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More "Disuse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worm-eaten that they had to be replaced by new ones. The sheriff who pounced down on Billy Boyle's in his official capacity must have fancied he had struck a second Sazeraz, for the lock upon the door was so rusty and rheumatic through disuse that it absolutely refused to respond to the persuasion of the keys produced for the performance of its functions. We cannot help applauding the steadfastness with which this lock resented the indignity which the official visit of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... name was Nathan, but it had grown musty with disuse. He was the oldest of the Eddy trio, and "ballasted" the other two, Father Eddy said. Old Tilly was fourteen and the Eddy twins—Jotham and Kennet—were twelve. All three were well-grown, lusty fellows who could work or celebrate their liberty, as the case might be, with a good ...
— Three Young Knights • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... grow old. This chloroformed audience was afflicted with a long and too heavy programme, as is the custom in performances of this kind. They played fragments of the best known pieces, and sang songs from operas long since fallen into disuse even on street organs. This public saw the same comedians march out; the most famous are the most monotonous; the comical ones abused their privileges; the lover spoke distractedly through his nose; the great coquette—the actress par excellence, the last of the Celimenes—discharged ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... as dogmas, and Jewish law was abrogated. When Babylon replaced Palestine as the centre of Jewish intellect, the works of Philo, like the rest of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature, written as they were in a strange tongue, fell into disuse, and before long were entirely forgotten. The Christians, on the other hand, found in Philo a notable evidence for many of their beliefs and a philosophical testimony for the dogmas of their creed. They claimed him as their own, and the Church Fathers, to bind ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... gather from the story. I will now compare with them two Lacedaemonian popular leaders, the kings Agis and Cleomenes. For they, being desirous also to raise the people, and to restore the noble and just form of government, now long fallen into disuse, incurred the hatred of the rich and powerful, who could not endure to be deprived of the selfish enjoyments to which they were accustomed. These were not indeed brothers by nature, as the two Romans, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... painting ideas, being arrested in the state in which the use of the alphabet found it, went into general disuse for common purposes; and the works then extant, as well as the knowledge of writing in that mode, being no longer intelligible to the people, became objects of deep and laborious study, and known only to the learned; that is, to the men of leisure ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... willow twigs, brought up a shovel from the canoe, and swept and shovelled the place out. MacDonald meanwhile cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up the unseemly refuse. The stove fulfilled its functions perfectly despite the red rust of disuse. With buckets of boiling water they flooded and drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as if ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... similarly, the town walls are formed in many places of native rock, squared and smoothed, up to a certain height, after which courses of stone succeed each other in the ordinary fashion. It is as if the Phoenician builders could not break themselves of an inveterate habit, and rather than disuse it entirely submitted to an intermixture which was not without a certain amount ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... to an old Russian law which had come into disuse, departure from the country without a special Government permit is ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no higher power existed to see, it; but for all that it worried him. Memories are not dead things but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on, his memory ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... that an equally clever chemist will be required to work this improved process as compared with those that have, one by one, fallen into disuse, mainly from want of knowledge among the operators. To a certain extent this is so. The natural chemical actions are not so delicate, but an ignorant operator would spoil this process, as he does nearly every other. When ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... to Dr. Kennedy for his late exposure of the erroneous, though common, use of the phrase "mutual friend," and I am convinced that there are many similar solecisms which only require to be denounced to ensure their disuse. I am anxious to ask the opinion of Dr. K., and others of your subscribers, on another point in the English language, namely, the principles which should guide our use of "A" or "An" before a word ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... latter went into disuse many years ago. In fact it never had many soldiers in it, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... he be liable for any new form of forced labour, which in the days that are to come a king, or a governor appointed in the district of Bit-Pir-Shadu-rabu, shall institute and exact, nor for forced labour long fallen into disuse which may be revived anew. To prevent encroachment on his land the king hath fixed the privileges of his domain, and that which appertaineth unto it, and all that he hath granted unto him; and in the presence ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... was heard. The nursing of children by their own mothers, which had gone into disuse as vulgar and troublesome, became a fashion. Great ladies prided themselves upon returning to the usage of nature, and infants were brought in with the dessert to give an exhibition of maternal tenderness. This affectation died out, but in most families the ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... lack of food dwarfs all animals and plants, and hundreds of other similar examples could be selected. Another class of similar influences are those produced by use and disuse. Beyond question the use of an organ tends to increase its size, and disuse to decrease it. Combats of animals with each other tend to increase their strength, flight from enemies their running ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... which our manhood is capable of rising can never be reached by us under the present system. The moral elevation which every Self-governing people feel cannot be felt by us. Our administrative and military talents must gradually disappear owing to sheer disuse, till at last our lot, as hewers of wood and drawers of water in our ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... an old door connected with another passage that leads by a dark and wearying staircase to the servants' corridor beneath! I am afraid you won't be able to open it, as it is rusty with age and disuse. The servants would as soon think of coming up here as they would of making an appointment with the Evil One; so it has not ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... cure of Saint-Ferdinand, and that she is weak enough—may she not have to regret it!—to permit the inhabitants of Ternes to be baptised, married, and buried according to the deplorable rites and ceremonies of Catholicism, which has happily fallen into disuse in the other quarters of Paris? I can now understand why the shells fall so persistently in this poor arrondissement: the anger of the goddess of Reason (shall we not soon have a goddess of Reason?) lies heavily on this quarter, the shame of the capital, where the inhabitants still try ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... so,' I was obliged to reply. 'With a people naturally more gentle and humane than we of Rome this custom would long ago have fallen into disuse. They would have easily found a way, as all people do, to conform their religious doctrine and offerings to their feelings and instincts. But the Romans, by nature and long training, lovers of blood, their country built upon the ruins of others, and cemented with blood—the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... a space. The furniture had been greatly disordered—perhaps by some inquisitive rat—but a coat upon a clothes-peg on the door, a razor and some dirty scraps of paper, and a piece of soap that had hardened through years of disuse into a horny cube, were redolent of Skinner's distinctive personality. It came to Bensington's mind with a complete novelty of realisation that in all probability the man had been killed and eaten, at least in part, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... the same resolutions should the bill pass into a law, as no man could foresee when the prohibition would cease, should it be continued at a time when all sorts of grain abounded in such plenty, that the very waste of materials by disuse, over and above the lying out of the money, would be of great prejudice to the proprietor: thus the business of distilling, by which so many families were supported, would be banished from the kingdom entirely; especially, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... extremely obliged to you for your expressions of kindness: they did not at all surprise me, but every instance of your friendship gives me pleasure. I wish I could say the same to good prince Craon. Yet I must set about answering his letter: it is quite an affair; I have so great a disuse of writing French, that I believe ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... has been received by the editors of the Repertoire de Pharmacie: For some months past, a good deal has been heard about a product of our island that had quite fallen into disuse, and which no one cared to gather, so much had the demand fallen off because a substitute for it had been found in Europe; I ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... eat a raw pourcontrel, that he might disuse himself from meat dressed by fire; and as several priests and other people stood round him, he wrapped his head in his cassock, and so putting the fish to his mouth, he thus said unto them: It is for your sake, sirs, that I undergo this danger, and run this risk. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... silver-chest in the garret; among them was a huge center ornament, called in those days an epergne—an extraordinary arrangement of prickly silver leaves and red glass cups which were supposed to be flowers. It was black with disuse, and Blair made Harris work over it until the poor fellow protested that he had rubbed the skin off his thumb—but the pointed leaves of the great silver thistle sparkled like diamonds. Blair was charmingly considerate of old Harris so long as it required no sacrifice ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... different natures of the two kinds of existence, their different laws, and the different demands they made upon the two consciousnesses; he had in fact, by a long course of disobedience growing to utter disuse of conscience, arrived nearly at non-individuality. In regard to what was outside him he was but a mirror, in regard to what was inside him a mere vessel of imperfectly interacting forces. And now his capacities and incapacities together had culminated in a hideous plot, in which it would be ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... things that are quiet), I have no doubt that he would have thought that the less discussion is provoked upon such matters, the better for both church and laity. Nor had he ever been known to regret the disuse of the ancient custom of excommunication, nor any other diminution of the powers of the priesthood, whether minatory or militant; yet for all this, Parson Dale had a great notion of the sacred privilege of a minister of the gospel—to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... spoke with great difficulty, from the long disuse of vocal cords. It was hardly more than a whisper, but she heard and ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... scholars." Artisans, countrymen, and merchants—the ideal had been already accepted in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Moliere making his washerwoman first critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of the mind, and every quality of the soul take on new strength through exercise. And on the other hand, as a muscle not used atrophies and dies, so will the faculties of the spirit die through disuse. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... quantum inde regi dare valeat per annum, salva sustentatione sua et uxoris et libe- rorum suorum, (how much is he able to give to the king per annum, saving his own maintenance, and that of his wife and children). And since the disuse of such inquest, it is never usual to assess a larger fine than a man is able to pay, without touching the implements of his livelihood; but to inflict corporal punishment, or a limited imprisonment, instead of such a fine as might amount to imprisonment for ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... that there was now less military experience among the colonists, than at any former period. The old Puritans had always kept their weapons bright, and were never destitute of warlike captains, who were skilful in assault or defence. But the swords of their descendants had grown rusty by disuse. There was nobody in New England that knew any thing about sieges, or any other regular fighting. The only persons, at all acquainted with warlike business, were a few elderly men, who had hunted Indians through the underbrush of the forest, in ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rambling old mansion, made conspicuously larger here and there by jutting porches and more than one convenient lean-to. Though furnished, warmed and lighted with candles, as I have previously described, it had about it an air of disuse which made me feel myself an intruder, in spite of the welcome I had received. But I was not in a position to stand upon ceremony, and ere long I found myself inside the great room and before the blazing logs ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... found the state of religion and morality hopeful, defenses adequate, quiet Sabbaths and physical improvements which indicated that a considerable amount of labor had been done. For twenty-two months following, the jails were in disuse.[156] By 1826 the people had developed from inexperienced immigrants to efficient citizens. No family was without ample food and wearing apparel. Wages were high and employment could be found everywhere. The common laborers ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... buildings with rushes by way of protection against the damp earth, may have had something to do with keeping the custom in existence, long after the origin of the institution had been forgotten. The ceremony of Rushbearing has now fallen into complete disuse, except in a few secluded hamlets in Westmoreland, and in one or two other places in the kingdom; nor can that disuse be much regretted, since what was founded as a religious act, every where degenerated into an occasion for unseemly revelry, in fact, into a sort of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... from the famous kilns in Ching-te-chen, in the province of Kiangsi, were relatively coarse, but in the fifteenth century the production was much finer. In the sixteenth century the quality deteriorated, owing to the disuse of the cobalt from the Middle East (perhaps from Persia) in favour of Sumatra cobalt, which did not yield the same brilliant colour. In the Ming epoch there also appeared the first brilliant red colour, a product of iron, and a start was then made with three-colour porcelain (with lead glaze) ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... little time I began to lose that little learning I had acquired at school, and by a continued disuse of my books became at length so utterly a stranger to learning, that I could not have read, far less have understood, a sentence in Latin: which I was so sensible of that I warily avoided reading to others, even in an English book, lest, if I should meet with a Latin word, ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... in such cases often colours highly without a premeditated design of falsehood. Fear and dread, however, accompanied its progress; such families as had neglected to keep holy water in their houses borrowed some from their neighbours; every old prayer which had become rusty from disuse was brightened up—charms were hung about the necks of cattle, and gospels about those of children—crosses were placed over the doors and windows;—no unclean water was thrown out before sunrise ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... appearance. It had been kept a long time in the Temple among other precious objects of great antiquity, the use and origin of which had been forgotten. The same has been in some degree the case in the Christian Church, where many consecrated jewels have been forgotten and fallen into disuse with time. Ancient vases and jewels, buried beneath the Temple, had often been dug up, sold, or reset. Thus it was that, by God's permission, this holy vessel, which none had ever been able to melt down on account of its being made of some unknown material, ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... as a child follows butterflies; and all this ecstasy in and about me, is the joy of health—my health and the health of the world. This April day has set brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming; an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of—well, I do not know of what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... iron. We have proof of this in Sussex. The whole country is full of iron-stone, and the railings of St. Paul's churchyard are made of Sussex iron. Iron-foundries were at work there as long as there was wood enough to supply them, but gradually the works fell into disuse, and the last furnace was put out in the year 1809. So now, because there is no coal in Sussex, the iron lies idle, while in the North, where the iron-stone is near the coal- mines, hundreds of tons are ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... succeeded Jefferson, Monroe succeeded Madison, John Quincy Adams succeeded Monroe. After successful application for a quarter of a century the custom fell into disfavor and, by bitter agitation, into disuse. The cause of its overthrow was the appointment of Henry Clay to the State Department, and the baseless scandal of a "bargain and sale" was invented to deprive Mr. Clay of the "easy accession." After a few years, when National Conventions ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of old potteries and china and glass, at present being reproduced, are very likely good, because after having been for a century or more in disuse, they are again being chosen. Perhaps one might say that the "second choice" is "proof ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... postage...Indeed, I should be very glad to have a nestling common pigeon sent, for I mean to make skeletons, and have already just begun comparing wild and tame ducks. And I think the results rather curious ("I have just been testing practically what disuse does in reducing parts; I have made skeleton of wild and tame duck (oh, the smell of well- boiled, high duck!!) and I find the tame-duck wing ought, according to scale of wild prototype, to have ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... weak; so that, after this has been continued for some time, leaving off the unnatural support produces a feeling of weakness. Thus a person will complain of feeling so weak and unsupported, without corsets, as to be uncomfortable. This is entirely owing to the disuse of those muscles, which corsets throw out ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... scrutiny Became stone-blind, precedence went in truck, And he was competent whose purse was so. A dissolution of all bonds ensued, The curbs invented for the mulish mouth Of headstrong youth were broken; bars and bolts Grew rusty by disuse, and massy gates Forgot their office, opening with a touch; Till gowns at length are found mere masquerade; The tasselled cap and the spruce band a jest, A mockery of the world. What need of these For gamesters, jockeys, brothellers impure, Spendthrifts and booted sportsmen, oftener ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... boycotts. The statutes directed against both originated about the same time and have run historically on all-fours together. The old offences of forestalling and regrating may have been lost sight of, and possibly the statutes against them fallen into disuse, although they were expressly made perpetual by the 13th Elizabeth in 1570 and not repealed until the 12th George III in 1772; but the principle invalidating restraint of trade and contracts in restraint of trade ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... exclaimed Miles Parker, who was supposed to watch over the sawmill and see that the machinery didn't suffer too much during the long period of disuse. "How did ye find the travelin' to-day? See ye didn't manage ter freeze them whiskers ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... that a statute of the Imperial Parliament overrides every law or custom repugnant thereto, by whomsoever enacted, in every part of the Crown dominions. The right, moreover, of Imperial legislation has not fallen into disuse. Mr. Tarring[42] enumerates from sixty to seventy Imperial statutes, extending from 7 Geo. III. c. 50 to 44 & 45 Vict. c. 69, which apply to the Colonies generally, and to this list, which might now be lengthened, must be added a large ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... practice of expressly, and in the text of a Constitution, forbidding a self-governing Colony to legislate upon certain subjects, or of expressly reserving concurrent or exclusive powers of legislation to the Mother Country, has fallen into disuse since the establishment of the principle of responsible government. Such restrictions were inserted in the Canadian Union Act of 1840, where the old right of the Mother Country to impose customs ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... move might be expected to develop. Otherwise his plight was little bettered; he did not quite know where he was in relation to the doors and the pieces which furnished the room. That old-time habit of memorising the arrangement of furniture in a room immediately on entering it had failed through disuse in course of years. He was acquainted with the plot of this drawing-room in a general way but by no means with such accuracy as was needed to ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... Name of God to be irrecoverably lost by disuse, and regard its pronunciation as one of the Mysteries that will be revealed at the coming of their Messiah. And they attribute its loss to the illegality of applying the Masoretic points to so sacred a Name, by which a knowledge of the proper ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... one of those moods at once gay and serene which are possible only to successful middle-aged men who have consistently worked hard without permitting the faculty for pleasure to deteriorate through disuse. He was devoted to his colliery, and his commercial acuteness was scarcely surpassed in the Five Towns, but he had always found time to amuse himself; and at fifty-two, with a clear eye and a perfect digestion, his appreciation of good food, good ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... the masonry are exposed. In. Pl. XCIX may be seen two ovens differing in size, one of which shows the manner in which the opening is blocked up with stone to keep out stray dogs during periods of disuse. Fig. 55 illustrates a mud-plastered oven at Pescado, which is elevated about a foot above the ground on a base or plinth of masonry. The opening of this oven is on the side toward the houses. This form is quite exceptional in Cibola, though of ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... drove on to Vandon. The stable clock, still partially paralyzed from long disuse, was laboriously striking eleven as he drew up before the door. His resounding peal at the bell startled the household, and put the servants into a flutter of anxious expectation, while the sound made some one else, breakfasting ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... men had used the incredibly tough synthetic to build their spacecraft. It had given man his empire. Kennon gave the hull one quick glance. That part of the ship didn't worry him. It was what he would find inside that bothered him. How much damage had occurred from two thousand or more years of disuse? How much had the original travelers cannibalized? How much could be salvaged? What sort of records remained? There were a thousand questions that the interior of that enigmatic ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... castles and fortresses, and thus far not a person likely, after death, to be suspected of such warlike feats. But I can easily conceive why Sir John de Walton should have allowed the usual rites of hospitality to fall into disuse, and why a man of public character like myself ought not to desire food or lodging where it is accounted so dangerous; and it can surprise no one why the governor did not even invest his worthy young lieutenant with the power ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... conversation, he should at least allow another to carry the tarpot and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over, although I recalled two or three clever stories, which I shall botch in the telling, I came away tired and dissatisfied, my tongue dry with disuse. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... interchanged. I replied, that there were amongst us stories told of such trance or vision, and that I had heard much and seen something in mesmeric clairvoyance; but that these practices had fallen much into disuse or contempt, partly because of the gross impostures to which they had been made subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the effects when fairly examined and ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and they shipped them in the hand-pump. But, heave as they might, they could not move it, except in jerks of about an inch. With an old-fashioned force-pump, rusty from disuse, a three-inch outlet, and three atmospheres of pressure, pumping was useless, and they gave it up, even though the girl added her little weight ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... than by the ordinary means. Yet it must not be forgotten that the thieves' jargon was invented for that purpose, whilst the Rommany, originally the proper and only speech of a particular nation, has been preserved from falling into entire disuse and oblivion, because adapted to answer the same end. It was impossible to treat of the Rommany in a manner calculated to exhaust the subject, and to leave no ground for future cavilling, without devoting a considerable space to the consideration ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... favour of ye [Footnote: This form of the article, though in general disuse at the time, was still frequently employed in epistolary writing, in that part of Pennsylvania. [ed note: The r in Yr and e in ye, etc. are superscripted.]] 11th came duly to hand, and ye proposition wh it contains has been submitted to Mr. Jones, ye present houlder of ye mortgage. He wishes ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... or fancy we have any. We are taught to place all our art in adorning our outward forms, and permitted, without reproach, to carry that custom even to extravagancy, while our minds are entirely neglected, and, by disuse of reflections, filled with nothing but the trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom, so long established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common road, and forces ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... Quisante's own. In fact it was very doubtful if he asked any more of the world than what the world was prepared to give him. But that, said May, was not because he lacked the power and the desire of love, but because his affections were withered by neglect or rusty from disuse. She knew well that they were there and would expand under the influence of sympathy. If people grew human towards him, he would respond in kind; in hitting on this idea she commended herself for a sagacity in questions of emotion not less than that which Dick ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... qualities of the strong which would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the tapeworm, which feeds upon the digested ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... will be full of choke-damp when the door is opened, from long disuse and confined air. I have men, accustomed to descend dangerous wells and shafts, who will undertake the job at a moderate price. Should you labour under any temporary pecuniary embarrassment in paying me, I shall be happy to take it out in your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fused with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his fellow- citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them away; he thought the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... old Dutch festivals, those periodical demonstrations of an overflowing heart and a thankful spirit, which are falling into sad disuse among my fellow citizens, were faithfully observed in the mansion of Governor Stuyvesant. New year was truly a day of open-handed liberality, of jocund revelry and warm-hearted congratulation, when the bosom swelled with genial ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... heaviest battalions—a fact which Napoleon emphasized. The practice of fencing in a nation with a few wild-eyed prophets, or sending a single soldier forth with a hair-trigger hoodoo and the jawbone of a defunct jackass to drive great armies into the earth, gradually fell into disuse—curses and blessings became a drug in ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... these matters Pompey revived the law about elections (which had fallen somewhat into disuse) commanding those who seek an office to present themselves without fail before the assembly, so that no one who is absent may be chosen. He also confirmed the ordinance, passed a short time previously, that those ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... caves and holes, excavated by the solitaries, who thought it the most suitable place for undergoing the austerities of Lent,—a practice which has not even at the present day fallen altogether into disuse. Hasselquist describes the path as "dangerous beyond imagination. I went as far up on this terrible mountain of Temptation as prudence would admit, but ventured not to go to the top; whither I sent my servant to bring what natural curiosities he could ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... fishery began with the use of hoop-net pots, which were generally of very rude construction, and the facility with which the lobsters escaped from them led to their disuse soon after the lath pots began to be introduced. The lath pots were essentially the same in construction as those now used on the coast of Maine, and each pair of fishermen then handled between 25 ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... scripture, 'till they were examined by the king and his council," &c. "He requires that none may argue against the presence of Christ in the Sacrament, under the pain of death, and of the loss of their goods; and orders all to be punished who did disuse any rites or ceremonies not then abolished; yet he orders them only to be observed without superstition, only as remembrances, and not to repose in them a trust of salvation."—Burnet's Hist. of the Reformation. But long before this obscure and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... but I trust not tiresome, details of the operation of weaving on a hand-loom, because a few years more will see the last of those who know the operation and the terms used. The fact that so many terms are now obsolete proves how quickly disuse brings oblivion. When in a country crowded full of weavers, as was England until about 1845, the knowledge has so suddenly disappeared, need we hope for much greater memory or longer life here? When what is termed the Westmoreland Revival ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... me smile to think how bewildered they must have been. Picture to yourself your own feelings if, on looking out of your luxurious carriage, you suddenly perceived that the lines upon which you ran were rusted and corroded, red and yellow with disuse and decay! What a catch must have come in their breath as in a second it flashed upon them that it was not Manchester but Death which was waiting for them at the end of that sinister line. But the train was running with frantic speed, rolling and rocking ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... help us. It is not even its own reward, except for the self-centred and—I had almost said—the unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor capitis diminutio of social ostracism, is an affair of wisdom—of cunning, if ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... For the rest, I counsel that we do not rouse the city. 'Twere of no use to-night to set our arms, Blunt with long peace and rusted with disuse, Against these banded levies. By to-morrow— And we are safe till then—we shall have time To league together such o'erwhelming force As may make bloodshed needless, vain their plot, And mercy possible. Meantime, dear lady, Breathe not a word of what ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... the accurate, must have been frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by the printer's now general substitution of a semicolon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... formerly used as ornaments seems to have been the great convertible value belonging to them, which made them symbols of wealth and importance, and consequently a favorite means of social ostentation. The fact that they have entirely lost this quality would account, I think, largely for their disuse as ornaments, even if ostentation itself had not been deprived of its motive by ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... Ancient the Use of the Bow is, and how lately its Disuse began (I mean in relation to the Common-Wealth, as a defensive, or offensive Weapon) and how great the Ancient Fame of our English was in the knowledge of it: However the Glory of it is somewhat still preserved ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... fiercer, from generation to generation, while the rocks piled up their strata and the oceans shaped their beds. Moses! Why, Lord Rothschild's great-grandfather, a few score times removed, must have known Moses, talked with him. Babylon! It is a modern city, fallen into disuse for the moment, owing to alteration of traffic routes. History! it is a tale of to-day. Man was crawling about the world on all fours, learning to be an animal for millions of years before the secret of his birth was whispered to him. It is only during the last few centuries that ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... best mode of improving its quality. If the principles involved in the production of butter were thoroughly understood, and generally known, I believe that such terms as "seconds," "thirds," and "fourths," would speedily fall into disuse; that there would be only one kind of butter sent into the market; and that the article would always be of the best quality, in other ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... of two bishoprics, both of which are now vacant, yet have not one newspaper. The only printing press has been so long in disuse that there is nobody who can work it in the country. I could not learn that there are any manufactures in Teneriffe; if there are, I conclude they must be in the neighbourhood of Laguna or Santa Cruz. Oratava appears to be the ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... Auff der Halsbrucker, near Freiberg, he says "they are not so much troubled with water, and have very good engines to draw water out." Yet the chain of dippers and rag and chain pump were evidently fallen into disuse, as they do not appear among the mining machines reported by Fritsche and Wagenbreth as having been described by Lohneyss (1617) or Roessler (1700); and Fritsche and Wagenbreth declare that German hydraulic machinery was able to compete with the steam engine in mine dewatering for some time into ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf
... It consisted of elongated beads, white and purple, made from the inner part of certain shells. It is not easy to conceive how, with their rude implements, the Indians contrived to shape and perforate this intractable material. The art soon fell into disuse, however; for wampum better than their own was brought them by the traders, besides abundant imitations in glass and porcelain. Strung into necklaces, or wrought into collars, belts, and bracelets, it was the favorite decoration of the Indian girls at festivals and dances. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... time. Our bodies are the same sort of bodies that our ancestors had, therefore we are full of needless fears. During the early years of a child's life, wise treatment causes most of the fear tendencies to disappear because of disuse. On the other hand, unwise treatment may accentuate and perpetuate them, causing much misery and unhappiness. Neither the home nor the school should play upon these ancestral fears. We should not try ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... obliged to entreat Phillips to bring him back, and entreated him to entendre raison.(48) . . . I pleaded their late hour of dinner, our having no carriage, and my disuse to the night air at this time of the year; but M. de Narbonne said their cabriolet (they have no other carriage) should take us home, and that there was a top to it, and Madame de la Chtre declared she would cover me well with shawls, etc. . . . M. d'Arblay scampered off for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... The old pet name, although it had to be fetched across more than half a century of disuse, flashed like lightning from madame's heart into the ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... writers—the modification of structures resulting from modification of functions. They recognized as the sole process in organic development, the adaptation of parts and powers consequent on the effects of use and disuse—that continual moulding and re-moulding of organisms to suit their circumstances, which is brought about by direct converse ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... and trodden under foot involuntarily; more than one hand, jammed against the spit, was covered with blood. These games are dangerous, and latterly the accidents have been so severe that our peasants have determined to allow the ceremony of the favors to fall into disuse; I believe we saw the last at the marriage of Francois Meillant, although there was no real ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say that anything else of his with which I have ever been familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity with him) seems at all on a ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... immense quantities of verses on that pedestrian occasion (of course I never make any when I am in my right senses), and that I spoke a certain language once pretty familiar to me, but which I have nearly forgotten from disuse, with fluency. Of both these phenomena I have such frequent experience in the state between sleeping and waking, that I sometimes argue with myself that I know I cannot be awake, for, if I were, I should not be half so ready. The readiness ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... and Miss Melville was an unusually successful teacher, and as dearly loved as a judicious teacher can be. The school-house was a bit of a brown building tucked away under some apple-trees on a quiet by-road. It had been built for a district school, but had fallen into disuse years ago, and Miss Melville had ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... by some, that men will think and act for themselves; that none will disuse spirits or anything else because his neighbors do; and that moral influence is not that powerful engine contended for. Let us examine this. Let me ask the man who could maintain this position most stiffly, what compensation ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... distinctively Italian. Specially curious and admirable is the use of elision (in the eighth, for instance, and even more so in the fifth line), so characteristic alike of ancient and modern Italy. In Latin poetry Virgil was its last and greatest master; its gradual disuse in post-Virgilian poetry, like its absence in some of the earliest hexameters, was fatal to the music of the verse, and with its reappearance in the early Italian poetry of the Middle Ages that music once ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... completed their armour, except when ammunition failed, when they substituted for the gun, the lochaber axe; this was a species of long lance, or pike, with a formidable weapon at the end of it, adapted either for cutting or stabbing. The lochaber axe had fallen into disuse since the introduction of the musket; but a rude, yet ready substitute had been found for it, by fixing scythes at the end of a pole, with which the Highlanders resisted the attacks of cavalry. Such had been their arms in the early part of the Insurrection of 1745, and such they continued until, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... abuse to disuse, I would not refer to words which are gradually becoming obsolete, but which some of us, partly from admiration of the words themselves, and partly from old associations, would not willingly let die. Beginning alphabetically, the adjective ask is one of those grand ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... of the consequences, was a great and evident advantage to the public, by the judicious use which the king made of the money levied by that expedient. And though it was justly apprehended, that such precedents, if patiently submitted to, would end in a total disuse of parliaments, and in the establishment of arbitrary authority, Charles dreaded no opposition from the people, who are not commonly much affected with consequences, and require some striking motive to engage them in a resistance of established government. All ecclesiastical ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... century, 823 A.D., and for four centuries thereafter, tea fell into disuse, and almost oblivion, among the Japanese. The nobility, and Buddhist priests, however, continued to ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... crests on stationery, after a period of disuse, seem to be coming into favor again. The monograms in the best taste are the small round ones, though very pleasing designs may be had in the diamond, square, and oblong shapes. They should not be elaborate, and no brilliant colors should be used. ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... very little exception, represented them to be most valuable servants. I could hear of no case, in either of the prisons I visited, of any permanent injury to the health of a prisoner from the entire disuse of intoxicating drinks, however intemperate their previous habits might have been. The same remark is true with regard to tobacco. I will only add, that it is notorious that the prison discipline of Great ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... penance in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in the walls. The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs; the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... exercise, that she picked up some gravel, threw it at the panes, and waited to see the result. The night-bell which had been fixed when Fitzpiers first took up his residence there still remained; but as it had fallen into disuse with the collapse of his practice, and his elopement, she did not venture to pull ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... and the sermon still preached, or has it fallen into disuse now that it is unpopular to believe in witchcraft and diabolic possession? Have any of the sermons ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... delicate, narrow-minded woman, with no open vulgarity about her, but simply ignorant of the fact that bragging of one's distinguished relatives had fallen into disuse. Her daughter, was like her in manner, with the likeness imposed by having such a mother, but much more largely made in mind and body, pleasant-looking, healthy, high-browed. Sophia liked ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... formerly in medicine, but it has now gone nearly into disuse. The peasants of Mount Libanus eat it as others do honey. The Bedouin Arabs consume great quantities, considering it the greatest dainty their country affords. In Mexico, they are said to have a manna which they eat as we do cheese. At Briancon, in France, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... however, not so strong as those of the Negroes. The habit of blackening the teeth, from the age of fifteen, by the juices of certain herbs* and caustic lime, attracted the attention of the earliest travellers; but the practice has now fallen quite into disuse. (* The early historians of the conquest state that the blackening of the teeth was effected by the leaves of a tree which the natives called hay, and which resembled the myrtle. Among nations very distant from each other, the pimento bears ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... its first freshness, there appeared to be little more against him than that he had committed an indiscretion while under the influence of liquor, and had afterward atoned for it in accordance with a code of honor which had not, at that epoch, fallen entirely into disuse. And, after all, what business was it of theirs? Pennroyal, however objectionable in himself, owned a large property and belonged to a good family. In short, society received the honorable prodigal in its bosom once more, and Mrs. Pennroyal reigned ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... Hawes and Barclay employed it, largely in imitation of Chaucer; Wyatt used it in his Vixi Puellis Nuper Idoneus; and Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. Since then it has not proved attractive to the poets—though no reason for its disuse is obvious—except Wordsworth (in his translations of Chaucer) and Morris, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... frantic attempt! But the window catch, rusted with long disuse, stuck. Panting, sick with fear, the girl leaped away and crushed herself into a corner, crouching on the floor behind a heavy box, her dark cloak drawn up to shield ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... qualify a man, but also as military advisers. This was apparently because their elaborate studies had made them mere imitators or copyists. Whatever originality of thought or power of invention they ever possessed had ceased to exist from disuse. They could plan and direct a campaign with absolute accuracy, according to the teachings of the great masters, for the well-defined purpose upon which those teachings had been based. But when a wholly new problem was presented to them, they had no conception of the right ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... Greece, it is evident that the barbiton never won for itself a place in the affections of the Greeks of Hellas; it was regarded as a barbarian instrument affected by those only whose tastes in matters of art were unorthodox. It had fallen into disuse in the days of Aristotle,[2] ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... rusty with age and disuse, two-handed weapons which it required a giant strength to wield; huge battle-axes, maces, clubs tipped with iron spikes, ancient suits of armour, rusty and unsightly, as old clothing of that sort is apt to become after the lapse of ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... of him takes my mind off the certainly gallant captain who only that day had joined our division with the reinforcements. I could not stand the man myself. He added soda-water to our whiskey in his tent, and would only keep a couple of bottles when we came away. Softened by the spirit, to which disuse made us all a little sensitive, our officer was soon convinced of the honest part that we were playing for once, and for fifty minutes of the hour we spent with him he and Raffles talked cricket without a break. On parting ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... He is here dating according to the French custom. In England the calendar was not rectified by the disuse of the "Old Style" ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... architectural remains being rapidly destroyed and archaeological specimens collected and carried away by travelers, excursionists, and curiosity hunters, but the ancient habits and customs of these tribes are rapidly giving way and falling into disuse before the ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 • James Stevenson
