"Millionth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... universal decimal system, to be applied to everything whatever that could be counted, weighed, or measured. They started from the measurement of the globe itself, and took as the basis of their whole system the ten-millionth part of a quadrant of a meridian, equal to 39-371/1000 inches English. This they called a metre (measure), and to it, as a unit, they prefixed the Greek numerals to express increase in the decimal ratio; thus decametres, tens of meters; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... considered a part of any curved surface you please, if you only take that surface on a sufficiently large scale. Thus, the surface of water conforms to the surface of a sphere eight thousand miles in diameter; but, as the arc of such a circle would arch up from a chord ten feet long by only the ten-millionth part of an inch, the surface of water in a cistern may be considered a plane. But no figure or outline can be composed of a single plane or a single straight line; nor can the position of more than two straight ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Men are cheap in New York. Every little man I see stewing along the street, when I look into his face in my long, slow country way, as if a hill belonged with him or a scrap of sky or something, or as if he really counted, looks at me as one would say, "I? I am a millionth of New York—and you?" ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... exaggerated, and their mistrust of the future unjustified. This example shows how imprudent it is to endeavour to fix limits to progress. It is an error to think the march of science can be stayed; and in reality it is now known that the ten-millionth part of the quarter of the terrestrial meridian is longer than the metre by 0.187 millimetres. But contemporary physicists do not fall into the same error as their forerunners, and they regard the present result as merely provisional. They guess, in fact, that new improvements ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... susceptible to the least touch of any natural thing, so that even an atom, so small that it cannot be seen with the most powerful microscope, yet so elastic is this Aether medium, that the least motion or vibration of one of these atoms, though the motion did not exceed the 20- or 40-millionth part of an inch, yet even this would create in the aetherial ocean, Aether-waves, just as a body moving in water creates water-waves, which, radiating from the place of their birth, beget and create others, the process continuing until they reach ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... closer than that requires many precautions. Training in observation and the use of delicate instruments thus narrow the limits of approximation. Similarly with regard to space and time, there are instruments with which one millionth of an inch, or of a second, can be measured, but even this approximation, although far closer than is ever practically necessary, is not accuracy. In the statement of measurements there is no meaning in more than six significant figures, and only the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... more than drink his beer and sleep. August lay on the wolfskin dreamy and comfortable, looking up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on the crest of the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time whom it had been made for, and what grand places and scenes ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... variation, labor has its average, which justifies us in saying that, on the whole, day's work pays for day's work, neither more nor less. It is quite true that, if we compare the products of a certain period of social life with those of another, the hundred millionth day's work of the human race will show a result incomparably superior to that of the first; but it must be remembered also that the life of the collective being can no more be divided than that of the individual; that, though the days may not resemble each other, they are ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... two dice being 1/36, the chance of sixes ten times in succession is 1 divided by the tenth power of 36; in other words, such a concurrence is only likely to happen once in 3,656,158,440,062,976 trials, a number which no dice-player's experience comes up to a millionth part of. But if, instead of sixes ten times, any other given succession of ten throws had been fixed upon, it would have been exactly as unlikely that in any individual's experience that particular succession had ever occurred; although this does ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... assume that its atoms are composed of electrons, or of some structures not wholly dissimilar: the space which these bodies actually fill, as compared with the whole space which in a sense they 'occupy,' is comparable to one ten-millionth of the whole, even inside each atom; and the fraction is still smaller if it refers to the visible mass. So that a kind of minimum estimate of aetherial density, on this basis, would be something like ten thousand million times that ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... the same cycle over again without assistance at any point from the observer. The most sensitive organ for perception of a stimulus was the human tongue. An average European could by his tongue detect an electrical current as feeble as six micro-amperes, a micro-ampere being a millionth part of a unit of electrical current. Professor Bose found that his Hindu peoples could detect a much feebler current, namely, 1.5 micro-amperes. It was an open question whether such a high excitability of the tongue was to be claimed as a