RETROGRESSION • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Retrogression

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noun

Retrogression n.

The act of retrograding, or going backward; retrogradation.

(Biol.) Backward development; a passing from a higher to a lower state of organization or structure, as when an animal, approaching maturity, becomes less highly organized than would be expected from its earlier stages or known relationship. Called also retrograde development, and regressive metamorphism.

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Etymology of 'Retrogression'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Retrogression" Quotes from Famous Books

... expansion of that energy caused in him the destruction of another force: the moral one, which his own father had not scrupled to repress in him. And he never perceived that his whole life was a steady retrogression of all his faculties, of his hopes, his joys—a species of gradual renunciation—and that the circle was slowly but ...

— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... Serpents, for example, have been developed from some lizard-like type which has lost its limbs; and though this loss has enabled them to occupy fresh places in nature and to increase and flourish to a marvellous extent, yet it must be considered to be a retrogression rather than an advance in organisation. The same remark will apply to the whale tribe among mammals; to the blind amphibia and insects of the great caverns; and among plants to the numerous cases in which flowers, once specially adapted to be fertilised by insects, have lost their ...

— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... fact that they make things easier technically. They facilitate purity of intonation. Yet I am willing to forgo these advantages when I consider the wonderful pliability of the gut strings for which Stradivarius built his violins. I can see the artistic retrogression of those who are using the wire E, for when materially things are made easier, ...

— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... near to Dumiger's. The latter, quite unaccustomed to the neighborhood of so great a man, immediately withdrew his seat to a more deferential distance; but the dimensions of the room speedily put a stop to the retrogression and his modesty ...

— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... movement, this retrogression towards primevalism, must have possessed a certain charm, for it attracted vast multitudes; it was only hemmed, at last, ...

— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

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