... is almost obsolete, and its English synonym, merry-andrew, is not much in vogue, but as they are andronymics, to coin a word, embalming the memories of two famous charlatans, they possess an abiding interest apart from all question of their use or disuse. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... spoke his eyes went to the wall by the door where during these weeks of disuse his own rifle had stood leaning, and his wife smiled as her glance followed his. She was thinking that soon both his arms would be strong enough to use it again, and she was happy that he would need it ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... himself, so there can be no mistake about it. From the few words thus preserved, we glean several important items of knowledge, not the least interesting of which is the fact that a thousand years ago actual monuments had fallen into disuse—as was all very proper—the people contenting themselves, as we do now, with a mere indication of the design to erect a monument at some future time; a corner-stone being cautiously laid by itself ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... nauseous on the palate of the man at the tent door—and then his father, pale as himself, rose amidst the affrighted boys and girls, and motioned him silently to the sitting-room. This was a sort of family vault, with its scanty furniture in grave-clothes, and a smell of damp disuse about it ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... regardless of the course in which they led her; and these ideals were far from ignoble. To beauty of all kinds she was passionately sensitive. As a girl she had played the piano well, and, though the power had gone from long disuse, music was still her chief passion. Graceful ease, delicacy in her surroundings, freedom from domestic cares, the bloom of flowers, sweet scents—such things made up her existence. She loved her husband, and had once worshipped him; she loved her recovered daughter; but both affections ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... then hear the conclusion of the whole matter. The undesirable instincts do not need encouragement. It is better to let them fade away from disuse, or in some cases even by attaching punishment to their expression. They are echoes from a distant past, and not serviceable in this better present. The desirable instincts we are to seize upon and utilize as starting points for the development of useful interests, good habits, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... hinge so greatly upon the perfection of his senses. His power to reason has relieved them of many of their duties, and so they have, to some extent, atrophied, as have the muscles which move the ears and scalp, merely from disuse. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... consequence of disobedience to the law of the spiritual life. He who seeks to save his life shall lose it. He who makes this world his all shall receive as his reward only what this world can give. He who buries his talent shall, by the natural law of disuse, forfeit it. Not to believe in Christ is to miss eternal life. To refuse Him who is the Light of the world ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of the disappointed little face, his fun yielded to an impulse of kindness, and from a far-away corner he produced an old box with the dust of disuse lying thickly upon it. It contained some small cotton handkerchiefs, gayly printed, with border, pictures and verses, in bright colors. Nannie's eyes brightened. They were much prettier than the others, she thought, and they were only ten cents! ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... believes to be exclusively English; and its rapid disuse in many parts of England cannot be but a source of regret to those who study the moral enjoyment of the labouring classes of society. The social meal is now recompensed by a trifling sum of money, which is either the resource of drunkenness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... and passed. She was very weary. Factory life had told on her physically, and the recent distress of mind added its devitalizing influence. There was a desperate flagging of the muscles weakened by disuse and an ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... became the predominant dialect of England; and the East Midland variety of this dialect became the parent of modern standard English. This predominance was probably due to the fact that it, soonest of all, got rid of its inflexions, and became most easy, pleasant, and convenient to use. And this disuse of inflexions was itself probably due to the early Danish settlements in the east, to the larger number of Normans in that part of England, to the larger number of thriving towns, and to the greater and more active communication between the eastern seaports ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... they reached the great forest, Lem Hallowell knew that he must speak or cry aloud. But what would be the sound of his voice—after such an age of disuse? Could he speak at all? Broken and hoarse and hideous though the sound might be, he must speak. And hoarse and broken it was. It was not his own, but still ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I must make the humiliating confession that long disuse has impaired sadly my understanding of German. If you should speak to me very slowly, probably I could comprehend you, but at that time you ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... door leading from the balcony, and entered a room that had once been occupied by General Harrington's first wife. It was a small chamber, rich in old-fashioned decorations, and gloomy with disuse. The shutters were all closed, and curtains of heavy silk darkened the windows entirely. Still Ralph could see a high-post bedstead and the outlines of other objects equally ponderous. Beyond this, he saw a female figure, evidently ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... and she thought so all the more as, for four years now, she had been obliged to renounce all hope of that annual sacrifice, which was so easy and so fugitive formerly, but which had now fallen into disuse. In fact, at the birth of the twelfth child, the reverend gentleman had ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... unpalatable to the honest burghers of Jedburgh, that they have suffered the ancient privilege of 'riding the Fair,' as it was called (during which ceremony the inhabitants of Kelso were compelled to shut up their shops as on a holiday), to fall into disuse. Huoy, the runaway forger, a native of Kelso, availed himself of the calumny in a clever ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... after trying the little he could get at, had gladly denied himself its pleasures, and consorted with the young men he met at the caffe's, or in the Piazza. But when the Vervains came, they recalled to him the younger days in which he had delighted in the companionship of women. After so long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected him to ask her in marriage because he sat alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola, walked with her, read with her. All young men like a house in which no ado is made about their ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... every farm, along with the other implements, there should be a row of good books, which should not be allowed to rust with disuse: a book, like a hoe, grows brighter with employment. And no farm, even in this country where we enjoy the even balance of the seasons, rain and shine, shine and rain, should be devoid of that irrigation ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... likewise been alleged, that if attendance at class-meeting be not made a church-law, and the capital punishment of expulsion be not attached to its violation, class-meetings will fall into disuse. I answer, this is beside the question. The question is, whether there is such a law in the Bible? Has our Lord or His Apostles given authority to any conclave or conference to make such a law? Our Lord and the Apostles knew better than their ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... third reading of the Bill, and fifty-five opposed it. Lord Cowper, with twenty other peers, entered a protest against the decision of the House, according to a practice then common in the House of Lords, and which has lately fallen into complete disuse. The recorded protests of dissentient peers form, we may observe, very important historical documents, and deserve, some of them, {218} a careful study. Lord Cowper's protest was the last public act of his useful and honorable career. He died on the 10th of October ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... ceased everywhere in these parts; and is growing into disuse in Bundelkhand, where the Rajas, at the request of the British Government, have prohibited it among their subjects. This was a measure of real good. You see girls now at play in villages, where the face of one was never seen before, nor the voice ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... leaders, Isaac Penington and Thomas Ellwood. At the actual time of burial there were no gravestones, but these have since been added. Though the house as a regular place of meeting has long fallen into disuse, there is still an annual gathering of Quakers there in ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... Abolition of the SLAVE-TRADE was agitated in England, the friends of humanity endeavoured by two means to accomplish it.—To destroy the Trade immediately by the interference of Government or by the disuse of West-Indian productions: a slow but certain method. For a while Government held the language of justice, and individuals with enthusiasm banished sugar from their tables. This enthusiasm soon cooled; the majority of those who had made this sacrifice (I prostitute the word, but they thought ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... 'Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication' comprise so large a collection of facts for the use of students in most departments of biology. It will suffice to allude, in support of these statements, to the writings of Mr. Darwin on such subjects as rudimentary organs, the use or disuse of certain parts according to circumstances, the frequently observed tendency of some flowers to become structurally unisexual, the liability of other flowers perfectly organised to become functionally imperfect, at least so ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... granite-built house, sheltered under the rocky cliff, had an air of stern and unkempt loneliness; and there was something sinister about the watermill, whose dingy wheel, green with disuse, was close against the side of the building. Yet there was prosperity to be read in the large open barn stacked high with corn and hay, in the many cows that fed in the meadow below the hill, and in the horses that ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... young girls in gossamer gowns of white, with arms entwining each other's waists, their backs toward him, slowly pacing northward up the mesa and to the right of the road. Some old croquet arches, balls, and mallets lay scattered about, long since abandoned to dry rot and disuse, and, so absorbed were the damsels in their confidential chat,—bubbling over, too, with merry laughter,—they gave no heed to these until one, the taller of the pair, catching her slippered foot in the stiff, unyielding wire, plunged forward ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... very ancient power in the human brain, and most of the lower animals possess it to a greater degree than do humans. When Man developed language, it gave his thoughts more concreteness and permitted a freer and more clearly conceived type of thinking. The result was that telepathy fell into disuse. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... employment to be that of a sculptor and colourer of images for the ornament of churches, as well as an illuminator of missals and manuscripts—an occupation at that time still pursued, although gradually falling into disuse since the invention of printing. Scattered about upon the table were several old parchment manuscripts, which had served as models for the artist's use, or had been confided to his hands to clean. Old illuminated missals, some of the gorgeous illustrations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... pretend to assign any reason why this or that part varies more or less from the same part in the parents.... The external conditions of life, as climate and food, etc., seem to have induced some slight modifications. Habit, in producing constitutional differences, and use, in strengthening, and disuse, in weakening and diminishing organs, seem to have been more potent ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... talked less than formerly. Gradually the power of speech was going from her because of disuse. It is almost always so with the very young who are deprived ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... is able to communicate by language to his children and others, the knowledge of the kinds of food to be avoided, he would have little occasion to use the faculty of voluntary rejection; so that this power would tend to be lost through disuse. ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... ultimately obliged to submit to the Stamp Act was at first commonly believed, both in England and America. The framers of it, in particular, flattered themselves that the confusion which would arise upon the disuse of writings, and the insecurity of property which would result from using any other than that required by law, would compel the colonies, however reluctant, to use the stamped paper, and consequently to pay the taxes imposed thereon. They therefore boasted ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... and their success certain. But—though heads of a nation venerable for antiquity, and having good cause to preserve with reverence the institutions of their elder forefathers—they must not be indiscriminately afraid of new things. It is their duty to restore the good which has fallen into disuse; and also to create, and to adopt. Young scions of polity must be engrafted on the time-worn trunk: a new fortress must be reared upon the ancient and living rock of justice. Then would it be seen, while the superstructure ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... fore-arm, disarticulation at the elbow-joint may be easily performed. This operation was proposed and performed so long ago as the days of Ambrose Pare,[30] was much approved by Dupuytren, Baudens, and Velpeau, had fallen into disuse for a time, but is now again recommended by some excellent surgeons, especially by Gross[31] and Ashhurst,[32] both ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... view that a system of telegraphy sufficiently rapid and economical to be practically available for important business correspondence should have fallen into disuse. This, however, is made clear—so far as concerns Edison's invention at any rate—in Chapter VIII of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... change from wood to metal that caused the decline of shipbuilding in Canada. It was also partly the change to steam; but only partly, for Canada started well in the race for building steamships. What proves that the disuse of wood was the real cause of the decline is the fact that Canada never even attempted to compete with other countries in building metal sailing vessels. If Canada had developed her metal industries a generation sooner she would ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... and trussed the same way as a pheasant, but the custom of cooking them with the heads on is going into disuse somewhat. The usual way of carving them is similar to a pigeon, dividing it into two equal parts. Another method is to cut it into three pieces, by severing a wing and leg on either side from the body, by following the lines 1 to 2, thus making two servings of those parts, leaving the ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... is eulogized by Fuller as producing superior dogs for the sport; and in Grimsby bull-baiting was pursued with such avidity, that, to increase its importance, and prevent the possibility of its falling into disuse, it was made the subject of an official regulation of the magistracy. It had been practised within the borough from time immemorial, but about the beginning of the reign of Henry VII., the butchers finding it both troublesome and inconvenient to ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... woman, with no open vulgarity about her, but simply ignorant of the fact that bragging of one's distinguished relatives had fallen into disuse. Her daughter, was like her in manner, with the likeness imposed by having such a mother, but much more largely made in mind and body, pleasant-looking, healthy, high-browed. Sophia ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... great and wonderful institutions of the republics and principalities of antiquity that have now gone into disuse, was that by means of which towns and cities were from time to time established; and there is nothing more worthy the attention of a great prince, or of a well-regulated republic, or that confers so many advantages upon a province, as the settlement of new places, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... The disuse of these ancient pastimes and the consequent neglect of Archerie, are thus lamented by Richard Niccols, in his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... result in a mere jumble of sounds, utterly unintelligible, even with the addition of tone-marks. There is another aspect of the case. The characters are a potent bond of union between the different parts of the Empire with their various dialects. If they should ever fall into disuse, China will have taken a first and most fatal step towards internal disruption. Even the Japanese, whose language is not only free from dialects, but polysyllabic and therefore more suitable for romanization, have utterly refused ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... little fellow shiver with apprehension, never guessing at his brother's self-debate whether obstinate impenitence ought not to bring the rod, and wondering recollection of his own displeasure when Mr. Audley recommended its disuse in the fatherless household. Felix held by the spirit rather than the letter, and had decided that unless he found submission, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had determined that his will should be absolute law. The lady was quick to perceive the firmness of his purpose, and would not (even had she been particularly averse to the proposed measure) hazard her usual authority by a fruitless opposition. But, by long disuse, she had lost the power of consenting graciously to ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greatly reduced in size and are incapable of flight. I suggested in my 'Origin of Species' that, as these birds are not persecuted by any enemies, the reduction of their wings had probably been caused by gradual disuse. Hence, during the earlier stages of the process of reduction, such birds would probably have resembled our domesticated ducks in the state of their organs of flight. This is the case with the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... of the erect position do not advise that we should go on all-fours. It is just the same with a great human device, the introduction of clothes. They have led to all sorts of new susceptibilities to disease and even tendencies to direct injury of many kinds. Yet no one advocates the complete disuse of all clothing on the ground that corsets have sometimes proved harmful. It would be just as absurd to advocate the complete abandonment of contraceptives on the ground that some of them have sometimes ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... &c., are maintained in their normal state of health. Their condition, moreover, is only to be improved by the muscular movements belonging to exercise. The heart itself is intended for action, not for inaction. By action it thrives, and by disuse it becomes weakened. It is so with all the other organs. In conclusion, therefore, it must be said that the whole system can only be kept in perfect health by muscular movements, and that in addition to keeping the body in health exercise actually increases the chances ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... Prayer Book in every church and chapel in Virginia each Sunday in the regular forms prescribed in the Prayer Book. The Act made further provision that in every parish in which the incumbent minister disobeyed the law and continued disuse of the Book of Common Prayer, his parishioners were thereby absolved from paying him ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... cellars will be full of choke-damp when the door is opened, from long disuse and confined air. I have men, accustomed to descend dangerous wells and shafts, who will undertake the job at a moderate price. Should you labour under any temporary pecuniary embarrassment in paying me, I shall be happy to take it out in your wine, which I should think had been some years ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... possible to ocean steamships, or whether it is destined to be surpassed by a still higher degree of speed, remains to be seen. Many persons are of opinion that the increased facilities of speed which are now within reach of travellers on long voyages will gradually lead to the total disuse of sailing ships for passenger traffic. It may be so, but there are still not a few who would prefer a sailing to a steam ship for a long sea voyage, notwithstanding its so greatly inferior rate of speed. But nowadays everything must be sacrificed to time. "Time flies," ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... plight was little bettered; he did not quite know where he was in relation to the doors and the pieces which furnished the room. That old-time habit of memorising the arrangement of furniture in a room immediately on entering it had failed through disuse in course of years. He was acquainted with