distinct advantage. But the fact might ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... and discussion of them. An inspection of the plates, however, shows some points of interest. A photograph of a Cygni, taken November, 26, 1886, shows that the H line is double, its two components having a difference in wave length of about one ten-millionth of a millimeter. A photograph of o Ceti shows that the lines G and h are bright, as are also four of the ultra-violet lines characteristic of spectra of the first type. The H and K lines in this spectrum are dark, showing that they probably do not belong to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... of your day into a subject for a speech or an illustration. Translate all that you see into terms of speech. When you can describe all that you have seen in definite words, you are seeing clearly. You are becoming the millionth man. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... tell you how we measure the capacity of a condenser. We use units called "microfarads." You remember that an ampere means an electron stream at the rate of about six billion billion electrons a second. A millionth of an ampere would, therefore, be a stream at the rate of about six million million electrons a second—quite a sizable little stream for any one who wanted to count them as they went by. If a current of one millionth of ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... declare yourself the God of Austerlitz; and the German eagle, the Russian eagle, abandoned by you, became the prey of the French eagle, which you never cease to protect." A singular piece of flattery this, to call the Creator of the universe—of which this earth is not a millionth part—the God of a village, because near this village a man has wrought the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... work which has come to naught; each fresh check leaves it young, alert, and full of illusions. Be of good cheer, Nature! Pursue, like the deaf and blind star-fish which vegetates in the bed of the ocean, thy obscure task of life; persevere; mend for the millionth time the broken meshes of the net; repair the boring-machine which sinks to the last limits of the attainable the well from which living water will spring up. Sight and sight again the aim which thou hast failed to hit throughout the ages; try ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... once; but, if once, why not twice running? and if twice, why not three, four, or a million times running, provided that the thrower's strength held out so long? No one of the separate throws, from the first to the millionth, would be attended with more difficulty than any other. Whoever made the first might with no greater effort make any one, and therefore every one, of the rest. In the fact of his having commenced the series there would be proof ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... visible only to a few. Mr. Nelson has photographed here what it is absolutely impossible to see. What the size of these ends may be, I have no means of telling. Dr. Royston Piggott has estimated some of them at less than one-millionth of an inch, but, whatever they are, they supply for the first time objects of extreme smallness the form of which is certainly known, and, therefore, I cannot help looking upon them as more satisfactory tests for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... in the fact of her respectable birth, and his position, she being the daughter of a solicitor, he the son of a nobleman. Marriage was promised, of course, as it has been promised a million times with the same intent, and for the millionth time was not performed. The seducer took her from her home, kept her quiet for a time, and when the novelty was gone, abandoned her. The old story went on; poverty—a child—a mother's love struggling ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... that wouldn't work on a small rock. You took too long. What would you have done on a rock with a millionth ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... hitched himself into a new and uncomfortable pose and set the wrench on a nut, screwing his well-fed face into an agonized grimace while he put his full strength into the turn. "If I could find a man that I'd trust my life with on these roads, I'd have me a chauffeur," he grumbled for the millionth time. "That reformed blacksmith musta welded these nuts on to the bolts," he added, and muttered something savage when the wrench slipped and he barked a knuckle. "Well, what yuh want? Go ahead and have it, or do it—only don't stand watching me when I'm trying to—" He gritted his teeth, ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... war! What has that war to do with the real struggle for existence? It is a product of degeneration. War is justifiable. Not war between human beings. But creative war for man's mastery over natural forces, the young war of which hardly a millionth part has yet been waged. In this war we can foresee victories such as no human ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... England type. He was brought up in the fear of God and the Poor-House. God was a good way off, I guess; but there stood the Poor-House on the hill, where you couldn't help but see it. The way of salvation from it was through the dollar. Elias M. worked hard for his first dollar, and for his millionth. He's still working hard. He still finds the fear of God useful: he puts it into everybody that goes up against his game. The fear of the Poor-House is with him yet, though he doesn't realize it. It's the mainspring of his religion. There's nothing so mean ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... formed by the compression of the ocean into one single drop. For the