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noun
Fluid  n.  A fluid substance; a body whose particles move easily among themselves. Note: Fluid is a generic term, including liquids and gases as species. Water, air, and steam are fluids. By analogy, the term was sometimes applied to electricity and magnetism, as in phrases electric fluid, magnetic fluid, though not strictly appropriate; such usage has disappeared.
Fluid dram, or Fluid drachm, a measure of capacity equal to one eighth of a fluid ounce.
Fluid ounce.
(a)
In the United States, a measure of capacity, in apothecaries' or wine measure, equal to one sixteenth of a pint or 29.57 cubic centimeters. This, for water, is about 1.04158 ounces avoirdupois, or 455.6 grains.
(b)
In England, a measure of capacity equal to the twentieth part of an imperial pint. For water, this is the weight of the avoirdupois ounce, or 437.5 grains.
Fluids of the body. (Physiol.) The circulating blood and lymph, the chyle, the gastric, pancreatic, and intestinal juices, the saliva, bile, urine, aqueous humor, and muscle serum are the more important fluids of the body. The tissues themselves contain a large amount of combined water, so much, that an entire human body dried in vacuo with a very moderate degree of heat gives about 66 per cent of water.
Burning fluid, Elastic fluid, Electric fluid, Magnetic fluid, etc. See under Burning, Elastic, etc.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fluid" Quotes from Famous Books



... the moment occur to either of them that the position on which they stood was peculiarly liable to attack by the subtle and dangerous fluid which was darting and zig-zagging everywhere among the rolling clouds of smoke ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... substance. It ignites instantly when brought in contact with water. Within that little globule of potassium, I have imbedded a pill of my own composition and discovery. The moment it is liberated from the potassium, it commences the work of decomposing the fluid on which it floats. The potassium at once ignites the liberated oxygen, and the conflagration of this ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... to account for the numerous, but not generally very important, variations in different texts and versions by supposing the story to have been a favourite oral narrative, long continuing in a fluid state. This is far ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney

... difference from the female. (29. Prof. Mantegazza is inclined to believe ('Lettera a Carlo Darwin,' 'Archivio per l'Anthropologia,' 1871, p. 306) that the bright colours, common in so many male animals, are due to the presence and retention by them of the spermatic fluid; but this can hardly be the case; for many male birds, for instance young pheasants, become brightly coloured in the autumn of their first year.) In mankind, and even as low down in the organic scale as in the Lepidoptera, the temperature of the body is higher in the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... pentomic army's small, mobile and self-sufficient battle groups and the very fluid nature of modern warfare the frequency of units being surrounded, cut off and subsequently captured is very high. As early as thirty years ago, in the Laotian War, the number of prisoners taken by all sides was becoming increasingly unmanageable and so the present system of prisoner ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia

... transferred several loads of the precious fluid to the tank of the Eagle, working with extreme caution, when Jack gave a warning hiss from his post at ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson

... upon several elements, and always with the same result. In every case an hour's current would produce a perceptible loss of weight. My theory at that stage was that there was a loosening of the molecules caused by the electric fluid, and that a certain number of these molecules were shed off like an impalpable dust, all round the lump of earth or of metal, which remained, of course, the lighter by their loss. I had entirely accepted this theory, when ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle

... after a time quite slack, though still remaining firmly coiled round the stick. Hence it would appear that the chief use of the coiling, at least whilst the plant is young, is to support the pitcher with its load of secreted fluid. ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... spermacetti, the same quantity of white wax, and two fluid ounces of oil of almond; while these are still warm, beat up with them as much rose water as they will absorb. This is a very healing kind of cold cream. The usual cold cream sold by perfumers is nothing more than lard, beat ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore

... editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room, filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong touch ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... occupied her mother's unprofitable attention through the day and the night. The Doctor called thrice in the twenty-four hours, and the house reeked with the smell of the Condy's Fluid, chlorine-water, and carbolic acid washes. Mrs. Mallowe kept to her own rooms she considered that she had made sufficient concessions in the cause of humanity and Mrs. Hauksbee was more esteemed by the Doctor as a help in the sick-room than the ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... pipe leading from a huge boiler to the ditch. The dark fluid was running out of it. From a rusty old engine with big smokestack poured the strangling smoke. A man broke open a sack of yellow powder and dumped it into the ditch. Then he poured an ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... foundation of it is sliced, sour cabbage, which, as the saying is, goes into the mouth of itself; this, enclosed in a kettle, covers with its moist bosom the best parts of selected meat, and is parboiled, until the fire extracts from it all the living juices, and until the fluid boils over the edge of the pot, and the very air around is ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... both became better understood. Needham in 1745 had declared that heated infusions of organic matter were not deprived of living beings; Spallanzani (1777) had replied that more careful heating and other precautions prevent the appearance of organisms in the fluid. Various experiments by Schwann, Helmholtz, Schultz, Schroeder, Dusch and others led to the refutation, step by step, of the belief that the more minute organisms, and particularly bacteria, arose de novo in the special cases quoted. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... And we thought: "This is a foul place. They are damned who touch the things of the Unmentionable Times." But our hand which followed the track, as we crawled, clung to the iron as if it would not leave it, as if the skin of our hand were thirsty and begging of the metal some secret fluid beating in its coldness. ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand

... calculating and planning nature. With tough tenacity he could sacrifice years of earning and saving and planning to acquire farms and meadows and orchards. Thus the girl could meditate and plan her fate which, until yesterday, had been fluid as water but which to-day lay definitely anchored in the soul of ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... Pianura, and the influence of the Church is sometimes counteracted by that of the physicians with whom the Duke surrounds himself. The latest of these, the famous Count Heiligenstern, who is said to have performed some remarkable cures by means of the electrical fluid and of animal magnetism, has gained such an ascendancy over the Duke that some suspect him of being an agent of the Austrian court, while others declare that he is a Jesuit en robe courte. But just at present the people scent a Jesuit ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... of considerable size, two large, flat cakes of bread, a can of condensed milk, and a saucer swimming with partially melted butter, which had resolved itself into little lumps of whitish grease and a thin golden fluid under the afternoon sun. He laid them on the table, and after deftly picking out one or two dead flies from the butter turned to the girl with a grin in which pride was evident, though it was ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... barometer is frequently used in connection with air- ship experiments. The word aneroid means not wet, or not a fluid, like mercury, so that, while aneroid barometers are being made which do use mercury, they ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***

... smallest print so legible that a page may be read with case. I once tried the experiment of killing the grub, but the light was not extinguished with life, and by opening the tail, I squeezed out a quantity of glutinous fluid, which was so highly phosphorescent that it brilliantly illumined the page of a book which I had been reading by its ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... and, lauding the generous juice of the grape, expressed surprise at the extraordinary sobriety of his host. With this he redoubled his attack on the bottle, and was in some degree, though less vigorously, seconded by Gustave. De Vlierbeck's agony became more and more intense as he saw the rosy fluid sink and sink in the second bottle, until at length the last drop was ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience

... few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them. Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... various facts bear to one another—not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily movements, and friends. To the one who is learned, subject matter is extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. To the one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through his personal occupations. 1 The problem of teaching is to keep the experience of the student moving in the direction of what the expert already knows. Hence the need that the teacher know both subject matter ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... Thomson has founded on Helmholtz's splendid hydrodynamical theorems, seeks for the properties of molecules in the ring vortices of a uniform, frictionless, incompressible fluid. Such whirling rings may be seen when an experienced smoker sends out a dexterous puff of smoke into the still air, but a more evanescent phenomenon it is difficult to conceive. This evanescence is owing to the ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell

... are the isolation camps for scarlet fever and cerebro-meningitis, and as soon as a man complains of headache and temperature he is segregated there, preparatory to being sent down to No. 14 Stationary to have his spinal fluid examined by the bacteriologists. Here, in fact, the man and his kit, instead of being thrown on the scrap-heap, are renewed and made whole, restored in mind, body, and estate, his clothes disinfected and mended, the "snipers" treated to a hot ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... first, then melt and add the rosin, and, lastly, the soap, bringing the mass to a heat that will make it very fluid. ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... the theory now advanced by the animal-magnetists, is just the reverse. If they believe they can work all their wonders by the means so dimly shadowed forth by Maxwell, what becomes of the universal fluid pervading all nature, and which they pretend to pour into weak and diseased bodies from the tips of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... caterer. Letitia's slate-pencil coffee was ambrosia for the gods, sweetest nectar, by the side of the dishwater that cook prepared. I began to feel quite proud of her. She grew to be an adept in the art of boiling water. If we could have lived on that fluid, everything ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... slashed at a cake of paraffine, her deep-set eyes emitting a spark at every fall of the razor. The other student, a young woman with the heavy figure of middle age, went steadily on, dropping paraffine shavings into some fluid in a watch crystal. With a long-handled pin she fished out minute somethings left by the dissolving substance, dropping these upon other crystals—some holding coloured fluids—and finally upon glass slides. She worked as if for dear life, but every quiver of ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... beings, not dependent on adventitious machinery for locomotion or labour, or on artificial or animal blood for nutriment. Think how helpless such a creature would be at the loss or rusting of his machinery, and at the exhaustion of just the right sort of nutritive fluid. Our digestive apparatus will convert a thousand different foods into blood. Suppose we could live only on buffalo meat? We should all have been dead long ago. We might as well imagine men as mere fungus brains, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... he holds that the origin of the sun itself, and the forms, the positions, the relations, and the motions, of all the heavenly bodies, may be accounted for by supposing a previous state of matter, fluid or gasiform, subject only to the law of gravitation. The Nebular Cosmogony, which is well characterized by himself as his "version of the romance of Nature," is based on the assumption that "the nebulous matter of space, previously to the formation of stellar and ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... run out; on the contrary, they say, they are then formed and come into existence for the first time, by the liquefaction of the surrounding matter; and that this change is caused by density and cold, when the moist vapor, by being closely pressed together, becomes fluid. As women's breasts are not like vessels full of milk always prepared and ready to flow from them; but their nourishment being changed in their breasts, is there made milk, and from thence is pressed out. In like manner, places of the earth that are cold and full of springs, do ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... word," said James, gulping the ruby fluid down. "Nothing like blood, sir, in hosses, dawgs, AND men. Why, only last term, just before I was rusticated, that is, I mean just before I had the measles, ha, ha—there was me and Ringwood of Christchurch, Bob Ringwood, Lord Cinqbars' son, having our beer at the Bell at Blenheim, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is it asked, Whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. To follow Nature, he should make his statue of snow. To make it of stone is to pretend that the form is something of itself. This the Greeks never meant, for then it would follow that all parts of it were alike significant. Haydon was delighted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... contributing its full share to the discouraging mess on the floor. But, as it whirled past, a great wedge of the boiling water leaped out over the rim, flew off at a tangent, and caught the floundering calf full in the side, in a long flare down from the tip of the left shoulder. The scalding fluid seemed to cling in the short, fine hair almost like an oil. With a loud bleat of pain the calf shot to his feet and went galloping around the yard. Mrs. Jabe rushed to the door, and stared at him wide-eyed. In a moment her senses came back to her, and she realized what a hideous ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Germans broke open the windows of the houses and threw fluid inside, and the houses burst into flames. Some of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... whit disturbed; "but I knows I got a right to duck that boy where'er I've a min' to. He's my gran'son,—more shame to me,—an' a little water ain't goin' to hurt him. His fam'ly's used to water,—good salt water, too," with a contemptuous look at the fluid in the fountain basin, "an' if I could wash the meanness outer him, I'd duck him a dozen times a day. ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews

... prey. At first, if there was no vomiting, it was easy to ply the hourly drinks of tea and water and medicine. But once deadly and exhausting vomiting had begun, one could no longer feed the victim by the mouth. Then came the keener struggle for life, for fluid was essential and had to be given by other ways and means. Into the soft folds of the skin of the arm-pits, breast and flanks we ran in salt solution by the pint. The veins of the arms we brought into service, that we might pour in this vitalising fluid. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... the beverage of the Orient shore, Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore. Taste the dark fluid with a dainty lip, Digestion waits on pleasure ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... of spiritual perception are directed, not to the beginning and end, but to the middle period of evolution of this Saturn incarnation, we find there a condition which consists principally of heat. Nothing is to be found composed of gaseous, fluid, or even solid constituents. All these states appear only in later incarnations. Let us assume that a human being, with the present organs of sense, were to approach the Saturn condition as a spectator. None of the sense-impressions possible to ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... There was two dollars' worth of fluid extract of cinchona and a dime's worth of aniline in that half-gross of bitters. I've gone through towns years afterwards and had folks ask for ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry

... removed and the powder placed in stoppered bottles or tins. All parts of the plant are fragrant because of the volatile oil, which is commercially distilled mainly in France. About one per cent of the green parts is oil, which after distillation is at first a reddish-brown fluid. It loses its color on redistillation and becomes slightly less fragrant. Both grades of oil are used commercially in perfumery. In the oil are also crystals (thymol), which resemble camphor and because of their pleasant odor ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... character, but Flora and Madame were essentially fluid. They never let themselves clash with any one, and their private rufflings of each other had only a happy effect of aerating their depths, and left them as mirror-smooth and thoroughly one as the bosom of a garden lake after the ripples have died behind two jostling swans. To the Callenders ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... eight inches in diameter at the base. "In case of fire drive in knob by hard blow against floor, and let liquid play on flames," she read the instructions on the side. "I know them things," she said. "It spurts out like a fountain, and it's a rather nasty chemistry sort of a fluid. I shall take one downstairs to the scullery, and the others we'll have upstairs in the room over Miss Nickall's. We can put 'em in the housemaid's lift.... I shall open the scullery door and leave it a bit open like, and when he comes ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... that the ether is an infinitely subtle fluid, pervading all space, we see that it must constitute a connecting link between all modes of substance, whether visible or invisible, in all worlds, and may therefore be called the Universal Medium; and following ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... a fluid haze of light. Till toward the center set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... you turn the silver tap, and the pure and limpid water pours into a large bowl of enamelled porcelain. You throw in a few drops of that fluid which perfumes and softens the skin, and like a nymph in the depths of a quiet wood preparing for the toilet, you remove the drapery that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... got there.—Hence, "boxes" and "ovens", private internats, the preparatory secular or ecclesiastical schools and other "scholastic cramming-machines"; hence, the prolonged mechanical effort to introduce into each intellectual sponge all the scientific fluid it can contain, even to saturation, and maintain it in this extreme state of perfection if only for two hours during an examination, after which it may rapidly subside and shrink. Hence, that mistaken ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... returned Aaron was at his heels with an immense bottle containing a small quantity of red fluid. "S'pose you'll want this filled?" he said to Gordon with a grin which only disturbed for a second ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

... We're all Christians in this room, though perhaps," he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd, "not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I'll finish it right enough!" and he knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash of glass and a splash of silver fluid. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... offers no difficulty in the way of applying his principles. If any wing were a rigid plane surface, it appears to me that there are only two ways in which it could be made to produce flight. Firstly, on the principle that the resistance in a fluid, and I believe also in air, increases in a greater ratio than the velocity (? as the square), the descending stroke might be more rapid than the ascending one, and the resultant would be an upward or forward motion. Secondly, some kind of furling or feathering by a rotatory ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... obtained by vapors was extended to the nerves; it was thus in passing from fibre to fibre that the science of neurology was born. This admirable science has since then led such men as Philips and other clever physiologists to the discovery of the nervous fluid in its circulation; they are now perhaps on the eve of identifying its organs, and the secret of its origin and of its evaporation. And thus, thanks to certain quackeries of this kind, we may be enabled some day to penetrate the mysteries ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... vertebrates alone? It may be so. It may be that man and other animals in germination pass through all stages, from the lowest to the highest; but the microscope cannot reveal the fact, for the jelly-like or fluid conditions of the nervous system during the first month after conception do not enable us to discover any organization or outline from which anything can be learned. And yet, from certain interesting experiments in sarcognomy ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various

