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Mechanism   /mˈɛkənˌɪzəm/   Listen
Mechanism

noun
1.
The atomic process that occurs during a chemical reaction.  Synonym: chemical mechanism.
2.
The technical aspects of doing something.  Synonym: mechanics.  "Mechanisms of communication" , "The mechanics of prose style"
3.
A natural object resembling a machine in structure or function.  "The mechanism of infection"
4.
(philosophy) the philosophical theory that all phenomena can be explained in terms of physical or biological causes.
5.
Device consisting of a piece of machinery; has moving parts that perform some function.



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"Mechanism" Quotes from Famous Books



... and substantive relations between signs and language, it is to be expected that analogies can by proper research be ascertained between their several developments in the manner of their use, that is, in their grammatic mechanism, and in the genesis of the sentence. The science of language, ever henceforward to be studied historically, must take account of the similar early mental processes in which the phrase or sentence originated, both in sign and oral utterance. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... of powder had been placed in the hollow of the stone-work, where the mechanism for opening and closing the great sluice-gates was fixed, and the result of the explosion was a huge chasm in the stone, and one of the gates blown right off, leaving the ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... resemble the lay figures of a painter; they sit on their hips, never on their chairs. When any one speaks to them they turn their whole busts instead of simply turning their heads; and when their gowns creak one is tempted to believe that the mechanism of these beings is out of order. Mademoiselle Habert, an ideal of her species, had a stern eye, a grim mouth, and beneath her wrinkled chin the strings of her cap, always limp and faded, floated as she moved. Two moles, rather large and brown, adorned that chin, and from them ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... palaces where she is found. The ancients were not always right in hiding the goddess in a well; witness the light which Bacon has thrown upon philosophy; witness the principles of our divine faith—that moral mechanism by which the simplicity of a child may overbalance the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... possible to conceive how their author was able to execute them. Unfortunately he was not able to transmit to his successors the vital spark which animated and rendered human those astonishing prodigies of mechanism. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... As the pencil was not round, but polygonal in its form, it made a curious clicking sound in rolling down, which amused Marco, though it disturbed and troubled Forester. Whatever may have been the nice peculiarities in the delicate mechanism of Forester's ear, and of the nerves connected with it, compared with that of Marco's, by which the same sound produced a sensation of pleasure in one ear, while it gave only pain in the other, it would require a very profound philosopher to explain. But the effect was certain. ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott

... Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda to gain control over populated areas and natural resources - government heads pledge to end conflicts, but localized violence continues despite UN peacekeeping efforts; DROC and Rwanda established a border verification mechanism in 2005 to address accusations of Rwandan military supporting Congolese rebels and the Congo providing rebel Rwandan "Interhamwe" forces the means and bases to attack Rwandan forces; as of 2004, Rwandan refugees lived in the ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... Each of the different types of heavy but finely made weapons had to be learned in detail—a feat of memory when it came to the watch-like mechanism of the Maxim. Guns were disabled and had to be put right. They missed fire and were made by the instructors—old naval gunners—to play every dastardly trick conceivable. The final test which had to be successfully passed was the dismantling of each type of ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife

... had twice gone over every part of these magnificent establishments. I had seen at the Bank the spirit of order operating like predestination, compelling the will of man to act necessarily and continually with all the precision of mechanism. I had beheld human creatures, called clerks, turned nearly ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... rapidly than any of the others, whirled and whirled, and turned madly, so close together that they seemed but one, and with the form erect, the legs almost motionless, as if some invisible mechanism, concealed beneath their feet, caused them to twirl. They appeared tireless. The other dancers stopped from time to time. They still danced on, alone. They seemed not to know where they were nor what they were doing, as if, they had gone far away from the ball, in an ecstasy. The ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... rally never comes. Some mysterious spring in the mechanism of the young life has been broken. The mind lives only in brief intervals between long hours of unconsciousness. Parents watch, and friends, for these living moments to whisper caressing things, or to ask: 'Is there anything thou dost wish?' And one ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... of appearances; others rolled aside, bent upon placing some little distance between themselves and the invader. Bluff was trying to work the mechanism of his gun in order to secure a second shot, but as so often happens when the hunter is excited, he failed to accomplish what should have ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen

... "The mechanism is as follows: The manager is frequently one of the most wealthy and considerable persons of the little town he inhabits. He forms a company consisting of prima donna, tenoro, basso cantante, basso buffo, a second female singer, and a third ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... called for; and the want of it is a subtle evasion, for which Mr. Styles is fairly accountable. As he has been silent on this subject, it is for us to explain the plan and nature of this terrible and unknown piece of mechanism. Kimes, then, are neither more nor less than a false print in the Edinburgh Review for knives; and from this blunder of the printer has Mr. Styles manufactured this Daedalean instrument of torture, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... means to shape anew, and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return. On this point, G.K. attacked two popular sayings. One was "You can't put the clock back"; but, he said, you can and you do constantly. The clock is a piece of mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "There is another proverb: 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God, I will ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... watching the contestants in the model contest trying out their craft. The models were of all sorts and sizes. Some were freak craft that had been constructed in a hurry from pictures, without any attention being paid to scale or proportions, while others were carefully made bits of mechanism. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson

... crouching with fear and anger, and shaking his head from time to time to get clear of the bandage which blinded him and made him helpless. Now and then he reared a little and came down on prancing forefeet, and Bull noted the spring and play of the fetlock joints. The whole running mechanism of the horse, indeed, seemed composed of coiled springs. Once released, what would the result be? And the first hope entered his mind, the first hope since he had seen the proud form of ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... is a most essential part of the mechanism, and its shape and height are needed in handling the long rods, piping, casting, and other fittings which have to be inserted perpendicularly. The borer or drill used is not much different from the ordinary hand ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various