centrifugal force of the vortex at 2,300,000 miles from the centre of the sun, is equal to gravity at the surface of the earth, and taking the mean centrifugal force of the whole vortex as one-millionth of this last force; so that at 3,500,000 miles from the surface of the sun, the density of the air in the tube (supposing it obstructed at that distance) would be double the density of the attenuated air in the reservoir. And the air at the extremity of the tube reaching ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... said the Portuguese, 'that he's a rapid calculator, and the minute he's got to his millionth claw, and finds it's hooked tight and fast, he begins to ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... all, but the astonishment grows when one hears the results. It appears from Clerk-Maxwell's calculations that the mean free path, or distance traversed by the molecules between collisions in ordinary air, is about one-half-millionth of an inch; while the speed of the molecules is such that each one experiences about eight billions of collisions per second! It would be hard, perhaps, to cite an illustration showing the refinements of modern physics better than this; ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... St. Vincent's tower during the Convention, 1792-5, were taken those measurements, the outcome of which was the metric system. Two mathematicians, by name Delambre and Mchain, were charged with the necessary calculations, the mtre, or a ten-millionth part of the distance between the poles and the equator (32,808 English feet), being made the unit of length. Uniformity of weight followed, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... but also exquisite precision. You get the thought into your mind with the accuracy and precision of the words that express numbers in the multiplication table. Ten times one are ten—not ten and one one-millionth. Having got the idea into your mind with the precision, accuracy, and beauty of the Latin expression, you are to get its equivalent in English. Suppose you have knowledge of no language but your own. The thought comes to you in the mysterious way in which ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... mature man, who, in point of work, in all practical and demonstrable ways, was the millionth man. He was a great editorial writer, which was a minor but genuine activity. He was a yet greater writer on social science, which was one of the supreme activities. On this side, then, certainly the chief side, there could be no question about the successfulness of his life. His ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... kingdom, which derived its support from the absorption and conversion of inorganic matter. And so constant and universal is this absorption, waste, and reproduction, that it may be said with perfect certainty that there is left in no one of our bodies at the present moment a millionth part of the matter of which they were originally formed! We have seen, again, that not only is the living matter derived from the inorganic world, but that the forces of that matter are all of them correlative with and convertible into those ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... forgiven you will both perish everlastingly, and to be forgiven you must forgive. God is very forgiving—He forgives the best of us a thousand vile offenses. But He never forgives unconditionally. His terms are our repentance and our forgiveness of those who offend us one-millionth part as deeply as we offend Him. Therefore in praying against Hawes you have prayed against yourself. Give me your slate. No; take ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... had merely to assert the fact: "It is so! it cannot be otherwise!" "For the thousandth and hundred-thousandth time;—what is the use of discussing this prime motor, this Spinozan substance, any longer? We know it is there!" that—as Professor Haeckel very justly repeats for the millionth time—is enough. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Whigs of all scoundrelly factions, are, and have ever been, the most scoundrelly, the most ungenerous, the most ungrateful. What have they done for Fonblanque, who could have kicked them overboard on his toe-nail? Their abilities put together are less than a millionth of his; and his have been constantly and most zealously exerted in their favour. My first conversation with Kenyon was about the publication of his poems, which are just come out. They are in part extremely clever; particularly one on happiness and another on the ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... another, and then raised his hand and looked at that to make sure that he was seeing correctly—was not the victim of some strange illusion. Yes, his eyes were all right; he saw his calloused, big-jointed hand—the hand which had labored so long for a millionth part of what he now saw here. The gold and the jewels were within arms' reach of him—there was no longer any doubt about that. His luck ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... to himself when some hours afterward he found himself confronted by the same gigantic counsel, instructed specially by the crown to prosecute so notorious a marauder.) The twelve men in the box opposite at once became all ear. Some leaned forward, as though to anticipate by the millionth of a second the silvery accents of Mr. Smoothbore; others leaned back with head aside, as though to concentrate their intelligence upon them; and the foreman held his head with both his hands, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... for Richard's getting an appointment so low, if I was in his situation, I should not trouble myself one fig concerning appointments. They cost more than they