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More "Geometrical" Quotes from Famous Books



... the cutting of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of to-day but for the future security and improvement of the race,—in fact for "progress." If only the cake were not cut but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors. In that ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... into a flat surface of varicoloured figures. Woods are irregular blocks of dark green, like daubs of ink spilled on a table; fields are geometrical designs of different shades of green and brown, forming in composite an ultra-cubist painting; roads are thin white lines, each with its distinctive windings and crossings—from which you determine your location. The higher you are the easier it ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell

... the written or printed notes of a tone piece or the perforations on the paper music roll of an automatic player are arranged in symmetrical and geometrical figures and groups? Dry sand strewn on the top of a piano on which harmonious tone combinations are produced shows a tendency to arrange itself in ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... (all meanings except building) stationery (articles) counsel (advice or an adviser) miner (a workman) council (a body of persons) minor (under age) complement (a completing element) angel (a spiritual being) compliment (praise) angle (geometrical) ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... which they are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... working such an instrument enabled them to add many improvements to it; until the skilful artisan at length produced not merely circular turning of the most beautiful and accurate description, but exquisite figure-work, and complicated geometrical designs, depending upon the cycloidal and eccentric movements which were from time to ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... mullions; it is this tracery which marks most clearly the various changes of style. The shape of the arch is similar throughout. This was a concession on the part of the later builders which ensured harmony in the whole; but on each side the tracery is varied. On the east side it is geometrical in character, the work being transitional between Early English and Decorated; on the south side the tracery is more flowing and has advanced to Decorated; on the west side again, we get the transitional style between Decorated and Perpendicular, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... by geometrical lines, showing man's labor and its regularity, an immense parti-colored checker-board traversed by the lines of highroads and rivers, and containing islands which were forests and towns and cities. Was it the chain of the Pyrenees covered ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux

... are the blocks in our kindergarten simply to make geometrical figures, but rather to illustrate such facts of history as will have a moral influence, or be an intellectual stimulus to ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland

... here are by no means the only remarkable features of the masonry of Mitla. The interior and exterior of these great halls are carved with a beautifully executed geometrical design—the Greek pattern enclosed in a quadrilateral, the blocks upon which they are cut being exactly fitted and adjusted in their places with scarcely visible joints. Indeed, at Mitla, as in other places in the Americas—Huanuco[9] and Cuzco, in Peru, for example—it seems to have ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... himself a series of visages presenting successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... this society, with a deep sense of the unity of nature, have combined in the completest manner, all the branches of physical knowledge, and the historical, geometrical, and experimental philosophy. The names of natural historian and natural philosopher are here, therefore, nearly synonymous, chained by a terrestrial link to the type of the lower animals. Man completes the scale of higher organization. In his physiological and pathological qualities, ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage

... brief period of incubation fall sick with the disease; being bitten by other mosquitoes they serve to transmit the disease through the "intermediate host" to still others. Thus the epidemic extends, at first slowly from house to house, then more rapidly, as by geometrical progression. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... in the eccentricities of topiarian art—is even, it is to be hoped, on the way to free itself finally from the ugliness of "carpet bedding"—when plants are largely grouped and massed instead of being placed in alternate kinds at regular intervals in geometrical patterns. Present day taste with its appreciation of garden colour, of masses and groups of particular kinds, instead of isolated plants dotted about with irritating regularity, is found beautifully exemplified in the numerous beds cut in the ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold

... perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions. Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441. Schoeffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to such perfection that books ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... opaque, is now clear and transparent, so that I can look right up the balloon and see the meshes of the net-work showing through it, the upper valve with its springs and line reaching to the car, and the geometrical form of the balloon itself. Nor is this an idle examination. I have already said that, in passing through the cloud, the netting would gather moisture, augmenting the weight of the balloon. If this should not all have evaporated, the net-work would have become frozen, and be a wire-rope; so that, ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne

... mansion, or, we should rather say, city of mansions, with its monastic chapel, and geometrical gardens, laid out in the trim style of our forefathers. The suite of state apartments in the principal front was very splendid, and previously to their being dismantled by Sir William Chambers, they exhibited a sorry scene of royal finery and attic taste. Mouldering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various

... each corner a pole had been erected, and wires crossed the roof diagonally, hung with red and amber bulbs. Around the chimneys had been massed evergreen trees in tubs, hiding their brick-and-mortar ugliness, and among the trees tiny lights were strung. Along the parapet were rows of geometrical boxwood plants in bright red crocks, and the flaps of a crimson and white tent had been thrown open, showing lights within, and ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... laughed at all abstract theories and at the ingenuous minds which take them seriously. He held that all system was but logical infatuation; that the only pardonable follies were those which were frankly avowed; and that only a pedant could clothe his imagination in geometrical theories. In general, pedantry to his eyes was the least excusable of vices; he understood it to be the pretension of tracing back phenomena to first causes, "as if," said he, "there were any 'first causes,' or chance admitted of calculation!" This did not prevent him however ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... traced, and thus we are enabled to produce an accurate representation of them. Some of the beautiful crystalline deposits shown in Fig. 4 represent less than a millionth part of a grain, yet their forms are delineated with geometrical precision. Earthy phosphates are often mistaken for pus and also seminal fluid. Phosphates are always found in decomposed urine, otherwise they indicate brain affections, acute cystitis, etc. Experience has taught us that the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... example, the notes of Aennchen von Tharau were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever heard them. Even so the music of the future sleeps now, to be awakened hereafter. Or, if we take the world of geometrical relations, the thousandth decimal of 'pi' sleeps there, tho no one may ever try to compute it. Or, if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically FITTED; countless stones 'fit' gaps in ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... described. 7. The "leaf plan," "rib plan," or "tree plan," with lines branching off from a trunk line like ribs, veins of a leaf, or branches of a tree. 8. Parallel lines which cross at right angles and mark off the field like a checkerboard. 9. Paths making one or more fairly symmetrical geometrical figures, like a square, a diamond, a star, a hexagon, etc. 10. A combination of two or more ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... antimacassar, as its name implies, was designed to protect chairs and couches from the disfiguring stains of macassar oil, then liberally used in the adornment of the hair which received much attention. A parting, of geometrical precision, at the back of the head was often affected by men of dressy habits, who sometimes also wore a carefully arranged curl at the front; and manly locks, if luxuriant enough, were not infrequently permitted to fall in careless ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... unaware of this precious drop of sympathy plodded through an essay on Intellect, wrote out a laborious analysis, and at the stroke of the nine-thirty gong crept reluctantly back to her room. The next morning she translated her Latin, committed a geometrical demonstration to a faithful memory, consumed a silent luncheon amid a dizzying cross-fire of psychological arguments, walked around the garden, through the pines and over the orchard hill for a scrupulously full hour of exercise, read her physiology notes, ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... show some realistic motives, such as the fish, birds, and flowers in Fig. 23, No. 1; the snake and lizard in No. 2; the man in No. 5; but the strictly geometrical is dominant in nearly every case. Probably the most typical of this class of work is shown in Nos. 3 and 4 and Fig. 22, Nos. 1, 2, and 3. It should be noted, however, that, where one decorated object is seen, many more entirely ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... Fatality as having a fixed seat, and that seat must be considered to be Space, which should be conceived as possessing feeling, but not activity or intelligence. And in our abstract speculations we should imagine all our conceptions as located in free Space. Our images of all sorts, down to our geometrical diagrams, and even our ciphers and algebraic symbols, should always be figured to ourselves as written in space, and not on paper or any other material substance. M. Comte adds that they should be conceived as green ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... of them around, the class will readily gain a correct idea of the use of the term angle; also of the terms acute angle, right angle, and obtuse angle. By pinning three of these rules together at their ends, the children not only see, but can handle the simplest form of geometrical figures. When this figure is defined, they are enabled permanently to possess themselves of the meaning of the word triangle, by the simultaneous exercise of three senses. By combining rules of the same and different lengths, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... July 1, 1858, Darwin's share amounts to little more than six pages, yet within this space he describes the geometrical rate of increase of animals, the checks that occur, the effects of changed conditions, the natural selection of the better equipped forms resulting from the struggle for existence, and the influence of sexual selection. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... Professor Murray to exclaim in despair—Let it be granted that A. B. (for such was our hero's name) is a straight line. The other magnitude, which drew near with a step at once elusive and fascinating, revealed as she walked a figure so exquisite in its every curve as to call from her geometrical acquaintances the ecstatic exclamation, "Let it be granted that M is ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... that with each succeeding degree of relationship the ratio of same-name to different-name cousin marriages would increase in geometrical proportion, viz. first cousins, 1:3; second cousins, 1:9; third cousins, 1:27, etc., but on the other hand there is the tendency for families of the same name to hold together even in migration as may be proved by the ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner

... the bayonet. The situation was full of humour. Bedard was an excellent mathematician, and was in the habit of whiling away the hours of his imprisonment by solving mathematical problems. When the guard came to turn him out, he was in the midst of a geometrical problem. 'At least,' he begged, 'let me finish my problem.' The request was granted; an hour later the problem was solved, and Bedard was thrust forth from ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles

... fever of expectation, I hung over the banisters of the geometrical staircase, watching ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour

... element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements—comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... seem no special need for light, the place being designed more to pass the night in, than the day; in brief, a pine barrens dormitory, of knotty pine bunks, without bedding. As with the nests in the geometrical towns of the associate penguin and pelican, these bunks were disposed with Philadelphian regularity, but, like the cradle of the oriole, they were pendulous, and, moreover, were, so to speak, three-story cradles; the description of one of ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... as the subject matter is one which demands for its effective apprehension either intellectual effort or emotional insight. When both these variables are demanded, the gulf widens and deepens at a ratio which is "geometrical" rather than "arithmetical"; and when a high degree of each is demanded, the separation between knowledge and ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... liquids and still less so in solids, they are nevertheless capable of arranging themselves and of becoming polarized in a regular order, special to each kind of atom, in order to produce crystals of geometrical form characteristic of each species. Thus, as Mr. Saigey remarks in "Physique Moderne" (p. 181): "So long as the atmospheres of the molecules do not touch each other, no trace of cohesion manifests ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... glass to his eye, Barbican examined the clefts for some time with close attention. He saw that their banks were sharp edged and extremely steep. In many places they were of such geometrical regularity that he readily excused Gruithuysen's idea of deeming them to be gigantic earthworks thrown up by the Selenite engineers. Some of them were as straight as if laid out with a line, others were curved a little here and there, though still maintaining the strict parallelism ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... robbed of this advantage the Conference companies could do little or nothing to harm the Guardian. And in justice to them it must be said that none of them apparently manifested any abnormal desire to do so, excepting always the Salamander, whose hostility increased in geometrical ratio with the Guardian's recovery of strength and prestige. Most of the agencies which had been lost under Mr. Gunterson's management were either restored to the company's lists, or else their places had been taken by others of ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... stand three stones which have not as yet been described in detail, since they do not fall within the geometrical arrangement of the circle. They are, however, of the highest importance, as it is from them, and from their position, that it is possible to gather some conclusions as to one use to which the ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens

... current among the more advanced thinkers. These erroneous methods, if the word method can be applied to erroneous tendencies arising from the absence of any sufficiently distinct conception of method, may be termed the Experimental, or Chemical, mode of investigation, and the Abstract, or Geometrical, mode. We shall begin with ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... boys had his own room, and there collected his own treasures and trophies, arranged to suit his convenience and taste. Frank's was full of books, maps, machinery, chemical messes, and geometrical drawings, which adorned the walls like intricate cobwebs. A big chair, where he read and studied with his heels higher than his head, a basket of apples for refreshment at all hours of the day or night, and an immense inkstand, in which several pens were always ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... Pleasures, and Advantages of Science" is admirable, as a bird's-eye view of the subject, while at the same time it is an enticing stimulant to study. The work on "Natural Theology" necessarily touches upon the physical sciences, and their connection with the great mechanism of nature. The geometrical and optical papers, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, when he was only fifteen years of age, show at least a firm groundwork of scientific knowledge. And if it be said that Lord Brougham's attainments are superficial only, we say that knowledge ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... usefully combine with it; all else remains in shadow." But we have no more right to say that the past effaces itself as soon as perceived than to suppose that material objects cease to exist when we cease to perceive them. Memory, to use a geometrical illustration which Bergson himself employs, comes into action like the point of a cone pressing against a plane. The plane denotes the present need, particularly in relation to bodily action, while the cone stands for all our total past. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... abstraction. And since this abstraction, being completely empty, left, as we have said, full room for every gratuitous hypothesis and the logical consequences resulting therefrom, the "scientific" mission of these reformers assumed the appearance of a geometrical problem; given a certain nature, find what structure of society best corresponds with it. So Morelly complains bitterly because "our old teachers" failed to attempt the solution of "this excellent ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... on the walls. The walls were painted a light buff. The furniture consisted of two single-width beds, two chiffoniers, a study table and two straight-backed chairs. The beds were against the opposite walls, the table in the geometrical centre of the rug, the chiffoniers occupied a portion of the remaining wall space on each side and the two chairs were set between beds and bureaus. The window was in a slight bay and there was a six-foot seat below it. The ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... garments for holiday occasions are exceedingly handsome, being decorated with "geometrical" patterns, in which the "Greek fret" takes part, in coarse blue cotton, braided most dexterously with scarlet and white thread. Some of the handsomest take half a year to make. The masculine dress is completed by an apron of oblong shape decorated in the same elaborate manner. ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... sum total of objects situated in an event as thus inter-related is a mere abstract concept. Again a right-angle is a perceived object which can be situated in many events; but, though rectangularity is posited by sense-awareness, the majority of geometrical relations are not so posited. Also rectangularity is in fact often not perceived when it can be proved to have been there for perception. Thus an object is often known merely as an abstract relation not directly posited in sense-awareness although ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them? Why is it that the value of acres increases in a geometrical ratio, as they stretch away towards the North Star from the frontier of Slavery? These questions must suggest their sufficient answer to thousands of hearts, and be preparing the way for the insurrection of which the slaveholders stand in the deadliest fear,—that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... with it under his pillow. As for the girl, timid, sensitive, aged fifteen, she fled on his approach, and shook with fear if he looked at her. He made his love plain by logical formulas and proved his passion by geometrical permutations—by charts and diagrams. A seasoned widow might have broken up the icy fastness of his soul and melted his forbidding nature in the crucible of feeling, but this poor girl just wanted some one to hold her little hand ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... little fact is not difficult. I will not attempt any geometrical reasoning, but will give only a practical illustration. In doing this, I shall first have to allude to a point which was almost passed over when treating of Twining-plants. If we hold in our left hand a bundle of parallel strings, we can with our right hand turn these ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... spaces on each side of the arch, or the corresponding slopes of the gable, are loaded with recumbent figures by the sculptors of the renaissance, are we to call, for instance, Michael Angelo's Dawn and Twilight, only the decorations of the sloping plinths of a tomb, or trace to a geometrical propriety the subsequent rule in Italy that no window could be properly complete for living people to look out of, without having two stone people sitting on the corners of it above? I have heard of charming young ladies occasionally, at very ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... dances and other exercises of the young maidens naked, in sight of the young men, were, moreover, incentives to marriage: and, to use Plato's expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attractions of love, as a geometrical conclusion follows from the premises. To encourage it still more, some marks of infamy were set upon those that continued bachelors. For they were not permitted to see these exercises of the naked virgins; and the magistrates commanded them to march ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... these people. Nothing can be more pleasing, nothing surprises an European so much as the silence and harmony which prevails among them, and in each family; except when disturbed by that accursed spirit given them by the wood rangers in exchange for their furs. If my children learn nothing of geometrical rules, the use of the compass, or of the Latin tongue, they will learn and practise sobriety, for rum can no longer be sent to these people; they will learn that modesty and diffidence for which the young Indians are so remarkable; they will consider labour as the ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... and in the course of it, to the surprise of the examiners, showed that he could repeat Euclid verbatim,—not by the exercise of the memory, which in Ericsson is not remarkably retentive, but from his perfect mastery of geometrical science. There is no doubt that it is this thorough knowledge of geometry to which he is indebted for his clear conceptions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... loved one. But if we are allowed to sit at meat with her,—ever a royal condescension,—it is ours at least to pass her the salt, to see that she is never kept waiting a moment for the mustard or the pepper, to cut the bread for her with geometrical precision, and to lean as near her warm shoulder as we dare to pour out ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... directed the public curiosity to Tasmania. For several successive years new books were published, describing the fertility of the soil and the beauty of the climate. These generally contained a theory of pastoral increase—a geometrical progression towards wealth. The increase was, indeed, rapid beyond oriental precedent. Between 1810 and 1820, it was estimated at fifty fold.[109] The adaptation of these colonies for the growth of wool ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... who profess to discern, after the beginning of the Russian campaign, and especially in the last contest in Belgium, signs of a decline in his almost superhuman vigilance and energy. Yet all must admit "that transcendent geometrical faculty," as Sainte-Beuve calls it, "which characterized Napoleon, and which that powerful genius applied to war with the same ease and the same aptitude that Monge [a great French mathematician] applied it to other subjects." No general ever had greater power to fascinate ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... which is at variance with common practice among architects. After pointing out the importance of studying design in the solid, that is, constantly keeping in mind that the forms which are to be designed have three dimensions, and that a geometrical projection, such as a plan or elevation, only partially represents its appearance, he advocates the more general use of perspective drawing in designing. By this is not meant the making of pretty sketches after the design is all determined, to mislead impressionable ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various

... incrusted with mosaic work of jasper, carnelian, lapis-lazuli, agate, turquoise, bloodstone, malachite and other precious materials in the form of foliage, flowers, ornamental scrolls, sentences from the Koran in Arabic letters and geometrical patterns. The decoration is as beautiful and as rich as the Taj Mahal, so far as it goes, and was done by the ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... of that new-born democracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan of this interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Built by the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the larger uses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of this particular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The cross is divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries and mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in its upper stages, leaving the clear-story surrounding the crossing ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... Mind, and its opposite, the so-called material life and mind, are figured by two geometrical symbols, a circle or sphere and a straight 282:6 line. The circle represents the infinite with- out beginning or end; the straight line represents the finite, which has both beginning and end. The sphere 282:9 represents good, the self-existent and eternal individuality or Mind; the straight line ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... spiders. They frequently show the greatest skill and cunning in the construction of their webs and the capture of their prey, and naturalists say that the spider has a very well developed brain. They must certainly have a geometrical talent, or they could not arrange their webs with such regularity and scientific accuracy. Some spiders will throw their webs across ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... at one with Lord Foppington, and much disposed to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own wit—without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others. Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book? These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may have no value in the world's market. One of my conscious efforts, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... vary the colour of the wood. The variation caused by the diverse lie of the grain and so forth, is enough. Most decorators will be willing, I believe, to accept it as an axiom, that when a pattern is made of very simple geometrical forms, strong contrast of colour is ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... (improbum ausum,) but which had been conducted with so much judgment, and on such sound principles, that it commanded and deserved our credit. Hipparchus, who was distinguished for his correctness and diligence in every part of geometrical and astronomical science, and who had specially exerted those qualities in his endeavours to correct the errors of Eratosthenes, had been able to add only the comparatively small extent of 25,000 stadia to the computation of Eratosthenes.—Plin. Nat. Hist. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... steadily regaining his normal health. So I felt more and more at liberty to devote myself to Miss Kemball—in such moments as she would permit me—and I found her fascination increasing in a ratio quite geometrical. Martigny was still abed, and, so the ship's doctor told me, ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson

... existence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter, and another between Venus and Mercury, he might be able to attain his object; but he found that this assumption afforded him no assistance. Kepler then imagined that as there were five regular geometrical solids, and five planets, the distances of the latter were regulated by the size of the solids described round one another. The discovery afterwards of two additional planets testified to the absurdity of this speculation. ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... enjoy in peace all the gifts of Providence, admire its works in the innocence of my heart, and discover by what geometrical process God has regulated the form of the globe, and to what pallet, to use the painter's phrase, he has ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... took up the Sage's staff, which he had dropped for the moment, and with its point she drew geometrical figures in the sand. But the sun made shadows with her eyelashes, and the Sage felt his voice tremble, so ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn

... enchanting views. "Well can we understand the distress of mind in a mediaeval divine, or even in a modern savant, who, bent upon following the most subtle windings of some scientific debate in the Talmudical pages—geometrical, botanical, financial, or otherwise—as it revolves round the Sabbath journey, the raising of seeds, the computation of tithes and taxes—feels, as it were, the ground suddenly give way. The loud voices grow thin, the doors and walls of the school-room vanish before his eyes, and in their ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... action is precisely that described in No. 666, Pl. 4. It is hardly necessary to observe that the other sketches on this page and the lines of text below the circle (containing the solution of a geometrical problem) have no reference to the picture of the Last Supper. With this figure of Christ may be compared a similar pen and ink drawing reproduced on page 297 below on the left hand; the original is in the Louvre. On this page again the rest of the sketches have no direct ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... spiritual lustre. Nothing is more interesting than the way in which the two qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving an almost geometrical precision to his most mystical visions. In his letter to Can Grande he says: "It behooves not those to whom it is given to know what is best in us to follow the footprints of the herd; much rather are they bound to oppose its wanderings. For the vigorous in ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... intend to forego logic," said he, "but it is not as easy to measure the logical value of a conclusion in questions of sentiment, of love of faith, as it is to measure the logical value of a conclusion in geometrical problems. In the questions which interest us the logical process is hidden. Surely my dear friend Marinier, one of the most acute-minded men I know, when he answered my dear friend Selva, did not intend to imply that when a person very ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... which may be said to have an educational value. They are the "Wisdom Boards" and the "Ring of Wisdom." The former consists of a number of flat thin pieces of wood, cut in many geometrical shapes. Certain possible figures are printed on paper as models, and the boy tries to form them out of the pieces given him. In some cases much time and thinking are required to form the figure. The ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton

... Varro propounded to cast Romulus's nativity, even to the first day and hour, making his deductions from the several events of the man's life which he should be informed of, exactly as in working back a geometrical problem; for it belonged, he said, to the same science both to foretell a man's life by knowing the time of his birth, and also to find out his birth by the knowledge of his life. This task Tarrutius undertook, and first looking into the actions and casualties of the man, together ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... justifying its intoxication by revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called The Ecstasy, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... the Romans in the geometrical Roman way you may see as you look down from the Bell Tower upon its four main streets—north, south, east and west—east becoming Stane-street and running direct to London. Chichester then was Regnum. On the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... up simply, naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the need of staff or crutch."[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that the gain of vast aerial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very strongly when ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... and it went worse than the history, either from want of memory or because she was upset by fear. Then the whipping recommenced; a whalebone blow now and then, then oftener and oftener. Manin, true to his pedagogical opinions, applauded with his mouth full, and cut his bread into wonderful geometrical shapes before conducting them with all solemnity to his mouth. The faults were many, the blows were the same. But at the end of the lesson Concha thought that besides the punishment at every fault there was a certain reparation due for general naughtiness, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... the forms assumed by plane or solid figures in certain positions. For performing computations he devised a machine of great ingenuity, which also served the purpose, with certain modifications, of representing geometrical diagrams. In religion he was a sceptic or something more, and in his last hours Diderot supposes him to have engaged in a discussion with a minister of religion, upon the arguments for the existence of a deity drawn from final causes. This discussion Diderot professes to reproduce, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... implies Sir James's scale, his vine-dresser being the equatorial case between the two extremes of the envoy. Malthus again, in his population-book, contends for a mathematic difference between animal and vegetable life, in respect to the law of increase, as though the first increased by geometrical ratios, the last by arithmetical! No proposition more worthy of laughter; since both, when permitted to expand, increase by geometrical ratios, and the latter by much higher ratios. Whereas, Malthus ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... it seemed; and Walter prepared to climb into the narrow bedstead, which he shared with his brother Laurens. He was now in a tranquil frame of mind. He didn't even have any desire to romp with Laurens, who, without laying claim to geometrical knowledge, usually managed to find the diagonal of ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... the seventy-three had been arrested, but not to the 2nd of June, 1793, when the twenty-two were arrested. After overthrowing Robespierre, and the committee, it had to attack Marat and the Mountain. In the almost geometrical progression of popular movement, a few months were still ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet

... hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... sensation, but unity of joy as does music. Therefore when a poet sees the vision of a girl in April, even a downright materialist is in sympathy with him. But we know that the same individual would be menacingly angry if the law of heredity or a geometrical problem were described as a girl or a rose—or even as a cat or a camel. For these intellectual abstractions have no magical touch for our lute-strings of imagination. They are no dreams, as are the harmony of bird-songs, rain-washed leaves glistening in the sun, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... Town museum. It is thought that they represent vultures, and the vulture was a bird of religious significance among some of the Semitic nations. Fragments of soapstone bowls were discovered, some with figures of animals carved on them, some with geometrical patterns, while on one were marks which might possibly belong to some primitive alphabet. There were also whorls somewhat resembling those which occur so profusely in the ruins of Troy, and stone objects which may be phalli, though some at least of ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... cannot understand those parts which relate to solids, and their surfaces, and lines generated by their section 155 Nor even the elements of plane geometry 156 The proper objects of sight incapable of being managed as geometrical figures 157 The opinion of those who hold plane figures to be the immediate objects of sight, considered 158 Planes no more the immediate objects of sight, than solids 159 Difficult to enter precisely into the thoughts of the above-mentioned intelligence 160 The object ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley

... S. Faith and S. Thomas the Apostle, one to our Lady of Bolton and the other to our Lady of Houghall. The north transept is closed by a large window, which is the work of Prior Fossor, probably about the year 1362. The window is of six lights, and the head contains late geometrical tracery. The architectural feature of this window, especially for its date, is the transom which crosses the mullions, and which is not visible from the exterior. Below the transom is a second inner ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate

... piece of faded ribbon. Paton was never in the habit of hampering himself with fine-drawn scruples, and he had no hesitation in opening the folded paper and spreading it out on the table. Judging from the glance I gave it, it seemed to be a confused and abstruse mixture of irregular geometrical figures and cramped German chirography. But Paton set to work upon it with as much concentration as if it had been a recipe for the Philosopher's Stone; he reproduced the lines and angles on fresh paper, and ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne

... drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine. This skill, together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of numbers and geometrical figures, was the most brilliant achievement ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... obvious explanation is, that the conditions of life have been very favorable, and that there has consequently been less destruction of the old and young, and that nearly all the young have been enabled to breed. In such cases the geometrical ratio of increase, the result of which never fails to be surprising, simply explains the extraordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion of naturalized productions in their new homes."—(pp. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... or mathematical proportions, such as we employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics, e.g. his distinction between arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics (Book V), or between numerical and ...
— The Republic • Plato

... and the case, or house. in which this dwells, is made of small husks, and gravel, and slime, most curiously made of these, even so as to be wondered at, but not to be made by man, no more than a king-fisher's nest can, which is made of little fishes' bones, and have such a geometrical interweaving and connection as the like is not to be done by the art of man. This kind of cadis is a choice bait for any float-fish; it is much less than the piper- cadis, and to be so ordered: and these may be so preserved, ten, fifteen, ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same, according to the pitch,—quite regular when the combination is a true chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,—I say that music is an art conceived in ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... kind." I found afterward a large variety of these Winnebago sacks, and all were characterized by patterns of men, deer, turtles, or other animals. Not one Fox sack of such pattern was to be found, though many elaborate and beautiful geometrical designs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my good looks by giving me the chance ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... rational—numerical or geometrical—approach to kinematic synthesis is possible is a relatively recent idea, not yet fully accepted; but it is this idea that is responsible for the intense scholarly interest in the kinematics of mechanisms that has occurred in this country ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... tragedies have we lately seen!. . . Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. A man cannot tell whether Apelles, or Albert Durer, were the more trifler; whereof the one, would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, would please nobody, but the painter that made them. Not but I think a painter may make a better face than ever was; but he must do it by a ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