... classes and which are consequently misshapen, unstable, and inconsistent forms. In such a collision, the concerning question is: What is the best constitution—that is, by what arrangement, organization, or mechanism of the power of the State can its object be most surely attained? This object may indeed be variously understood; for instance, as the calm enjoyment of life on part of the citizens, or as universal ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... branch of study which Wallace himself set going—the inquiry into the local variations, races, and species of insects as evidence of descent with modification, and of the mechanism by which that modification is brought about—there is still great work in progress, still an abundant field to be reaped.... Several able observers and experimenters have set themselves the task of improving, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... it...."[41] He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros. Thus appears the enormous difference in method," concludes Pouget, "which distinguishes syndicalism and democracy: the latter, by the mechanism of universal suffrage, gives direction to the unconscious ... and stifles the minorities who bear within them the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... there is every reason to assume it—one may conjecture what memories it recalled. The great battles of the Warsaw salient, the drive that lasted for many months through the flats of Poland, the struggles of the Vilna salient, and all the time the knowledge that mechanism, the guns in which Germany put her trust, were shattering Russian legions day after day. Then the gradual settling of the eastern line, well into Russia, with all the industrial districts of Poland firmly gripped in German hands, and the certainty that though ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... of their task. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to cherish the young life in all ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... human system is a very elastic piece of mechanism, and modern man, far from being the degenerate which some admirers of cave-man hardihood have pictured him, is able to undergo a tremendous amount of privation. Besieged cities have nearly always held ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... back into his chair. His red face became tinged with a sudden grey pallor. His eyes, now bloodshot, half closed like those of a prostrate doll with the eye mechanism in its stomach. There was witheredness, almost lifelessness, in ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... this point that Montague dropped out of the race, and took to studying from the outside the mechanism of this young poet's conversation. Strathcona flouted the idea of a moral sense; but in reality he was quite dependent upon it—his recipe for making epigrams was to take what other people's moral sense made them respect, and identify ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... Nikolai Petrovitch's remarks answered, 'Certainly, sir,' and tried to make the peasants out to be thieves and drunkards. The estate had only recently been put on to the new reformed system, and the new mechanism worked, creaking like an ungreased wheel, warping and cracking like homemade furniture of unseasoned wood. Nikolai Petrovitch did not lose heart, but often he sighed, and was gloomy; he felt that the thing could not go on without money, and his money was almost all spent. Arkady had ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... 1813 purchased commodious premises in Cannon-street, which they fitted up in a similar manner to the Royal Institution in London, and it is now become a most valuable establishment. The various lectures that have been delivered by the different fellows of this society, on mechanism, chemistry, mineralogy, and metallurgy, have produced very beneficial effects, and contributed in a considerable degree to the improvement of gilding, plating, bronzing, vitrification, and metallurgic combinations. At one of these lectures, in the year 1812, Dr. De Lys descanted upon the ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye

... to the former rather than to the latter type; in other words, that they have believed in God because they felt, or imagined that they felt, him stirring in their own hearts rather than because they discerned the handiwork of a divine artificer in the wonderful mechanism ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... by so many thought to be the one referred to in The Old Clock on the Stairs. But no; that one was in the "Gold House" at Pittsfield, and is now in disuse; while this one is a fine piece of mechanism, striking the coming hour on each half hour, and on the hour itself sweet carillons are played for several moments, so familiar to the poet that it is no wonder that ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... portmanteau. The thieves lay a trunk artfully contrived on a smaller trunk; the latter clings to the former, and the owner of the larger carries both away. The decoy trunk is said to be fitted with a false bottom, which goes up when it is laid on a smaller trunk, and with mechanism inside which does for the innocent trunk what Polonius recommended Laertes to do for his friend, and grapples it to its heart with hooks of steel. In fact, the decoy duck—we do not know how better to describe it—is made to perform an office ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... as gas goes, I suppose a gas mask would be necessary. Busch doesn't know about the breathing mechanism, except that he had to take breaths. But as far as fire or radiation goes, the man's protected. If the radiation is either harmful by nature or by amount, the field merely reflects it. It is something called the 'lemic stress' of the field that ...
— The Untouchable • Stephen A. Kallis

... was struck by Harriott and Descartes, with their contemporaries, or immediate predecessors, and the restoration of ancient geometry, aided by the modern invention of algebra, placed the science of mechanism on the philosophic throne. How widely this domination spread, and how long it continued, if, indeed, even now it can be said to have abdicated its pretensions, the reader need not be reminded. The sublime discoveries of Newton, and, together ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... philanthropic principles upon which its organisation has always rested, and the resolute devotion and capability of those who direct it as the heads of one great family. Every member is concerned to maintain the regular and effective functioning of its mechanism, and all work for the same ends in a spirit of ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... explains itself. The work of drilling completed, the gallery ready, the mother turns and places the tip of the abdomen against the orifice. She extrudes the internal mechanism, which easily passes through the loose debris of the boring. No sign of the probe appears, so quickly and discreetly does it work; nor is any trace of it to be seen when, the egg having been properly deposited, the implement ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... practical discussion of the things that every man needs to know if he is to buy the right car and get the most out of it. The various details of operation and care are given in simple, intelligent terms. From it the car owner can easily learn the mechanism of his motor and the art of locating motor trouble, as well as how to use his car ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray

... the steel chair at Longford Castle. The most startling and frightful work of man I ever saw or expect to see was another specimen of work in steel, said to have been taken from one of the infernal chambers of the Spanish Inquisition. It was a complex mechanism, which grasped the body and the head of the heretic or other victim, and by means of many ingeniously arranged screws and levers was capable of pressing, stretching, piercing, rending, crushing, all ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... are several ways of constructing a gun-trap. Of course a gun is the principal part of the mechanism, and the trigger pulled by a string is the main point of the contrivance. In some countries the bait is tied to the string, and the animal on seizing the bait tightens the string, draws the trigger, and shoots itself. In this way, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid

... the machine gun a sudden resolve gripped her. Why not man it herself? Von Horn had explained its mechanism to her in detail, and on one occasion had allowed her to operate it on the voyage from Singapore. With the thought came action. Running to the magazine she snatched up a feed-belt, and in another moment was on deck beside the ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... restrictions on movement, arbitrary detention, and physical, mental, and sexual abuse tier rating: Tier 3 - Qatar failed, for the second consecutive year, to enforce criminal laws against traffickers, or to provide an effective mechanism to identify and protect victims; it continues to detain and deport victims rather than providing them protection; the government made little progress to increase prosecutions for trafficking in a meaningful way in 2007; workers complaining of working conditions or non-payment ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... earnestness. But in Dr. Henson one is conscious of nothing behind the intellect but intellect itself, an intellect which has absorbed his spiritual life into itself and will permit no other tenant of his mind to divert attention for a single moment from its luminous brilliance, its perfection of mechanism. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... 'I shall be an author next!' He tore it up and, rolling the pieces into a ball, played catch with it. 'What waste of energy! Six months ago that energy would have gone into something useful, a patent—perhaps an improvement in the mechanism of—of—' he hesitated, then finished the sentence with a sigh of yearning and another passing ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... the inventor, after he had explained the mechanism to Paul, and also to the city officials who had gathered to ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope

... machine—while one that has been giving trouble is dealt with in the engine-shop—there should always be a full complement of craft for the work of instruction. When workshops are in operation in connection with a school an opportunity is usually provided, also, for a novice to gain some knowledge as to the mechanism and working of the aero-motor: and this of course will ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White

... ingratiated himself with the iron-workers. He was received into the works, to every part of which he had access; and he seized the opportunity thus afforded him of storing his mind with observations, and mastering, as he thought, the mechanism of iron splitting. After a continued stay for this purpose, he suddenly disappeared from amongst his kind friends the miners—no ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... assertion of will is a real force in the working out of distribution. Each group with a claim to a share of the product, by organization, agitation, and other tricks of the market place strives to forward its interest. It explores, by pressure upon the price mechanism and otherwise, the full extent of the dependence of the industrial system upon it or its product, as when monopolists control prices, or a trade union strikes to enforce a wage demand. Each group or agent tends to favor or ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... adopted is precisely similar in character, though the parts of which this mechanism is made up are of a totally different kind. Here, the mouth-parts are specially modified, so as to form a supporting and piercing weapon, like the 'gouge-like' piercing weapon of the bee, with delicate pointed and barbed weapons corresponding to the barbs of the bee's ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... full meal. Can we give any reason for these variations, except experience? Where then is the power, of which we pretend to be conscious? Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders the power or energy of the will ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al

... wept with anger and mortification. Beale had put the catch of the weapon at safety, not realizing that she did not understand the mechanism of it, and van Heerden in one lightning glance ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... compared our telescopes together, and mine was found very superior to any of the Royal Observatory. Double stars which they could not see with their instruments I had the pleasure to show them very plainly, and my mechanism is so much approved of that Dr. MASKELYNE has already ordered a model to be taken from mine, and a stand to be made by it to his reflector. He is, however, now so much out of love with his instrument that he begins to doubt whether it deserves a ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden

... cliff rose; the other half was formed of some pithy suffruticose herb which I could not determine satisfactorily, as I saw only the cut sections and was not permitted to handle these. The pith was removed so as to allow the wooden part to move into the herby part with a telescopic mechanism. The herbaceous portion was so covered with feathers that nothing could be seen of its surface. A large stone arrowhead was attached to the wooden shaft. When the actor pretended to swallow this he merely held the stone point firmly between his teeth and forced the upper or plumed shaft ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews

... same young man gave me the most convincing demonstrations of materialized forms I have ever seen. In his own little home, under the simplest conditions, he commanded forth from a little bedroom a figure which was unmistakably not a mechanism. A lamp was burning in the room, and the young fellow was perfectly visible at the same moment as the phantom which ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... of grief over, young Armstrong rose, and began sadly to wander about the ruins. It had been an extensive structure, fitted with all the most approved appliances of mechanism which wealth could purchase. These now helped to enhance the wild aspect of the wreck, for iron girders had been twisted by the action of fire into snake-like convolutions in some places, while, in others, their ends stuck out fantastically from the blackened ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... invention. It was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have ever known. But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. It had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up. I took out my ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... talk; we are overhearing a soliloquy in his study, not a vigorous discussion over the twentieth cup of tea; he is not fairly put upon his mettle, and is content to expound without enforcing. We seem to see a man, heavy-eyed, ponderous in his gestures, like some huge mechanism which grinds out a ponderous tissue of verbiage as heavy as ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... in which we see the ceiling and the walls of the room contract round one's helpless and immobile form. Blessed is he who has variety in his life: thrice blessed is he who has both freedom and variety: but the subordinate toiler in the vast mechanism of a great city has neither. He will sit at the same desk, gaze upon the same unending rows of figures, do, in fact, the same things year in and year out till his youth has withered into age. He himself becomes little better than a mechanism. There ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... that turned on mysterious disappearances, and the substitution of one person for another, and murders real or suspected. All this was, to my mind, a mistake. Dickens had no real gift for the manufacture of these ingenious pieces of mechanism. He did not even many times succeed in disposing the events and marshalling the characters in his narratives so as to work, by seemingly unforced and natural means, to a final situation and climax. Too often, in order to hold his story together and make it move ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... Idea of Modern Civilization.—The object of life is not to build a perfect social mechanism. It is only a means to a greater end, namely, that the individual shall have opportunity to develop and exercise the powers which nature has given him. This involves an opportunity for the expression of his whole nature, physical ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... mill and store, and went clambering along the trail toward the northern coves. The driver ran cautiously enough, despite Zeke's impatience, but, at the best, the trip was a strain on the men and on the mechanism that bore them, for the car lurched and bounced over the uneven surface, and more than once was near to being overturned. Their ultimate safety was due, in great measure, to Zeke himself. Familiar with ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily

... of alternate oak plank and cork wood. She carries forty-four guns, four of which are hundred pounders; quarter-deck and forecastle guns, forty-four pounders: and further, to annoy an enemy attempting to board, can discharge one hundred gallons of boiling water in a minute; and, by mechanism, brandishes three hundred cutlasses with the utmost regularity over her gunwales; works also an equal number of heavy iron spikes of great length, darting them from the sides with prodigious force, and withdrawing them every quarter of a minute!" This vessel, although probably ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... muddy trench hounds" in canvas leggings and with three buttons loose. Until Byng came the Canadian Corps was a semi-disciplined and marvellous mob of men who could swear as hard as they could fight and fight like wildcats. Byng gave then the massive and complex mechanism of an army competent to conduct operations as a unit of modern war, dominated by the man of whom the boys sang to the tune of Three Blind Mice, "Byng Bangs Boche, See how they run!" Currie, commander of the 2nd Division, had seen ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... the place to describe its anatomy or its nervous mechanism or the newer instruments of precision in estimating the heart function, but they may be briefly itemized. It has now been known for some time that the primary stimulus of cardiac contraction generally occurs at the upper part of the right auricle, near its junction ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... thing a moment." There were hinges at one end of the panel, and I lifted it carefully. An intricate maze of delicate mechanism came ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... well be recognized that unless there be a strong loyalty to the cooperative principle by a considerable group of patrons and unless there be peculiar need of a cooperative store that it is not a mechanism which will automatically secure much lower prices or superior service, for the success of the enterprise depends primarily on the manager and if he be competent, he must be paid sufficient to command ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... love-affairs to disturb her with pleasure or with pain, and she was full of the mechanism of the evening, and wanted to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... Had he knocked out the entire circuit or what had he done in his fit of temper? Well, there was no escape from confession now; no pretending he had not vented his nervousness on the mechanism before him. With honesty he told the truth and even illustrated his hasty action. The thing was simple enough. In some way the make-and-break points of the transmitter spring had become welded together so that even when Watson ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... chapters we have been considering only the muscular engines of the human machine, counting them over and comparing their construction and their mechanism with those of the internal-combustion engine of a motor cycle. But of the levers or crank-pins through which muscular engines exert their power we have said nothing hitherto. Nor shall we get any help by now spending time on the levers of a motor ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... Estimate of Motherhood.—Ellen Key expresses this feeling that fitness for a task so tremendous as parenthood is more important than any mechanism by which parenthood is secured when she says, "It is solely from one moral point of view that motherhood without marriage, as well as the right of free divorce, must be judged. Irresponsible motherhood is always sin with or without marriage; responsible ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... at greater length, were it not that the subject of style is cluttered up with such a mass of preconceptions, that it would be necessary to redefine our terminology, and then, after all, perhaps we should not understand one another. Men have an idea that they are thinking when they operate the mechanism of language which they have at command. When somebody makes the joints of language creak, they say: "He does not know how to manage it." Certainly he does know how to manage it. Anybody can manage a platitude. The truth is simply ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... glowing afternoon, and the line of white road before them appeared to Christopher as a track dividing past and future, the thin edge of the passing minutes. They spoke no more, however, on the forbidden subject. Christopher presently explained to her the visible mechanism of the car and on a stretch of clear road let her put her hands on the wheel beneath his own and feel the joy of fictitious control. Before the sun quenched itself in the sea they stood on the Cliff Edge and looked out across the shining waters into the great ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... she had so loved, seem to-day so desolate?" Her eyes fell on the clock. The little bee was swinging from left to right and from right to left over the gilded flowers, with the same quick even movement as of old. She suddenly felt a glow of affection for this little piece of mechanism, which told her the hour in its silvery tones, and beat like a human heart, and the tears came into her eyes as she looked at it; she had not felt so moved when she had kissed her father and mother on her return, but the heart has no rules ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... sudden awe. He would make no answer of his own; he would lend the aid of no obscure mechanism of the brain to any tricking of himself. No answer came, and he sat disheartened, staring at the one visible hill which peered like a shadow from the other shadows in the midst ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... down to the door of the Baptistery, through the atrium, and into the church again by the door close to the Cappella dei Mascoli. There is something in all Roman Catholic ceremonial which for me impairs its impressiveness—perhaps a thought too much mechanism—and I watched this chanting line of choristers, priests, and prelates without emotion, but perfectly willing to believe that the fault lay with me. Three things abide vividly in the memory: the Jewish cast of so many of the large inscrutable faces of the wearers of ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... of birds, and a piece of mechanism, an automaton in the form of a bird, which ate like a living creature, drank, hopped from one bar to another, opened