are worth. I shall not esteem him the less for not getting a higher, and not more than one millionth part of the world knows what an appointment is. You will both of you have a different opinion of appointments after you have been out of college a short time. I had rather be Richard with a dialogue than Sanford with a dispute. If appointments at college ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... savagely. "She didn't give it to you without she wanted you to have it, and she didn't expect you to pay her bequests with it. In my opinion," he burst out, in a wrathful recollection of his own sufferings from Mrs. Lander, "she didn't give you a millionth part of your due for all the trouble she made you; and I want Mr. Orson to understand ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Angus did not understand. At night in the Lone Lands, among a thousand hill pockets and shoestring draws, it would be only a millionth chance that would bring a man and woman together unexpectedly. He pushed home questions, for he was not one to slough any of the responsibilities that belonged to him as father of ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... salts of ammonia and other chemicals was even more wonderful. "It is an astonishing fact that so inconceivably minute a quantity as the one twenty-millionth of a grain of phosphate of ammonia should induce some change in a gland of Drosera sufficient to cause a motor impulse to be sent down the whole length of the tentacle; this impulse exciting movement often through an angle of above 180 deg.. I know not whether to be most astonished at ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got me on her mind. And as the two hundred and eighty million benighted souls of India are her continual concern, I seem a superfluity. To think of being the two hundred and eighty millionth and ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... magnificent smallness and minuteness. The latter has shown us that a drop of water is a world of minute living forms who live, eat, fight, reproduce, and die. The mind is capable of imagining a universe occupying no more space than one million-millionth of the tiniest speck visible under the strongest microscope—and then imagining such a universe containing millions of suns and worlds similar to our own, and inhabited by living forms akin to ours—living, thinking men and women, identical in every respect to ourselves. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... never have another chance. I tell you again, as I've told you before, I don't care for her swag—you may have it. But her husband was rough on me—many times he was rough on me—and mainly he was the justice of the peace that jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain't all. It ain't a millionth part of it! He had me HORSEWHIPPED!—horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a nigger!—with all the town looking on! HORSEWHIPPED!—do you understand? He took advantage of me and died. But I'll take ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that he is debarred from the joy of putting the crown on his beloved measure; however, his must be the honor, though another may complete it; and for my part, I feel that, if I were to believe that my exertions ought to detract the millionth part from his merits, I should be one of the most unprincipled and contemptible of mankind. Ask the question simply, Who has borne the real evil, who has encountered the real opposition, who roused the sluggish public to sentiments of honor and ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... reason for discouragement now than there had been two hours before. The obvious offset to this was the equal certainty that there had been no more reason for optimism two hours before than at present. So he stared into the darkness, listened to the splashing waterspouts, and, for the millionth time at least, eternally condemned the Old Colony railroad and ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... and, in October, 1879, we made lamps of paper carbon, and with carbons of common sewing thread, placed in a receiver or bulb made entirely of glass, with the leading-in wires sealed in by fusion. The whole thing was exhausted by the Sprengel pump to nearly one-millionth of an atmosphere. The filaments of carbon, although naturally quite fragile owing to their length and small mass, had a smaller radiating surface and higher resistance than we had dared hope. We had virtually reached the position and condition ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... being. The ear is a miserable organ at best, and the majority are far too gross to know clair-audience. What about sounds, for instance, that have a wavelength of a hundred, a thousand miles on the one hand, or a millionth part of an ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... is well known; but in this freshly glaciated region the shores have been so short a time exposed to wave-action that they are scarcely at all wasted. The extension of the sea affected by its own action in post-glacial times is probably less than the millionth part of that affected by glacial action during the last glacier period. The direction of the flow of the ice-sheet to which all the main features of this wonderful region are due was in ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... that dresses With flowers the bones of one bare month, Of all it would say scarce expresses In crooked ways a millionth. ...