the plot of this drawing-room in a general way but by no means with such accuracy as was needed to serve ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... and children. The man is now a citizen, a member of society, with developed powers of social sympathy, of social energy. How has he developed these powers? Not by any supposition that the early sex instincts he felt in his boyhood were wholly animal and must be atrophied by disuse, but by gathering and directing them into the right channels. Direction, like control, depends ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... custom and the right of the strongest than by any law. A Salic law, so called from the place whence the Franks had come, was supposed to exist; but this had never been used by their subjects, whose law remained that of the old Roman Empire. Both of these systems of law, however, fell into disuse, and were replaced by rude bodies of "customs," which gradually grew up. The habits of the time were exceedingly rude and ferocious. The Franks had been the fiercest and most untamable of all the Teutonic nations, ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... observed clinically that if the muscles are impaired by long disuse, or by a disease such as myasthenia gravis, then the range of production of both heat and motion is below normal. This is in agreement with the experimental findings that anesthetics, curare, or any break in the muscle-brain connection causes ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... encampment offered no exception to the general rule. Abdur Kad'r, it is true, may have raged a little more extensively than usual when it was discovered that the well had caved in from sheer disuse, and several hours' labor would be necessary before some brackish water could be obtained. He did not trouble the Effendi with this detail, however. There was another more pressing matter to be dealt with, but, Allah be praised, ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of Moses, according to tradition, had been lost; had been lost so long that its provisions had dropped into disuse, into oblivion; an oblivion so complete that the nation's religion ignored and violated the whole system of that law; had been lost so long and so thoroughly that the very existence of such a law had passed ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... Germany,[365] when that unhappy country had been separated from France and Italy after the Treaty of Verdun in 843, Carlovingian law and the ancient German law books fell into disuse. The law again rested on unwritten customs, on the decisions of the judges and their assessors, and on agreements of the interested parties (feudal services and tenures). Not till the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was any record made of the rules of law ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... Mrs. Gotfry take counsel together. The one train for Baalbek leaves in the morning; the carriage road is ruined from disuse; and only on horseback can we fly. So, Mrs. Gotfry orders her dragoman to hire horses for three,—nay, for four, since we must have an extra guide with us,—and a muleteer ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... day, in which, to the amazement of county court lawyers, Horace and Aulus Gellius were sometimes quoted as authorities. And it is worthy of note, that Tazewell, affectionately attached as he was to Wythe, did not adopt his prejudices or antipathies, nor those peculiarities of punctuation and the disuse of capital letters at the beginning of sentences, which even Mr. Jefferson copied from his old master, but cherished a proper and becoming admiration for Pendleton, as will presently appear, between whom and Wythe there had been a life-long rivalry, and more recently some sharp ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... disposed, as well from interest as the obligations of their charters, it can not be doubted that such conditions as Congress may see fit to adopt respecting the deposits in these institutions, with a view to the gradual disuse, of the small bills will be cheerfully complied with, and that we shall soon gain in place of the Bank of the United States a practical reform in the whole paper system of the country. If by this policy we can ultimately witness the suppression of all bank bills below $20, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Cities.%—Yet another characteristic of the period was the great change which came over the cities and towns. The development of canal and railroad transportation had thrown many of the old highways into disuse, had made old towns and villages decline in population, and had caused new towns to spring up and flourish. Everybody now wanted to live near a railroad or a canal. The rapid increase in manufactures had led to the occupation of the fine water-power sites, and to the ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... there stretches an interval of at least fourteen centuries. It is an oft-told story, how, with the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish desire for song temporarily ceased. The sorrow-laden heart could not sing of love. The disuse of a faculty leads to its loss; and so, with the cessation of the desire for song, the gift of singing became atrophied. But the decay was not quite complete. It is commonly assumed that post-Biblical Hebrew ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... quiet surroundings; and here are buried two well-known Quaker leaders, Isaac Penington and Thomas Ellwood. At the actual time of burial there were no gravestones, but these have since been added. Though the house as a regular place of meeting has long fallen into disuse, there is still an annual gathering of Quakers there in ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... resistance. Under the circumstances he took command; and having, fortunately, as passengers two seamen from the squadron going home sick, these formed a nucleus around which rallied the courage of the others, paralyzed only through disuse. It was, however, the firmness of the lad of eighteen, supported by his position as an officer and acting upon the two men prepared to recognize him as such, that redeemed the others from imbecility to manhood. The incident had no results, the stranger proving to be a regularly ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... thanks your offer? My dear Frank, I don't think you will ask so thoughtless a question. The prisoner looks to liberty as an immediate return to all his ancient energy, quickened into more vital forces by long disuse. When he goes out, he finds he has still to suffer: his punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and physically just as it lasts socially: he has still to pay: one gets no receipt for the past when one walks out into ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... little old rocking-chair, her desk and table, and her toilet and mantel ornaments and things of use. A pair of candle-branches with dropping lustres,—that she had marveled at and delighted in as a child, and had begged for herself when they fell into disuse in the drawing-room,—stood upon the chimney along which the first sun-rays glanced. Just in those days of the year, they struck in so as to shine level through the clear prisms, and break ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... from this hateful thing, and coming to the bed began to examine the huddle of goatskins, and though full of dust and something stiff, found them little the worse for their long disuse; the same applied equally to the sailcloth, the which, though yellow, was still strong and serviceable. Reaching the firelock from the corner I found it to be furnished with a snaphaunce or flintlock, and though very rusty, methought cleaned and oiled it might make me a very ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the little he could get at, had gladly denied himself its pleasures, and consorted with the young men he met at the caffe's, or in the Piazza. But when the Vervains came, they recalled to him the younger days in which he had delighted in the companionship of women. After so long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected him to ask her in marriage because he sat alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola, walked ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... in a coupe you must consent to be ruthlessly bounced over the rough pavements on wheels unsoftened. It "follows as the night the day" that the coupe is not in favor, and that in its conservative disuse it accumulates a smell not to be acquired out of Spain. One such vehicle I had which I thought must have been stabled in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, and rushed on the Sud-Express for my service at Madrid; the ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the Use of the Bow is, and how lately its Disuse began (I mean in relation to the Common-Wealth, as a defensive, or offensive Weapon) and how great the Ancient Fame of our English was in the knowledge of it: However the Glory of it is somewhat still preserved (though in a Pastime) by the Honourable City ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... what it showed her:—A lonely woodman's hut in the forest upon the bank of a great blue river; in the hut a solitary man, pale and thin, worn out with sickness and sorrow stretched upon a bed; not a living thing about the house; the axe lying rusty from disuse by the trunk of a fallen tree; one little bed deserted in the other corner of the room, toward which the sick man is turned with longing look, while his lips move but refuse to speak the name his heart dwells upon. And just as the Tufter flew out, having ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... that it will be as an open book. And, if I have succeeded in my task, the reader will by now have become aware that he was a young man with the gall of an Army mule. His conscience, if he had ever had one, had become atrophied through long disuse. He had given this sensitive girl the worst fright she had had since a mouse had got into her bedroom at school. He had caused Jno. Peters to totter off to the Rupert Street range making low, bleating noises. And ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... duty it is to examine the measures used by beer and liquor sellers to guard against fraud, are still chosen annually by the liverymen in common hall assembled on Midsummer Day. Since ale and beer have become excisable commodities the custom of appointing ale-tasters has in most places fallen into disuse. (See also ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to show disuse. There was dust on the shining surfaces of the furniture and on the polished floors. The clocks had all stopped and the musty chill of a closed house was in ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... surprise our readers to know that the punishment of the pillory remained on the Statute-book of this country until the year 1837, though it had practically fallen into disuse for many ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... under the hot glare of the August sun; and when she came away, she brought her father with her to Boston, where he spent his days as he might, taking long and aimless walks, devouring heaps of newspapers, rusting in idleness, and aging fast, as men do in the irksomeness of disuse. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... world than such pale fables of the early Christian life as "Work while ye have the Light." A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man who has the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or to let it rust out in disuse. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... arrangement of a sermon whether it is "easy to follow" or not. We are old-fashioned enough to believe rather strongly in the method according to which the preacher divided his subject into "heads." We had heard that this method was falling into disuse, but have been surprised during recent months to discover how many of the more acceptable and successful preachers still find it the most effective plan. Of course there are those who vote the method out of date; and we have listened to the preaching of some who hold ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... exhibited in the folklore. It is true that the tales give sanction to some things not in agreement with Tinguian usage—such, for instance, as the marriage of relatives, or the method of disposing of the dead—and it may be that we have here a remembrance of customs which long ago fell into disuse. ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... architect to James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and more into disuse. "If in the history of British art," says Eastlake, "there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century." But architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials more obvious and imposing. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... atrophy, in which the muscle elements are merely diminished in size without undergoing any structural alteration, is commonly met with as a result of disuse, as when a patient is confined to bed for a ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... of military drill would be as thoroughly implanted in them as the power to swim or skate, so that, once acquired, they'd never quite lose it. I speak from experience, for I learned to skate and swim when a boy, and I feel that nothing—no amount of disuse—can ever rob me of these attainments. Still further, in early manhood I joined the great volunteer movement, and, though I have now been out of the force for many years, I know that I could 'fall in' and behave tolerably well ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... went in, closed it behind her, and gazed about. There lay over everything a fine dust; there was the look of decay which comes with disuse; and the air bore the musty odour of a shut and long uninhabited house. The Bonbright home had been a good one for the mountains, of hewn logs, and with four rooms, and two great stone chimneys. Inside was the furniture which Mary Gillenwaters brought to it as a bride when her mountain ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... period. The old Puritans had always kept their weapons bright, and were never destitute of warlike captains, who were skilful in assault or defence. But the swords of their descendants had grown rusty by disuse. There was nobody in New England that knew any thing about sieges, or any other regular fighting. The only persons, at all acquainted with warlike business, were a few elderly men, who had hunted Indians through the underbrush of the forest, in ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... disuse of the bow, the callosities on the forearm, usually caused by the bow-string, were not sufficiently prominent to prevent the bracelet from slipping down from the wrist to the elbow, when the arm was raised to support ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... muscle; and while both young men had an appearance of athletic power, as if they could have leaped over the hearse, the elder gave you the further impression that he was actually longing to perform some such feat. The younger brother's half languid gait, that told of bodily strength impaired by disuse, had become in the elder an impatient elasticity as if he moved on springs. His thoughts were clearly elsewhere; his eyes wandered absently to and fro, and his pre-occupation was obvious enough to me later on, when I offered ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... men of inferior rank, but whose abilities were the proof of his discernment; took upon himself the office of Justizia, and, in conjunction with Isabella, re-established an institution which had fallen into disuse through the civil wars, but which was admirably suited for the internal security of their kingdom by the protection of the peasantry and lower classes: it was an association of all the cities of Castile and Arragon, known as the Sainta Hermandad, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... hue of ivory that hath lain long in air. The skin and the nails were complete and whole, as though the body had been placed for burial over night. I touched the hand and moved it, the arm being something flexible as a live arm; though stiff with long disuse, as are the arms of those faqueers which I have seen in the Indees. There was, too, an added wonder that on this ancient hand were no less than seven fingers, the same all being fine and long, and of great beauty. Sooth ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... peers voted for the third reading of the Bill, and fifty-five opposed it. Lord Cowper, with twenty other peers, entered a protest against the decision of the House, according to a practice then common in the House of Lords, and which has lately fallen into complete disuse. The recorded protests of dissentient peers form, we may observe, very important historical documents, and deserve, some of them, {218} a careful study. Lord Cowper's protest was the last public act of his useful and honorable ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... premeditated design of falsehood. Fear and dread, however, accompanied its progress; such families as had neglected to keep holy water in their houses borrowed some from their neighbors; every old prayer which had become rusty from disuse, was brightened up—charms were hung about the necks of cattle—and gospels about those of children—crosses were placed over the doors and windows;—no unclean water was thrown out before sunrise or ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... joined in some of the ceremonies. Demosthenes, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch, say that it was first celebrated by Orpheus; while Herodotus states, that it was introduced from Egypt by the daughters of Danaues; and that, after the Dorian conquest, it fell into disuse, being retained only by the people of Arcadia. It was intended to commemorate the introduction of laws and the regulations of civilized life, which were generally ascribed to Demeter. It is not known whether the festival lasted four or five days with the Athenians. Many days were spent by the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the people from our boat seemed to be the only visitors who woke the echoes in the sleepy place. It was like a city in a fairy tale, over which a spell had been cast; its very cleanliness was depressing, and so suggestive of disuse, that I think a mass of mud scraped off the road might have given some appearance of traffic and life ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... school, and from coming within five miles of any city, corporate town, or borough sending members to Parliament, or any town or village in which they themselves had resided as ministers. The latter statute had fallen into complete disuse, and many of the provisions of the former had been relaxed, though magistrates in general construed the relaxing enactments as leaving the relaxations wholly at their discretion to grant or to withhold, and were very much in the habit of withholding or abridging them. Other statutes, such as the ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... terra firma. The price has been paid for the first step and that is the step that counts. Blood, sweat, fire; with these we have forged our master key and forced it into the lock of the Hellespont, rusty and dusty with centuries of disuse. Grant us, O Lord, tenacity to turn it; determination to turn it, till through that open door Queen Elizabeth of England sails East for the Golden Horn! When in far off ages men discuss over vintages ripened in Mars the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... continuance of every language, however narrow in its extent, or however incommodious for common purposes, till it is reposited in some version of a known book, that it may be always hereafter examined and compared with other languages, and then permitting its disuse. For this purpose, the translation of the bible is most to be desired. It is not certain that the same method will not preserve the Highland language, for the purposes of learning, and abolish it from daily use. When the Highlanders read ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Sunday of the month, and on Christmas and Easter Days; and after Evening Service on the third Sunday. The black gown was, of course, worn in the pulpit, and I remember a mild sensation caused by the disuse of bands. The prayers were preached; the Psalms were read; and the hymn-book in use was "The Church and Home Metrical Psalter and Hymnal"—a quaint compilation which I have never seen elsewhere. It would not be easy to describe the dreariness of the services; and the ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... I have done with verse-making,—not that I relish other people's poetry less: theirs comes from 'em without effort; mine is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse. I have been reading "The Task" with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton; but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the "divine chit-chat of Cowper." Write to me. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... much nearer right. We ought to enter fully, at least, into the spiritualism of the Bible. Circles and spiritual jugglery I regard as the lying signs and wonders, with all deceivableness of unrighteousness; but there is a real scriptural spiritualism which has fallen into disuse, and must be revived, and there are, doubtless, people who, from some constitutional formation, can more readily receive the impressions of the surrounding spiritual world. Such were apostles, prophets, and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... rotten state, and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair death, out pusht ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... leaves, upon which virtuous plants depend as upon a part of their digestive apparatus; they grew smaller and smaller, shriveled and dried, until now that the one-flowered broom-rape sucks its food, rendered already digestible through another's assimilation, no leaves remain on its brownish scapes. Disuse of any talent in the vegetable kingdom, as in the spiritual, leads to inevitable loss: "Unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... fisheries a multitude of smaller types were constructed—such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack. Some of these survive to the present day, and in many cases the name has passed into disuse, while the type itself is now and then to be met ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... of a second class, more complex in nature than the direct effects of environment,—namely, the functional results of use and disuse. A blacksmith uses his arm muscles more constantly than do most other men, and his prolonged exercise leads to an increase of his muscular capacity. All of the several organic systems are capable of considerable development by judicious exercise, as every one knows. If the functional ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... once; that all the prisoners should be arraigned the first day; that the King's counsel might privately manage the evidence before the Grand Jury (the practice of allowing any advocates to appear before the Grand Jury has long fallen into disuse); that the murder of the King should be precisely laid in the indictment, and be made use of as one of the overt acts to prove the compassing of his death; that any act tending to the compassing of the King's death besides the one laid in the indictment might ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use of the rail instead—these are other items in the huge bill of ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... Bishop Jebb used to disapprove of its disuse by country clergymen. In his Charge he requests that "all beneficed clergymen" of his diocese "who are Masters of Arts, or of any superior degree, and who by chaplaincies or otherwise are entitled to the distinction, may with their ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... what were called "public days," when it was open house for all who chose to come, with a sort of tacit understanding that none below the class of substantial yeomen or tradesmen would make their appearance. This custom has now fallen into disuse, but was maintained to the last by the Hon. Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, who was for more than half a century archbishop of York, and is yet retained by Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House, his princely seat in Yorkshire. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... regret that the disuse into which magic has fallen, makes it impossible to render the technicalities of that mysterious art into tolerable English; they have therefore found it necessary to insert several ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... before Wood knocked and gave her a bucket of water, a basin and towels. Later he came with her breakfast. After that she had nothing to do but pace the floor of her two rooms. One appeared to be only an empty shed, long in disuse. Her view from both rooms was restricted to the green slope of the gulch up to yellow crags and the sky. But she would rather have had this to watch than an outlook upon the cabins and the doings ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... Colony. The practice of expressly, and in the text of a Constitution, forbidding a self-governing Colony to legislate upon certain subjects, or of expressly reserving concurrent or exclusive powers of legislation to the Mother Country, has fallen into disuse since the establishment of the principle of responsible government. Such restrictions were inserted in the Canadian Union Act of 1840, where the old right of the Mother Country to impose customs duties in the Colonies ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... to such an extent that the king could no longer cope with it unaided. The employment of purohits or family priests, formerly optional, now became a sacred duty if the sacrifices were not to fall into disuse. The Brahman obtained a monopoly of priestly functions, and a race of sacerdotal specialists arose which tended continually to close its ranks against the intrusion of outsiders." Gradually then from the household ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... seems to have come to us from the East, and although at first indigenous dyestuffs were largely employed, with the discovery of new countries many of these fell slowly and gradually into disuse, giving way to the newly imported dyestuffs of other lands, which possessed some advantage, being either richer in coloring matter, yielding brighter or faster colors, or being capable of more easy application. Thus kermes gave way to cochineal, woad to indigo, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... word "fall." Mr. Brander Matthews writes: "An American with a sense of the poetic cannot but prefer to the imported word 'autumn' the native and more logical word 'fall,' which the British have strangely suffered to drop into disuse." Well, "autumn" was a sufficiently early importation. "Our ancestors," wrote Lowell (quoted by Mr. Matthews in the same article), "unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's;" and in Shakespeare's (and Chaucer's) English they brought over "autumn." The word has ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... practically, the largest portion of the Degrees claimed by the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and before it by the Rite of Perfection, fell into disuse, were merely communicated, and their rituals became jejune and insignificant. These Rites resembled those old palaces and baronial castles, the different parts of which, built at different periods remote from one another, upon plans and according to tastes that greatly ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... persevere in the disuse of tobacco until the enchanter's spell seemed broken, when some disturbing thing would upset him, and he would turn his pockets inside out, and fumble with his thumb and finger in their extreme corners for the least particle of the "luxury." "John, I must have ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... reaching the coveted place was known as the "easy accession." By its operation Madison succeeded Jefferson, Monroe succeeded Madison, John Quincy Adams succeeded Monroe. After successful application for a quarter of a century the custom fell into disfavor and, by bitter agitation, into disuse. The cause of its overthrow was the appointment of Henry Clay to the State Department, and the baseless scandal of a "bargain and sale" was invented to deprive Mr. Clay of the "easy accession." After a few years, when National Conventions were introduced, it became the habit of the President ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Its final disuse was brought about by a variety of causes, among which may be named the improved condition of the people after the Revolution, enabling many to live in larger and better warmed houses, and in the very few places where the ministers dared to touch the subject in the pulpit, as in Dedham, already ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... the Isthmus of Darien, but that name has fallen into disuse among all persons who have any intercourse with that part of the globe, though still preserved in ...
— A Succinct View of the Importance and Practicability of Forming a Ship Canal across the Isthmus of Panama • H. R. Hill
... life, of labour pushed to contempt of the physical and moral conditions of existence; but honest work for an honest purpose, the full exercise of all the powers from day to day, the steady strain of faculties that were meant for strain and which rust in disuse, never hurt any one yet. But the temptations of exuberant vitality are all, if not to over-strain, yet to a certain hardness, and arrogance, and disregard of eternal law. It is not complimentary to human ...
— Strong Souls - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... merchants—the ideal had been already accepted in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Moliere making his washerwoman first critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... other animal, presents structures which, as far as we can judge, are not now of any service to him, nor have been so during any former part of his existence. Such structures can not be accounted for by any form of selection or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... this opinion. The Pehlvi, he says, is much more flowing, and less overcharged with vowels, than the Zend. The books of Zoroaster, first written in Zend, were afterwards translated into Pehlvi and Parsi. The Pehlvi had fallen into disuse under the dynasty of the Sassanides, but the learned still wrote it. The Parsi, the dialect of Pars or Farristan, was then prevailing dialect. Kleuker, Anhang zum Zend Avesta, 2, ii. part i. p. 158, part ii. 31.—G.——Mr. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... there's one condition The C.C.P. are strong upon It is that every house one buys Must have a yard for exercise; So Jones, as tenant, was unfit. His state of health was proof of it. Two doctors of the T.T.U.'s Told him his legs from long disuse, Were atrophied; and saying "So From step to higher step we go Till everything is New and True," They cut his legs off and withdrew. You know the E.T.S.T.'s views Are stronger than the T.T.U.'s: And soon (as one may say) took wing The Arms, though not the Man, I sing. To see him sitting limbless ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... form of the Arabic alphabet; to judge from its being identical with the Hebrew. It is supposed to date from after the beginning of the Christian era, when the Himyaritic form fell into disuse, and it is now ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Monsieur, if you mean seriously to asperse my ward, I say, prepare;—not for the action of the law,—no, no, I hate the law, when it is cited for myself,—but for the action of an old man's arm. Sir, I have been a swordsman in my youth, and though the lank skeleton of my skill at fence is buried in disuse, it moves now in the grave of this right hand, that so long has wielded only the quiet quill. I do not bid you quail; not I,—but, by the angry devil of the duel, you answer me, either sword point to sword point; or from the pointing pistol, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... sickness and in health, depletion was indicated, and it is no exaggeration to say that about the hospital rooms at times the floors were covered with blood. The reckless way in which venesection was resorted to, led to its disuse, until to-day it has so vanished from medical practice that even its benefits are overlooked, and depletion is brought about in some other manner. Turning to the older writers, we find Burton describing a patient from whom he took 122 ounces of blood in four ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... kept during three hundred and sixty years and more; then the over-confident octogenarian's prophecy failed. During the tumult of the French Revolution the promise was forgotten and the grace withdrawn. It has remained in disuse ever since. Joan never asked to be remembered, but France has remembered her with an inextinguishable love and reverence; Joan never asked for a statue, but France has lavished them upon her; Joan never asked for a church for Domremy, but France is building one; Joan ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... and the disuse of English, and he played the role of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... which seems to combine the objections both to what is antiquated and what is novel, so to conduct ourselves that nothing in the revival of this great Parliamentary process shall afford a pretext for its future disuse. ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... enjoyed the blessing in disguise of a less indulgent mother, all might have been well. By nature Mrs. Arlington had been endowed with an active and energetic temperament. "Miss Can't-sit-still-a-minute," her nurse had always called her. Unfortunately it had been allowed to sink into disuse; was now in all probability beyond hope of recovery. Their father was quite right. When they had lived in Bayswater and the business was in Mincing Lane it did not matter. Now it was different. A farmer's wife ought to be up at six; she ought to see that everybody else was up at six; servants looked ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... severe in his judgment on the Patriots, and impatient of professional service. Commodore Hood and his family also sailed for Halifax. Both Mackay and Hood, aiming at reconciliation, and liberal in non-essentials, easily won the general good-will. The disuse of the press-gang, which even "Junius" was now justifying, and which England had not learned to abominate, but which rowelled the differently trained mind of the Colonies, was regarded as a great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... within. Small in proportion to its great high ceiling, bleak in its white-washed walls and scantily covered floor, oppressive from its damp, stifling air and poor ventilation, it gave every indication of the state of disuse into which it had fallen. It was no more than an anteroom to the vestry of the church, though quite detached from it, yet one could almost feel through the stout south wall the impenetrable weight of darkness which had settled down within the great building beyond. The gloomy shadows had ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... makes the whole world kin. It is distrust of a mere reputation. It is a hankering to be shown. Unless the evidence to set us right is forthcoming, we will praise dust which is gilded over rather than gold which is dusty from disuse. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... a Correspondent believes to be exclusively English; and its rapid disuse in many parts of England cannot be but a source of regret to those who study the moral enjoyment of the labouring classes of society. The social meal is now recompensed by a trifling sum of money, which is either the resource of drunkenness and debauchery, or at best ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... supreme court of appeal. To the Utraquists he would counsel conformity to the practice of the majority; although unable to understand why the Church should have allowed a practice instituted by Christ to fall into disuse. ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... feeler of thought toward the mind behind that expressionless face. He expected to find it difficult to do, because of long disuse of the faculty. But he was amazed both at the ease with which the technique returned to him, and with the feeling of warm friendliness he found in that mind—almost like a sort ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... there was no snow yet. It is a curiosity of broken sleep that I made immense quantities of verses on that pedestrian occasion (of course I never make any when I am in my right senses), and that I spoke a certain language once pretty familiar to me, but which I have nearly forgotten from disuse, with fluency. Of both these phenomena I have such frequent experience in the state between sleeping and waking, that I sometimes argue with myself that I know I cannot be awake, for, if I were, I should not be half so ready. The readiness is not imaginary, because ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... rude chandeliers of barrel-hoops from the ceiling, lit up the most astounding diversity of female costume the master had ever seen. Gowns of bygone fashions, creased and stained with packing and disuse, toilets of forgotten festivity revised with modern additions; garments in and out of season—a fur-trimmed jacket and a tulle skirt, a velvet robe under a pique sacque; fresh young faces beneath faded head-dresses, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the window catch, rusted with long disuse, stuck. Panting, sick with fear, the girl leaped away and crushed herself into a corner, crouching on the floor behind a heavy box, her dark cloak drawn ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... grand procession, but this had not been thought advisable in the prevailing excitement; they had driven into the oppidum singly and without any display; and the images of the gods, which in former days had always been placed on the spina before the games began, had long since fallen into disuse. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... they were dying on the vine, that easy living was making farmers and storekeepers out of them, that they were getting soft, ruined by disuse of their talents for meeting and coping with hostile conditions. There had even been threats that one of these days they would all pile into their ship and come back home. So far he had stopped them by threats of his own, that he would personally see they ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... directness, and a laconic weightiness, which give an air of importance and authority even to his simplest utterances. This tendency to compression frequently has the effect of obscurity, not because his thought is obscure, but rather because energetic brevity of expression has fallen into disuse, and even a Norse public, long accustomed to the wordy diffuseness of latter-day bards, have in part lost the faculty to comprehend the genius of their own language. As a Danish critic wittily observed: "Bjoernson's language is but one step removed ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... shoulder-braces improve by use, while the artificial ones not only soon fail, but their very use generally impairs the healthy action of the natural ones; for these, like all other muscles, improve by use and become enfeebled by disuse. Parents and teachers, then, and all who have the care of the young, should encourage the correct use of Nature's inhaling tubes, shoulder-braces, and abdominal supporters; for in this way they have it in their power not only to supersede the necessity of resorting to artificial ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged. I replied, that there were amongst us stories told of such trance or vision, and that I had heard much and seen something in mesmeric clairvoyance; but that these practices had fallen much into disuse or contempt, partly because of the gross impostures to which they had been made subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the effects when fairly examined and analysed, were very unsatisfactory—not ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... across lots to come to her! Aunt Henderson put away her loaf cake in the cupboard, set back her chair against the wall in its invariable position of disuse, and departed to the milk room and kitchen for ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon[273] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... In the fierce protests against the peculiar sins which had marked Pagan life,—gluttony, wine-drinking, unchastity, ostentatious vanities, and turbulent mirth,—monasticism decreed abstinence, perpetual virginity, the humblest dress, the entire disuse of ornaments, silence, and meditation. These were supposed to disarm the demons who led into foul temptation. Moreover, monasticism encouraged whatever it thought would make the soul triumphant over the body, almost independent of it. Whatever ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... great aim of the slaveholder, then, should be to keep his people in strict subordination. In this, it may in truth be said, lies his entire duty." Again, in speaking of the punishments of slaves, he remarks: "If to our army the disuse of THE LASH has been prejudicial, to the slaveholder it would operate to deprive him of the MAIN SUPPORT of his authority. For the first class of offences, I consider imprisonment in THE STOCKS[A] at night, with or ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Rousseau was heard. The nursing of children by their own mothers, which had gone into disuse as vulgar and troublesome, became a fashion. Great ladies prided themselves upon returning to the usage of nature, and infants were brought in with the dessert to give an exhibition of maternal tenderness. This affectation died out, but in most families the good and wholesome custom ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... garden array of roses, English violets, lilacs, tulips, irises, and poppies—for these are flowery times in linens. Occasionally we meet with a scroll or fern design, though the latter is gradually falling into disuse as being too stiff to twine and weave into graceful lines. So true to nature and so exquisitely woven are these posy patterns that they form in themselves a most charming table decoration. In order to secure perfect reproduction a manufacturer ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... was finished it actually fell into disuse, except for the periodical intervals when the Cardinal visited the capital. At other times it was as quiet as a cemetery. Moss grew on the flags, grass on the gravelled walks and tangled shrubbery killed off the budding ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... reestablish its hierarchy in Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport, which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, had very generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month of this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot" of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that, as the realities of Mount Sinai were apprehended by the senses, so the realities of Mount Zion are to be grasped by the soul? And this not by any trick of the imagination, but in downright actuality. The soul has eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the life-giving touch of Christ alive now and capable of sharpest sight and most ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... leading from the balcony, and entered a room that had once been occupied by General Harrington's first wife. It was a small chamber, rich in old-fashioned decorations, and gloomy with disuse. The shutters were all closed, and curtains of heavy silk darkened the windows entirely. Still Ralph could see a high-post bedstead and the outlines of other objects equally ponderous. Beyond this, he saw a female figure, evidently attempting ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... interpretive, that would have made them art, was absent. A third, a fourth, and a fifth time Vandover made the attempt. It was useless. He knew that it was not because his hand lacked cunning on account of long disuse; such a thing, in spite of popular belief, never happened to artists—a good artist might abandon his work for five years, ten years—and take it up again precisely where he had laid it down with no loss of technical skill. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... cold climate stunts the growth of plants; lack of food dwarfs all animals and plants, and hundreds of other similar examples could be selected. Another class of similar influences are those produced by use and disuse. Beyond question the use of an organ tends to increase its size, and disuse to decrease it. Combats of animals with each other tend to increase their strength, flight from enemies their ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... by saying that he is supposed to be in a lucid interval, as indeed his own language at 239 ff. implies. But the probability is that Shakespeare's real reason for breaking his rule here was simply that he did not choose to deprive Hamlet of verse on his last appearance. I wonder the disuse of prose in these two scenes has not been observed, and used as an argument, by those who think that Hamlet, with the commission in his pocket, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... entrance to a square of houses, and found yourself in the remains of an old farmyard, of which one side was a row of cottages. The rest was old red brick—I think I remember a great dovecote—and a quiet look of age and disuse. But now new buildings ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... so essentially a children's festival, that I think it is a great pity that English children should allow it to fall into disuse. One certainly does not love flowers less as one grows up, but they are more like persons, and their ways are more mysterious to one in childhood. The cares of grown-up life, too, are not of the kind ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... alleged, that if attendance at class-meeting be not made a church-law, and the capital punishment of expulsion be not attached to its violation, class-meetings will fall into disuse. I answer, this is beside the question. The question is, whether there is such a law in the Bible? Has our Lord or His Apostles given authority to any conclave or conference to make such a law? Our Lord and the Apostles knew better than their followers what was essential to membership ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... occasionally occurred where the general, disregarding this principle, convoked his forces in the camp as a burgess assembly, nor was a decree passed under such circumstances legally void; but custom disapproved of such a proceeding, and it soon fell into disuse as though it had been forbidden. The distinction between Quirites and soldiers became more and more deeply rooted in the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and secondly, would let me pay postage...Indeed, I should be very glad to have a nestling common pigeon sent, for I mean to make skeletons, and have already just begun comparing wild and tame ducks. And I think the results rather curious ("I have just been testing practically what disuse does in reducing parts; I have made skeleton of wild and tame duck (oh, the smell of well- boiled, high duck!!) and I find the tame-duck wing ought, according to scale of wild prototype, to have its two wings 360 grains in weight, but it has it only 317."