vertical ridges of snow clung to the crevices of the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... printers for many years after his death. Roman type, unlike the black-letter, had two distinct origins. The capitals were derived from the letters used by the ancient Roman architects for inscriptions on public buildings. The small letters were adapted from the rounded vertical style of writing used in many Italian texts, altogether different in form from the angular gothic alphabet used in ecclesiastical manuscripts. Jenson's roman letters were clear, sharp and easy to read, and constituted the greatest single addition to the art of printing since its beginning. ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... the other direction, it shows at once that the way to print upon the mind a map of California's physical formation is to see it a la bird's-eye—as the short path to acquaintance with a great city is a vertical one—to the tower of ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... Perspectives. True Perspective of a Cube. Isometric Cube. Flattened Perspective. Technical Designations. Sector and Segment. Terms of Angles. Circles and Curves. Irregular Curves. Ellipses and Ovals. Focal Points. Produced Line. Spirals, Perpendicular and Vertical. Signs to Indicate Measurement. Definitions. Abscissa. Angle. Apothegm. Apsides or Apsis. Chord. Cycloid. Conoid. Conic Section. Ellipsoid. Epicycloid. Evolute. Flying Buttress. Focus. Gnomes. Hexagon. Hyperbola. Hypothenuse. Incidental. Isosceles. Triangle. Parabola. Parallelogram. Pelecoid. Polygons. ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... by the arrow. The carriages, C C, are traversed by screws, V V, which are fixed between the columns. The extremity, v, of the axle of the pulley to the right is threaded, and actuates a helicoidal wheel, E, which transmits motion to the wheel, R, through the intermedium of the vertical shaft, F. This transmission, completed by the wheels, R R, and the pitch-chains, G G, is designed to move the saw vertically, through the simultaneous shifting of the carriages, C C. A tension weight, P, through the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... through a stagnant calm in a line almost vertical, had pierced the morning mists, and now swam emancipated in a heaven of exquisite blue. Below us, by some trick of eyesight, the country had grown concave, its horizons curving up like the rim of a shallow bowl—a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... earth the attraction of gravitation causes all bodies to fall along vertical lines, and, indeed, when one omits the resistance of the air, with an equally accelerated movement; the velocity increases in equal degrees in equal consecutive divisions of time at a rate that in this country gives the velocity attained ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... vain he tries to 'sound'—there is a devil on each side of his jaws, their cruel teeth fixed firmly into his huge lips; perhaps two or three are underneath him tearing and riving at the great rough corrugations of his grey-white belly; whilst others, with a few swift, vertical strokes of their flukes, draw back for fifty feet or so, charge him amidships, and strike him fearful blows on the ribs with their bony heads. Round and round, in ever-narrowing circles as his strength fails, the tortured ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... of Lanai is a block of lava eighty or ninety feet high, vertical or overhanging on every side, absolutely without foothold. Yet at its top one may see from the neighboring shore a grave with a low wall built about it. This is the resting-place of Pupehe, the wife of one to whom was given the name of Misty Eyes, because the woman's eyes so dazzled his own. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the outskirts of a crowd surrounding the pillory, and above the heads of those in front they could see a huge red face under a thatch of tousled hair protruding stiffly through a hole in a beam supported at right angles to a vertical post about five feet high. On each side of the head a large and dirty hand hung through an ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... thrust hard with his head, and the bottom gave way, turning upon its hinges till it was vertical, and he passed up inside the tub, stepped on to the narrow ledge at the side, and the bottom dropped down into its place, forming a firm flooring, with a ring at the edge ready for lifting ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... small extent by the requirements of timber construction. In such regions, Saxon churches were probably built of wood. The only wooden church of Saxon times which remains is that of Greenstead in south Essex, with a rectangular chancel and aisleless nave constructed of vertical logs placed side by side, and framed originally into a timber plinth. However, it may be stated as a general rule, that, whatever may be the helps or hindrances to development provided by local materials, the real starting-point ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... leaves of the tal palm; the sair and nadua, used for catching fish. The Ors are said to take their name from the oriya basket used by the sower, and made of split bamboo, sometimes helped out with tal fibre. They also make umbrellas, and the chhota dali or dala, a flat basket with vertical sides used for handling grain in small quantities. Doms make the harka and scale-pans (taraju). Domras make the peti and fans. Turis frequently reckon in as a fifth subcaste the Birhors, who cut bamboos and make the sikas used for carrying loads slung on a shoulder-yoke (bhangi), ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... History, does have, as Nelson (op. cit.) pointed out, larger tympanic bullae and a slenderer rostrum than do other specimens of S. f. cognatus. Nevertheless, No. 208, agrees with cognatus and differs from Sylvilagus nuttallii pinetis in the greater vertical depth of the zygoma, the greater transverse width of the first pair of upper incisors, the broader posterior extensions of the supraorbital processes, the fusion (instead of freedom from, or mere touching to, the braincase) of the tips ...