... resemble animals; others have a geometrical aspect. In each class the similarity tends to indicate character. The fox-faced man is apt to be sly, the triangular man is likely to be a lump. So Mr. Asche, being rectilinear, was on the square; just as Mr. Hogan, being soft and round, was slippery and hard to hold. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... into yellow dust which covered everything. Arid hillsides without a leaf of green but dotted thickly with gray sagebrush, eroded valleys, rocks and gullies—all shone a dusty yellow in the heat. The dust penetrated everything. Wherever water could be utilized were orchards, little trees planted in geometrical rows and only waiting the touch of irrigation to make their owners ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... beams, bent beneath the weight of the upper stories, though it had never given way under them. Built en colombage, that is to say, with a wooden frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on as to form geometrical figures,—thus preserving a naive image of the burgher ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... simply because the chief inducement is on the wrong side. If an author receives twice as much pay for a page as for half a page, he will write a page as a matter of course; and, as a matter of course, the quality of what he writes will be depreciated in geometrical proportion. For the same thing, said in few words, is ten times more effectual than when said ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... casual omens Divination by dreams Divination by geometrical figures The vine omen The rattan omen Divination by suspension and other methods The suspension omen The omen from eggs Divination by sacrificial appearances The blood omen The neck omen The omen from the gall The omen from the liver The omen from a fowl's intestinal appendix Ornithoscopy In ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... intercourse with him, was subjected to the same penalties as could by law be inflicted on the criminal himself. Several writs of intercommuning were now issued against the hearers and preachers in conventicles; and by this severe and even absurd law, crimes and guilt went on multiplying in a geometrical proportion. Where laws themselves are so violent, it is no wonder that an administration ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... a seminary for the training of teachers, and a school for teaching the different branches of industrial drawing. There are free-hand drawing from copies and plaster models, perspective and geometrical drawing, the drawing and painting of ornamental and practical designs, and flower-painting on wood, china, and paper, with thorough courses of one and two years in the History of Art. Modelling in clay, wax, and designs for gold ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... the question before me, I must say a word of the road that I shall traverse. When Pascal approached a geometrical problem, he invented a method of solution; to solve a problem in philosophy a method is equally necessary. Well, by how much do the problems of which philosophy treats surpass in the gravity of their results those discussed by geometry! ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year; otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... may learn, as the individual organism does, by the method of trial and error. Costly blunders need not be repeated, and the waste involved {144} in untried experiments may steadily be reduced. Furthermore, the advance is by geometrical, and not merely by arithmetical progression. Every discovery and achievement is multiplied in fruitfulness through being added to the capital stock ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... war-lord's tactical plan, the evolution of a geometrical theorem, the devising of a great business campaign, the elimination of waste in a factory, the denouement of a powerful drama, the overcoming of an economic obstacle, the scheme for a sublime poem, and the convincing siege of an audience may—nay, indeed must—each be conceived ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... Princess, and had bestowed all her care to lead her mind to the path which she had traced out for her, for the most decided feature in the character of Anne of Austria was an invincible obstinacy in her calculations, to which she would fain have subjected all events and all passions with a geometrical exactitude. There is no doubt that to this positive and immovable mind we must attribute all the misfortunes of her regency. The sombre reply of Cinq-Mars; his arrest; his trial—all had been concealed from the Princesse Marie, whose first fault, it is true, had been a movement of ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... not allowed to have pen and ink without special permission; but paper and pencils were not included under this regulation, so my guard got them for me, together with candles and candlesticks, and I proceeded to kill time by making geometrical calculations. I made the obliging soldier sup with me, and he promised to commend me to one of his comrades who would serve me well. The guard was ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... spots in our picture are geometrical figures, nevertheless geometry can obviously say nothing at all about their actual form and position. The network, however, is purely geometrical; all its properties can be given a priori. Laws like the principle of sufficient reason, etc. are about ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein

... pure line swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, its warm, glowing colours, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury that the new ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... the gallery was a true oval, a geometrical ellipse, the extraordinary acoustic properties of which I knew well. This peculiarly shaped gallery contained two foci—one towards each end—and the nature of the curve of the walls was such that sound ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade

... who first called attention to the clear flame of Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony. So Munch, who pins to paper with almost geometrical accuracy his personal adventures in the misty mid-region of Weir. And a masculine soul is his. I can still recall my impressions on seeing one of his early lithographs entitled, Geschrei. As far as America is concerned, Edvard Munch was discovered by Vance Thompson, who wrote an appreciation of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... effort, good sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life now among ourselves. In essence it is neither more nor less than this, as the rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the same kind as that which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical ratio with the effect it has produced already. As we are extending reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we should admit also that ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... in the cemetery of Kait Bey, are instances of the second and more matured style of the period. The simple plain ashlar masonry still predominates, but the wall surface is broken up with sunk panels, sometimes with geometrical patterns in them. The principal characteristics of this second period are the magnificent portals, rising sometimes, as in the mosque of sultan Hasan, to 80 or 90 ft., with elaborate stalactite vaulting at the top, and the deep stalactite cornices which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... mouldings and wainscotings (for example, the alternation of egg and dart), the series of windows in a wall, or of the columns of a Greek temple, or of the black and white keys of a piano. Still more complex is the balanced arrangement of straight lines and curves in a geometrical design, as in certain Oriental rugs or the Gothic rose windows. And probably the most complex spatial rhythms are those of the facades of great buildings like the Gothic cathedrals or St. Mark's of Venice, where only the trained eye perceives ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... chopping-tray, was the washtub. The ironing or mangling apparatus consisted of a rolling-pin, round which the article of clothing was wrapped, and a curved paddle of hard wood, its under-surface carved in pretty geometrical designs, with which it was smoothed. This paddle served also to beat the clothes upon the stones, when the washing was done in the river, in warm weather. A few wooden bowls and spoons and earthen pots, including the variety which keeps milk cool ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... been already in itself a character, and had not constituted a well-marked distinct personality, almost unique in kind, Moore would have been at variance with the most profound moralists, who agree that human nature never has the simplicity of a geometrical figure, and that, in reality, characters always are mixed, complicated, composed of opposite elements of incompatible inclinations and passions. For Moore appears to think that men are almost always swayed by one ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... shows little or no duplication in decorative design, and every ornamented food basin bears practically different symbols. The decoration of the food basins is mainly on the interior, but there is almost invariably a geometrical design of some kind on the outside, near the rim. The ladles, likewise, are ornamented on their interior, and their handles also are generally decorated. When the specimens were removed from the graves their colors, as a rule, were apparently as well preserved as at the time of ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... our description of the stellar universe has been confined to its geometrical properties. A serious study of the evolution of the stars must seek to determine, first of all, what the stars really are, what their chemical constitutions and physical conditions are; and how they are related to each other as to their physical properties. The application of the spectroscope ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... the neat geometrical pattern of little scars, perpendicular on the forehead, horizontal on the cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he chewed ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... lighted it and flipped the match into the campfire. He smoked it down to the last inch, staring into the fire and saying nothing the while. When the cigarette stub followed the match, he leaned back upon one elbow and began tracing a geometrical figure in the sand with ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower

... exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world. "Was Clara," he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... fields—the inundation obliterating old landmarks and divisions. The science thus forced upon their attention was cultivated with zeal and success. A single papyrus has been discovered that holds twelve geometrical theorems. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... rank has the inherent lack of cohesion of open order. However, open order is necessary to economize losses and permit the use of weapons. Thus to-day there is greater necessity than ever for the rank, that is for discipline, not for the geometrical rank. It is at the same time more necessary ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... most vast, of our own world, are still to be further multiplied by the inconceivably momentous relations subsisting between our own and other planets and their common centre; amidst whose sublime and solemn phenomena science has most clearly discovered that everything is accurately adjusted by geometrical precision of force and movement; where the chances of error are infinite, and the proofs of intelligence, therefore, equal. These proofs of design in each fragment of the universe, and in all combined, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... This is only the D of the alphabet of power. And glancing up to the other suns, one hundred, five hundred, twelve hundred times as large, double, triple, septuple, multiple suns, we shall find power enough to go through the whole alphabet in geometrical ratio; and then in the clustered suns, galaxies, and nebulae, power enough still unrepresented by single letters to require all combinations of the alphabet of power. What is the significance of this single element of power? The answer of science to-day is "correlation," ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... human family should remember, that the human race is, as to time and nature, but as one totality; for, since every man and woman had two parents, each parent two parents, and so on in geometrical progression, hence every individual, high or low, must necessarily be descended from every individual of the whole population as it existed but a few hundred years before, whether they were high or low, virtuous or abandoned; while every procreative individual ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various

... suddenly and temporarily increased in any sensible degree. The obvious explanation is, that the conditions of life have been very favorable, and that there has consequently been less destruction of the old and young, and that nearly all the young have been enabled to breed. In such cases the geometrical ratio of increase, the result of which never fails to be surprising, simply explains the extraordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion of naturalized productions in ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... and, sometimes, purely material, in the condensed shape of allegorical symbols, India, nevertheless, has known how to express all these teachings more or less successfully. She has immortalized them in her ugly, four-headed idols, in the geometrical, complicated forms of her temples, and even in the entangled lines and spots on the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... adorning linen was practised from the earliest times. Threads were drawn and fashioned with the needle, or the ends of the cloth unravelled and plaited into geometrical patterns. St. Cuthbert's curious grave-clothes, as described by an eyewitness to his disinterment in the twelfth century, were ornamented with cut-work, which was used principally for ecclesiastical purposes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... scores and scores of scrolls made out of slippery white linen, on which had been drawn all sorts of most amazing geometrical designs ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... understood from the ground-plan (fig. 129)[508]. This plan shews very clearly the library itself, the two circular staircases at the west end, leading up to the gallery, the wide geometrical staircase leading down to the portico, the corridor into which this staircase opens, and from which a visitor could either ascend by a flight of stairs to the gallery crossing the nave, or, turning to his right, either enter ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark

... in his old home,—in the hipped roof of it, the mullioned casements, the wide window-seats, the high and spacious rooms, the geometrical gardens and broad lawns, in all that was quaint and beautiful at Matocton,—because it would be Patricia's so very soon, the lovely frame of a yet lovelier picture, as the colonel phrased it with a flight ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... the pure line swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, its warm, glowing colours, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury that the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... also be reached by a different path, may be attained by the road of physics as well as by that of transcendental metaphysics. For Newton has given in his Principia a geometrical demonstration of the infinite compressibility of matter. All the worlds, therefore, that cluster in yon swelling vault can be condensed into a single globe of the size of a walnut; and then, on that petty lump of apparent substance, the enfranchised soul might ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... that I could be in either place by a sort of mental shift, something like staring at one of the geometrical optical illusions you can find in any psychology textbook in the chapter on illusions, and seeing it ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham

... Geometrical). Pointed arches. Pillars with detached shafts. Moulded or carved capitals. Narrow and high pointed windows. Later period—Geometrical trefoil ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic. While under the influence of his genius, we are sincerely glad that the requisite science for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age. Art had to go through a toilsome period of geometrical and anatomical pedantry, before it could venture, in the frescoes of Michael Angelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive of the situation, not communicably. The most vivid and persistent was a triangle. Interpret who may. The one beheld the two pass from view ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... The objects of geometrical inquiry are so entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart, that mankind, without difficulty, adopt not only the more simple theorems of the science, but even those abstruse paradoxes ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... the Sage's staff, which he had dropped for the moment, and with its point she drew geometrical figures in the sand. But the sun made shadows with her eyelashes, and the Sage felt his voice tremble, so ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn

... with time and labor but after all successfully he conquered the remainder of Syracuse. The Romans when they became masters of these districts killed many persons, among them Archimedes. He was constructing a geometrical figure and hearing that the enemy were at hand he said: [Sidenote: (FRAG. 56^32?)] "Let them come at my head, but keep their distance from my figure!" He was little perturbed when a hostile warrior confronted him, and by his words, "Fellow, stand away from my figure," he irritated ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio

... he had no skill at all. And not only in that, but in the other mathematical sciences, as geometry, astronomy, music, &c. For in waiting on the concoction and attending the digestion of his food, they made a thousand pretty instruments and geometrical figures, and did in some measure ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... for holiday occasions are exceedingly handsome, being decorated with "geometrical" patterns, in which the "Greek fret" takes part, in coarse blue cotton, braided most dexterously with scarlet and white thread. Some of the handsomest take half a year to make. The masculine dress is completed ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... says that these walls were twelve thousand eight hundred and forty-three geometrical feet in extent, and that they were built without expense ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga

... the window, seemed never to have been disturbed since it left the upholsterer's hands. Whatever life and motion there might have been in the basement, were sheltered from observation by conical firs or square-clipped box borders, set out on strictly geometrical principles in each of the four front yards. The doors were ponderous and tight fitting, as if they were never meant to be opened; and the vivid polish of their surfaces showed no trace of human handling. No marks of feet could be detected on the smooth, heavy flagstones which led up from the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... beautiful, and points to a degree of refinement and cultivation which we do not usually associate with a rough life, such as was led by the monks of sea-girt Lindisfarne. There are to be seen wonderful initial letters, geometrical and tesselated designs, like the most delicate and intricate mosaics, and above all, beautifully devout representations of the four evangelists, all evidently drawn by the same loving and reverent hand, and the whole colouring as fresh now as if ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... used with many extensions of this primary meaning. It denotes the imaginary line about which a body or system of bodies rotates, or a line about which a body or action is symmetrically disposed. In geometry, and in geometrical crystallography, the term denotes a line which serves to aid the orientation of a figure. In anatomy, it is, among other uses, applied to the second cervical vertebra, and in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... Now, however, the geometrical and mathematical difficulties of calculation, which before had been tedious and oppressive, threatened to become overwhelming; and it is with a rising sense of despondency that Kepler sees his six years' unremitting labour leading deeper ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... M'Lean's, and Burnet's History of his own Times, from Captain M'Lean's; and he had of his own some books of farming, and Gregory's Geometry. Dr Johnson read a good deal of Burnet, and of Gregory, and I observed he made some geometrical notes in the end of his pocket-book. I read a little of Young's Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties; and Ovid's Epistles, which I had bought at Inverness, and which helped to solace ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... to the impassive chief, calm-eyed, keen, alert, surveying the line, dispatching brief commands, receiving reports. It is Franklin. With the air of a marshal on a civic pageant, perplexed only by some geometrical problem denying the possibility of two right lines on the same plane, he glances upward toward the brow of the plateau. The four flags had been increased by half a dozen. Ah, they have received aid! A tremendous crash comes from the left. That must be Sherman. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... from the Twelfth Century on, employed in their religious edifices a geometrical plan that was different from that employed by the Byzantine architects, but one very close to that admitted by the architects of Greece during the early years ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... worked out this subject most minutely and truthfully some years ago; he showed quite clearly,—and although he was much abused for his conclusions at the time, they have never yet been disproved and never will be—he showed that in consequence of the increase in the number of organic beings in a geometrical ratio, while the means of existence cannot be made to increase in the same ratio, that there must come a time when the number of organic beings will be in excess of the power of production of nutriment, and ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... in the Paleolithic Age was by engraving animal forms. In the Neolithic Age they seem to have cared very little for ornamenting. During the Bronze Age the ornamentation was of a simple but pleasing and uniform style. It consisted of simple geometrical patterns, combination of circles, dots, and straight lines. In this next figure we have given the principal designs found ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... personal habits. Now there was suddenly opened a door of hope to the almost despair of the drunkard himself. The lately reformed drunkards of Baltimore set themselves to the reforming of other drunkards, and these took up the work in their turn, and reformation was extended in a geometrical progression till it covered the country. Everywhere meetings were held, to be addressed by reformed drunkards, and new recruits from the gutter were pushed forward to tell their experience to the admiring public, and sent out on speaking tours. The people were stirred up as never ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... relative prime, prime factor, prime pair; reciprocal; totient[obs3]. binary number, octal number, hexadecimal number[Comp]. permutation, combination, variation; election. ratio, proportion, comparison &c.464; progression; arithmetical progression, geometrical progression, harmonical progression[obs3]; percentage, permilage. figurate numbers[obs3], pyramidal numbers, polygonal numbers. power, root, exponent, index, logarithm, antilogarithm; modulus, base. differential, integral, fluxion[obs3], fluent. Adj. numeral, complementary, divisible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... antecedent to the application of limitations to it.(337) The last of these three views belonged to Spinoza, along with the ancient Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists of the early ages, and the principal schools of modern German philosophy. Accordingly he tried to work out with mathematical rigour in geometrical form a philosophy of existence, conceiving that the mind grasps the idea of God as infinite substance, and understands its development under two modes; viz. extension and thought: the former the objective act of Deity, the latter the subjective.(338) The universe ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... different. In his first work Professor Smyth describes the coffer as showing no "symptoms" whatever of grooves, or catchpins or other fastenings or a lid. "More modern accounts," he re-observes, "have been further precise in describing the smooth and geometrical finish of the upper part of the coffer's sides, without any of those grooves, dovetails, or steady-pin-holes which have been found elsewhere in true polished sarcophagi, where the firm fastening of the lid is one of the most essential features of the whole business." ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... thinker of genius, but it was yet more than that—it was the outcome, also, of the work and thought of another man of genius fifty years before. The book of Malthus on the Principle of Population, mainly founded on the fact that animals increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore, if unchecked, must encumber the earth, had been generally forgotten, and was only recalled with a sneer. But the genius of Darwin recognised in it a deeper meaning, and now the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... seemed favourably disposed towards the expedition, but that, whenever he attempted to enter into particulars, the king began to construct squares and triangles with his fingers upon the sand, and during the whole time that he spoke, seemed unwilling to withdraw his mind from these fits of geometrical study, and showed no anxiety to have a ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... in which the theoretical aspects of electromagnetism, the classical theories, and the equations that represent transitory and equilibrium conditions in complex circuits are discussed. In optics, likewise, there is ample material of great importance: physical, geometrical optics, spectroscopy, photography, X-ray crystallography, etc. The advanced student in these fields finds more elasticity and opportunity for cultivating a special interest in having a large number of limited interest courses from which to choose than in having such material presented ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... the more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... almost as hard of feature, yet of the two more human, stood with pursed lip, his eyes fixed on the floor, as if he were studying the geometrical pattern of the parquet ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... much disposed to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own wit—without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others. Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book? These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may have no ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... the complement or completing part of a correspondent dome on the other side of the world. It follows that we are in the heart of a hollow sphere of loveliest blue, spangled with light. Now the sphere is the one perfect geometrical form. Over and round us then we have the one perfect shape. I do not say it is put there for the purpose of representing God; I say it is there of necessity, because of its nature, and its nature is its relation to God. It is of God's thinking; and that half-sphere above men's ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... "tree plan," with lines branching off from a trunk line like ribs, veins of a leaf, or branches of a tree. 8. Parallel lines which cross at right angles and mark off the field like a checkerboard. 9. Paths making one or more fairly symmetrical geometrical figures, like a square, a diamond, a star, a hexagon, etc. 10. A combination of two or ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... sight. One of their greatest pleasures is to handle, to grasp, to guess the forms of things by feeling them. It is affecting to see them when they are taken to the Industrial Museum, where they are allowed to handle whatever they please, and to observe with what eagerness they fling themselves on geometrical bodies, on little models of houses, on instruments; with what joy they feel over and rub and turn everything about in their hands, in order to see how it is made. They call ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... MR. WILKINSON has traced with singular acumen the manner in which the spirit of geometrical research was diffused amongst the operative classes, and the class immediately above them—the exciseman and the country schoolmaster. Still it is not to be inferred, that even these classes did not contain a considerable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various

... paraded in the papers as a "public-spirited citizen." Then the press grew bolder and introduced the adjectives "charming," "fascinating," "beautiful," etc. That "took" still better. The next step was the "write up" in extenso; next the portrait. Thus, in a ratio of geometrical progression, the bad habit has grown from the daring but courtly compliment to its present disguising proportions, and the vanity and folly of the fair followers of fashion have grown ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world. I asked you because I wanted you to lie. I expected it of you. I needed bolstering up. I realize that the rent I'm paying and the flat I'm getting form a geometrical problem where X equals the unknown quantity and only the agent knows the answer. But it's going to be a home for Jock and me. It's going to be a place where he can bring his friends; where he can have his books, and ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber

... his horses, his valet, and his sumptuous house; noblemen, millionaires, great dames, and men and women of all degrees conspire to pamper him: for jockey-worship, when it is once started, increases in intensity by a sort of geometrical progression. A shrewd man of the world may smile grimly when he hears that a popular rider was actually received with royal honours and installed in the royal box when he went to the theatre during his honeymoon, but there are the facts. It was so, and the best people of the fine ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... science whatever, while my conversation might divert the attention of the blind man. Thus," added he, with extreme volubility, "I would have told him my opinion on the isothermal and orthogonal superficies, causing him to observe that the equations of partial differences, of which the geometrical explanation is summed up in two orthogonal superficies, cannot generally be integral on account of their complication. I should have proved to him that the united superficies are all necessarily isothermal, and together we would have sought what superficies are capable of composing a ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... interpreting more complex thought-forms and mental states. The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, and those of private investigators as well, have shown us that a picture of a complicated geometrical design held in the mind of one person may be carried to and received by the mind of another person, who reproduces the design on paper. In the same way, complicated thoughts have been transmitted and received. But these are only exceptional cases. In many cases this sense seems almost ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... universe of musical relations, for example, the notes of Aennchen von Tharau were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever heard them. Even so the music of the future sleeps now, to be awakened hereafter. Or, if we take the world of geometrical relations, the thousandth decimal of 'pi' sleeps there, tho no one may ever try to compute it. Or, if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... progress, I perused Father Reynaud's Science of Calculation, and then his Analysis Demonstrated; but I never went far enough thoroughly to understand the application of algebra to geometry. I was not pleased with this method of performing operations by rule without knowing what I was about: resolving geometrical problems by the help of equations seemed like playing a tune by turning round a handle. The first time I found by calculation that the square of a binocular figure was composed of the square of each of its parts, and double the product of one by the other; though ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... offered to do so into Latin, if the inquirer would bring him a solution of the problem,—for the advertisement was one of those challenges which the mathematicians of the age were accustomed to throw down to all comers, daring them to discover a geometrical mystery known as they fancied to themselves alone. Descartes promised and fulfilled; and a friendship grew up between him and Beeckman—broken only by the dishonesty of the latter, who in later years took credit for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... sick with the disease; being bitten by other mosquitoes they serve to transmit the disease through the "intermediate host" to still others. Thus the epidemic extends, at first slowly from house to house, then more rapidly, as by geometrical progression. ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... prove my Propositions in detailed geometrical fashion, it is advisable to sketch them briefly in advance, so that everyone may more readily ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the geometrical instruments handed them from France; Kant attempted to push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was eighteen years old ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... in our picture are geometrical figures, nevertheless geometry can obviously say nothing at all about their actual form and position. The network, however, is purely geometrical; all its properties can be given a priori. Laws like the ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein

... 1. Geometrical Proof: Earth and Water are spheres with different centers; the center of the Earth's sphere is the center of the universe; consequently the surface of the Water is above ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton

... on July 1, 1858, Darwin's share amounts to little more than six pages, yet within this space he describes the geometrical rate of increase of animals, the checks that occur, the effects of changed conditions, the natural selection of the better equipped forms resulting from the struggle for existence, and the influence of sexual selection. Wallace insists ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... one inconsistancy in this scheme of things: Just as the train emerged from a deep valley of slag-hills and swung into a long curve, passengers on the left side had a panoramic view of the city—a frozen scene of battle between geometrical monsters, made remote and obscure by the dust of a thousand thousand merely human struggles, too small to be visible from the crusty windows of the train by the merely human eye. They had about one second in which to absorb this vision of corporate purpose. Then they were plunging into a final stretch ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler

... substantial character and essential differences of governments are often lost and confounded in his technical language and arrangement; that he often bends the free and irregular outline of nature to the imposing but fallacious geometrical regularity of system; that he has chosen a style of affected abruptness, sententiousness, and vivacity, ill suited to the gravity of his subject: after all these concessions (for his fame is large enough to spare many concessions), the Spirit of Laws will still remain not only one of the ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh

... measure of success. Of other men's success, that is, and their aim, not his. For he was, in his own eyes, a humble plodder, not in the swim at all. But he ascribed to the huge sums real people had a right to, outside the limits of the likes of him, a kind of sacredness that grew in a geometrical ratio with their increase. It gave him much more pain to hear that a safe had been robbed of thousands in gold than he felt when, on opening a wrapped-up fee, what seemed a guinea to the touch turned out a new farthing and a shilling to the sight. It was in the air that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... now and then," I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses—almost like geometrical figures. Nothing more." ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... be well to remark that a strategic point is not necessarily a geometrical point; an entire province, or a considerable portion of a geographical frontier, is, in military language, sometimes denominated a point. In the same way, strategic lines, instead of being mathematical lines, are frequently many ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... Wentworth, directed the public curiosity to Tasmania. For several successive years new books were published, describing the fertility of the soil and the beauty of the climate. These generally contained a theory of pastoral increase—a geometrical progression towards wealth. The increase was, indeed, rapid beyond oriental precedent. Between 1810 and 1820, it was estimated at fifty fold.[109] The adaptation of these colonies for the growth of wool first drew the attention of several gentlemen of Hamburgh, whose importations ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... it that makes common salt crystallize in the form of cubes, and saltpetre in the shape of six-sided prisms? We see no reason why it should not have been just the other way, salt in prisms and saltpetre in cubes, or why either should take an exact geometrical outline, any ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... added attraction in these orchids is their form—the curvature of their sepals and petals, and the wonderful little pitchers and cups and lips and tongues which an orchid exhibits. And the form is no mere geometrical pattern of lines and curves. It is obviously an ingenious contrivance devised for some special purpose. That purpose we now know to be the attraction of insects, who in sucking the orchid's honey will unconsciously ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... prove. In both cases the basic axioms are obtained from intuition; the structural work from reason. Our knowledge of the ether may be as absolute and exact as our knowledge of prakriti, working on physical as we work on geometrical axioms. ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson

... proportion of elements (Chemistry), symmetrical arrangement of parts (Crystallography), numerical and geometrical relation of the forms and movements of the heavenly bodies (Spherical Astronomy), all of which are capable of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... over for its pipes, a branch of manufacture for which it is now as famous as of yore. Partly in this parish and partly in that of Benthall, and only about 300 yards from the station, are the geometrical, mosaic, and encaustic tile works of the Messrs. Maw. They were removed here a few years since from Worcester, the better to command the use of the Broseley clays, since which they have attained to considerable importance, and now rival ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall

... surprises an European so much as the silence and harmony which prevails among them, and in each family; except when disturbed by that accursed spirit given them by the wood rangers in exchange for their furs. If my children learn nothing of geometrical rules, the use of the compass, or of the Latin tongue, they will learn and practise sobriety, for rum can no longer be sent to these people; they will learn that modesty and diffidence for which the young Indians are so remarkable; they will consider ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... difficult; breaking stone on the road would be called hard rather than difficult work; that is difficult which involves skill, sagacity, or address, with or without a considerable expenditure of physical force; a geometrical problem may be difficult to solve, a tangled skein to unravel; a mountain difficult to ascend. Hard may be active or passive; a thing may be hard to do or hard to bear. Arduous is always active. That ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... shape of the arch is similar throughout. This was a concession on the part of the later builders which ensured harmony in the whole; but on each side the tracery is varied. On the east side it is geometrical in character, the work being transitional between Early English and Decorated; on the south side the tracery is more flowing and has advanced to Decorated; on the west side again, we get the transitional style between Decorated and Perpendicular, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... influence of man, decreasing. Fluctuations there may be; but permanent increase, except in restricted localities, is almost impossible. For example, our own observation must convince us that birds do not go on increasing every year in a geometrical ratio, as they would do, were there not some powerful check to their natural increase. Very few birds produce less than two young ones each year, while many have six, eight, or ten; four will certainly be below ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... these early days every quadrator found a geometrical opponent, who finished him. Regimontanus[45] did this ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... and the mosque of Barkuk in the cemetery of Kait Bey, are instances of the second and more matured style of the period. The simple plain ashlar masonry still predominates, but the wall surface is broken up with sunk panels, sometimes with geometrical patterns in them. The principal characteristics of this second period are the magnificent portals, rising sometimes, as in the mosque of sultan Hasan, to 80 or 90 ft., with elaborate stalactite vaulting at the top, and the deep stalactite cornices which crown ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... is the capital of the group, and consists of a little village, lying in the heart of the bay, and watered by a noisy, rapid stream. It contained about fifty houses, tolerably clean, and disposed with geometrical regularity. Behind this miniature town there lay 1,500 hectares of meadow land, bounded by an embankment of lava. Above this embankment, the conical ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... that she hadn't the courage. It gave her quite a thrill as he took her hand and led her out through the low window to the great stone terrace. They passed down the terrace steps into a garden ablaze with tulip beds in geometrical patterns; at the foot ran a yew hedge, and beyond it, in a side-walk, they came upon a scullion boy chasing a sulphur-yellow butterfly. The Grand Duke forgot his fine manners, and dropped his bride's ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... colored print portraying a blue sea, spread with rank upon rank of accurately measured waves, each with its tiny cap of foam, stretching without diminution to the horizon, upon which was perched a full-rigged ship, a geometrical triumph; and from this vessel came by small-boat to the strand a company of accurately moulded, accurately featured, accurately tailored fellows, pulling with perfect accuracy in every respect. I shall never forget the geometrical gentleman ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... exercises of the young maidens naked, in sight of the young men, were, moreover, incentives to marriage: and, to use Plato's expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attractions of love, as a geometrical conclusion follows from the premises. To encourage it still more, some marks of infamy were set upon those that continued bachelors. For they were not permitted to see these exercises of the naked virgins; ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... to say that the designs of Providence do not stop on such a fair road. Every scheme of this caliber is completed by its results, like a geometrical calculation. The king, in prison, will not be for you the cause of embarrassment that you have been for the king enthroned. His soul is naturally proud and impatient; it is, moreover, disarmed and enfeebled, by being accustomed ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... Keynes words, "Society was working not for the small pleasures of to-day, but for the future security and improvement of the race,—in fact for 'progress.' If only the cake were not cut, but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would be at last the enjoyment of our labors. In that day, overwork, overcrowding and underfeeding ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... reach those more distant. Viewed in relation to this universe of suns, our particular sun and all its satellites—of which the earth is one—shrinks to a point (a physical point, so to speak—not geometrical one). ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... wainscotings (for example, the alternation of egg and dart), the series of windows in a wall, or of the columns of a Greek temple, or of the black and white keys of a piano. Still more complex is the balanced arrangement of straight lines and curves in a geometrical design, as in certain Oriental rugs or the Gothic rose windows. And probably the most complex spatial rhythms are those of the facades of great buildings like the Gothic cathedrals or St. Mark's of Venice, where only the trained eye perceives ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... is plain that all truths cannot be established by reasoning. For the attempt to do so would involve us in an infinite regress, wherein the number of syllogisms required would increase at each step in a geometrical ratio. To establish the premisses of a given syllogism we should require two preceding syllogisms; to establish their premisses, four; at the next step backwards, eight; at the next, sixteen; and so on ad infinitum. Thus the very possibility of reasoning implies truths that are known to us prior ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... this curious little fact is not difficult. I will not attempt any geometrical reasoning, but will give only a practical illustration. In doing this, I shall first have to allude to a point which was almost passed over when treating of Twining-plants. If we hold in our left hand a bundle ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions. Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441. Schoeffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... he seemed to have regarded speech a weakness to be fortified against. Putting the pleasant thought aside, he opened the roll, and with exceeding tenderness of touch brought forth a sheet of vellum dry to brittleness, and yellow as a faded sycamore leaf. There were lines upon it as of a geometrical drawing, and an inscription in strange characters. He bent over the chart, if such it may be called, eagerly, and read it through; then, with a satisfied expression, he folded it back into the cover, rebuckled the straps, and placed the parcel under the pillow. Evidently the business ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... shapes its own world. Intellect and instinct have been developed along divergent lines. The intellect has merely a practical function. It is related to the needs of action.[24] It is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.[25] It deals with solids and geometrical figures, and its instrument is logic. But according to Bergson it has an inherent incapacity to deal with life.[26] When we contrast the rigidity and superficiality of intellect with the fluidity, sympathy and intimacy of intuition, we see at once wherein {119} lies ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and the glue, and a prying finger penetrates the solid-looking panel ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... Blackletter; but in most of the pages here devoted to illustrating the individual forms the letters have been spaced too wide for their proper effect that each separate shape might be shown distinctly. The style appears at its best in compositions which fill a panel of more or less geometrical form, as, for example, the beautiful title-page reproduced in 147. Could anything be more delightful to the eye than its rich blackness, energetic lines, and refreshing virility? In this design surely we have a specimen that, from the proportion and balance ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown

... theories and at the ingenuous minds which take them seriously. He held that all system was but logical infatuation; that the only pardonable follies were those which were frankly avowed; and that only a pedant could clothe his imagination in geometrical theories. In general, pedantry to his eyes was the least excusable of vices; he understood it to be the pretension of tracing back phenomena to first causes, "as if," said he, "there were any 'first causes,' ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... way industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by painting a formalised nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature into the world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts, externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind's devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... service and sacrifice, is the noblest consequence of real belief in God. Never a shorter line can bind our planet with the centre of the Universe than the line going through Christ. It is the shortest way, as a straight line is the shortest distance between two geometrical points. ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... stadium is supposed to have contained a hundred and twenty-five geometrical paces, or six hundred and twenty-five Roman feet, corresponding to our furlong. Eight stadia make a geometrical, or Italian mile; and twenty, according to Dacier, a French league. It is observed, notwithstanding, by Guilletiere, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian

... had been overlooked by my predecessors, but are always accepted readily by my auditors, when fully explained. As new facts and principles led to the discovery of other facts and principles, a system of philosophy (not speculative, but scientific) was thus evolved, and a number of geometrical principles were established as the basis of the science of the brain, so evidently true, though so long overlooked, as to command the unanimous assent of all to whom they have been presented; and, as ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various

... which I am the High Noble Toby and Surreptitious Treasurer. Two months ago I was the only member. One month ago there were two. To-day we number four Emperors of the Abnormal Proboscis in good standing—doubles every four weeks, see? That's geometrical progression—you know how that piles up. In a year and a half every man in California will have a wart on his Nose. ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... without the need of staff or crutch."[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that the gain of vast aerial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very strongly ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... mind. To him X is a known quantity all along. In any picture that he paints he understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... turned back from the 9th Thermidor, 1794, to the 3rd of October, 1793, the day on which the seventy-three had been arrested, but not to the 2nd of June, 1793, when the twenty-two were arrested. After overthrowing Robespierre, and the committee, it had to attack Marat and the Mountain. In the almost geometrical progression of popular movement, a few months were still necessary to ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet

... though, instead of not having a penny, he had not a care in the world. Accustomed to the geometrical conduct of my well-fed fellow-Britons, who map out their lives by rule and line, I had no measure whereby to gauge this amazing and inconsequential person. In one way he had acted abominably. To leave an affianced bride in the lurch in this heartless manner was a most ungentlemanly proceeding. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... highest authorities have taken issue with this opinion. Sir John Lubbock (Ibid., p. 73) gives the following reasons why the Phoenicians could not have been the authors of the Bronze Age: First, the ornamentation is different. In the Bronze Age "this always consists of geometrical figures, and we rarely, if ever, find upon them representations of animals and plants, while on the ornamented shields, etc., described by Homer, as well as in the decoration of Solomon's Temple, animals and plants ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... the said cross-aisle, and running parallel therewith. The floor of the whole is paved with marble, but under the cupola and within the rail of the altar with fine porphyry, polished and laid in several geometrical figures. ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales

... Upon the site where had been the hive of huts wrapped in the green arms of the banana plantation, laboured under the incandescent sun gangs of prisoners under armed guards upon the building of larger huts laid out in streets, broad and geometrical, lined with correct ditches for drainage. Around the outskirts here and there remained ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... that much of the teaching done by these early professors would sound absurd to our ears, trained to listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point however, which I want to make is this—the Middle Ages and especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation, there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... the details as in the general proportions; buttresses and battlements were generally omitted. A great deterioration took place in the decorative part; the ornamental pannels and freizes of the Gothic style, consisting of geometrical combinations of circles and straight lines, had always a distinct outline and a sharpness of effect which contrasted agreeably with the foliage so often intermixed; but these were succeeded by strange grotesque combinations, confused, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... to well-defined laws, elaborates its structure into a crystal of great beauty, so does the protoplasm elaborate itself into the most beautiful of all structures—the cell unit. Just as gold and copper crystallizes in a geometrical form, a cube—bismuth and antimony in a hexagonal, iodine and sulphur in a rhombic form—so we find among radiolaria, and among other protista and lower forms, that they "may be traced to a mathematical, fundamental form, and whose form in its whole, as well as in its ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... building) stationery (articles) counsel (advice or an adviser) miner (a workman) council (a body of persons) minor (under age) complement (a completing element) angel (a spiritual being) compliment (praise) angle (geometrical) ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... interests of man. The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... Rhind Papyrus in the British Museum (No. 10,057), which was written before 1700 B.C., probably during the reign of one of the Hyksos kings. The papyrus contains a number of simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge

... same name also; while not large, it contains exquisite examples of wood carving, marble mosaic, and plaster ornament worked in by hand. Seventy-seven years later, in 1356, we find that, in the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, the sculpture was in stone; hence, the material being unyielding, the designs are geometrical, instead of arabesque, as in the plaster. This is one of the most important mosques of any age, and is the most characteristic of the madrasah form. Seen from without, the walls appear even higher than the accredited one hundred and thirteen feet; they are built of fine cut stone, from the pyramids, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... Plainly simple, klare. Plainness simpleco. Plaint plendo. Plaintive plenda. Plait (with straw) pajloplekti. Plait plekti. Plait plektajxo. Plait (hair) harligo. Plan plano. Plan (geometrical) plato. Plane raboti. Plane (tool) rabotilo. Planet planedo. Plank tabulo. Plant planti. Plant kreskajxo. Plantation plantejo. Plaster plastro, gipso. Plastron brustosxirmilo. Plate stanumi. Plate telero. Plate (stereotype) klisxajxaro, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... early learned to use compasses and ruler, because all the instructions they gave me in geometry were forthwith put into practice; and I occupied myself greatly with paste-board-work. I did not stop at geometrical figures, little boxes, and such things, but invented pretty pleasure-houses adorned with pilasters, steps, and flat roofs. However, but little of ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... made hereafter.[61] We can see precisely how this relief was made. The stucco adheres to a strong canvas, which in its turn is nailed on to a wooden panel. The background, also much injured, is decorated with mosaic and geometrical patterns of glass, now dim and opaque with age. The relief must have been of signal merit. Complete it would have rivalled the polychrome Madonna of the Louvre: as a fragment it is quite sufficient to prove that the Piot Madonna, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... are the large lines of a soul-history, a sketch of the affecting drama of a man who attains to the conquest of himself, with Bonaventura all this interior action disappears before divine interventions; his heart is, so to speak, the geometrical locality of a certain number of visitants; he is a passive instrument in the hands of God, and we really cannot see why he should have been chosen ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... should one waste a lot of time, he had thought, and be bored during the wasting, by studying grammar if one could already talk intelligibly to people? And why should one not revel in complicated problems of figures and geometrical designs that really took some hard thinking to work out, if hard thinking was just what ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... the Malthusian doctrine,—the fear of over-population as a hindrance to social reform,—was dismissed from consideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vain rags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometrical ratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily double itself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come, through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standing room for it on the globe. All of this is undeniable, but it is quite wide of the mark. ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... told. The Romans finally took the city by surprise. Tradition tells that, as the assailants were rushing through the streets, with death in their hands, they found Archimedes sitting in the public square, with a number of geometrical figures drawn before him in the sand, which he was studying in oblivion of the tumult of war around. As a Roman soldier rushed upon him sword in hand, he called out to the rude warrior not to spoil the circle. But the soldier cut him down. Another ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... called, was more often a farmhouse industry, which accounts for its narrow limits, since, with choice of material, even a small familiarity with geometrical design might bring good results. It might have easily become good domestic art. Geometrical borders in two colors would have taken their place in decorative work, and the applied work, so often ventured upon, was the beginning of one very capable method. ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... pored over it, slept with it under his pillow. As for the girl, timid, sensitive, aged fifteen, she fled on his approach, and shook with fear if he looked at her. He made his love plain by logical formulas and proved his passion by geometrical permutations—by charts and diagrams. A seasoned widow might have broken up the icy fastness of his soul and melted his forbidding nature in the crucible of feeling, but this poor girl just wanted some one to hold her little hand and say peace to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... corresponding slopes of the gable, are loaded with recumbent figures by the sculptors of the renaissance, are we to call, for instance, Michael Angelo's Dawn and Twilight, only the decorations of the sloping plinths of a tomb, or trace to a geometrical propriety the subsequent rule in Italy that no window could be properly complete for living people to look out of, without having two stone people sitting on the corners of it above? I have heard of charming young ladies occasionally, at very crowded balls, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... Some of the most prominent and distinctive marks of this style occur in the windows, which were greatly enlarged, and divided into many lights by mullions or tracery-bars running into various ramifications above, and dividing the heads into numerous compartments, forming either geometrical or flowing tracery. Triangular or pedimental canopies and pinnacles, more enriched than before with crockets and finials, yet without redundancy of ornament, also occur in the churches built ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam

... as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away. Hougomont has two doors,—the southern door, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... roofs of the structures lacy spires soared heavenward; inter-connected by long, slim cantilever bridges whose prodigious spans seemed out of all proportion to the gossamer delicacy of their construction. Buildings, spires, and bridges formed fantastic geometrical designs, at ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... containing vessel into the water all round. Provided the generator is quite small, provided the carbide container is so constructed as to possess the maximum of superficial area with the minimum of cubical capacity (a geometrical form to which the sphere, and in one direction the cylinder, are diametrically opposed), and provided the walls of the container do not become coated internally or externally with a coating of lime or water scale so as to diminish in heat- transmitting ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... its Elements. Numerical and Geometrical Problems. The Theory of Inference. The Construction of Problems. ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll

... enabled to produce an accurate representation of them. Some of the beautiful crystalline deposits shown in Fig. 4 represent less than a millionth part of a grain, yet their forms are delineated with geometrical precision. Earthy phosphates are often mistaken for pus and also seminal fluid. Phosphates are always found in decomposed urine, otherwise they indicate brain affections, acute cystitis, etc. Experience has taught us that the voiding of urine loaded with phosphates ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... departure, and also because it is the hub of Washington,—the centre of an eccentric, having the White House at the end of its shorter, and the Capitol at the end of its longer radius,—moral, so they say, as well as geometrical. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... decreasing distances on the same stick, but also that the distances are perceptibly the same, and that the situations of the points are identical on different bows compared together, M. Vuillaume sought to ascertain whether the positions of the ten points could not be obtained by a geometrical construction, by which they might be found with certainty; and by which, consequently, bows might be made whose good condition should be always settled a priori. This he attained in the following manner. At the ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George

... should use in distributive justice, I often observe in commutative; and keep a geometrical proportion in both, whereby becoming equable to others, I become unjust to myself, and supererogate in that common principle, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done unto thyself." I was not born unto riches, neither is it, I think, my star to be wealthy; or if it were, the freedom of my mind, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... atmosphere. But under the pressure of a column of water one thousand feet high, giving a pressure of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom, water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat. Every engineer knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios. Steam made by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren

... Soul, and the World,"—Translation done by an Excellency Suhm, as has been hinted,—"from the pen of the same Author. I will send it you when it is finished; and I am sure that the force of evidence in all his propositions, and their close geometrical sequence, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

... thickness of the columns, the beautiful entablature, the ample proportion of the capital, the great horizontal lines of the architrave and cornice predominating over the vertical lines of the columns, the severity of geometrical forms produced for the most part by straight lines, gave an imposing simplicity ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... be no denial of the fact that Space is a constituent of the external world, it would seem to follow that those who hold Sensation to be the only source of our Knowledge must be obliged to affirm the possibility of sensations of Space. Mach indeed claims to distinguish physiological Space, geometrical Space, visual Space, tactual Space as all different and yet apparently harmoniously blended in our Experience. He is, however, sadly wanting in clearness of statement. He never tells us when and where exactly we do have a sensation of Space. In truth he never ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... is atrociously bad; but the reflection is grand—it is another way of expressing the beautiful old Greek thought that "God geometrizes everywhere"—that is, that all motion is in geometrical lines, and full of beauty. You can pick hundreds of fine things in very short verse out of Emerson, but the verse is nearly always shapeless; the composition of the man invariably makes us think of diamonds in the rough, ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... The elder brother shook him, and went into the kitchen. He was followed by the child who staggered from drowsiness. The mother meanwhile had placed on the floor a pile of corn-cakes. Beside it, in an earthen bowl decorated inside and out with geometrical lines, steamed the stew. Dinner was ready; ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... and prose, and no store at all upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let me put this ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... animals. For ages men have been taught what is good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men, and they ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... upon the question before me, I must say a word of the road that I shall traverse. When Pascal approached a geometrical problem, he invented a method of solution; to solve a problem in philosophy a method is equally necessary. Well, by how much do the problems of which philosophy treats surpass in the gravity of their results those ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... to write algebra and geometry in class and solve problems in physics, and this I could not do until we bought a braille writer, by means of which I could put down the steps and processes of my work. I could not follow with my eyes the geometrical figures drawn on the blackboard, and my only means of getting a clear idea of them was to make them on a cushion with straight and curved wires, which had bent and pointed ends. I had to carry in my mind, as Mr. Keith says in his report, the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... a growing mastery of the forces of nature. In the period in which their most brilliant minds were busied with the problems of the universe men might improve the building of ships, or invent new geometrical demonstrations, but their science did little or nothing to transform the conditions of life or to open any vista into the future. They were in the presence of no facts strong enough to counteract that profound veneration of antiquity which seems natural to mankind, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... symbols of the third degree. Here the same mystical application is supplied as in the Egyptian figure, namely, that the union of the male and female, or active and passive principles of nature, has produced the world. For the geometrical proposition being that the squares of the perpendicular and base are equal to the square of the hypothenuse, they may be said to produce it in the same way as Osiris and Isis are equal to, or produce, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... wandered back to bygone times, while I, not wishing to interrupt her, had taken the poker in my hand and with it was tracing geometrical figures in the peat-ash on the hearthstone. So absorbed was I in my circles and pentagons that I did not notice that Grannie had stopped short in her story, and was taking a lively interest in what I was doing. ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman

... beneath his chest, but as he used his hand with less effect owing to the inflammation, he did not immediately despatch himself, and having some difficulty in dying he fell from the bed and made a noise by overturning a little abacus of the geometrical kind that stood by, which his attendants perceiving called out and his son and his friends immediately ran in. Seeing him smeared with blood and the greater part of his bowels protruding, though he was still alive and his eyes were open, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... sextant, pocket chronometer, and artificial horizon. I have to lament that our mountain barometers were broken at an early stage of the expedition; the height however of some principal points had been previously obtained, and is marked on the chart; these in two instances were verified by geometrical measurement, and the difference was found to be too trilling to be noticed. The conveyance of such delicate instruments is always attended with great risk, and in our case peculiarly so, our means being only those of horseback. I am afraid that a method of constructing ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley

... reception by Mansong. That prince assured him, in general, that the expedition would be allowed to pass down the Niger; but whenever the latter came to particulars, and proposed an interview with Mr. Park, the king began to draw squares and triangles with his finger on the sand, and in this geometrical operation his mind seemed wholly absorbed. Isaaco suspected that he laboured under some superstitious dread of white men, and sought by these figures to defend himself against their magic influence. It was finally arranged, that the presents should be delivered, not to Mansong in person, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... either black or brown); and the vessels must have been thick, and with a thicker coarse rim. Out of the grave in the mound V, the pottery was more perfect. There are pieces of a tinaja (bowl) with a vertical rim, yellow outside, white inside, with black geometrical ornamentation, not vitrified. This kind of pottery is still made by the Indians of Nambe, of Tezuque, and of Cochiti. (The former two are Tehuas, the latter is Queres.) But there I also found fragments of a plain black pottery, ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier

... what you know to be right, for the right's sake alone. And conscience has never wavered in the inculcation of that precept. The reason of man has been constantly advancing, discovering the content of the moral law just as it has been discovering the content of the geometrical, mathematical or musical law; but conscience, like the polar star, has been pointing steadily in one direction, the direction of duty, without error, without failure. "An erring conscience," says the ethical ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... to those who are desirous of knowing divine concerns through images, the method will be apparent. Thus, for instance, the Politicus shadows forth the fabrication in the heavens. But the figures of the five elements, delivered in geometrical proportions in the Timaeus, represent in images the idioms of the gods who preside over the parts of the universe. And the divisions of the essence of the soul in that dialogue shadow forth the total orders of the gods. To this we may also add that Plato ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... concrete, pragmatic situation—anything, no matter how abstract, that arouses their curiosity or appeals to their love of mastery offers enough of a problem. Sometimes children are vitally interested in working geometrical problems, translating difficult passages in Latin, striving to invent the perpetual motion machine, even though there is no evident and useful result. It is not the particular type of situation that is the thing to be considered, but the attitude that ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy









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