—A letter to Sir J. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... very soon—within a month—perhaps less—the country will run with the blood of vengeance from Churchill to the Barrens. If what I expect to happen does happen there will be no government road built to the Bay, the new buildings at Churchill will turn gray with disuse, the treasures of the north will remain undisturbed, the country itself will slip back a hundred years. The forest people will be filled with hatred and suspicion so long as the story of great wrong travels down from father to son. And ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... danger on payment of a tax. Thus men cease protecting themselves, and so in the course of time lose the ability to protect themselves, because the faculty of courage has atrophied through disuse. Brooding apprehension and crouching fear are the properties of civilized men—men who are protected by the State. The joy of reveling in life is not possible in cities. Bolts and bars, locks and keys, soldiers and police, and a hundred other symbols of distrust, suspicion ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... dressmaking, than to earn more money and have no opportunity to learn. The more she tries to understand and imitate the work of experienced dressmakers, the better will be her training. The custom of having apprentices has fallen rather into disuse, and the girl will find the learning of her trade left largely to her own initiative. As soon as she begins to have some skill in the operations of the workroom, she should attend evening classes in sewing, fitting, finishing, ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... not largely developed; there has been no opportunity for their growth. Ambitions cannot exist without an aim, nor hope without an object. Just as in certain dark caves of the world, where daylight never penetrates, the fish found there have no eyes, because, from long disuse of the organ, it has gradually lessened and died out; so hope and ambition amongst the moral faculties must equally disappear ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... the language of Uncle Ulick, a mighty convenience, and a great softener of the angles of life. But a time comes to the most easy when he must answer "No," or go open-eyed to ruin. Then he finds that from long disuse the word will not shape itself; or if uttered, it is taken for naught. That time had come for Uncle Ulick. Years ago his age and experience had sufficed to curb the hot blood about him. But he had been too ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... follows butterflies; and all this ecstasy in and about me, is the joy of health—my health and the health of the world. This April day has set brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming; an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of—well, I do not know of what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; but ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... practice of making heavy applications of fresh burned lime to stiff limestone soils to make them friable, and to make their plant food available, led to disuse of all lime in some sections on account of the exhaustion that followed dependence upon these large amounts as a manure. Queerly enough, these original limestone soils have latterly been going into the acid class through loss of their distinctive elements, ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... construction of the branch line, carriages fell into disuse and dilapidation, and many an old barouche, landau, and brett passed into the hands of the negro hackmen who were former slaves of the old families. Among these ex-slaves the traditions of the first families of Columbus were upheld long after the war, and it thus happened ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... and the multiplicity of altars to Jehovah that their destruction brought bitterness to his soul as the height of wickedness, and with his own hand he rebuilt the altar that had fallen into ruins on Mount Carmel. And that the improvised offering on extraordinary occasions had also not fallen into disuse is shown by the case of Elisha, who, when his call came as he was following the plough, hewed his oxen to pieces on the spot and sacrificed. In this respect matters after the building of Solomon's temple continued to be just as they had been before. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... spear with blood, or was guilty either of taking or retaking castles and fortresses, and thus far not a person likely, after death, to be suspected of such warlike feats. But I can easily conceive why Sir John de Walton should have allowed the usual rites of hospitality to fall into disuse, and why a man of public character like myself ought not to desire food or lodging where it is accounted so dangerous; and it can surprise no one why the governor did not even invest his worthy young lieutenant with the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... expected to flow from it. Gander Pullin's is popular a lot when I'm a yearlin'; I knows that for shore; though in a age which grows effete it's mighty likely if we-all goes back thar now, we'd find it fallen into disuse as a reelaxation. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... remark that the execution of the sentence begins in time, and in its first stages lies within the reach of our observation. The portion of the sentence, moreover, which is inflicted in our sight, comes through the regular operation of law. The disuse of any personal faculty, surely, though gradually, takes the faculty away. Those who explain away the positive doctrines and facts of the Gospel, delight in representing that God does everything by the instrumentality of law. It is superstition, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... here called Nicolaitans, from Nicolas one of the seven deacons of the primitive Church of Jerusalem; who having a beautiful wife, and being taxed with uxoriousness, abandoned her, and permitted her to marry whom she pleased, saying that we must disuse the flesh; and thenceforward lived a single life in continency, as his children also. The Continentes afterwards embraced the doctrine of AEons and Ghosts male and female, and were avoided by the Churches till the fourth century; and the Church of ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... the ideas of humility and meanness. We appear to the Sumatrans to have degenerated from the more splendid virtues of our predecessors. Even the richness of their laced suits and the gravity of their perukes attracted a degree of admiration; and I have heard the disuse of the large hoops worn by the ladies pathetically lamented. The quick, and to them inexplicable, revolutions of our fashions, are subject of much astonishment, and they naturally conclude that those modes can have but little intrinsic merit which we are so ready to ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... description of the sack of Troy. It is probable that this and other superfluous incidents disappeared after the Alexandrian arrangement of the poems in the Cycle, either as the result of some later recension, or merely through disuse. Or Proclus may have thought it unnecessary to give the accounts by Lesches and Arctinus ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... which were left vacant for them, whilst the men by themselves {95} occupied those at the western end. The existence of a distinction of this kind in regard to the open seats only, affords strong proof, if proof were necessary, that it was the introduction of appropriated pews which led to the disuse of else long established, and once general, custom of the men occupying the south side of the nave, and the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... considered essential at the home table have fallen into disuse in camp. It is pardonable, and perhaps best, to bring on whatever you have cooked in the dish that it is cooked in, so as to ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... actually kills the bull) was Francisco Romero, of Ronda in Andalusia (about 1700), who introduced the estoque, the sword still used to kill the bull, and the muleta, the red flag carried by the espada (see below), the spear falling into complete disuse. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... gratefully. "That, of course, wouldn't appeal to you; people who abstain from the pleasures of the card- table never really appreciate the finer possibilities of the dining-table. I suppose their powers of enlightened enjoyment get atrophied from disuse." ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... charcoal of a Victory laying a wreath on the brow of a dead soldier, who had died for the fatherland. Once the subject would have called out all his enthusiasm, but the Tribunal consumed all his days and absorbed his whole soul, while his hand had lost its knack from disuse and had grown ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... institutions or in the general welfare of the country, he suffers the former (and many wise and laudable institutions existed in the provinces of the Nabob, for their good order and government) to fall into disuse, and he leaves the country itself to persons in inferior situations, to be wasted and destroyed by them. You find that in Oude, the very appearance of justice had been banished out of it, and that every aumil exercised an ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... Greek in the University of St. Andrews, has also most generously read the proofs of the translation. It is, of course, to be understood that these scholars are not responsible for the slips which may have wandered into my version, the work of one whose Greek has long "rusted in disuse." Indeed I must confess that the rendering "Etin" for [Greek text] is retained in spite of Mr. Butcher, who is also not wholly satisfied with "gledes of light," and with "shieling" for a pastoral summer station in the hills. But I know no word for it in English ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... was faithfully kept during three hundred and sixty years and more; then the over-confident octogenarian's prophecy failed. During the tumult of the French Revolution the promise was forgotten and the grace withdrawn. It has remained in disuse ever since. Joan never asked to be remembered, but France has remembered her with an inextinguishable love and reverence; Joan never asked for a statue, but France has lavished them upon her; Joan never asked ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... empressement that was due, if Laura had only known it, to the harmony of her flounces. Laura eyed the little Gaston kindly. "You are of the South, are you not?" she said in her soft French, the French of a Frenchwoman but for a slight stiffness of disuse: "and are you comfortable here, Gaston? You must tell me if there is anything ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... cloud or streamer in the sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... which had been occupied by one unlucky tenant after another, and had suffered long periods of vacancy when ladies' aid societies served lunches there, under great white signs, badly lettered. Some months of disuse were now broken by the news that the store had been let to a music man. A music man, what on earth was ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... provisions of the Land Code (Den-ryo) should have fallen quickly into disuse will be easily comprehended when we come presently to examine that system in detail, but for the neglect of portions of the Military Code (Gumbo-ryo), of the Code of Official Ranks and Titles, and of the Code relating to the Meritorious Discharge of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Magalhaens, whose name is associated with the straits at the southern extremity of the American continent, but which has no memorial in these islands. Now that the glory which he gained by being the first to penetrate from the Atlantic to the Pacific has been in some measure obliterated by the disuse of those straits by navigators, it would seem due to his memory that some spot among these islands should be set apart to commemorate the name of him who made them known to Europe. This would be but common justice to the discoverer of a region which has been a source of so much honour and profit ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... general substances, and substantial forms, doctrines which under varieties of language pervaded alike the Aristotelian and the Platonic schools, and of which more of the spirit has come down to modern times than might be conjectured from the disuse of the phraseology. The false views of the nature of classification and generalization which prevailed among the schoolmen, and of which these dogmas were the technical expression, afford the only explanation which can be given of their having misunderstood the real ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... has ceased everywhere in these parts; and is growing into disuse in Bundelkhand, where the Rajas, at the request of the British Government, have prohibited it among their subjects. This was a measure of real good. You see girls now at play in villages, where the face of one was never seen before, nor ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... This seemed as nothing to the lover who, by his own shewing, had ofttimes seen her 'ride like a bird, all day, on the moors.' But to us who know the effect of monastic life and how quickly such matters as these become lost arts through disuse, this romantic ride in the late afternoon and on into the summer night, loomed large as a possible obstacle to ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... Beard's little expedition wintered was called "The Caches" for years, and the name has only fallen into disuse within the last two decades. I remember the great holes in the ground when I first crossed the plains, a third of ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... that the demonstration was a success the wooden rails were not durable enough to last long and the company was not rich enough to replace them with metal ones. Therefore, in spite of Allen's pleas and his wonderful exhibition of courage, the road fell into disuse, the engine was taken apart, and the ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... procession, but this had not been thought advisable in the prevailing excitement; they had driven into the oppidum singly and without any display; and the images of the gods, which in former days had always been placed on the spina before the games began, had long since fallen into disuse. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that the hour was early. The air of the place was as that of some gigantic sepulchre. A little daunted by this all-enveloping stillness, I skirted the terraces and approached the house on the eastern side. Here I found an old-world drawbridge—now naturally in disuse—spanning a ditch fed from the main river for the erstwhile purposes of a moat. I crossed the bridge, and entered an imposing courtyard. Within this quadrangle the same silence dwelt, and there was the same obscurity in the windows that overlooked it. I paused, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... would no longer have the plea of other duty to perform, I would certainly exact, by enumeration, many points of their duty (evening service, catechism, visitation of sick, and other points), which are now growing, or grown into disuse. ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... she had said—how the one had thrilled him and the other mystified! It was her voice that had most attracted him. There was something in it besides music—what, he could not tell—sadness, depth, something like that in Nas Ta Bega's beauty springing from disuse. But this seemed absurd. Why should he imagine her voice one that had not been used as freely as any other woman's? She was a Mormon; very likely, almost surely, she was a sealed wife. His interest, too, was absurd, and he tried to throw ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... machinery developed in the process of learning is subject to the wasting effects of time. It is subject to the law of "atrophy through disuse". Just as a muscle, brought by exercise into the pink of condition, and then left long inactive, grows weak and small, so it is with the brain connections formed in learning. With prolongation of the condition of rest, the machinery is less and less able to function, till finally ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... the ground. The great iron guns were oxidized, as were the gun-carriages; the long-range cannons, painted red, and sunken in the herbage, resembled exhaust pipes of a steam engine. Neglect and the rust of disuse were aging these modern pieces. The traditional, monotonous atmosphere which, according to Febrer, enveloped the island, seemed to weigh upon these instruments of war, old and out-of-date almost before they were fashioned, and before ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... on the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were delicately-outlined squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the warm red brown of the upturned earth in the fallow places. The old negro quarters on the Dabney grounds, many years gone to the ruin of disuse, were vine-grown and invisible save as a spot of summer verdure; and the manor-house itself, gray, grim and forbidding to a small boy scurrying past it in the deepening twilight, was now no more than a great square roof with the cheerful sunlight ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... other, pressing down his key. The blue spark leaped out for a long moment, but Mart was careful not to break it, and with a satisfied nod he threw off the current. The Seamew's wireless, in spite of a year of disuse, was in splendid shape; like other merchant ship stations of modern type, it was almost perfect in its conveniences. The whole transmitting apparatus, from the generator to the aerial tuning inductance, was in a special silence ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... legislators rely—if they think on the matter at all—is the cumulative inheritance of the beneficial effects of education, training, habits, institutions, and so forth—the inheritance, in short, of acquired characters, or of the effects of use and disuse. If this substitute is but a broken reed, then the deeper thinkers who gradually teach the teachers of the people, and ultimately even influence the legislators and moralists, must found their systems ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... service, utilization, exploitation; necessity, need; utility, avail, advantage, usefulness, service; custom, usage, practice. Antonyms: disuse, obsolescence, desuetude, inutility. Associated Words: obsolescent, obsolete, obsoletism, utilitarian, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 823 A.D., and for four centuries thereafter, tea fell into disuse, and almost oblivion, among the Japanese. The nobility, and Buddhist priests, however, continued to drink it as ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... be ascertained, one of the oldest titles was that of Prince of Sibuguey, whose territory was situated on the bay of that name which washes the N.E. coast of Zamboanga Province. The title fell into disuse, and the grandson of the last prince, the present Manguiguin, or Sultan of Mindanao, resides at Dinas. The sultanate dates from the year 1640, but, in reality, there never was a sultan with effective jurisdiction over the whole island, as the title would ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... affected him had an equal right to be by him regarded as existent. He paid no heed to the different natures of the two kinds of existence, their different laws, and the different demands they made upon the two consciousnesses; he had in fact, by a long course of disobedience growing to utter disuse of conscience, arrived nearly at non-individuality. In regard to what was outside him he was but a mirror, in regard to what was inside him a mere vessel of imperfectly interacting forces. And now his capacities and incapacities together had culminated ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... lessons are proper to each saint. This arrangement interrupted the weekly recitation of the whole psalter, and caused great difficulty in later times; for when the feasts increased in number the ferial psalter fell almost into complete disuse. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... idler into the indefatigably industrious, checking, limiting and sometimes almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and, besides, she would not have known which way to turn. After receiving the Lord of Ringstetten's message, that Bertalda was with them, the old Fisherman had traced a few lines, scarcely legible, from infirmity and long disuse, saying, "I am now a poor old widower; for my dear good wife is dead. But, lonely as I am by my fireside, I had rather Bertalda stayed away than come here. Provided she does not harm my dear Undine! My curse be ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... anciently it was usual to rate wages, first by general laws extending over the whole kingdom, and afterwards by particular orders of the justices of peace in every particular county, both these practices have now gone entirely into disuse. "By the experience of above four hundred years," says Doctor Burn, "it seems time to lay aside all endeavours to bring under strict regulations, what in its own nature seems incapable of minute limitation; for if all persons in the same kind ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... May 22, 1723, sixty-nine peers voted for the third reading of the Bill, and fifty-five opposed it. Lord Cowper, with twenty other peers, entered a protest against the decision of the House, according to a practice then common in the House of Lords, and which has lately fallen into complete disuse. The recorded protests of dissentient peers form, we may observe, very important historical documents, and deserve, some of them, {218} a careful study. Lord Cowper's protest was the last public act of his ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... In Spanish days no European gentleman or lady could be seen in a carromata [235] (gig) about Manila; now this vehicle is in general use for both sexes of all classes. Bicycles were known in the Islands ten years ago, but soon fell into disuse on account of the bad roads; however, this means of locomotion ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the road to the sea, nearly a mile away. Man had almost given up the task of attempting to wrest a living from this inhospitable region. The boat channels which threaded the ooze were choked with weed and covered with green slime from long disuse, the little stone quays were thick with moss, the rotting planks of a broken fishing boat were foul with the encrustations of long years, the stone cottages by the roadside seemed deserted. Here and there the marshes had encroached upon the far side of the road, creeping half a mile or ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... necessarily precarious. No critic can separate the actual laws of Solon from those which passed under his name in later ages. Nor do the Scholiasts and Lexicographers attempt to distinguish how many of these laws were still in force at the time when they wrote, or when they fell into disuse and were to be found in books only. Nor can we hastily assume that enactments which occur in the Laws of Plato were also a part of Athenian law, however ...