— Comments on the Taxonomy and Geographic Distribution of Some North American Rabbits • E. Raymond Hall
... the melting of their sides continue to increase in width long after the opening strain has ceased; while the sliver-bridges, level on top at first and perfectly safe, are at length melted to thin, vertical, knife-edged blades, the upper portion being most exposed to the weather; and since the exposure is greatest in the middle, they at length curve downward like the cables of suspension bridges. This one was evidently very old, for it had been weathered and wasted until it was the most dangerous ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... amateur lines seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could have sworn they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them curve and waver everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the telegraph post the pines were crooked—and alive. That lonely vertical rod at once deformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yet made it free, like any grotesque undergrowth ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... frequent showers and breezes allay the sultriness of the days. I never saw the thermometer above 90 deg. in the shade, and seldom below 65 deg.. It once fell to 54 deg., to the lamentable discomfort of our feelings and fingers. Of course, where the sun for months is nearly vertical, and twice in the summer actually so, the heat of his direct beams is intense. But those careful precautions of avoiding travelling in the middle of the day, on which some lay such stress, we never concerned ourselves with in Jamaica, and I could not discover that we were ever the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... aspect, as she swept up the room and into the vacant place at Richard's right hand with a rush of silken skirts. She produced a singular effect at once of energy and self-concentration—her lips thin and unsmiling, an ominous vertical furrow between the spring of her arched eyebrows, her eyes narrow, unresponsive, severe with thought under their ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Germany. It is characterized by its large size, its robust form, its large head, its long, flat ears, its square muzzle separated from the forehead by a deep depression, its large nose, often double (that is to say, with nostrils separated by a deep vertical groove), its pendent lips, its thick neck, its long and strong paws provided with dew claws, both on the fore and the hind feet, and its short hair, which is usually white and marked with brown or orange-yellow spots. The old brach breed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... mechanically, and few ready and habitual writers could, if suddenly called upon to do so, say what peculiarities their writing possessed. For example, how many could say off-hand how they dotted an i—whether with a round dot, a tick or a dash—whether the tick was vertical, horizontal or sloping; what was the proportional distance of the dot from the top of the i. Again, ask a practised writer how he crosses the letter t—whether with a horizontal, up or down stroke? ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... correcting for vertical movement, or rolling up or down. Set control to lock picture. ...
— Zenith Television Receiver Operating Manual • Zenith Radio Corporation
... incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upwards to God's throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death; Most like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe, Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet— If it could ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... in back of the premaxillary beak, in the last stages of adduction. Abrasion of the sides of the inner maxillary and outer dentary teeth indicates that tooth-to-tooth contact did occur. Whether such abrasion was due to contact in simple vertical adduction or in anteroposterior sliding is impossible to determine, but the evidence considered above indicates the ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... that he held open before her, and perceived that its vertical ruling betokened a sordid import, that its list of items in an illegible mixture of English and German was lengthy. "1 kettle of coals 6d." occurred regularly down that portentous array and buttoned it all together. It was Madam ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... spot when a second explosion more terrible, if possible, than the former was heard. The volcano in all its fury vomited forth some thousands of cart-loads of stones and burning lava. As the projection was nearly vertical, the greater part fell back again into the mouth of the mountain and this was again vomited forth as before. On the 11th and 12th, the fury somewhat abated, but on the 13th a fresh eruption commenced, and burning matter flowed down all the sides ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various |