his bill, and sang the air which was so popular before the revolution, "Oh, Richard! oh, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... that may be readily set in motion through the mechanical vibrations of a sensitive diaphragm much as when one speaks into a telephone. This motion is transmitted in waves of varying intensity and frequency which are sent into space by the mechanism of the broadcasting station, which consists of a sound conducting apparatus induced by strong electrical currents from generators or batteries and extensive aerial or antennas wires high in the air. Thus sound is ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... to relieve her feelings, and she sat down before the machine, which clicked and rattled for several minutes under her stubby fingers. Then the clicking ceased with sudden abruptness, and she prodded the mechanism viciously with a hairpin. As this appeared unavailing she used her forefinger, and when at length the carriage slid along the rod with a clash there was a smear of grimy oil upon her cheek and her somewhat tilted nose. The machine, however, gave no further trouble, and she endeavoured ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... activity of which the more fortunate classes at Rome were now reaping the fruits. The trades represented by Numa's colleges would at best have formed a mere framework for a maze of instruments which formed the complex mechanism needed to satisfy the voracious wants of the new society. The gold-smithery of early times was now complicated by the arts of chasing and engraving on precious stones; the primitive builder, if he were still to ply his trade with profit, must associate it with the skill of the men ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... encourage them to sprout and blossom as a March sun encourages crocuses, ask them questions, give them answers—in short, a glance that could do as many things as an American cooking-stove or a multum-in-parvo pocket-knife. But, as with most men of the world, this was mere mechanism: his actual emotions were kept so far within his person that they were rarely heard or seen near ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... Rodin made a low bow; then he returned to the large, cold, bare apartment. The attitude, countenance, and gait of this personage seemed to have undergone a sudden change. He appeared to have increased in dimensions. He was no longer an automaton, moved by the mechanism of humble obedience. His features, till now impassible, his glance, hitherto subdued, became suddenly animated with an expression of diabolical craft; a sardonic smile curled his thin, pale lips, and a look of grim ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... our days it is taken up almost as much with the destructive engines of war as with the productive arts of peace, so in those early ages it applied itself to the fabrication of idols, to the mechanism and theatrical contrivances for mysteries and religious ceremonies. There was then no desire to communicate discoveries, science was a sort of freemasonry, and silence was effectually secured by priestly anathemas; ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... to explain to the reader the general principles on which the political organization of the counties and townships of the United States rests, I have thought it expedient to choose one of the States of New England as an example, to examine the mechanism of its constitution, and then to cast a general glance over the country. The township and the county are not organized in the same manner in every part of the Union; it is, however, easy to perceive that the same principles have guided the formation of both of them throughout ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... well to contemplate him, though he may seem possibly to be worthless. What is worthless, if it be well looked at? Nay, the most worthless creatures are most serviceable for examination, when the microscope is applied to them, as a simple study of human mechanism. This youth is one of great Nature's tom-fools: an elegant young gentleman outwardly, of the very large class who are simply the engines of their appetites, and, to the philosophic eye, still run wild ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... human beings, because to our microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet we rush along at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the fastest ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... kept on rubbing the mirror. This mirror was, in fact, provided with some western mechanism, which enabled it to open and shut, so while goody Liu inadvertently passed her hands, quite at random over its surface, the pressure happily fell on the right spot, and opening the contrivance, the mirror flung round, exposing a door to view. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... coins have you seen or heard of? How are coins made? Where is the United States mint located? Where are the branch mints? How much value does the stamp of the government add to a piece of gold? Is there a dollar's worth of silver in a silver dollar? Why? (See Jevons' Money and the Mechanism ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... it occurs in the urine of diabetic patients and of persons addicted to alcohol. Its important source lies in its formation by the "spirituous'' or "alcoholic fermentation'' of saccharine juices. The mechanism of alcoholic fermentation is discussed in the article FERMENTATION, and the manufacture of alcohol from fermented liquors ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... stone. Like a human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he tried to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping against hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and overlooking facts. A mere mechanism would have left the empty and useless shell untouched—would have accepted facts at once, however bitter, just as the balance on the heaviest side declines immediately, obeying the fact of an extra grain of weight. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... and might have stumbled into some hole, striking his head and rendering himself unconscious; or there was a chance that he had wounded a stag which had thereupon charged vigorously upon him, as wounded bucks are apt to do; so that Eli, not being accustomed to working the mechanism of the repeating rifle, might have been caught napping and ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne

... in St. Paul's to be burned, and on fourteen of them the sentence was carried out, Paul's Cross echoed with renunciation of the Pope's authority. The miraculous rood of Bexley, in Kent, having been exposed as a fraud there, was brought up to Paul's Cross, February, 1538, and the mechanism having been shown to the indignant audience, it was ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham

... read the articles he had published on the meaning of the different "sections" of a symphony orchestra, or the books issued on that subject. He would try to solve the mechanism of an orchestra for himself, and ascertain as he went along the relation that each portion bore to the other. When, therefore, in 1913, the president of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association asked him to become a member of its Board of Directors, his acceptance was a ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... unnecessary pain and fatigue from lifting, pulling and carrying weights in the wrong way. Ability to carry and lift or move is not so much dependent upon absolute strength as it is on knowing how. The whole body, so far as it is a physical mechanism, may be thought of as a series of levers, of which the muscles, bones, and joints make up the parts and are fulcrum, power arm or weight arm as the case may be. Without going into the details of bodily structure or even knowing the ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... absolute ending of the war, except for the few Royalist towns and garrisons that had yet to make terms. In the midst of the universal joy, why dwell on a difference between the City and Parliament as to the details of the Presbyterian mechanism? Accordingly, on Friday, March 27, divers Aldermen and others were at the door of the House of Commons, not to remonstrate farther this little difference, but to beg that the House would "so far honour" the City as to dine with the Corporation at Grocers' Hall on the following Thursday, being ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... the sea in motion. This destroyer is a toy. Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid. What is to be done with this complication? How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck? How foresee its coming and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks? Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel. How can one guard against these terrible gyrations? One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that has ideas, and changes ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... that the King's son spread great banquets for the towns-folk and they held high festival a whole month, at the end of which time he went in to the Princess and they took their joy of each other with exceeding joy. But his father brake the ebony horse in pieces and destroyed its mechanism for flight; moreover the Prince wrote a letter to the Princess's father, advising him of all that had befallen her and informing him how she was now married to him and in all health and happiness, and sent it by a messenger, together ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... and under his direction. It was an immense globe of copper, which was long preserved, though unfinished, in the Mazarine library. Louis XVI. invented and had executed under his own eyes the ingenious mechanism required for this globe.—NOTE BY ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... temerity to offer a surfeited public still another book on wild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almost every blossom in the world is everything it is because of its necessity to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - its form, mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening and closing, and its season of blooming being the result of natural selection by that special insect upon which each depends more or less absolutely for help in perpetuating its species - it seems fully time that the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... distinguishes hosiery from woven stuffs. The nature of the loop formed by the knitting needle favors elongation and contraction without marring in the least the general structure of the goods. Builders of weavers' looms have at times endeavored to secure this elastic effect by certain manipulations of the mechanism of the loom, but as yet nothing approaching the product of the knitter has been made. The elastic feature of a knitted texture renders it peculiarly adapted for all classes and kinds of undergarments, for it not only ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley

... writings which probably did not pay so well. In 1604 he published "A Supplement to Vitellion," containing the earliest known reasonable theory of optics, and especially of dioptrics or vision through lenses. He compared the mechanism of the eye with that of Porta's "Camera Obscura," but made no attempt to explain how the image formed on the retina is understood by the brain. He went carefully into the question of refraction, the importance of which Tycho ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant

... Scripture has no interest in natural history, nor does such an interest help us to understand it. It is no doubt perfectly true that to the biologist death is part of the indispensable machinery of nature; it is a piece of the mechanism without which the movement of the whole would be arrested; to put it so, death to the biologist is part of the same whole as life, or life and death are for him aspects of one thing. One can admit this frankly without compromising, ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney

... is nourished by a transudation of the blood through the coronal suture. This pellicle is also said to have a connection with the heart, which arrangement furnishes a decidedly curious explanation of the mechanism of sympathetic and maudlin lachrymation. For, as Gilbert tells us, when the heart is compressed this pellicle is also compressed, and if any moisture is found beneath the pellicle it is expressed into the substance of the lachrymal gland by the ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... a monk, who had constructed the great dial in the prior's garden, and a wheel for drawing water, and a winnowing machine for the grain, etc., and had ever some ingenious mechanism on hand. He had made several psalteries and two dulcimers, and was now attempting a set of regalles, or little ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... he could see nothing—nothing but light; subdued, soft, beautiful light. He knew the ray was passing steadily downward, for the mechanism was working with its accustomed regularity, but it revealed to him nothing at all. He could not understand it; his brain was dazed. He thought there might be something the matter with his eyesight. He got down from the ladder and hurriedly sent for Margaret, and when she came he begged ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... wrong with the mechanism. Our technical staff has never encountered a problem like this, and they advise me that any attempt at repair might possibly result in ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco

... wheel. But the economy in the turbine is accompanied by some conditions which render it peculiarly valuable. In a water-wheel you cannot have great economy of power without very slow motion, and hence where high velocity is required at the working point, a train of mechanism is necessary, which causes a material loss of force. Now, in the turbine the greatest economy is accompanied by rapid motion, and hence the connected machinery may be rendered much less complex. In the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... not be content with having pressed that spring once. A mania is upon me which, after thirty years of useless resistance and superhuman struggle, still draws me from bed and sleep to rehearse in ghastly fashion that deed of my early manhood. I can not resist it. To tear out the deadly mechanism, unhinge weight and drum and rid the house of every evidence of crime would but drive me to shriek my guilt aloud and act in open pantomime what I now go through in fearsome silence and secrecy. When the hour comes, as come it must, that I can not rise and enter that fatal closet, I shall still ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... occasionally contributed to the periodicals. He began his career as a stone-mason, and by his ability and perseverance rose to the respectable position of a master builder. He died at Dalswinton, near Dumfries, on the 27th July 1832. John, the third brother, who died in early life, evinced a turn for mechanism, and wrote respectable verses. Peter, the fifth son, studied medicine, and became a surgeon in the navy; he still survives, resident at Greenwich, and is known as the author of two respectable works, bearing the titles, "Two Years in New South Wales," and "Hints to Australian ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... accounts of income and expenditure, even the reports of physicians in regard to the health of members of the royal family or of the royal household: these documents reveal to us the whole machinery of government in actual operation, and we almost seem to witness the secret mechanism by which the kingdom was maintained in activity. Other tablets contain authentic copies of works which were looked upon as classics in the sanctuaries of the Euphrates. Probably, when Babylon was sacked, Sennacherib had ordered the books ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... unbend somewhere. It was nothing against him that he told good stories at the royal table, or at his own, surrounded by earls and barons. These relaxations preserved in him elasticity of mind, without which the greatest genius soon becomes a hack, a plodding piece of mechanism, a stupid lump of learned dulness. But he was stained by no vices or excesses. He was a man of indefatigable activity, and all his labors were in the service of the Crown, to which, as chancellor, he was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... that may be made, by one self-palter with the Fiend, of elements the most glorious; the secret effect of conscience in frustrating all for which the crime was done, leaving genius without hope, knowledge without fruit, deadening benevolence into mechanism, tainting love itself with terror and suspicion,—such reflections (leading, with subtler minds, to many more vast and complicated theorems in the consideration of our nature, social and individual) arise out of the tragic moral which the story of Eugene Aram (were it but ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility, spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him of his youth was a belief in God. At sea he was too close to the immense mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to believe, not to accept him ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... phenomena move with the eye, whereas the objective phenomena are not displaced.... This neglect of the subjective phenomena is effected, however, not by means of an act of will, but rather by some central mechanism which, perhaps in the manner of a reflex inhibition, withholds the stimulation in question from consciousness, without our assistance and indeed without our knowledge." The suggestion of a central mechanism which brings ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... debtor who was behindhand in his payment received a legal notice to quit at an appointed time. Then followed seizures, law-suits, costs, and the whole judicial array set in motion with the rapidity of what the head's-man calls the "mechanism." Molineux granted neither grace nor time; his heart was a callus in the direction of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... with the concave turn toward the ground. There was the usual propeller in front, operated by a four cylinder motor, the cylinders being air cooled, and set like the spokes of a wheel around the motor box. The big gasolene tank, and other mechanism was in front of the right-hand operator's seat, where Tom always rode. He had seldom taken a passenger up with him, though the machine would easily carry two, and he was a little nervous about the outcome of the ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton

... picked up the two halves. "The oracle of Delphi was not more impudently worked," he said. "Observe this sponge, these plates of metal that close down upon it and exert the pressure necessary to send the liquid with which it is laden oozing forth." As he spoke he tore out the fiendish mechanism. "And see now how ingeniously it was made to work—by pressure upon ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... drew back a step to look at the crumpled and motionless creature before him. The jay was dead. He had won his first battle. And with victory came the wonderful dawning of that greatest instinct of all, which told him that no longer was he a drone in the marvelous mechanism of wilderness life—but a part of it from this time forth. ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... example, what man may gain in force by being but a voice. Look at that clock. When the hour has come, it marks it. Whether it be the hour of birth or of death, the hour of joy or of sorrow, the hour of longed-for meetings, or of heart-breaking farewells, the clock strikes that hour. It is only a mechanism, but it is scrupulously exact, it measures that time which descends to us drop by drop from the bosom of eternity, and when the hammer falls on the brazen bell, the entire universe confirms what it announces. The suns and the worlds mark at this very moment, in the immortal light, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... the air and stuck in the mast, doing no hurt. After this no more bolts came, for in his eagerness Adrian had broken the mechanism of the bow by over-winding it, so that it became useless. They leaped into the water, Ramiro with them, and charged for the land, when of a sudden, almost at the tip of the little promontory, from among the reeds rose the gigantic shape of Red Martin, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... if it had been only here. And, oh dear, the irresistible fun of Jock's capering antics, and Rob moving by mechanism, as stiff and obedient as the giant porter to Flibberti- gibbet." Carey stopped to laugh. "But then I never thought of their going on to present themselves to Ellen in the middle of a mighty and solemn dinner party! All the grandees, the county people ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... which put harmony into the movements of celestial bodies, could also give it to the internal mechanism of society. We will see the advantages of this invention escaping from the individual, to become for ever the common ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat

... remained waiting for the other to say something more. He did not look at the man, but stooped down, fidgeting with the mechanism of the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... find it in Mrs. Somerville's 'Mechanism of the Heavens.' If you come to my study to-morrow morning before I leave home, I will assist you in the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... astounded. A pine tree in the upper Arctic! That alone was sufficient cause for amazement. From a stiff red-plumed gun captain issued a brief series of commands which set the wonderfully drilled crew to silently adjusting their training and elevating mechanism. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... flycatcher has another name which at once distinguishes him—chebec'. As he sits on a limb, his whole body trembles when he jerks out these syllables, and his tail snaps as if it played some important part in the mechanism ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... we can commence a series with an optic nerve merely coated with pigment, and without any other mechanism; and from this low stage, numerous gradations of structure, branching off in two fundamentally different lines, can be shown to exist, until we reach a moderately high stage of perfection. In certain crustaceans, for instance, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... furs he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse's knees to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence towards one bit of mechanism and another. Then like a huge, portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup the car slid down the yawning street into the ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... noticed, and by means of an incubator Tarnier succeeded in raising infants which at the age of six months were above the average. A full description of the incubator may be found. The modified Auvard incubator is easily made; the accompanying illustrations (Figs. 5, 6, and 7) explain its mechanism. Several improved incubators have been described in recent years, but the Auvard appears to be the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... the species to which he belongs, i. e., his phylogeny. The wounding stone made an impression upon the nerve receptors in the foot similar to the innumerable injuries which gave origin to this nerve mechanism itself during the boy's vast phylogenetic or ancestral experience. The stone supplied the phylogenetic association, and the appropriate discharge of nervous energy automatically followed. If the sole of the foot be repeatedly bruised or crushed by a stone, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... Friedrich escorted Samuel home, and saw him safely in, and the door locked. They had supplied him with some Socialist papers and pamphlets, and he spent most of the next day devouring these. They spread a picture of the whole wonderful movement before him; they explained to him all the mechanism of the cruel system, in the cogs of which ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... Strauss knows how to use them, are a good substratum for the arch-colorist. The nervous staccato chatter of Herod is certainly characteristic of this neurasthenic. This specimen from the pathological museum of Messrs. Wilde and Strauss appears in a state which causes alarm lest his internal mechanism fly asunder and scatter his corporeal parts about the scene. The crepitating volubility with which Strauss endows him is a marvelously ingenious conceit; but it leans heavily for its effect, we ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... can only compare life without it to sailing on board ship with hatches battened down and being kept a prisoner, living by the light of a candle, and then suddenly, on some splendid starry night, allowed to go on deck for the first time to see the stupendous mechanism of the heavens all aglow ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet in ten minutes—rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... live after death,—that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... hours a week for original study and research. I can't describe my work and you would not understand it if I did. But my problem is to find a way of making an electric arc light which will go without an expensive mechanism and be self-regulating without machinery. There is a German student in my class by the name of Felix Bauer who is working at the same problem. Bauer is a good friend of mine and we have our laboratory tables in the same number. Now, mother, you ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon

... into the air, or makes a gesture as if flinging into the air, some powder, which, by a stage-device, is kindled so as to produce a flash of blue light. In the original draft among the Cambridge MSS. the phrase is powdered spells; but Milton, by a judicious change, concealing the mechanism of the stage-trick, ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... great reform, Lord Durham was wont to lay great stress on the evil effect of the English party system on Canadian politics. The party system in Great Britain acts as a corrective and an adjusting mechanism to a degree which is never known in Ireland, where the principle of government with consent of the governed has only been applied to ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... sky parlour adjoined the elevator shaft. The head of his bed was in close proximity to the upper mechanism of the lift, a thin wall intervening. A French architect, who had a room hard by, met Brock in the hall, hollow-eyed and haggard, on the morning after their first night. He shouted lugubrious congratulations in Brock's ear, just ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon

... stairs. Across the end, under the front windows, was a workbench, with a variety of carpenter's tools, few in number, and of the most useful kind. On the bench was an unfinished piece of work, whose intended use would have puzzled a philosopher, if several similar specimens of mechanism, completed and practically applied, had not appeared in the cellar ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic

... a man of intelligent features but painfully distorted body; his right leg, permanently bent double, was supported at the knee by metal mechanism, and his arm on the opposite side ended at the elbow. None the less he moved with much activity, gesticulated frequently with the normal arm, and seemed always to be in excellent spirits. He was a Cambridge graduate, but had never been able to make much use of his education and abilities; having ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing

... existed. "Man", said he, "is called the masterpiece of nature; and man is also, as we all know, the most curious of machines. Now, a machine is a work of art; consequently the masterpiece of nature is the masterpiece of art. The object of all mechanism is the attainment of utility; the object of man, who is the most perfect machine, is utility in the highest degree. Can we believe, therefore, that this machine was ever intended for a state which never could have called forth ...
— English Satires • Various

... have occurred to the great novelist, in his search for the real Audrey, to look deeper than the "primitive passions," or to suspect that the secret of personality could lie in so pure a piece of mechanism as ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... rendering of new lists, returned equally with the living, to the end that the courts might be relieved of a multitude of trifling, useless emendations which might complicate the already sufficiently complex mechanism of the State. Nevertheless, said Chichikov, the general equity of this measure did not obviate a certain amount of annoyance to landowners, since it forced them to pay upon a non-living article the tax due upon a living. Hence ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... the Greek discobolus, as in any passable representation of an English cricketer, there can be no successful evasion of the natural difficulties of the thing to be done—the difficulties of competing with nature itself, or its maker, in that marvellous combination of motion and rest, of inward mechanism with the so smoothly finished surface and outline—finished ad unguem— ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... very thoughtful, "our civilisation, which we think so highly developed, is, after all, but a great decadence which has lost even the historical remembrance of the gigantic societies which have disappeared. We are stupidly proud of a few ingenious pieces of mechanism which we have recently invented, and we forget the colossal splendours and the vast works impossible to any other nation, which are found in the ancient land of the Pharaohs. We have steam, but steam is less ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... determine how that energy shall be directed. That is to say, the organism does not blow up indiscriminately, like a charge of dynamite, but makes some definite movement. This is true even of the simplest animals, and the more elaborate the internal mechanism of the animal, the more the animal itself has to do with the kind of response it shall make to a stimulus. The nervous system of the higher animals, by the connections it provides between the stimulus and the stores of energy in the muscles, is of especial importance in determining ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... purchasing power. To relieve the pungent pinchings of penury with raiment, food and shelter, and so send the sunshine of gladness to the poor and needy, is something—indeed is much. But, ah! the delicate and intricate mechanism of mind is out of gear, a secret sorrow swells and sways the heart, and unitedly they cry: "Who will show us any good? Who remove this rankling sorrow? What good Samaritan competent to the task of affording relief to this dazed brain?" Oh! it is here that the trained votaries of the triple brotherhood ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... whole trivial, stupid, and no doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to get the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... obtained by the throttle. I bought the iron work for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. The wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made and all of the more delicate mechanism I made myself. One of the features that I discovered necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine altogether ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford



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