— Laws • Plato
... characterized the general state of the country; and they suggest also the difference in energy and efficiency between a man of forty, in continuous practice of his profession, and generals of sixty, whose knowledge of their business derived over a disuse of more than thirty years, and from experience limited to positions necessarily very subordinate. From the meagreness of steamer traffic, all this provision of men and material had to go by sail vessel to Albany; and Chauncey wrote that his ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... visitors, who detected a resemblance between this section of the country and the Holy Land, were responsible for the christening of this road and also of the Sea of Galilee—which last has almost dropped into disuse. There does not seem to be any particular suggestion of the land of the Pharaohs and present-day Egypt, but tradition explains that as follows: Old Squire Perce had accumulated a store of grain in case of drought, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... gone beyond the library and adjoining room. The whole western side of the house was at this time shut up, her life being confined to two or three small rooms in the south- east corner. The great apartments through which they now whisperingly walked wore already that funereal aspect that comes from disuse and inattention. Triangular cobwebs already formed little hammocks for the dust in corners of the wainscot, and a close smell of wood and leather, seasoned with mouse-droppings, pervaded the atmosphere. So seldom was the solitude of these chambers intruded on by human feet that more ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... side; the whole so light that the soldiers of Grant's army, when they first saw one, stoutly averred that "those boats could run on a heavy dew." The hull was then thinly plated with iron, and the prow lengthened, and made massive, until it formed the terrible "ram," fallen into disuse since the days of the Greek galleys, to be taken up again by naval architects in the nineteenth century. Then on the deck was built a pent-house of oak and iron, with sloping sides just high enough to cover the engine. The two towering ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... backs, but in how many household processes is the worker expected to get down on all fours? The free-born American rebels. Perchance it is the unconscious protest over a four-footed ancestry, or it may be that disuse has really weakened the spinal column. Whatever the cause, the fact remains. It is not the idea of work, of service, but of bending the back to work that is so repugnant; likewise the effect on the hands of hot water and scrubbing. Close observation has convinced ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... not between the theory of a supernatural cause and the theory of any one particular natural cause, or set of causes—such as natural selection, use, disuse, and so forth. The issue thus far—or where only the fact of evolution is concerned—is between the theory of a supernatural cause as operating immediately in numberless acts of special creation, and the theory of natural causes as a whole, whether ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... would plainly be wrong to advocate it; no priesthood is more sacred than that which comes with fatherhood. But we must face the fact that in our modern American life family prayer, like sundry other wholesome habits, has fallen largely into disuse. If the Church can, in any measure, supplement the deficiencies of the household, and help to supply to individuals a blessing they would gladly enjoy at their own homes, if they might, it is her plain duty to do so. Moreover, many ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... seen a white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash hands and face in it, throw it out, fry bacon and beans in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and plate in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse of the bath in this country, that in cold weather most men perspire very little indeed, and the perspiration that is exuded passes through to the outer garments and is immediately deposited upon them as frost; and ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... while the doors themselves had become so worm-eaten that they had to be replaced by new ones. The sheriff who pounced down on Billy Boyle's in his official capacity must have fancied he had struck a second Sazeraz, for the lock upon the door was so rusty and rheumatic through disuse that it absolutely refused to respond to the persuasion of the keys produced for the performance of its functions. We cannot help applauding the steadfastness with which this lock resented the indignity which the official visit of the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... was a common vice. Of the young men who were my contemporaries a very large proportion became habitual drunkards and died prematurely. No reform in my time has been so general and beneficial as that of the disuse of drinking intoxicating liquors, commencing in 1841. Formerly liquors were put on the sideboard or table, and the invitation "take a drink" was as common then as "take a seat" is now. This method of treating was shared in by preachers of the Gospel, and by all who ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... clocks and watches began to supersede sun-dials, and these have gradually fallen into disuse except as an additional ornament to a garden, or in remote country districts where the old dial on the church tower still serves as an occasional check on the modern clock by its side. The art of constructing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of which it disapproved as a ministry would mean in the majority of cases a resignation, and it is not possible to suppose that the governor would be asked to exercise a prerogative of the Crown which has been in disuse since the establishment of responsible government and would now be a revolutionary measure ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... sire, to the most holy sacrament had greatly fallen into disuse in this city, just as if we who are its residents had not come from the Christian country of Espana. Consequently, as soon as I entered upon the government of this church, I endeavored to promote this observance, and exerted all my effort and strength—so that, by the goodness ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... blood-hound for following a scent. Marvellous feats are related of his perseverance and strength in pursuit of his game; but since the reign of George the Third, the breed has not been kept up. That monarch was particularly fond of this description of hunting; but now, having fallen into disuse, it is not likely to be revived. Stag-hounds are somewhat smaller than the blood-hound; rougher, with a wider nose, shorter head, loose hanging ears, and a rush tail, nearly erect. A most remarkable stag hunt ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... fallen into complete disuse; but in France it is largely used in the shape of Absinthe. As a garden plant, Tarragon, which is a species of Wormwood, will claim a place in every herb garden, and there are a few, such as A. sericea, A. cana, and A. alpina, which make pretty shrubs ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... has never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech (the phenomenon does occur), I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old, old way; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... English actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many parts of the body which it ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and averse to all unnecessary exertion. The example of the upper classes would tell on the lower, though not perhaps to any very large extent. The ordinary Mede, no doubt, lost something of his old daring and savagery; from disuse he became inexpert in the management of arms; and he was thus no longer greatly to be dreaded as a soldier. But he was really not very much less brave, nor less capable of bearing hardships, than before; ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... to the intrenchments at the base of the hill, "that the victory was owing, not to the skill of the commander, nor the valor of the troops, but to a mound and a ditch." This ancient mode of securing a position, which had fallen into disuse, was revived after this, according to the same author, and came into general practice among the best captains ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... legislators are in forming them, many persons, instead of attending the churches, which they think profaned by priests who have taken the oaths, flock to church-yards, chapels, or other places, once appropriated to religious worship, but in disuse since the revolution, and of course not violated by constitutional masses. The cemetery of St. Denis, at Amiens, though large, is on Sundays and holidays so crouded, that it is almost difficult to enter it. Here the devotees flock in all weathers, say their mass, and return with the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... where it is found impossible to save any portion of the fore-arm, disarticulation at the elbow-joint may be easily performed. This operation was proposed and performed so long ago as the days of Ambrose Pare,[30] was much approved by Dupuytren, Baudens, and Velpeau, had fallen into disuse for a time, but is now again recommended by some excellent surgeons, especially by Gross[31] and Ashhurst,[32] both ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... the further side strive as they might, slowly, very slowly, the thick door quivered to its frame. Martin glanced at the bolt, for he could not speak, and with his left hand Foy slowly worked it forward. It was stiff with disuse, it caught upon ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... change us? Such as absolutely and on a sudden give way to these propensions, draw total destruction upon themselves. I am sorry for several gentlemen who, through the folly of their physicians, have in their youth and health wholly shut themselves up: it were better to endure a cough, than, by disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so great utility. Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant hours of the day! Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his constitution, as Caesar ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... was certainly the sharpest of all the boys in Northbourne. Naturally sharp, that is to say, for he, in common with Alick Carnegy, was incorrigibly idle, and Ned's talent of ability was therefore allowed to rust from disuse. ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... on stationery, after a period of disuse, seem to be coming into favor again. The monograms in the best taste are the small round ones, though very pleasing designs may be had in the diamond, square, and oblong shapes. They should not be elaborate, and no brilliant colors should be used. The ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... window in the corner, but the fastenings were so rusty from long disuse that, tug as they would, they could not open it. They wiped away the dust and cobwebs from it, and ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... became more numerous and more elaborate, and the mass of ritual grew to such an extent that the king could no longer cope with it unaided. The employment of purohits or family priests, formerly optional, now became a sacred duty if the sacrifices were not to fall into disuse. The Brahman obtained a monopoly of priestly functions, and a race of sacerdotal specialists arose which tended continually to close its ranks against the intrusion of outsiders." Gradually then from the household priests and those who made it their ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... girls, and Miss Melville was an unusually successful teacher, and as dearly loved as a judicious teacher can be. The school-house was a bit of a brown building tucked away under some apple-trees on a quiet by-road. It had been built for a district school, but had fallen into disuse years ago, and Miss Melville ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... curiously it was natural to recall the slumber of Rip Van Winkle, and to wonder seriously if the place was destined ever to wake up. How any shops afford their proprietors a subsistence here is a marvel. The few to be seen had but one shutter down, the rest being rusty with disuse. There were a plenty of broad-brimmed hats with priests under them, a sure crop in Spain, but scarcely a citizen was to be seen, or aught else to be noticed, except a few rusty towers and antique fountains. Everything seemed impregnated with decay, more desolate than an actual ruin, because ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... for the boy. The boat in time somehow got itself built and out upon the little river; but owing to the fact that its materials were stolen, the river failed to freeze over that winter, and for three winters following—not till the boat itself had fallen apart from disuse and lack of care—which points its own moral, as hinted at above. If you must build ice-boats, and you are a kid with mechanical yearnings, pay for the material that goes into the making of your product. ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... foot involuntarily; more than one hand, jammed against the spit, was covered with blood. These games are dangerous, and latterly the accidents have been so severe that our peasants have determined to allow the ceremony of the favors to fall into disuse; I believe we saw the last at the marriage of Francois Meillant, although there was no ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... formed in different quarters of the city, under various names, and used to fight for the honour of victory. When the country became more thoroughly tranquil, the custom of forming these leagues amongst gentlemen fell into disuse. ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... meaning. The very thing that would have made them intelligible, interpretive, that would have made them art, was absent. A third, a fourth, and a fifth time Vandover made the attempt. It was useless. He knew that it was not because his hand lacked cunning on account of long disuse; such a thing, in spite of popular belief, never happened to artists—a good artist might abandon his work for five years, ten years—and take it up again precisely where he had laid it down with no loss of technical skill. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... speak of some ancient ceremonies of holy week which have fallen into disuse, such as the custom of carrying the gospel or the B. Sacrament in triumphant procession on Palm-Sunday, and others alluded to by Cancellieri and described by Martene, De ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... so the realities of Mount Zion are to be grasped by the soul? And this not by any trick of the imagination, but in downright actuality. The soul has eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the life-giving touch of Christ alive now and capable of sharpest sight ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... up in her own hands these evidences of an earlier occupancy of the room. They were garments of a day gone by. The silks were faded, dingy, worn in the creases from sheer disuse. Apparently they had ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... fashion of settling a difference of opinion with the six-gun had long fallen into disuse, but Saguache was still close enough to the stark primeval emotions to wait with a keen interest for the crack of the revolver that would put a period to the quarrel between Soapy Stone and young Flandrau. ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... down on the ground, and went out, and turned the key. I found, on looking round, that I was right in my conjectures. I was in a cellar, which, apparently, had long been in disuse. Melchior soon returned, followed by an old crone, who carried a basket and a can of water. She washed the blood off my head, put some alve upon the wounds, and bound them up. She then ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... to everything that Mr Brownrigg took upon his own responsibility, as my reader will see. He, and another farmer, his neighbour, had been so often re-elected churchwardens, that at last they seemed to have gained a prescriptive right to the office, and the form of election fell into disuse; so much so, that after Mr Summer's death, which took place some year and a half before I became Vicar of Marshmallows, Mr Brownrigg continued to exercise the duty in his own single person, and nothing had as yet been said about the election of ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the circuit of the bedroom quarters. All, until he came to Alan's chamber, were locked from without, and bore the marks of a prolonged disuse. But Alan's was a room in commission, filled with clothes, knickknacks, letters, books, and the conveniences of a solitary man. The fire had been lighted; but it had long ago burned out, and the ashes were stone cold. The bed had been made, but it ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whence an overgrown walk led across tangled meadows to the negro "quarters"—a long, whitewashed row of almost deserted cabins. Since the close of the war the "quarters" had fallen partly into disuse and had decayed rapidly, though some few were still tenanted by the former slaves, who gathered as of old in the doorways of an evening to strum upon broken-stringed banjos and to wrap the hair of their ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... room in a religious house, a parlour (or parloir) became a place of reception or entertainment. Two centuries ago an air of elegance hung about it. It suggested spinnets and powdered wigs. And then, as fashion turned to commonness, the parlour grew stuffy with disuse, until it is to-day the room reserved for a vain display, consecrated to wax-flowers and framed photographs, hermetically sealed save when the voice of gentility bids its furtive door be opened. The American "parlor" resembles the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... advocate the disuse of milk have a substitute or imitation to take its place, nut milk made from finely ground nuts and water. Like all other imitations, it is inferior to the original. It is more difficult to digest than real milk and the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... of words. Her bosom was heaving underneath her lace blouse. She was pale almost to the lips. The sudden and complete disuse of all manner of cosmetics had to a certain extent blanched her face. There was room there now for the writing of tragedy. Borrowdean, still outwardly suave, was inwardly cursing the unlucky chance which had blown the ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of a universal law. It is this,—that from him who does not use his powers there is taken away even the power that he has. The gift is lost by the lack of exercise, or as Horace Bushnell stated the principle, the "capacity is extirpated by disuse." ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... hordes which afterwards overran the empire also treated the offence as a crime punishable Fith death. This severe penalty remained in force in all the countries of Europe until the Middle Ages. With the gradual disuse of the old barbarous punishments so universal in medieval times came also a reversal of opinion as to the magnitude of the crime involved in killing a child not yet born. But the exact period of transition is not ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of expressly, and in the text of a Constitution, forbidding a self-governing Colony to legislate upon certain subjects, or of expressly reserving concurrent or exclusive powers of legislation to the Mother Country, has fallen into disuse since the establishment of the principle of responsible government. Such restrictions were inserted in the Canadian Union Act of 1840, where the old right of the Mother Country to impose customs duties in the Colonies for the regulation of commerce ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... that only two reasonable kinds of punishment exist. Those used in the old days: corporal and capital punishment, which, as human nature gradually softens, come more and more into disuse," said Nekhludoff. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... elections could be managed by the officials through the official Press in their own interest; elections would become a sham, and would no doubt soon fall into disuse. The official class would become a caste of hereditary rulers governing millions ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... of the said muscular coat, but when constipation has existed for any length of time, the accumulated matter adhering to the walls of the colon renders that organ partially, if not wholly rigid, hence the difficulty of evacuation; consequently, through disuse, the muscles become to a certain extent atrophied, and require stimulation to resume their natural function even after the colon has been cleansed. It is largely owing to the use of this antiseptic "tonic" that the "Cascade Treatment" has been so ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... moment begun to sing, and to sing in a manner which could leave no doubt in anyone's mind that he was either exceedingly drunk or raving mad. It was a high, thin voice that they heard, and it seemed dry, as if from long disuse. Of words or tune there was no question. It went sailing up to a surprising height, and was carried down with a despairing moan as of a winter wind in a hollow chimney, or an organ whose wind fails suddenly. It was a really horrible sound, and Anderson felt that ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... the dash. Every writer for the press, who has any sense of the accurate, must have been frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by the printer's now general substitution of a semicolon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into the grossest ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... Plains," was a man of wonderful physique, straight and stout as a pine. His red-brown hair hung in curls below his shoulders; he wore a full beard, and his keen, sparkling eyes were of the brightest hue. He came from an Eastern family, and possessed a good education, somewhat rusty from disuse. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... Lessons are arranged upon a new progressive principle, exceedingly simple, and well adapted for the purpose. The Accented Type has been adopted, so as to ensure correct pronunciation. The old system of mis-spelling words is dangerous in the extreme, and, therefore, very justly, has now fallen into disuse. In a word, the "ILLUSTRATED WEBSTER SPELLING BOOK," whether considered in respect to its Typography, Binding, or Beauty of its Illustrations, must take the highest position as a School-Book, entirely setting ...