— A Dark Month - From Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works Vol. V • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... sudden, her governess was more agitated. "Oh why, little unfortunate, should we discuss their dreadful names?"—and she threw herself for the millionth time on Maisie's neck. It took her pupil but a moment to feel that she quivered with insecurity, and, the contact of her terror aiding, the pair in another instant were sobbing in each other's arms. Then it was that, completely relaxed, demoralised as she had never been, Mrs. Wix suffered ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... without those precautions which subsequent experience has shown to be necessary. Even those of the other observers must be taken as giving only a very general idea of the quantity of ammonia in the air, for a proportion so minute as one fifty-millionth cannot be accurately determined even by the most delicate experiments. For this reason, more recent experimenters have endeavoured to arrive at conclusions bearing more immediately upon agricultural questions, by determining the quantity of ammonia brought down by the rain. The first observations ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... in mid air, going like a circular saw through soft pine. Just when you are beginning to wonder if he has converted himself into a catherine-wheel or a corkscrew, he straightens himself out horizontally, remains poised for the millionth part of a second like a he-angel that has moulted his wings; then down he dives perpendicularly like a tornado in trousers, skinning forehead, nose, and chin as he kisses the drum-like surface of the hide. No, ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Nothing could persuade him that he had missed the question, which was whether he was St. Paul. The same thing takes place in the world at large. And especially must be noted the refusal to permit to the profane the millionth part of the licence assumed by the sacred. I give a sound churchman the epitaph of St. John Long; the usual pronunciation of whose name must ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... sometimes sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line. This would have been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much like the millionth magnification of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a good specimen of that extraordinary hybrid or mule between democracy and chrysocracy, a native-born New-England serving-man. The Old World has nothing at all like him. He is at once an emperor and a subordinate. In one hand he holds one five-millionth part (be the same more or less) of the power that sways the destinies of the Great Republic. His other hand is in your boot, which he is about to polish. It is impossible to turn a fellow citizen whose vote may make his master—say, rather, employer—Governor or President, or who ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... unpleasantness, and so, sincerely regretting it, I want—not to compensate, not to repay her for the unpleasantness, but simply to do something to her advantage, to show that I am not, after all, privileged to do nothing but harm. If there were a millionth fraction of self-interest in my offer, I should not have made it so openly; and I should not have offered her ten thousand only, when five weeks ago I offered her more, Besides, I may, perhaps, very soon marry a young lady, and that alone ought ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... calm, steady-going beings. We have a large respect for Quakerism. Its professors are made of strong, enduring, practical metal. They never neglect business for religion, nor religion for business. They believe in paying their way and in being paid; in moral rectitude and yard wands not the millionth part of an inch too long; in yea and nay; in good trade, good purses, good clothes, and good language; in clear-headed, cool calculations; in cash, discounts, sobriety, and clean shirts; in calmness ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... exposed to heat or cold, and thrust itself upon the button more or less, thereby varying the electric current and deflecting the needle of the galvanometer to one side or the other. The instrument was said to indicate a change of temperature equivalent to one-millionth of a degree Fahrenheit. It was tested by Edison on the sun's corona during the eclipse observations of July 29, 1875, at Rawlings, in the territory of Wyoming. The trial was not satisfactory, however, for the apparatus was ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... the basis on which the French found their system of weights and measures, for it certainly possesses the grandeur of simplicity. The metre, which is the basis of the whole system of French weights and measures, is the exact measurement of one forty-millionth part of a meridian ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... all the life in the world is made up of the men and women in it, and the few beasts, and birds, and insects, which you see about you in the fields. But these living things which you do see are not a millionth part of the whole number of God's creatures; and not one smallest plant or tiniest insect dies, but what it passes into a new life, and becomes food for other creatures, even smaller than, though just as wonderful ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... there are only nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine different ways of bearing hair, it is clear that the millionth person must repeat one of those ways. Do ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... more entertaining company, to be sure—But what a woman most wants is to be loved. If I touch Philippe's hand for, say, the millionth part of a second longer than necessity compels, he treads for the remainder of the day above meteors; if yours—why, you at most admire my fingers. No doubt you are a connoisseur of fingers and such-like trifles; but, then, a woman does not wish