... external balloon, which had the dimensions given above, contained a less one of the same shape, which was only forty-five feet in horizontal, and sixty-eight feet in vertical diameter. The capacity of this interior balloon was only sixty-seven thousand cubic feet: it was to float in the fluid surrounding it. A valve opened from one balloon into the other, and thus enabled the aeronaut to ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... previous to last summer Judge Twiddler's family obtained milk from Mr. Biles, the most prominent milk-dealer in the village. The prevailing impression among the Twiddlers was that Mr. Biles supplied an exceedingly thin and watery fluid; and one day when the judge stepped over to pay his quarterly bill he determined to make complaint. He found Mr. Biles in the yard mending the valve of his pump; and when the judge made a jocular remark to the effect that the dairy must be in a bad way when ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... they went, under orders of silence, because something big was on the boards for tomorrow. But 'twas not the quiet of glumness that enveloped them, for they showed in every step an elasticity of spirits, as of muscles. He might have called it a fluid line, so lithely did it flow by; he might have called it a line of gods, so proudly did each man hold ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... them on the spot, sitting in the sun on the sledge. The sight of my feet gave me quite a shock, for the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer, and abundant watery fluid had escaped into the socks. The new skin underneath was ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... soluble in absolute alcohol and 95 per cent is not as good an extractant as water. Substances rich in the vitamine apparently yield the latter more readily if they have first been subjected to autolysis or if the extracting fluid is acidified. Funk was the first to show that yeast produced a greater yield if it was allowed to autolyse before extraction with alcohol. However, Osborne and Wakeman have produced a method of treating fresh yeast ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy

... dip his bill in the water in the tumbler,—which caused the prophecy on the part of some of his guardians, that he would fall in some day and be drowned. For which reason it was agreed to keep only an inch in depth of the fluid at the bottom of the tumbler. A wise precaution this proved; for the next morning I was awaked, not by the usual hum over my head, but by a sharp little flutter, and found Mr. Hum beating his wings in the tumbler,—having ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various

... a corner past a booth where bottles full of pink and yellow fluid, and green leaves, wrapped around betel-nut, appeared to be the chief stock-in-trade, and a noise of hammering struck on their ears. Here a new shrine was being erected and was all but completed. A few Chinamen, who had been working at it, were putting ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... when observed in a fluid like blood, sputum, etc., are found to present very active movements, although provided with no ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... delivered into the charge of Dr. Holmes, the process of embalming has been somewhat difficult, and consequently the appearance of the remains is not so natural as it otherwise would have been. Last evening the body was placed in an erect position, in order to allow the injected fluid to settle in the veins and arteries, so as to give to the face a more natural appearance. The swelling has entirely disappeared from the neck and face, and the decomposition which had set in had been checked. The remains will not be enshrouded until this morning, when ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... immersion as effectually to seal the interior against the intrusion of greasy particles; it can then remain as long as may be necessary thoroughly to cook it, without imbibing any more of the boiling fluid than if it were enclosed in an eggshell. The other method is, to rub a perfectly smooth iron surface with just enough of some oily substance to prevent the meat from adhering, and cook it with a quick heat, as cakes are baked on a griddle. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... hungry human being in any city. The temperature in the fierce sunshine which beat down on my back was at least 130 deg. F.; the cold meats were immediately warmed up, the butter turned to a yellowish fluid which could have been applied to bread only with a paint-brush, and perspiration ran off my nose into my coffee-cup as I drank; but the coffee and the fried potatoes kept hot without the aid of artificial appliances, and I emptied ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... Italy. The making of Italy has not proceeded in the way he hoped it would; for the Italians, who are an eminently subtle and diplomatic people, have apparently thought it best to bend to the hard facts by which they have been surrounded. But if, as Emerson teaches, facts are fluid to thought, we may believe that the ideas of Mazzini will yet prevail in the nation of his birth, and that he may yet be regarded as the spiritual father of the future Italian commonwealth. For of him, if of any modern man, we ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... the name given to the divided roots of the spruce fir, which the natives wove into a degree of compactness that rendered it capable of containing a fluid. Watape fibre was also used to sew together different parts of the bark canoes. They also made fibre or thread from willow bark. Their cooking vessels made of this watape not only contained water, but water which was made to boil by putting a succession of hot stones into it. It would, of course, ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston

... slatternly woman came to the door and looked sleepily out. She seemed by no means pleased to be disturbed, and the way she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand suggested the fact that she had been taking some of a pleasing and not altogether unintoxicating fluid with her supper. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... water to flow over the dorsal branchiae or lungs. It feeds on the delicate sea-weeds which grow among the stones in muddy and shallow water; and I found in its stomach several small pebbles, as in the gizzard of a bird. This slug, when disturbed, emits a very fine purplish-red fluid, which stains the water for the space of a foot around. Besides this means of defence, an acrid secretion, which is spread over its body, causes a sharp, stinging sensation, similar to that produced by the Physalia, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... that we are supposed to have learnt—the attitude of the multitude when certain dangers threaten, appears to be as it was, and that we still hear of shuddering wretches trying to fight a dreaded enemy by letting off old muskets and drenching portmanteaus with Condy's fluid. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... succession of clouds or mists in which immense quantities of electricity not completely exhausted by storms, are stored. Hence there exists a formidable accumulation of electric fluid at the poles, and it flows towards the ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne

... to be bones such as may be bought at an osteological dealer's, for these usually have perforations to admit the macerating fluid to the marrow cavities. Dealers' bones, too, are very seldom all from the same body; and the small bones of the hand are drilled with holes to enable them to be strung ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... a column of water is used as the transmission fluid from a surface pump to a corresponding pump underground has had some adoption in coal mines, but little in metal mines. They have a certain amount of flexibility but low efficiency, and are not likely to have much ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... sped back along the dark wood-road to the village. A late moon was rising, full orbed and fiery, turning the mountain ranges from fluid gray to a massive blackness, and making the upper sky so light that the stars looked as faint as their own reflections in water. At the edge of the wood, half a mile from North Dormer, Harney jumped from his bicycle, took Charity in his arms for a last kiss, ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... middle of the table there rested, with dark fluid gleaming through clear plastic cases, six fresh cylinders which Auerbach had prepared in his laboratory ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton

... put on the lid. Move the handle slowly in warm weather, as churning too fast will make the butter soft. When you find that the handle moves heavily and with great difficulty, the butter has come; that is, it has separated from the thin fluid and gathered into a lump, and it then is not necessary to churn any longer. Take it out with a wooden ladle, and put it into a small tub or pail. Squeeze and press it hard with the ladle, to get out all that remains of the ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie

... the victory, none was more grateful than plenty of fresh water, after we had languished five weeks on the allowance of a purser's quart per day for each man in the Torrid Zone, where the sun was vertical, and the expense of bodily fluid so great, that a gallon of liquor could scarce supply the waste of twenty-four hours; especially as our provision consisted of putrid salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish horse; salt pork, of New England, which, though neither fish nor ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... grace; it is an essentially tender-hearted quality, apt to find excuse, ready to condone, eager to forgive. The possessor of it can never be ridiculous, or heavy, or superior. Wit, of course, is a very small province of humour: wit is to humour what lightning is to the electric fluid—a vivid, bright, crackling symptom of it in certain conditions; but a man may be deeply and essentially humorous, and never say a witty thing in his life. To be witty, one has to be fanciful, intellectual, deft, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... brazier,[FN159] ranged thereupon the implements of his industry and lighted a fire thereunder; then, fetching a portion of lead and a modicum of tin and a quant. suff. of copper, the whole weighing about a quintal, he fanned the flame that was beneath the crucible until the metal was fluid as water. And while the Sultan was sitting and looking on and considering the operation, the Fakir brought out something from a casket and taking a pinch of it on the ear-picker besprinkled therewith ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... an atmosphere of sweetness and light. The mother gives to her boy a kind of unspoken counsel. It is a very subtle thing, like electricity in the material world, and equally as powerful as that mysterious fluid. You get its effects by putting yourself eagerly and lovingly under its soothing yet ennobling and tonic influence. It is a matter hard to describe, but more real than any other ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain, blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes out, followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute, and out go all three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... to the even surface of the fluid: "so much hath the Great Spirit said it shall hold. Now," he added, filling the hollow of the other hand from the brook, and casting its contents into the gourd, "now my brother knows that some must come away. It is so with his country. There is no ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... the air Was all populous with forms Of the Hours, floating down, Like Nereids through a watery town. Some, with languors of waved arms, Fluctuous oared their flexile way; Some were borne half resupine On the aerial hyaline, Their fluid limbs and rare array Flickering on the wind, as quivers Trailing weed in running rivers; And others, in far prospect seen, Newly loosed on this terrene, Shot in piercing swiftness came, With hair a-stream like pale ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson

... been taken, of ordering the men away from the mast, had prevented any loss of life; but several of the men were temporarily blinded. Three or four had been struck to the deck, by the passage of the electric fluid close to them; but these presently regained their feet. Hardy returned, and reported to ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty

... power soils possess of fixing from their watery solutions various plant-foods, both organic and inorganic, was discovered. The earliest recognition of this most important property of soils was made by Gazzeri, who, in 1819, called attention to the fact that the dark fluid portion of farmyard manure was purified on passing through clay. He concluded that soils, more especially clayey soils, possessed the property of being able to fix from their watery solutions the necessary plant-food constituents, and fix them beyond risk of loss, only affording ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... which contained a red liquid. Bill got a spoon from the locker where the dishes were kept. With hands that trembled the old hunter poured out some of the fluid. Then, with Jack's help he forced open the inventor's mouth ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood

... for the first time. Consequently, to the immense advantage of coast navigation, calculators now venture to predict in detail the time and height of the tides several years in advance. Between the phenomena of the ebb and flow, and the attractive forces of the sun and moon upon the fluid sheet which covers three fourths of the globe, an intimate and necessary connection exists; a connection from which Laplace deduced the value of the mass of our satellite the moon. Yet so late as the year 1631 the illustrious Galileo, as appears from his 'Dialogues,' was so far from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... He plunged, almost headlong, down the precipitous side of a ravine and at its bottom, fell, face downward, into the cool waters of a rippling brook. How deliciously refreshing were the two or three great gulps that he swallowed. How the life-giving fluid thrilled his whole frame! If he could only lie there as long as he chose and drink his fill! But he could not; two magic words rang like bells in his ears, "Edith" and "Christie." For his own life alone he would hardly have ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... if you are of a different opinion, and find it more convenient to call the x which underlies (hypothetically) mental phenomena, Soul, and the x which underlies (hypothetically) physical phenomena, Body, well and good. The two-fluid theory and the one-fluid theory of electricity both accounted for the phenomena up to a certain extent, and both were probably wrong. So it may be with the theories that there is only one x in nature or two ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... judging from the standpoint of an outsider, I should say that man is not an improvement upon the original providence which distributes the staff of life to plants elsewhere, spreading the vital fluid over the whole land, so evenly that every grass blade gets its due share; and as all parts are wet at once, so all are dry at the same time, and the surplus, if there be any, runs in well-appointed ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller

... a little wooden door in one of the great portals, that opened and shut with a clanging noise now and then, and beside which a dilapidated-looking old man kept watch over a shell-shaped marble basin of holy water, and offered a brush dipped in the sacred fluid to devout passers-by. Here she could kneel unobserved, and in her ignorant fashion, join in the solemn service, lifting up her heart with the elevation of the host, and acknowledging her guiltiness in utter humility ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... that keep animals within certain limits; but the ocean as well as the land has its faunae and florae bound within their respective zooelogical and botanical provinces; and a wall of granite is not more impassable to a marine animal than that ocean-line, fluid and flowing and ever-changing though it be, on which is written for him, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther." One word as to the effect of pressure on animals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... of his dull, shallow, and disappointing speech. He began with a little touch of nature that certainly was prepossessing. He had brought in with him a dark-brown bottle, like the bottle one associates with seltzer water. The fluid was perfectly clear; it was evidently not like the strong wine which Prince Bismarck used to require in the days when he used to make great speeches. And Lord Salisbury, as he poured out a draught—it looked very like Johannis water—lifted up the bottle to the Ministers ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... feet—will take about an hour and a half, though an expert native will do it in perhaps half that time. It is a blessing to get water at this time, and a great shout goes up from the well-digger, as the delicious fluid comes bubbling up through the narrow well, that is echoed by the igloo builders and spreads throughout the camp. Then the women repair with tin dippers and cups cut from musk-ox horn, and after refreshing themselves carry a drink to their husbands. One can drink ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... fills a cavity which it has worn and turned for itself; and from this reservoir the industrious peasant has diverted sufficient to irrigate his dwarf terraced plots of cane, bananas, yams, or other vegetables; not a drop of the precious fluid is wasted, and beds are laid out wherever the vivifying influence can extend. The water-race down the wall is shown by mosses and lichens, pellitories, and rock-plants; curtains and hangers; slides, shrubs, and weepers of the most vivid green, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... Professor, again smiling blandly, "there you have touched what once was, and, to some philosophers it seems, still is, the great difficulty. By some great men it has been held that glacier ice is always in a partially soft, viscid, or semi-fluid condition, somewhat like pitch, so that, although apparently a solid, brittle, and rigid body, it flows sluggishly in reality. Other philosophers have denied this theory, insisting that the ice of glaciers is not like pitch, but like glass, and that ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... lakes struggling to get out, and the overflowing canals, rivers, and ditches, in many districts there is no water fit to swallow; our poor Hollanders must go dry or drink wine and beer or send far into the inland to Utrecht and other favored localities for that precious fluid older than Adam yet younger than the morning dew. Sometimes, indeed, the inhabitants can swallow a shower when they are provided with any means of catching it; but generally they are like the albatross-haunted sailors in Coleridge's famous poem ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge

... the roots. And then I was walking down a path bordered with Lombardy poplars; and then I was sitting on a couch in Mr. Jelnik's living-room, while he bathed my face with scented water, and afterward held a small glass to my lips. The fluid I swallowed went tingling through my whole ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... beliefs of savages as to the dead. The thought of the savage is apt to be vague and inconsistent; he neither represents his ideas clearly to his own mind nor can he express them lucidly to others, even if he wishes to do so. And his thought is not only vague and inconsistent; it is fluid and unstable, liable to shift and change under alien influence. For these and other reasons, such as the distrust of strangers and the difficulty of language, which often interposes a formidable barrier between savage man and the civilised enquirer, the domain of primitive beliefs is beset by so ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... to the rear. There he beheld Caspar Potts in a corner. In front of him stood Nat Poole, holding a big garden syringe in his hands. The syringe had been filled with a preparation for spraying peach trees, and the son of the money-lender had discharged the chalk-like fluid all over ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer

... ever see a drop of his abominable sherry. Golden? F. B. believes it is golden—and a precious deal dearer than gold too"—and herewith, ringing the bell, my friend asked for a second pint of the just-named and cheaper fluid. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... you an example of the 'enemy'-mosity of an ordinary housefly. It hid behind the paper, emitted some caustic fluid, and then departed this life. I have often caught them in such holes.' 30/12/83." The damage is an oblong hole, surrounded by a white fluffy glaze (fungoid?), difficult to represent in a woodcut. The ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades

... mind when she saw his glance fall on her breast, she could not have told. But a sudden flame of anger consumed her. The passion of the body was dead in her—atrophied. She was as one through whose veins had passed an icy fluid which stilled all the senses of desire, but never had her mind been so passionate, so alive. In the months lately gone, there had been times when her mind was in a paroxysm of rebellion and resentment and remorse; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker



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