— The Royal Picture Alphabet • Luke Limner
... are, however, not so strong as those of the Negroes. The habit of blackening the teeth, from the age of fifteen, by the juices of certain herbs* and caustic lime, attracted the attention of the earliest travellers; but the practice has now fallen quite into disuse. (* The early historians of the conquest state that the blackening of the teeth was effected by the leaves of a tree which the natives called hay, and which resembled the myrtle. Among nations very distant from each other, the pimento bears a similar name; among the Haitians aji or ahi, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... mind meantime busy with plans for immediate action. At last her healthful appetite so asserted itself that she went down to the dining-room. Mr. and Mrs. Muir had not yet appeared, and she strolled into the parlor, opened her piano, and played a few runs. She found it sadly out of tune from long disuse. As this was not true of her voice, she began ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... roughly to the dogs, snapped her whip, threw open the door, and stepped out boldly. She shut the door behind her and shot a bolt. It creaked as though it had grown rusty with disuse. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... said by some, that men will think and act for themselves; that none will disuse spirits or anything else because his neighbors do; and that moral influence is not that powerful engine contended for. Let us examine this. Let me ask the man who could maintain this position most stiffly, ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... power, as if they could have leaped over the hearse, the elder gave you the further impression that he was actually longing to perform some such feat. The younger brother's half languid gait, that told of bodily strength impaired by disuse, had become in the elder an impatient elasticity as if he moved on springs. His thoughts were clearly elsewhere; his eyes wandered absently to and fro, and his pre-occupation was obvious enough to me later on, when I offered him my card and reminded ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... a city which so impressed one with the fact that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is, on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... to eat a raw pourcontrel, that he might disuse himself from meat dressed by fire; and as several priests and other people stood round him, he wrapped his head in his cassock, and so putting the fish to his mouth, he thus said unto them: It is for your sake, sirs, that I undergo this danger, and run ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the learned and the wise. Some instances there are of men who have united both characters, but it will be found that these have had frequent laborious intervals, that though they may have been vicious, they have never been indolent, and that their minds have never slumbered and lost by disuse the power of exertion. Reflections of this sort make me very uncomfortable, and I am ready to cry with vexation when I think on my misspent life. If I was insensible to a higher order of merit, and indifferent to a nobler kind of praise, I should be happier far; but to be tormented with ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... machines have been and will be dealt with. Horizontal centrifugals, that is, those whose spindles are horizontal have been made, but the great inconvenience of charging and discharging connected with them has occasioned their disuse; though in other respects for liquids they are quite as good as vertical separators. Their underlying theory is practically the same as that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... usually performed for the specific purpose of obtaining rain. Formerly, too, when their lives were far less peaceful than they are to-day, the Pueblos indulged in war and scalp dances; but these are now falling into disuse. The most remarkable exhibition of dancing, still in vogue, is the repulsive Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, which takes place every year alternately in four villages between the 10th and the 30th of August according ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... expression of established custom and legalized institution upon gaining for each the aims and line of conduct desired? If so, is the result of the process to gain a ground of mutual compromise and accommodation and a division of labor in joint life which will enable the process itself to fall into disuse. ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... with such infinite pains to please the "Boy" stood in its accustomed place, but ferns and flowers alike were dead or drooping in their pots, untended and uncared for, and some had been taken away altogether, leaving gaps on the stand, behind which the common grate, empty, and rusted from disuse, appeared. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... days at Morristown, when that cloud overshadowed us, how wretched was my life. Nothing to do—only to sit with folded hands while others waited upon me. I shudder when I think of that time. No, let me be up and doing, and God grant I may die in harness, and not rust out in miserable disuse." ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... start is made here and now with the political education of Europe—unless boys and girls are made to think politically while their generosity and idealism is still untainted by motives of personal profit, and their powers of vital thought not yet decayed by disuse—these and worse things will happen; love, tolerance, and the independence which is the birthright of men, will all be engulfed in a mad welter of personal, class, and national selfishness. In such a society it really would not matter very much if political ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... they must have been. Picture to yourself your own feelings if, on looking out of your luxurious carriage, you suddenly perceived that the lines upon which you ran were rusted and corroded, red and yellow with disuse and decay! What a catch must have come in their breath as in a second it flashed upon them that it was not Manchester but Death which was waiting for them at the end of that sinister line. But the train was running with frantic speed, rolling and rocking over the rotten line, while ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... chin with a movement of coquetry most graceful in spite of long disuse, and the answering fire sprang into her eyes. She looked very piquant and a trifle diabolical. He pressed his lips suddenly on hers. A moment later something tugged at the long locks his hand caressed, and ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... different. There was no sex-feeling to appeal to, or practically none. Two thousand years' disuse had left very little of the instinct; also we must remember that those who had at times manifested it as atavistic exceptions were often, by that ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... value of the evidence derived from the study of the races which have arisen among domestic animals, and from the crossing of different forms. But his main argument was derived from the acknowledged fact that use or disuse may cause the development or the partial atrophy of organs—the case of the 'blacksmith's arm.' Unfortunately some of the suggestions made by Lamarck, in this connexion—like that of the elongation of the giraffe's neck to enable it to browse on high trees—were of a kind that made ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... bookcase, with its feminine ornaments on the upper shelf; the piano standing in the same place. Lily's own small low chair; that was not in its old place, but thrust into a remote angle, as if it had passed into disuse. Melville was reading a letter, no doubt one of those which the postman had left. Surely the contents were pleasant, for his fair face, always frankly expressive of emotion, brightened wonderfully ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in which the muscle elements are merely diminished in size without undergoing any structural alteration, is commonly met with as a result of disuse, as when a patient is confined to bed for ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Railway, to act in conjunction with Weitzel and to open the railway as they advanced. Weitzel had already turned the enemy out of his position, but the task committed to Thomas was slow and hard, for all the bridges and many culverts had to be rebuilt, and from long disuse of the line the rank grass, that in Louisiana springs up so freely in every untrodden spot above water, had grown so tall and thick and strongly matted that the troops had to pull it up by the roots before ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... tall, gaunt woman stood in the doorway against the inner glow. She advanced with a loose, long stride, and invited me to enter in a voice harsh (I took it) from disuse. I was warming myself before the kitchen fire when she came in carrying my heaviest box as though it had nothing in it. I ran to take it from her, for the box was full of books, but she shook her head, and was on the stairs with it ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... books follow; one "The First Three Gospels", by the Reverend Estlin Carpenter; the other on "Use and Disuse", directed against the doctrine of use-inheritance, by Mr. Platt Ball, who not only sent the book but appealed to him for advice as to his future course in undertaking a larger work on ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... 6. 18, Section 1. This seems to be written of a rural servitude (aqua) which was lost by mere disuse, without adverse user ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... destroyed, because in that case the forestieri, scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite rusty, would stiffen with disuse. But it's safe to say that the new Italy growing into an old Italy again will continue to take her elbow-room ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... when the change of fashion brought about the disuse of long periwigs in every-day life, their price did not cease to fall until they had entirely disappeared. But, if a person wishes to have one made to-day for a masquerade, for the stage, etc., he would ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the course in which they led her; and these ideals were far from ignoble. To beauty of all kinds she was passionately sensitive. As a girl she had played the piano well, and, though the power had gone from long disuse, music was still her chief passion. Graceful ease, delicacy in her surroundings, freedom from domestic cares, the bloom of flowers, sweet scents—such things made up her existence. She loved her husband, and had once worshipped him; she loved her recovered daughter; ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... down. There can be no doubt, however, that in the rural district the secular clergy supplied some of the moral strength which eventually enabled the Greeks successfully to resist the Othoman power. Happily, the exaction of the tribute of children fell into disuse; and, that burden removed, the nation soon began to fed the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... to entreat Phillips to bring him back, and entreated him to entendre raison.(48) . . . I pleaded their late hour of dinner, our having no carriage, and my disuse to the night air at this time of the year; but M. de Narbonne said their cabriolet (they have no other carriage) should take us home, and that there was a top to it, and Madame de la Chtre declared she would cover me ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... might be expected to develop. Otherwise his plight was little bettered; he did not quite know where he was in relation to the doors and the pieces which furnished the room. That old-time habit of memorising the arrangement of furniture in a room immediately on entering it had failed through disuse in course of years. He was acquainted with the plot of this drawing-room in a general way but by no means with such accuracy as was needed to ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... It was a lovely spot. Fallen into disuse, the bewitching grace of carelessness was added to the architectural beauty of the tombs. The verdure was rank, and luxuriant trees and marble tombs alike were festooned with clematis and jasmine. Here they ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... enumerated, both reformers added deacons and widows. The deacons were to attend to the church finances and all temporal cares, and, in their visiting of the sick and afflicted, they were to be aided by the widows. The latter office, however, soon fell into disuse, for it was difficult to find women of satisfactory character, attainments, and physical ability, since, in order to avoid scandal or censoriousness, those filling the office had to ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... were given, at which all the beauty and fashion in this part of the island attended; and for some days I had little leisure or inclination for any other pursuit than the enjoyment of civilized pleasure, a pursuit which, from long disuse, possessed more than ordinary zest. But at length having seen as much of Kingston and its vicinity as, I desired to see, I determined to take advantage of the opportunity which fortune had placed within ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... such as the Highlands and parts of Ireland. Some of these British dye plants had been used from early historical times for dyeing. Some few are still in use in commercial dye work (pear, sloe, and a few others); but their disuse was practically completed during the 19th century, when the chemical dyes ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... probably relates to the Dionusiaca, and other Orphic rites, which had been in early times introduced into the part of the world abovementioned, where they were celebrated at a place called Orpha. But the rites grew into disuse, and the history of the place became obsolete: hence Orpha has been converted to a nymph, favoured of the God there worshipped; and was afterwards supposed to have been changed to one of the trees, which grew within ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... seem not," replied the naturalist, "their wings only serve as gliders. Possibly once in the remote ages they could fly as well as great birds but with the course of the ages and disuse their wings have dwindled." ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... conspicuously larger here and there by jutting porches and more than one convenient lean-to. Though furnished, warmed, and lighted with candles, as I have previously described, it had about it an air of disuse which made me feel myself an intruder, in spite of the welcome I had received. But I was not in a position to stand upon ceremony, and ere long I found myself inside the great room and before the blazing logs whose glow had lighted up the doorway and ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... could get up and walk about it would be easier," said Robert. "I think my muscles are growing a bit stiff from disuse." ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... He had a particular fondness for the beautiful creations of this industrial art, and the rugs made during his reign bring fabulous prices. After his death a reaction followed. Rugs fell into comparative disuse, and the manufacture deteriorated until about 1850, when, thanks to the demand in Europe, the industry revived. To-day it is in a flourishing condition and the most ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... authority can sever the link which unites them. The great aim of the slaveholder, then, should be to keep his people in strict subordination. In this, it may in truth be said, lies his entire duty." Again, in speaking of the punishments of slaves, he remarks: "If to our army the disuse of THE LASH has been prejudicial, to the slaveholder it would operate to deprive him of the MAIN SUPPORT of his authority. For the first class of offences, I consider imprisonment in THE STOCKS[A] at night, with or without hard labor by day, as a powerful ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... has been continued for some time, leaving off the unnatural support produces a feeling of weakness. Thus a person will complain of feeling so weak and unsupported, without corsets, as to be uncomfortable. This is entirely owing to the disuse of those muscles, which corsets throw out ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
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