to be ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... that leads the earth over a circuit of 500,000,000 miles back to the solstice at the appointed moment without the loss of one second—no, not the millionth part of a second—for ages and ages of which it traveled that ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... spark in remoteness. Instantly it was vastly more than a spark. It was a globe of deadly, blue-white incandescence. It flamed brilliantly as all the Isis's fuel and the warheads on all its unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship's substance had been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... but for my own part I confess to caring very little whether my millionth ancestor was a gorilla or no; and as Darwin's book does not please me, I shall not trouble ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... dare not offer any speculations on this grand and awful subject. We can hardly comprehend the cause of a simple atmospheric phenomenon, such as the fall of a heavy body from a meteor; we cannot even embrace in one view the millionth part of the objects surrounding us, and yet we have the presumption to reason upon the infinite universe and the eternal mind by which it was created and is governed. On these subjects I have no confidence in reason, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... dangers brave, And, unappalled, view the deep, yawning grave! In every age thy praise have Poets sung; Throughout the world thy praise has loudly rung So much and often, that I need not dwell Upon thy worth: for it were hard to tell The millionth part of good thou hast achieved; By finite man it cannot be conceived! Thy sovereign virtues WILLIAM deeply felt, Howe'er engaged, and wheresoe'er he dwelt. In constant toil, and chilled by Penury, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... daughter?" said Pinchas, changing the subject abruptly. "You will tell her that what I wrote to her is not a millionth part of what I feel—that she is my sun by day and my moon and stars by night, that I must marry her at once or die, that I think of nothing in the world but her, that I can do, write, plan, nothing without ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... crushing scorn. "And do you ever hope, Hazlet, by centuries of preaching such as yours, to repair one millionth part of the damage done by your bad passions to a single fellow-creature? Such a hateful excuse is verily to carry the Urim with its oracular gems into the very sty of sensuality, and to debase your religion into 'a procuress to the lords of ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... "I really would counsel you to learn to know what's o'clock as soon as possible. Consider what a sad thing it would be to go out of the world not knowing what's o'clock. A millionth part of the trouble required to learn Chinese would, if employed, infallibly teach you ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Academy of Sciences was charged to seek and present the best mode of carrying this decree into execution. That society proposed the adoption of the decimal division, by taking for a fundamental unit the ten-millionth part of the quarter of the terrestrial meridian. The motives which determined this choice were the extreme simplicity of decimal calculation, and the advantage of having a measure taken from nature. The latter condition would, in truth, have been accomplished, had there been taken, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Mahon machines easy," said Sergeant Bellews heavily, "and not us. There was almost three micro-micro-watts goin' out then. That's three-millionths of a millionth of a ampere-second at ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 10,000,000 times four feet. It follows that if we made a little model of the earth four feet in diameter, having the average specific gravity of the earth, it would attract a particle with one ten-millionth part of the attraction of the earth. The attraction of such a model has actually been measured. Since we do not know the average specific gravity of the earth—that being in fact what we want to find out—we take a globe of lead, four feet in diameter, let us suppose. By means of a balance of the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... implements of incredible delicacy. Its "microbalance" can estimate "the difference of weight of the order of the millionth of a milligram." Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles a second, yet science can follow it with its methods, and finds that it travels faster with the current of running water than against it. Science has perfected a thermal instrument by which ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... a star awhile, creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not HERE—this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our veins. Why should Man—a being ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... identification with Brahma. Such identification with the Supreme Soul was the Emancipation they sought. No other religion has ever been able to preach such a high ideal. The Hindu's concern is with Eternity. He regards his existence here as having the duration of but the millionth part of a moment. How to prevent re-birth and attain to an identification with the Supreme Soul is the object ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... liver; there are 5,000,000 red and 30,000 white blood corpuscles in a space as big as a pin's head, each one of which travels a mile a day and lives but a fortnight, millions of new ones being built up in the bone-marrow every second; a flash of light lasting only one eight-millionth of a second, will stimulate the eye, which can