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Plastic   Listen
adjective
Plastic  adj.  
1.
Having the power to give form or fashion to a mass of matter; as, the plastic hand of the Creator. "See plastic Nature working to his end."
2.
Capable of being molded, formed, or modeled, as clay or plaster; used also figuratively; as, the plastic mind of a child.
3.
Pertaining or appropriate to, or characteristic of, molding or modeling; produced by, or appearing as if produced by, molding or modeling; said of sculpture and the kindred arts, in distinction from painting and the graphic arts. "Medallions... fraught with the plastic beauty and grace of the palmy days of Italian art."
Plastic clay (Geol.), one of the beds of the Eocene period; so called because used in making pottery.
Plastic element (Physiol.), one that bears within the germs of a higher form.
Plastic exudation (Med.), an exudation thrown out upon a wounded surface and constituting the material of repair by which the process of healing is effected.
Plastic foods. (Physiol.) See the second Note under Food.
Plastic force. (Physiol.) See under Force.
Plastic operation, an operation in plastic surgery.
Plastic surgery, that branch of surgery which is concerned with the repair or restoration of lost, injured, or deformed parts of the body.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books



... my own confession knew Kagig, I who had sent Kagig a message, I who five minutes ago was on the verge of being hanged in the greasy noose that still swung above the ladder through the hole in the roof—I who therefore ought to be thoroughly plastic-minded and ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... wisest in all ages have acknowledged that the most important period in human education is in childhood—that period when the plastic mind may be moulded into such exquisite beauty, that no unfavorable influences shall be able entirely to destroy it—or into such hideous deformity, that it shall cling to it like a thick rust eaten into a highly polished ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... information which held their attention while it lasted, but which was never mastered in any real sense of the term, and which could have but the most superficial influence upon their future conduct. But, worst of all, he permitted bad and inadequate habits to be developed at the most critical and plastic period of life. His pupils had followed the lines of least effort, just as he had followed the lines of least effort. The result was a well-established prejudice against everything that was not ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... various plastic cement materials are used for modeling mouths, of which papier mache is probably the best; plaster paris is often used in an emergency but is brittle and heavy. For modeling use finely ground paper pulp mixed with glue and plaster ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... this scene as he grew older as the mere expression of a whim of dissolution, but it had made so deep an impression upon him at the time that insensibly the words sank into his plastic mind creating a superstition that refused to yield to reason. The ruby was Helene's birthstone and she was passionately fond of it. She had begged and coaxed to wear this jewel, and upon one occasion had stamped her little foot and sulked throughout the evening. He had given her a ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... the excellent in mind adores. Then, Saviour! what a paragon art Thou Of all that Wisdom in her hope creates— A model for the universe—Though God Be round us, by the shadow of His might For aye reflected, and with plastic hand Prints on the earth the character of things— Yet He Himself,—how awfully retired Depth within depth, unutterably deep! His glory brighter than the brightest thought Can picture, holier than our holiest awe Can worship,—imaged only in I AM! But ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of the golden prime disdained to represent—or it may be unconsciously shrank from representing—the ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips

... ideas as treasures—they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the political ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... hypnodisc is the size of the hypnodisc illustrated in this circular. It is rigid with a special lens-like plastic surface. The miniature hypnodisc is held between the first finger and thumb like the crystal ball and is used incorporating the techniques of the large hypnodisc as ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers

... Romantic and the other Classic. Yet these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of "Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be the main desideratum ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... a type which Nietzsche did not altogether dislike, but which he would fain have rendered more subtle and plastic. It is the type that takes life and itself too seriously, that never surmounts the camel-stage mentioned in the first discourse, and that is obdurately sublime and earnest. To be able to smile while speaking of lofty things and NOT TO BE OPPRESSED ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur

... creatures may address thy name— For all that breathe and creep the lowly earth Echo thy being with reflected birth— Thee will I sing, thy strength for aye resound! The universe that rolls this globe around Moves wheresoe'er thy plastic influence guides, And, ductile, owns the god whose ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... Frankish songs should be collected and written down makes a neat pendant to the renaissance art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished triviality of Chretien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the Chanson de Roland, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church. Chretien de Troyes ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... reserve which had been knit like steel about her plastic years burst wide. "Thou art ill! What has happened to thee? Ay, Dios! what it is to be a woman and to suffer! Thou wilt die! Oh, ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... Dickens was reporter on the staff of a newspaper; he had written a book which, although successful, had created no very intense excitement; he was moreover a young man, and consequently plastic, and fifteen pounds a month would be a small fortune to him; so at least argued the artist and his friends. How little they understood the resolute, self-reliant character of this unknown writer! The result was altogether ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... before in the cloister, so now in the chateau, the reign of reverie set in. The devotion of the cloister knew that mood thoroughly, and had sounded all its stops. For the object of this devotion was absent or veiled, not limited to one supreme plastic form like Zeus at Olympia or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted, as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections. But then, the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousand secrets to make the absent near. Into this kingdom ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... began, but not at once to dance; instead, she executed a series of postures; almost without apparent transition she melted from one pose to another of plastic grace, her body the mere, boneless, obedient servant of ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... an opportunity for the testing of all her knowledge, all her skill, and the full measure of her altruism. Nor was he the proverbial mass of plastic clay to be molded into some preconceived form. Her wisdom and modernity interdicted such a conception of childhood as that. Rather, he was a growing plant, waiting for her skill to nurture him into blossom and fruitage. Some of his qualities she found ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels, "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear; and they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... from the ground of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own, melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty. But Sir Walter (we contend, under correction) has not this creative impulse, this plastic power, this capacity of reacting on his first impressions. He is a learned, a literal, a matter-of-fact expounder of truth or fable:[B] he does not soar above and look down upon his subject, imparting his own lofty views and feelings to his descriptions of nature—he relies upon it, is ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their failure ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... noticeable, more particularly near the pressure-ridges, which had forced the floe down so that its upper surface lay even with the water-line, while at other places it was a good half-yard above it, in these last cases thrust up by ice pressed in below. It all shows how extremely plastic these floes are, in spite of the cold; the temperature of the ice near the surface must have been from 4 deg. Fahr. to 22 deg. Fahr. below zero (-20 deg. to -30 deg. C.) at the time of these pressures. In many places the bending had been too violent, and the floe had cracked. The cracks were ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... has utilised evil with a view to good. It is more especially the good that has engaged our attention throughout this work. We have seen that the more society improves, the more plastic is the adaptability it obtains from its members; while the greater the tendency towards increasing stability below, the more does it force to the surface the disturbing elements inseparable from so vast a bulk; and thus laughter ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... base of her neck, in the fashion of her dead brother. Her eyelashes had been clipped; the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... books all the time. Even the man whose business it is to express himself in black and white has eyes like other people, and with them he perceives and observes the variegated visible world: its landscapes, cities, plain and cultivated men, plastic art. For him too does Nature exist; he too is moved at sight of such simple happenings as the fall of the leaves in October; he too is stirred as he gazes upon a waterfall, a mountain region, a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... to the righteousness of the kingdom is "poor in spirit." Then the next is a little deeper, "they that mourn." Because now you must get plastic, you must get broken, you must get like the metal in the fire, which the Master can mould; and so, it is not enough to see your unrighteousness, but deeply to feel it, deeply to regret it, deeply to mourn over it, to own it not a little thing that sin has come into your life. And so God leads a ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... Richard Edney to furnish materials for a dozen better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable Margaret—the poem Philo we regard ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... us—joys and sorrows, light and darkness, when His hand gives, and when His hand withdraws, as when His authoritative voice commands, and the sweet impulses of His love graciously constrain—is that our wills may be made plastic and flexible, like a piece of wrought leather, to every touch of His hand. True meekness goes far deeper down than any attitude towards men. It lays hold on the sovereign will of God as our supreme good, and delights in absolutely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... towards the end-result of an instinct remarkably straightforward and sure. They make few mistakes, and do not have to potter around. By contrast, the instincts of mammals are rather loosely organized. Mammals are more plastic, more adaptable, and at the same time less sure; and this is notably true of man. It would be a mistake to suppose that man has few instinctive tendencies; perhaps he has more than any other creature. But his instinctive behavior has not the hard-and-fast, ready-made ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... born in Cuba, but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... among Italians or Frenchmen they were received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the people; and in the vulgar speech of the people—rugged, plastic, and reckless of grammar—the message came as glad tidings of great joy. When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they signally failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... the Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave inordinate ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing serious seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear. By the time they set down on the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmed ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... The stranger looked at the smoke still oozing from the den and nodded approvingly. Then he came over and looked at Ed. He clacked his tongue in concern and bent over, touching Ed's wrist. Ed noticed there was now a cast on it, and it didn't hurt so much. There was also a plastic binding around his ribs and shoulder, where the claws of the first fighter had raked as it tossed him. That was a mighty neat trick, because the rags of his shirt were still buttoned around him, and he was pretty sure it had not been ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams

... his way to public recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He {231} touched life at fewer points than Byron ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... very disheartening to anti-slavery men; for, however confidently they might believe in the final success of their struggle, they could not fail to see the immense odds and fearful obstacles against which they would have to contend. The debauched masses who had been molded and kneaded by the plastic touch of slavery into such base uses, were the only possible material from which recruits could be drawn for a great party of the future, which should regenerate our politics and re-enthrone the love of liberty; and this should be remembered ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian

... the failure of legitimate drama, and the fact that the Atellanae, with their patrician surroundings, were only half popular; and lastly, the familiarity with the different offshoots of Greek comedy, thrown out in rank profusion at Alexandria, and capable of assimilation with the plastic materials of the Mimus. These worthless products, issued under the names of Rhinthon, Sopater, Sciras, and Timon, were conspicuous for the entire absence of restraint with which they treated serious subjects, as well as for a merry-andrew style of humour easily naturalised, if it were not ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... "Lact-albumin'' occurs in all kinds of milk. The globulins are insoluble in water and in dilute acids, but soluble in alkalies and in neutral salt solutions; these solutions are coagulated on boiling. "Serum-globulin,'' also termed globulin or fibrino-plastic globulin, paraglobulin and paraglobin, occurs in blood serum; "cell-globulins'' occur in many organs—liver, kidneys, pancreas and the thyroid gland, also in muscle-plasma; "crystalline,'' a globulin occurring in two forms a and b, is found in the lens of the eye; "egg-globulin'' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the less inspiriting air which Madam Puritan Gering suffused about her home. Himself in early youth had felt the austerity of a Cavalier father turned a Puritan on a sudden, and he wished no such experience for his daughter. For all her abundancy of life and feeling, he knew how plastic and impressionable she was, and he dreaded to see that exaltation of her fresh spirit touched with gloom. She was his only child, she had been little out of his sight, her education had gone on under his own care, and, in so far as was possible ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... irregular markings such as might have been made by rolling the plastic vessel irregularly upon a woven surface, or by molding it in an improvised sack made by tying up the margins of a piece ...
— Prehistoric Textile Fabrics Of The United States, Derived From Impressions On Pottery • William Henry Holmes

... ladies of the time of Louis XIV, in Versailles; and I adorned them, now with the modest stola, that inspired veneration and respect; now with diaphanous tunics and peplums, through whose airy folds were revealed all the plastic perfections of their graceful forms; now with the transparent coa, of the beautiful courtesans of Athens and Corinth, showing the white and roseate hues of the finely molded forms that glowed beneath their vaporous covering. ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... she was ready for a course of sprouts in the human heart. I used my drag at the hospital to bring her over with me for a cram course. We had a plastic model of a heart there, about four times life size, that was built in demountable layers for lecture and demonstration purposes. By the end of the second week, Pheola was able to work her sense of perception around inside my heart, based on what she had learned ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp

... "as blithe as bonnie." So it may be, that if you are alarmed at the humility of the occupation of the one—even with your remembrance that Sir Isaac Newton experimented upon soap-bubbles—as being so intractable in the plastic-work of romance, you may be appeased by the qualities of the other; for has it not been our delight to sing for a thousand years, yea, in a thousand songs, too, the praises of young damsels, whether under the names of Jenny or Peggy, or those of Clarinda or Florabella, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... Ternissa held her guide, Where Solon awed the ruler; there they grow, Weak as they are, on cliffs that few can climb. None to thy steps are inaccessible, Theodosia! wakening Italy with song Deeper than Filicaia's, or than his, The triple deity of plastic art. Mindful of Italy and thee, fair maid! I lay this sear, frail garland ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... as to arouse curiosity. Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so illuminating of manners ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... textile art is the parent, and, as I have already shown, develops within itself a geometric system of ornament. The fictile art is the offshoot and has within itself no predilection for decoration. It is dependent and plastic. Its forms are to a great extent modeled and molded within the textile shapes and acquire automatically some of the decorative surface characters of the mold. This is the beginning of the transfer, and as ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes

... Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her master hand, she ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... window. The well might have to be deepened, but little expense was put into or onto the house for fifty years. The married son or daughter might add a wing, but the main house once built was never disturbed. In the modern plastic condition of both ideals and materials this is all changed. In any city well known to my readers how many streets bear the same aspect as five years ago? In any suburban village made familiar by the trolley how many houses are the same as five years ago? Even if ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... as it were, only the other day, it has already taken its place as an appliance of daily life. Sixty years ago, the extraction of metals from their solutions, by the electric current, was simply a highly interesting scientific fact. At the present day, the galvano-plastic art is a great industry; and, in combination with photography, promises to be of endless service in the arts. Electric lighting is another great gift of science to civilisation, the practical effects of which have not yet been fully developed, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... the popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly to Greek music. It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel? The Greeks were so great in their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their name would seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of undying beauty. But it is not so: the march of the arts has not been parallel in human life; when sculpture had its Phidias, and had reached its climax, painting had hardly passed ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... antipathies cease almost at once. The arrival in a new land of immigrants from diverse countries breaks down the national barriers within which they were born and bred. A national spirit breeds true only on its native soil; when transplanted to a new land it becomes plastic and mouldable. A new country dissolves ancient nationalities; no country illustrates this truth ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith

... square to square of the big rope hairnet that served as guidelines on the outer surface of the big wheel, Mike Blackhawk completed his inspection of the gold-plated plastic hull, with its ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... manifesting as much wisdom in the religious training of our children as that horse-trainer. But unfortunately we are pursuing largely the old method, allowing our children to get full of all sorts of mental kinks up through those first plastic three or four years, and then handing them over to the church kindergarten-teacher for one hour a week, expecting her to straighten out all these aberrations and give back to the parents a ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley

... most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... forms of ware can be made almost as thin as an egg shell or a piece of heavy paper, and after being allowed to become thoroughly dry can be safely burned in the kiln. It can readily be understood that it would not be possible to make such fragile pieces by the usual processes with plastic clay, which must be of the consistency of putty or dough, on the potter's wheel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various

... any thing else. Flour is good, but flour is not bread. If I am to eat flour, I must eat it as bread; and either milk or water must be used to make it bread. If a little milk is used, the bread will be dry and heavy and hard. If a good deal is used, the flour will be transformed into a soft and plastic mass, which will rise in the heat, and come to my lips a sweet and fragrant morsel. Christianity is good, but it wants mixing with humanity before it will have a practical value. If only a little humanity be mixed with it, the product will be dry and tasteless; but if it be combined ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... food among the Marquese islanders is manufactured from the produce of the bread-fruit tree. It somewhat resembles in its plastic nature our bookbinders' paste, is of a yellow colour, and somewhat ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... in the same fanciful vein. We now know that there can be no cavities more than a few miles below the crust of a planet, simply because, under the enormous pressures which would exist, the most solid matter would be perfectly plastic. But while Whewell's general objection to the theory that Jupiter or Saturn is in the same condition as our earth thus acquires new force, the particular explanation which he gave of the planet's small density is open to precisely the same general objection. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... have watched succeeding races, Peopling my fertile strand, Marked each varying lovely model, Moulded by Nature's plastic hand. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... the slabs, and while they are in a plastic state, mouldings (if required) or other ornaments, having a suitable key, are inserted in the plastic surface, which is finished off to them (Figs. 7, 8, and 10). The slabs may also be cast with ornaments, etc., complete at one operation (Fig. 11), but it is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various

... should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... necessary and then what is pleasing. It is but a step from the painter's canvas to the weaver's loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks to-morrow. The same plastic power which is showing itself in the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our household-utensils. The beans of Beverly shall yet be baked in vases that Etruria might have envied, and the clay pipe of the Americanized Milesian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... the chain of the Greek slave out of one piece of stone, or the marble of the statue itself had no spot as big as a pin-head,—because he himself chooses to rasp and scrape plaster, rather than model in plastic clay,—because he tinkered up the "infernal regions" of the Cincinnati Museum years ago, or spends his time now in making perforating-machines and perforated files; in fine, for any reason rather than for the right legitimate one of artistic merit, they have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... rider in their van could now be discovered. The road-metal grew softer and more clayey as Weatherbury was left behind, and the late rain had wetted its surface to a somewhat plastic, but not muddy state. They came to cross-roads. Coggan suddenly pulled up ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... of soft wax, covered with a sensitive skin. All impressions on the skin shape the plastic wax, but go no deeper— do not reach the soul. You can separate these impressions from your real self, when calm and alone, and look upon emotion as a surface play. But the tragedies of life strike deep. They affect the soul, and go to the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... Church Wesley had lived, he would have been no doubt an active agent in the holy work of evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial to his temper, but it did not fail to leave ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, in those under Nature, be borne in mind, as well as the strength of the hereditary tendency. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... abraded as they flew. The last working flier made a forced landing five hundred miles from the colony. A caterwheel expedition went out and brought the crew in. The caterwheel trucks were armored with silicone plastic, resistant to abrasion, but when they got back they had to be scrapped. There had been men lost in sudden sand-squalls, and heroic searches for them, and once or twice rescues. There had been cave-ins in the mines. There ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... by vigorous words of authority and also by a lash of the whip. This perhaps sounds strange to you, dear reader, but you must in truth understand that even in the senseless sphere, thought alone is not efficacious without a certain plastic expression in shape of a visible, audible or palpable form. If this spectral company becomes too much for me I must loudly command them, even shout at them, "begone," and if that does no good I must wish for a whip - which forthwith appears - and give them ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... my object to give a history of the development of the plastic art, but to show the great excellence it attained in the hands ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... do we still look on specimens of their method of printing. Upon a revolving roller they engraved, in cuneiform letters, their records, and, running this over plastic clay formed into blocks, produced ineffaceable proofs. From their tile-libraries we are still to reap a literary and historical harvest. They were not without some knowledge of optics. The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that they were not unacquainted with magnifying ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... always be that of a country parson's wife. He had caught her young—it was unfortunate, of course, that he hadn't caught her three months younger—but in any case she was still young enough to be plastic and amenable to marital influence. It seemed to him that he had a good chance of moulding her into the shape that would suit his purpose, and it was obvious that the process would be easier if she were isolated from the free and easy manners of Roscarna which had—so very nearly—proved her ruin, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... was always in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling, which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... instant's relief. This was the third time the house had changed dice to try and break his winning streak, it was their privilege. The hard-eyed Casino man opened his wallet as he had done before and drew out a pair at random. Stripping off their plastic cover he threw them the length of the table to Jason. They came up a natural ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison

... fortune out of his first-discovery rights to the things, because she was really very fond of the Commissioner when he wasn't being irritating. But in some obscure way she found the plasmoids themselves and the idea of unlimited plastic life which they embodied rather appalling. However, she was in a minority there. Practically everybody else seemed to feel that plasmoids were the biggest improvement ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz

... In the plastic arts, the laws of form and the criteria of beauty have been swept aside by the futurists, cubists, vorticists, tactilists, and other ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... in that brilliant circle of Boston transcendentalists, who hoped in a few years to transform our selfish, competitive civilization into a Paradise where all the altruistic virtues might make co-operation possible. But alas! the material at hand was not sufficiently plastic for that higher ideal. In due time the community dissolved and the members returned to their ancestral spheres. Margaret Fuller, who was a frequent visitor there, betook herself to matrimony in sunny Italy, William Henry Channing to the Church, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... is very young,' he thought, thrilling. And youth was plastic—he, the sculptor, could surely mould her. Besides, was she not Sir Asher's daughter? She must surely have inherited some of his love for Palestine and his people. It was this Philistine set that had spoiled her. Julius, too, that young Oxford prig—he reflected ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... disciples of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human Nature and its Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the habits of the race will the new freedom be reborn. It sounds old, very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent ingredients of our composition ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products processing; oil refining, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... to the royal power; and Nero from the first regarded with aversion, which ended in assassination, the poor young orphan girl who recalled to the popular memory his slender pretensions to hereditary empire, and whom he regarded as a possible rival, if her cowed and plastic nature should ever become a tool in the hands of more powerful intriguers. But we do not hear of any attempt on Seneca's part to urge upon Nero the fulfillment of this high duty, and we find him sinking into the degraded position of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... it: in vain does he gird himself in his national pride: of all Europeans the German is the most easily denationalized. Unwittingly the soul of Christophe had already begun to assimilate from Latin art a clarity, a sobriety, an understanding of the emotions, and even, up to a point, a plastic beauty, which otherwise it never would have had. His David ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... about the land that golden afternoon. Harold was up and off in a moment, forgetting Nelson, forgetting the pig, the mole, the Larkin betrayal, and Selina's strange fever of conscience. Here was fire, real fire, to play with, and that was even better than messing with water, or remodelling the plastic surface of the earth. Of all the toys the world provides for right-minded persons, the original ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant sayings. He, looking on the long ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... from her earliest infancy, the father taking good care to press them deep into her plastic mind, it is not astonishing that Ninon should discard the more distasteful fruits to be painfully harvested by following her mother's tuition, and accept the easily gathered luscious golden fruit offered ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... too, that a third person had been in the house last night; but if so, one of the two men had lied. The bit of candle found by me on the rear stairs had adhered to somebody's shoe while still plastic; if either Burke or Maillot had used these stairs at or about the time of the murder, then both had studiously kept the fact from me. It was possible that one of the two could have made fast the front door behind a fugitive, without the other's knowledge; Burke, for example, ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... expression of the singer, to the development of all his powers. This life or vital force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... treatment system. Similarly, modern home owners want to stop sending yard wastes to landfills. These days householders may be offered incentives (or threatened with penalties) by their municipalities to separate organic, compostable garbage from paper, from glass, from metal or from plastic. Individuals who pay for trash pickup by volume are finding that they can save considerable amounts of money by recycling their own ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... painter he has more rivals than as a sculptor. We may limit the supreme masters of the plastic art to two, or to three at the most; but the supreme masters of the pictorial art are twice three, at the very least. By the side of Michelangelo there is Raphael, also an Italian; and has any one really a right to exclude Titian from their fellowship? Then there are Velasquez, the ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmonious melting down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual,—of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary; where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... Pescara, on the Adriatic coast. Its picturesque scenery has formed the background for more than one of his stories. At the age of fifteen, while still a student at Prato, he published his first volume of poems, 'Intermezzo di Rime' (Interludes of Verse): "grand, plastic verse, of an impeccable prosody," as he maintained in their defense, but so daringly erotic that their appearance created no small scandal. Other poems followed at intervals, notably 'Il Canto Nuovo' (The New Song: Rome, 1882), 'Isotteo e la Chimera' (Isotteo and the Chimera: Rome, 1890), ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... abundance of early Christian views and perceptions. That presupposition is simply a proclamation of the one God and of Christ transferred to Greek soil, fixed merely in its leading features and otherwise very plastic, accompanied by a message regarding the future, and demands for a holy life. At the same time the Old Testament and the early Christian Palestinian writings with the rich abundance of their contents, did certainly exercise ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. People die as they live, and they ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... the barriers which so long Have held in thraldom many a mind, Sing to the deaf a ransom-song, Be eyes to those whose souls are blind; Teach those who mould the plastic mind To know that God hath never given A mission weightier, more refined, To angels round the courts of heaven, Than that of training human minds Committed unto human hands, In which the spirit e'er survives And through ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love for reciting passages from "Spartacus," ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... merges itself in another—a panorama of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... religions, and absolutely no similarity remains. On the one side are forms of human beauty, majesty, and passion, in which the original groundwork of nature-worship is as much as possible concealed by the working of a plastic imagination; on the other side are forms bestial or grotesque, featureless and passionless, exhibiting nature-worship in one of its lowest stages. But in every respect, in language, in physiognomy, in mind, in political tendencies, in manners, as well as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... right. Upon my return to Earth, the serious operations took place, those giving me plastic limbs that would become living parts of my organic structure. The same outward push of the brain and nervous system that had created phantom pain now made what was artificial seem real. Not only did my own ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner

... more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a child—who knows why?" he relinquished the answer with an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. It isn't ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... gained in weight by the condensation of the nebula upon it, its plastic crust will proportionally gain in girth by internal expansion, which will finally bring all the old continents to the surface, but ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... corpse was swathed in a large series of bandages, which were moulded into shape to represent the form of the body. In a later (probably Fifth Dynasty) mummy, found in 1892 by Professor Flinders Petrie at Medum, the superficial bandages had been impregnated with a resinous paste, which while still plastic was moulded into the form of the body, special care being bestowed upon the modelling of the face[26] and the organs of reproduction, so as to leave no room for doubt as to the identity and the sex. Professor Junker has described[27] an interesting series of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... their Creator and Fashioner? Is the expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. An important fact has been proved, that the enemy cannot drive us from the Peninsula. We ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... properly insist upon the aesthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... as systematically as your friends in England eat, drink, and sleep. If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after times you may love to date the moulding of your character—that is, your very identity. Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy and contented in your saddle-home. As for ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... is irreparable! Education has passed her by. Well, she will go to find her education. She will make a teacher out of every friend, out of every sensation. Incident and feeling, praise and dispraise, will all alike tend to mould the sensitive plastic material into shape. So far she may have remained outside her art; the art, no doubt, has been a conventional appendage, and little more. Training would have given her good conventions, whereas she has only picked up bad and imperfect ones. But no training ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... was spread; in the second, adorned with emblematic devices and draped with the banners of the seventeen provinces, he was to perform the brief journey; while the third had been filled by the inevitable rhetoric societies, with all the wonders of their dramatic and plastic ingenuity. Rarely had such a complication of vices and virtues, of crushed dragons, victorious archangels, broken fetters, and resurgent nationalities, been seen before, within the limits of a single canal boat. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... grows slowly from confusion and lack of form to coherence and symmetry to the moral joy of its maker, so her experience in human plastic enterprise filled the heart of Miss Willis with a vital happiness. For two years—day in and day out—she never flagged in her task of giving sight to the eyes and ears to the mind of the unshaped clay which fate had put into her hands ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... answers all the purposes of wheat flour paste, while it is far superior in point of transparency and smoothness. This composition, made with so small a proportion of water as to have it of the consistence of plastic clay, may be used to form models, busts, basso-relievos, and similar articles. When made of it, they are susceptible of a very high polish. Poland starch is a nice cement for pasting layers of paper together, or any ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous

... New York has most successfully made a plastic travertine, composed of gypsum from Nevada combined with hemp fiber and a coloring pigment, which has been applied to all of the Exposition buildings, producing a most pleasing glareless background under the sunny skies ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James

... the simple unity of his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... boys were plastic tubes curved at both ends. At one end was a mouthpiece; at the other was a cage that held a rubber ball. A dive or rough wave action floated the ball upward, closing the tube and preventing water entry. Rick and ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... their own. She was captured many years ago in an attempt to overthrow the rule of Wananda upon a small satellite planet. Wananda did not kill her, but placed her in suspended animation within the protective crystal plastic. Our queen intends to revive her and study her mind for her wisdom, but we have not had time because of the press of events. Soon, now, she will become a tool in our hands to build greater the ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... is to be; leaving it passively to be determined by the conjunction of circumstances, the accident of locality, and the influence of friends or worldly prospects of gain. Still, in the hands of the Christian missionary, they are by no means the plastic substance which such a description would suggest—capable of being moulded into any form, or retaining permanently any casual impression—but rather a yielding fluid which adapts its shape to that of the vessel into which it may happen to be poured, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... the settled state of things; and that the old order of things was unsettled for ever: that the French revolution was as much more permanent than had been the French despotism, as was the great fabric of nature, than the petty plastic productions of art. To exclude the period since the revolution, would be to exclude some of the strongest evidences of the friendship of one nation, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall

... self-indulgent or a sentimentalist. The appeal of the present somewhat enchanted hour was to the intellect and the spirit, rather than sensuous, still less sensual. Nevertheless, an almost passionate desire of earthly beauty took him—of the beauty of things seen, of things plastic, beauty of the human form; beauty of far-distant lands and the varied pageant of their aspect and history; of great rivers flowing seaward; of tombs by the wayside; of the glorious terror of the desert's naked face; of languorous fountain-cooled gardens, close hid ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... the preludes, we can understand how there might well be something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to which, under proper training, he could not have added ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... too young to be greatly affected by the evils characteristic of that period, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's and the numberless vices that swept along in its train. His youth and early manhood, covering the plastic and formative period, stretched through the reign of Henry III., in which the standards of virtue and religion were little if in any degree improved. Early in the reign of Henry IV., when he had fairly entered upon his manhood, we find him closely associated with the moderate party, which encouraged ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain

... subject under this point of view would be struck dumb with amazement. He submits, however, that the amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost infinite in number during an almost infinite lapse of time have often had their whole organization rendered in some degree plastic, and that each slight modification of structure which was in any way beneficial under excessively complex conditions of life has been preserved, whilst each which was in any way injurious has been rigorously destroyed. The long-continued ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... the wall at the press of a button. Small scale models of some of their most famous inventions were also placed about the office, including a red-and-silver replica of Tom's first rocket ship, the Star Spear; a blue plastic model of the jetmarine in which he had fought a band of undersea pirates; and also a gleaming silvery model of Tom's latest, unique space ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton

... corresponding changes in its staff. And it was here that Rickman came in. He had been retained on The Museion partly in recognition of his brilliance, partly by way of satisfying the claims of Jewdwine's magnanimity. On The Museion he had not proved plastic either as sub-editor or as contributor. He did not fit in well with the traditions of the paper; for he was, to Jewdwine, modernity incarnate, the living spirit of revolt, to be bound down with difficulty by the editorial hand. Looking back on the record of ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the men who control ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... had hardened, two courses of concrete blocks were laid on each shoulder of the invert, using a 1-2- mortar, the part being lime paste. The lime made the mortar more plastic and easier to trowel. Then the form for the arch was placed, and as each 8-ft. section of the arch was built, a grout of 1-1 mortar was poured over the top to fill the joints. Earth was thrown on each shoulder and tamped, and ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... designs: Where, springing from the heart, the fancy shines, Thy enterprising mind had here bestow'd, To honour Felpham as thy sire's abode! All to thy mental eyes were present here; The scene, we join'd to deck, all yet endear, Tho' hardly embrios of plastic grace, Many yet want their features, and their place. These vacant circlets, that still court mine eye, Can I survey, without a bursting sigh, When fond remembrance tells me that from these Thy filial hand, tho' robb'd of strength ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley

... button on his shirt, he pulled back a strip of plastic cloth just below his rib cage and took out a small flat pistol. He held it in the palm of his hand. He knew now why ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet

... gross resist her by their weight. So women that take physic during their pregnancy, have slighter children indeed, but of a finer and more delicate turn, because the suppleness of the matter more readily obeys the plastic power. However, these are speculations which we shall ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... touch is as hard as steel. He sat over the keyboard and played down on the keys, thus striking them heavily, instead of pressing and moulding the tone. Pachmann's playing is a notable example of plastic beauty. He seems to dip his hands into musical liquid instead of touching inanimate ivory, and bone, wood, and wire. Remember this when you begin your day's work: Sit so that your hand is on a level with, never below, the keyboard; ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... promise to present reflections and observations concerning Nature, we must at the same time indicate that these remarks will chiefly have reference, first, to plastic art; then, to art in general; finally, to the general ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... tiers dropped away to the main deck, flowing lines and curves, broad sheets of clear plastic, animated signs, the grass and flowerbeds of a small park, people walking swiftly or idly. The huge gyro-stabilized bulk did not move noticeably to the long Pacific swell. Pelican Station was the colony's "downtown," its shops and theaters and restaurants, ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... when the concrete was mixed not quite wet enough to be plastic. If mixed too wet the charge was liable to be "lost," and if dry it would choke the chute. An excess of gravel permitted water to ascend in the tube; and an excess of sand tended to check the ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... habitually drawing many of the images and illustrations of his thoughts from the plastic art, fancied that the scene represented the process of the Creator, when he held the new, imperfect earth in ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... energetic functioning,—and these alone, that we have a complete refutation of the claim made by many artists to-day, that the phrase "demands of the eye" embodies a complete aesthetic theory. The sculptor Adolph Hildebrand, in his "Problem of Form in the Plastic Art" first set it forth as the task of the artist "to find a form which appears to have arisen only from the demands of the eye;" and this doctrine is to-day so widely held, that it must here be considered at ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of exchange. Society was regarded as a practically unlimited number of avaricious adult units incapable of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells



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