discriminate half a million tints. The ear can distinguish 11,000 tones, and is so sensitive that we hear waves of air less than one sixty-thousandth of an inch long; a mass of almost ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... fatal. A man can live in a boiler factory or in a cubist art gallery, but he cannot live in a room containing hydrogen sulfide. Since it is more important to be warned of danger than guided to delights our senses are made more sensitive to pain than pleasure. We can detect by the smell one two-millionth of a milligram of oil of roses or musk, but we can detect one two-billionth of a milligram of mercaptan, which is the vilest smelling compound that man has so far invented. If you do not know how much a milligram is consider a drop ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... overcoming the obstacles which almost infinite minuteness on the one hand, and almost infinite distance on the other, have hitherto opposed to the recognition of the presence and the condition of matter. One eighteen-millionth of a grain of sodium in the flame of a spirit-lamp may be detected by this instrument; and, at the same time, it gives trust-worthy indications of the material constitution not only of the sun, but of the farthest of those fixed stars and nebulae which afford sufficient light to affect ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... bore between two successive plugs. By the aid of a vernier, readings are made to thousandths of an inch, and the peripheral velocity of the disks being 1100 in. a second, the machine indicates portions of time rather less than one-millionth of a second; it is, in fact, practically correct to hundred-thousandths of a second (Phil. Trans., ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... mittIn) two or three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and truthing, in the newspapers. Sends me some strings of verses, candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I learn for the millionth time one of the following facts: either that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... by the score who do not know their right hands from their left, so far as the principles of justice are concerned. Does our High Council? No, for they will let men throw dirt in their eyes until you cannot find the one hundred millionth part of an ounce of common sense in them. You may go to the Bishops' courts, and what are they? A set of old grannies. They cannot judge a case pending between two old women, to say nothing of a case between man and man:' Journal of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... intensity with magnetic attraction. Everyone knows that a magnet will draw a piece of iron with considerable vigour, but the intensity of gravitation is very much less on masses of equal amount. The attraction between these two 50lb. weights is less than the ten-millionth part of a single pound. Such a force is utterly infinitesimal in comparison with the friction between the weights and the table on which they stand, and hence there is no response to the attraction by even the slightest movement. Yet, if we can conceive each ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... the more significant it becomes. Starting from almost the same point, with somewhat similar handicaps, we two had "arrived," though at widely separated goals. Each of our courses was characteristically American, and each was in demonstration—for the millionth time—of the magic power of the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... an international convention met at Paris to decide what the exact length of a meter should be, for several countries at that time were using what was known as the Metric System of Weights and Measures. It was finally agreed that the length of a meter should be equal to one ten-millionth of the distance on the earth's surface, from the pole to the equator, or ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... know—but I think I, even I (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man's. But, after all, a crown may not be worth dying for. Yet, to outlive Lodi for this!!! Oh that Juvenal or Johnson could rise from the dead! 'Expende—quot libras in duce summo invenies?' I knew they were light in the balance ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the commentator went on, "a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five-millionth child to be born in the hospital." The commentator faded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, ...
— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut
... millionth of an inch. Why, oh, why had she quarreled with Professor Trask? If some one had only told her that her own rebellion would mean the substitution of Cecilia for herself as his pupil, and another opportunity for that apt young perfectionist ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... little towns. The beauty of English scenery makes me desperate, it is so impossible to describe it, or in any way to record its impression, and such a pity to leave it undescribed; and, moreover, I always feel that I do not get from it a hundredth or a millionth part of the enjoyment that there really is in it, hurrying past it thus. I was really glad when we rumbled into a tunnel, piercing for a long distance through a hill; and, emerging on the other side, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... percent of the energy is released in less than one millionth of a second. Most of this is in the form of the heat and shock waves which produce the damage. It is this immediate and direct explosive power which could devastate the urban centers in a ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... into contact with the surface of a gland, act on it, and the tentacle bends. The pressure exerted by the particle of hair, weighing only 1/78740 of a grain and supported by a dense fluid, must have been inconceivably slight. We may conjecture that it could hardly have equalled the millionth of a grain; and we shall hereafter see that far less than the millionth of a grain of phosphate of ammonia in solution, when absorbed by a gland, acts on it and induces movement. A bit of hair, 1/50 of an ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... this and a filar eyepiece, the distance between the start of the two rows of spark dots on the drum can be measured accurately to 0.01 mm. As the drum is 500 mm. in circumference, and its normal speed is 86 rev. per sec., it is theoretically possible to measure time to one four-millionth of a second, though with a cartridge 1 m. long, such refinement ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... described elaborately the true method of securing it,—namely, by scraping, instead of by the ordinary process of grinding. At the same meeting he exhibited a machine of his invention by which he stated that a difference of the millionth part of an inch in length could at once be detected. He also there urged his favourite idea of uniformity, and proper gradations of size of parts, in all the various branches of the mechanical arts, as a chief means towards economy of production—a principle, as he showed, capable ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... which its electric charge vibrates. It is found possible to "tune," or "syntonize," the aerial rod or wire of a receiving station with a transmitter. A vertical wire about 200 feet in length, says Professor J.A. Fleming,[15] has a natural time period of electrical oscillation of about one-millionth of a second. Therefore if waves strike this wire a million times a second they will reinforce one another and influence the coherer; whereas a less or greater frequency will leave it practically unaffected. By adjusting the receiving circuit to the transmitter, ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... sovereign power belonging to you and your associates as individuals! The sovereignty of the nation split up into fractional shares—each of you possessing (say) one thirty-millionth part of the integral unit, and possessing it, of course, exclusively and therefore separately, if you are to exercise it individually, even in the way of clubbing your respective shares as you propose! Heard ever any one the like? Why, you might as well say that each individual in the nation possesses ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... use any of the steel ingots made in the works in which he owns shares. He uses practically no steel at all, except a knife or two. Mr. Rockefeller does not use the oil-wells he owns, nor a hundred-millionth part of the coal his shares in ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... that money which I give to the poor, and which the cook's wife thought I was giving to her? In the majority of cases, it is that portion of my substance which it is impossible even to express in figures to Semyon and the cook's wife,—it is generally one millionth part or about that. I give so little that the bestowal of any money is not and cannot be a deprivation to me; it is only a pleasure in which I amuse myself when the whim seizes me. And it was thus ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... malice aforethought, darling. And when it's done it's such a tiny thing, and the world's so big, and all but a millionth part of it doesn't care. Maisie, come with me and I'll show you something of the size of the world. One can no more avoid working than eating,—that goes on by itself,—but try to see what you are working for. I know such little heavens that I could take you to,—islands ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of intimacy for some years, suggested the holiday, and was himself a member of the excursion party that made its rendezvous at Rawlins, Wyoming Territory. Edison had tested his tasimeter, and was satisfied that it would measure down to the millionth part of a degree Fahrenheit. It was just ten years since he had left the West in poverty and obscurity, a penniless operator in search of a job; but now he was a great inventor and famous, a welcome addition to the band ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... so," said T.-T. He then got into his stride and gave me twenty minutes' Czecho-Slovakism when I was dying to discover whether HOBBS had scored his two-millionth run. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am noble on my father's and on my mother's side. On my mother's I derive ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd corrosion on the sense of identity in the human spirit that the man who lives in crowds should grow more dull and more literal about himself every day. He becomes a mere millionth of something. All these other people he sees about him hurrying to and fro are mere millionths too. He grows more and more obliged to live with a vast bulk of people if he is to notice people at all. Unless he sees ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in America, I had an innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against law. This was very wrong and foolish, considering that I was one of the sovereigns; but a sovereign, or any number of sovereigns, or the twenty-millionth part of a sovereign, does not love to find himself, as an American must, included within the delegated authority ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... replied that Lord with a smile, "A mile beyond the millionth mile. We know not South and we know not North, And ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker |
