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Evolution   /ˌɛvəlˈuʃən/  /ˌivəlˈuʃən/  /ˌɛvoʊlˈuʃən/  /ˌivoʊlˈuʃən/   Listen
Evolution

noun
1.
A process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage).  Synonym: development.  "The evolution of Greek civilization" , "The slow development of her skill as a writer"
2.
(biology) the sequence of events involved in the evolutionary development of a species or taxonomic group of organisms.  Synonyms: organic evolution, phylogenesis, phylogeny.



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"Evolution" Quotes from Famous Books



... first two or three centuries into a state of barbarism. Then slowly began to inch forward again. There were exceptions and the progress on one planet never exactly duplicated that on another, however the average was surprisingly close to both nadir and zenith, in terms of evolution ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... from private homes by the same pursuit of the employer. Men are only in a state of evolution, and the animal instincts are still strong in them. The world has allowed them so much license, and society has been so lenient with their misdeeds, that it has been difficult for them to practise self-control and aspire to a higher standard. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... founded on biology, founded on all the positive sciences, can give us the laws of humanity. Humanity, or human communities, are the organisms already prepared, or still in process of formation, and which are subservient to all the laws of the evolution of organisms. ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... to outline himself upon the public mind as a distant character in American life. Literature has not yet got hold of him, and perhaps his evolution is not far enough advanced to make him as serviceable as the soldier of the Republic and the Empire, the relic of the Old Guard, was to Hugo and Balzac, the trooper of Italy and Egypt, the maimed hero ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... in mind is the long road of evolution,—the road you and I have traveled in the guise of humbler organisms, from the first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animal kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, stretching through ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... whose conversation is always so attractive; and sometimes by scientific men, such as Sir James Hall, Professor Leslie, Dr. Brewster, and others. Whatever may have been my opportunities for education so-called, nothing could have better served the purpose of real education (the evolution of the mental faculties) than the opportunities I enjoyed while accompanying and listening to the conversation of men distinguished for their originality of thought and their high intellectual capacity. This was a mental culture of the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... remained in the drawing-room but Monsieur de Clagny, Monsieur Lebas, Gatien, and Monsieur Gravier, who were all to sleep at Anzy—the journalist had already changed his mind about Dinah. His opinion had gone through the evolution that Madame de la Baudraye had so audaciously ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... products of a longer and more varied experience; they have become more complex. And Shakespeare is plain and direct neither in the substance of his thought nor in the expression of it. The world has grown older, and in the evolution of his nature man has become conscious of the irreconcilable paradoxes of life, and more or less aware that while he is infinite in faculty, he is also the quintessence of dust. But there is one essential characteristic in which Shakespeare and Homer resemble each ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... is idle to deny this performance the applause which it plainly deserves. The self-evolution of England, as it may perhaps be called, in its economic, political, and literary life, offers an admirable model of concentration and energy. Even where it is a case of obtuseness to other civilisations, at least ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this phenomenon ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... justice, in refusing arbitration and in using menaces only too likely to bring about war in a dispute which might have been settled by judicial methods, had committed an outrage against the rights of nations calculated to retard the pacific evolution of humanity; that the Governments represented at the Hague had taken no public measures to ensure respect for the resolutions which should have been regarded by them as an engagement of honor; that ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell

... torture and a thing of self, but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution." ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... other suffers from neglect, when the attempt is made. Miss A—— made her brain and muscles work actively, and diverted blood and force to them when her organization demanded active work, with blood and force for evolution in another region. At first the schoolmaster seemed to be successful. He not only made his pupil's brain manipulate Latin, chemistry, philosophy, geography, grammar, arithmetic, music, French, German, and ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... behaving peculiar to themselves, as most wearers know to their cost; and the one in question, instead of rising and skimming like a swallow over the bulwark and dropping into the sea, performed a peculiar evolution, turned in the direction of the group under the awning, dived down, rose again, just touching Sir Humphrey's ear, missing the first mate, and striking the captain with its saw-like revolving edge just ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn

... obtain over the galloping steed, is similar to the control which it gratified Duerer to perfect over the dashing stroke of pen or brush, which, however swift and impulsive, is yet brought round and performs to a nicety a predetermined evolution. And the way he puts a little portrait of himself, finely dressed, into his most important pictures, may also carry our thoughts away to the banks of the Danube where it winds and straggles over the steppes, to picture some young horse-breeder, whose costume and harness ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... tirade they had stood close together, her face visibly eager in the glow from the hotel; and Milt had grown taller. But he responded, "I'm afraid I might have been just as bad. I haven't even reached the riding-breeches stage in evolution. Maybe never will." ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... finally solved. Probably most of the readers of this paper will say that all of this is mere theory. On the contrary, the theory, or philosophy, of scientific management is just beginning to be understood, whereas the management itself has been a gradual evolution, extending over a period of nearly thirty years. And during this time the employees of one company after another, including a large range and diversity of industries, have gradually changed from the ordinary to the scientific type ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... term Higher Space; for Higher Space is no mere external measurement. It is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... below in the courtyard, while the moon arose and shed its light through the sky, and the great black bird executed an evolution or two and whirred off to the north, doubtless headed for Seattle or some equally inaccessible point. A great helpless wrath was upon him. Dolt that he had been to let this human leper escape from him into the world again! A kind of divine frenzy seized ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... a dynasty which endured for three centuries, we must sketch the relations, in Scotland, of Crown and Parliament till the days of the Covenant and the Revolution of 1688. Scotland had but little of the constitutional evolution so conspicuous in the history of England. The reason is that while the English kings, with their fiefs and wars in France, had constantly to be asking their parliaments for money, and while Parliament first exacted ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... Office. If those walls could but speak, what strange tales they might tell—tales of clever juggling with the Powers, of ingenious counter-plots against conspiracies ever arising to disturb the European peace, plots concocted by Britain's enemies across the seas, and the evolution of ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux

... does finally come) still eludes us, is a sufficient proof that we have not yet found the right road. When we do, great doorways to the past of mankind will open of themselves, and we will know more of human life and evolution than we now guess. Until then we can only describe, classify, and try to get rid of some of the mechanical impedimenta of ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... impossible person, and represents no kind of political, social, or economical thinker. A man would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon this perfect prig. He employs the arguments of evolution and so forth to justify the seduction of a little girl of fifteen, and later, by way of making amends, proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister. There have been evolutionists, to be sure, who believed in promiscuity, like Mr Edgar, as preferable ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... time before the significance of this immortality is grasped by the people. But when it is grasped, all the conditions of life will change. Life will become beautiful. We will have reforms that, under ordinary circumstances, would have taken countless ages to bring about. We will anticipate our evolution by thousands of centuries. At one step we will reach the ultimate ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... way they live and die on the reservation. My dear child, don't develop any sentiment for the Indian. He's as doomed as the buffalo. It's fate or life or evolution working out—whatever your fancy names it. No sickly gush will stop it. As long as the Indian has a pine or a pelt, we'll exploit him. When he has none, we'll kick him out, like the dead dog ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... fuel be thick, and the supply of air through the bars insufficient, the carbonic acid is decomposed by the red hot coke, and twice the volume of carbonic oxide is produced, and this, making its way through the fuel, burns with a pale blue flame on the surface, the result, as far as evolution of heat is concerned, being the same as if the intermediate decomposition of carbonic acid had not taken place. This property of coal has been taken advantage of by the late Sir W. Siemens in his gas producer, where the supply of air is purposely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... it is decomposed with the evolution of carbonic oxide, which may be inflamed at the mouth of the tube; but there are oxalates that give off carbonic acid gas, which, of course, will not burn. A cyanide will become decomposed and eliminate nitrogen gas, while the residue ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous

... their extirpation. It is clear that they will one day be sloughed off like a mass of dead animal tissue, even if they are not amputated like a living limb that has grown hopelessly diseased. They are as surely doomed by the slow threat of evolution as is the failure to establish trial by jury in Russia. They are tolerated by progress for the simple reason that progress is not yet ready to destroy them. Hence are all imitations of their permitted and perpetuated folly in wofully bad taste. They are more; ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... old house, so many years ago, we were very young, and it is amusing now to think of its evolution. We had so many dreams, so many theories, and we tried them all out on the old house. And like a patient, well-bred maiden aunt, the old house always accepted our changes most placidly. There never ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe

... a great change since then. A new and far- reaching philosophy is gradually displacing the old. The Christian sees that evolution is as much a law of religion as of nature. The Ethnic, or non-Christian, religions are no longer treated as outside the pale of the Divine government. Each falls into its place as part of a vast divinely appointed scheme, of the character ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... on to the completion of the Erie Canal. In a moral and religions, as well as in a social and commercial point of view, there is something both solemn and sublime in the completion of a great thoroughfare. It indicates not only the march of mind and a higher type of society, but the evolution ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... Marxism in England. Public opinion altogether failed to recognise the greatness of Marx during his lifetime, but every year that passes adds strength to the conviction that the broad principles he promulgated will guide the evolution of society during the present century. Marx demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of commercialism and formulated the demand for the communal ownership and organisation of industry; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the value of this service to humanity. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... flowers, each having its separate root, and its position determined aforehand by the will of the gardener,—each fresh plant a fresh volition. In the former you see an Indian fig-tree, as described by Milton;—all is growth, evolution, [Greek (transliterated): genesis];—each line, each word almost, begets the following, and the will of the writer is an interfusion, a continuous agency, and not a series of separate acts. Shakspeare is the height, breadth, and depth of genius: ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... explain, and I hope to the satisfaction of the candid and patient reader, the principal symptoms or circumstances of fever without the introduction of the supernatural power of spasm. To the arguments in favour of the doctrine of spasm it may be sufficient to reply, that in the evolution of medical as well as of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... word recently introduced and now overworked, meaning a task, or performance in one's trade, or calling,—doubtless a variant of stint, without that word's suggestion of allotment and limitation. It is still in the reptilian stage of evolution. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce

... though, in those instances where such a deoxidizer as chloral hydrate is accidentally present. In case of doubt, a little washed and pressed yeast should be allowed to stand with the urine for a day or two in a warm place. Alcoholic fermentation with evolution of carbonic acid gas soon sets in, and the specific gravity of the liquid is lowered considerably. This reaction points conclusively ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... re-designed upon lines of practical consistency. The experienced tester's opinion is often at this point invaluable. To illustrate the foregoing, Figs. 66, 67, and 68 are given, representing, respectively, three distinct phases in the evolution of a turbine part, namely, the coupling. Briefly, an ordinary coupling connecting a driving and a driven shaft becomes obstinate when the two separate spindles which it connects are not truly alined. The desire of turbine manufacturers has consequently been to ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... with all her strength on China was henceforth considered vital by every Japanese; and it's in this spirit that every diplomatic pattern has been woven since the die was cast in 1905. Until this signal fact has been grasped no useful analysis can be made of the evolution of present conditions. Standing behind this policy, and constantly reinforcing it, are the serried ranks of the new democracy which education and the great increase in material prosperity have been so rapidly creating. The soaring ambition which springs ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... instruments,' as those apparatus are called which interpret the electrical condition of the telegraph wire into intelligible signals. Like other mechanical creations, no doubt its growth in idea and translation into material fact was a step-by-step process of evolution, culminating at last in its ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... the Law of the Three States are together explanatory of the course of human thought and knowledge. They are thus the double key of Comte's systematisation of the philosophy of all the sciences from mathematics to physiology, and his analysis of social evolution, which is the basis of sociology. Each science contributes its philosophy. The co-ordination of all these partial philosophies produces the general Positive Philosophy. 'Thousands had cultivated science, and with splendid success; not one had conceived the philosophy ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... other side of the Rhine,—with which French musicians were seeking in the unfilled fields of their art the germs from which the future might grow. While German musicians sat stolidly in the encampments of their forebears, and arrogantly claimed to stay the evolution of the world at the barrier of their past victories, the world was moving onwards: and in the van the French plunged onward to discovery: they explored the distant realms of art, dead suns and suns lit up once more, and vanished Greece, and the Far East, after its ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... has given us a God that loves us better than an earthly father can, yet permits us in the sight of his great white throne to writhe and suffer through the endless ages of eternity in the flames of hell. But he was a priest and prophet of a greater and grander faith, that in the evolution of the unborn centuries yet to come, will strip from the Godhead all of the horrid concepts, born of the puny hate of man for ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... duties successfully in war, organization and practice in peace is most essential. Infantry may suddenly be increased without much deranging its action in the field, but cavalry cannot be hurried into an increased augmentation. In tactics simplicity in every evolution and rapidity in execution are the most important principles. This simplicity of drill, I think, might be assisted if our squadrons were divided into four divisions, zuges, or pelotons. When squadrons have 48 files in the front rank there might be four of these, while weak regiments with 36 files ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various

... evolution of religion. In the dim remote past to which the Vedas introduce us, we find the Hindus a religious, a very religious, people. There is no indication of any period when they could be called secularists. ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... remember his telling me that a single short story of his, called 'The Vengeance of Vera Dalrymple,' had been instrumental in securing no less than thirty perfect specimens. Poor George! I was with him when he made his first attempt on the Scrutinizer. He had baited his hook with an essay on Evolution. He read me one or two passages from it. I stopped him at the third paragraph, and congratulated him in advance, little thinking that it was sympathy rather than congratulations that he needed. When I saw him a week afterwards ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... these elements, this important advance in theoretical chemistry was subsequently put to profitable use by Gustav Wendt from an evolutionary point of view. He endeavoured to show that the various elements are products of evolution or of historically originating combinations of seven primary elements, and that these last again are historical products of one single primitive element This hypothetical original matter had been already designated by Crookes, in his Genesis ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... number of spindles grew steadily larger. This rise of great manufacturing concerns was facilitated by a new order of corporation laws. There had been corporations in the country before 1830, as the Waltham case shows; but the system had had little evolution, as incorporation had in each case to proceed from a special legislative act. In 1837 Connecticut passed a statute making this unnecessary and enabling a group of persons to become a corporation on complying with ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... a prince whose dignity has been insulted may justly inflict the most barbarous punishment on the offender. Theologians have, since the days of Thomas Aquinas, wasted whole reams of parchment in defending the dogma of hell, because they knew nothing whatever of comparative jurisprudence and the evolution of moral ideas. To us the development of the doctrine is clear. In the Christian doctrine of hell we have a flagrant survival of the early barbaric theory of punishment. Modern divines—while continuing to describe the non-religious ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... instrument in the Basque and Northern provinces is the bagpipe, and the dances are quite different from those of the other parts of Spain. The zortico zorisco, or "evolution of eight," is danced to sound of tambourines, fifes, and a kind of flageolet—el silbato, resembling the rude instruments of the Roman Pifferari—probably of the ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... intellectual, our spiritual, our aesthetic ancestors who were the molders of English history and English thought, the interpreters of English emotion, the masters of the developing English mores that became our mores, and have since continued evolution with a difference. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, Wycliffe, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley, Elizabeth, Cromwell, and the great Whigs, these made the only tradition that can be called Anglo-Saxon, and if we have an American tradition, as ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... to a comprehension of that which lies around us—development and design, evolution and purpose; God's way and God's intent. Neither alone will solve the problem. These are the two limbs of the right angle which meet at the first life-cell found on earth, and lead out until we find man at one extremity and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... over forty-two centuries, as a self-governing and separate state, and of special, creative civilization, and are a peace-loving race. We claim a right to be sharers in the world's enlightenment, and contributors in the evolution of mankind. With a distinctive and world-wide glorious past, and with our healthy national spirit, we should never be subjected to inhuman and unnatural oppression, nor assimilation by another race; and still less could we submit to the materialistic subjugation by the ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... learn without any labour, and that self-acquired knowledge is far more readily retained than facts which are crammed down one's throat. More especially she applied this to history. Instead of making it a dry catalogue of dates of kings and battles, she tried to show the gradual evolution of the British nation from the barbarism of the Stone Age to present-day civilization. She dwelt much on folk-lore, ancient customs and traditions, and especially encouraged the study of all local legends and observances. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... a vicious "sizzzz" announced the evolution of a great puff of red gas, "we can never do it in two minutes. Better not attract the rest of the household by your racket. They may possibly ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin

... unselfish, though prosaic. You will accept resignation with an occasional sigh, feeling that you have gone far, perhaps as far as you can go. I trust that solution will not come quickly, however, because I cannot regard it as a brilliant ending to your evolution. For you have kept yourself sweet and clean from fads, and mean pushing, and the vulgar machinery of society. You never forced your way or intrigued. You have talked and smiled and bewitched yourself straight to the point where you now are. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... however, is racially the most distinctly foreign element in America. He belongs to a period of biological and racial evolution far removed from that of the white man. His habitat is the continent of the elephant and the lion, the mango and the palm, while that of the race into whose state he has been thrust is the continent of the horse and the cow, of ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... thought. The unwillingness of society to embrace the hypothesis was justified by the same lack of evidence which prevented the thinkers themselves from giving it proof. And if no Darwin had appeared, the problem of evolution would have been left about where it had been left by the speculations of the Greek mind. Darwin reached his conclusion by what that other great scientific genius in England, Newton, described as the essential of ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... others go back to Jewish, Grecian, and Roman history for their origin. Wherever they originated, their practical enforcement has been a slow and unequal growth among various peoples, and it is always the evident result of an evolution, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... an old story now that the true history of philosophy is the true evolution of philosophy, and that when we have eliminated whatever has been damaged by contemporary criticism or by subsequent advance, and have assimilated all that has survived through the ages, we shall find in our possession not ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... and then only will he appreciate that closets are even more essential than cozy corners and unexpected nooks and crannies for holding pieces of statuary and collecting dust. If a woman could be the "& Company" of every firm of architects, there would be an evolution in home building which would lengthen the lives and shorten the labors of "lady-managers" in many lands. When that comfortable wish becomes a reality, let us hope that "Let there be light" will be printed in large black letters across the space to be occupied by each closet ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... evolution, the “city fathers” build a theatre in connection with their casino, and (persuading the government to wink at their evasion of the gambling laws) add games of chance to the other temptations ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... overturned, for, instead, new principles were added to old ones as new conditions demanded. They learned how to modulate, how to transpose from one key to the next key and finally to the keys farthest away. In his treatise on harmony Fetis studied this evolution in a masterly manner. Unfortunately his scholarship was not combined with deep musical feeling. For example, he saw faults in Mozart and Beethoven where there are only beauties, and beauties which even an ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... England, France, and the United States the idea of justice is that an individual has certain fundamental and inalienable rights which even the State cannot override, and none of these fundamental rights have been more highly valued in the evolution of English liberty than the rights of a defendant who is charged with crime. Whether guilty or not guilty, he cannot be arrested without a judicial warrant on proof of probable cause; he may not be compelled to testify against himself; he is entitled to a speedy trial and shall be informed in advance ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck

... indeed, believe in historical Christianity, but he had the profoundest convictions of an overruling God, reigning in justice, and making the wrath of man to praise Him. Carlyle, too, despised everything visionary and indefinite, and had more respect for what is brought about by revolution than by evolution. But of all things he held in profoundest abhorrence the dreary theories of materialists and political economists. It was the spirit and not the body which stood out in his eyes as of most importance; it was the manly virtues which he reverenced in man, not his clothes and surroundings. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... fiery mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell; A jelly fish and a saurian, And the caves where the cave men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty And a face turned from the clod, Some call it evolution, And others call ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... add, that Fitzjames cared very little for what may be called the scientific argument. He was indifferent to Darwinism and to theories of evolution. They might be of historical interest, but did not affect the main argument. The facts are here; how they came to be here is altogether a minor question. Oddly enough, I find him expressing this ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... shapes itself to his reason, his imagination, ever more and more articulately, shares also the divine joy in that process of the formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of creation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is creator, himself actually a participator in the creative function. And by such a philosophy, he assures us, it was his experience that ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater

... unworthiness in the person you care for. Now with me one of the hardest things to bear is the fact that I've nothing to blame but myself. I'm not adequate, that's the trouble; no charm, you see,' Mr. Kane again almost mused, 'no charm. Charm is the great thing, and it means more than it seems to mean, all evolution, the survival of the fittest—natural selection—is in it, when you come to think of it. If I'd had charm, personality, or, well, greatness of some sort, I'd have probably won Althea long ago. You know, of course, that it's Althea I'm in love with, and have been for years and years. Well, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... the drama was both pleasant and profitable. The probabilities are that if a certain production had realized the hopes of its authors, he would have continued in the dramatic line. It was the beginning of that evolution of the stage that culminated in the ascendency, for a time, of ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... and up, filling it out, crowding it in; and all, really, without difficulty, for it was, every word of it, thanks to a long evolution of feeling, what she had been primed to the brim with. She made the picture, forced it upon him, hung it before him; remembering, happily, how he had gone so far, one day, supported by the Principino, as to propose the Zoo in Eaton Square, to carry with him ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... case of reverse evolution," said Calhoun. "Maybe pithecanthropus had a monkey uncle, but no pithecanthropus ever ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... this period brings us to the second stage in the evolution of the oratorio; namely, the passion-music, which may be regarded as the connecting link between the earlier form as developed by the Italian composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the oratorio as it appeared after it had felt the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... as he has made himself; man will be as he makes himself. This is a very simple theory, surely. It is not at all difficult to understand the Buddhist standpoint in the matter. It is merely the theory of evolution applied to the soul, with this difference: that in its later stages it has become a deliberate and a conscious evolution, and not an ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... less than forty thousand inhabitants. Peter Cooper was to see the city grow to two million. For seventy-one years after his majority he was to take an active and intelligent interest in its evolution, tinting its best thought and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... official ears and begin to balk and kick mule fashion. Often they were good men in every other particular, but they were simply queer reversions to type—which indicates that at one time, not so far back in the history of evolution, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... thousand new schemes of material technique and of social, institutional life where the lower culture found all it needed with simple devices. It is an unfolding not dissimilar to that which the plants and the animals have shown in their organic life in the long periods of natural evolution. The development from the infusors to the monkeys was such a steady increase in the manifoldness of functions. The butterfly is as well adjusted to its life conditions and as well off as the fish, and the fish as well off as the elephant, and in the evolution of economic ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it, however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a different context. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and to have grown it must have followed its own line of evolution, inevitably and in its own medium; and that, whether or not it has been "taken", as they say, "from life". The more alive it is the less likely is it to have been "taken", to have been seized, hauled by the scruff of its neck out of the dense web of the actual. All ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are, in fact, so manifold nowadays, that one might doubt whether this fruit could still come to maturity. The extent and towering structure of the sciences have increased enormously, and therewith also the probability that the philosopher ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... removed from accidents of interrupted development; might not, would not this creature, in process of time—ages, if necessary—have that rudimentary intelligence developed? There is no impossibility in this; it is only the natural process of evolution. In the beginning, the instincts of animals are confined to alimentation, self-protection, and the multiplication of their species. As time goes on and the needs of life become more complex, power follows need. We have been long accustomed to consider growth as applied almost exclusively to size ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... of the earth's surface carry in their stratification indelible records harmonizing with this scriptural arrangement of the evolution of the earth from its chaotic misty past to its ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... not necessary accompaniments of color. Thick lips do not inherently belong with a dark skin. Coarseness of feature belongs to white people, long degraded, as well, and is to be eliminated in them also by the evolution which takes place ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various

... had absolutely no effect to stay the evolution of a strong public opinion against the institution of slavery. The latest recorded sale of a slave was in 1802, and slavery gradually died out as a fact, although it was possible in law until the Imperial Act of 1833, freeing all slaves ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... travel-literature, Imperialism in Italy Individual, contrasted with race Insomnia Intelligence, its two ingredients Isola Liri Italians, evolution of new type Italy, reasons for visiting; over-policed Ives, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... you know, I have often had a dream (Work it up in your next month's article) Of man's poor spirit in its progress, still Losing true life for ever and a day Through ever trying to be and ever being— In the evolution of successive spheres— Before its actual sphere and place of life, Halfway into the next, which having reached, It shoots with corresponding foolery Halfway into the next still, on and off! As when a traveller, bound from North to South, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... range of topics, and the thread which binds them more or less intimately into one connected story is only imperfectly expressed in the title "The Evolution of the Dragon". ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... less with divinity; since it is by deviating painfully, conscientiously, and at some periods dangerously, from the established divinity, that his fathers have achieved their station in the great drama of the national evolution. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... 'In performing this evolution the second astern of the leader in each column is to pass through the line astern of the ship next ahead [sic] of where her leader broke through, and so on in succession, breaking through all parts of the enemy's line ahead [sic] of their ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... here immediately under discussion,—the annexation, even, of Hawaii would be no mere sporadic effort, irrational because disconnected from an adequate motive, but a first-fruit and a token that the nation in its evolution has aroused itself to the necessity of carrying its life—that has been the happiness of those under its influence—beyond the borders which heretofore have sufficed for its activities. That the vaunted blessings of our economy are not to be forced upon the ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... headship of the crown on a generally acknowledged triple principle of self-government, self-support and self-defence. The principle is more fully applied in some parts of the empire than in others; there are some parts which have not yet completed their political evolution; some others in which the principle is temporarily or for special reasons in abeyance; others, again—chiefly those of very small extent, which are held for purposes of the defence or advantage of the whole—to which it is not ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... the mind. It is as though we had two streams of thought, one of which we allow to flow freely, the other of which we are constantly repressing, pushing back into the subconscious, or unconscious. This matter of the evolution of our individual mental life is too long a story to bore you with ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... poetic tradition, or by the scientific labours of an editor of the sixth century B.C. We shall endeavour to prove, what we have already indicated, that the hypotheses of expansion are not self-consistent, or in accordance with what is known of the evolution of early national poetry. The strongest part, perhaps, of our argument is to rest on our interpretation of archaeological evidence, though we shall not neglect the more disputable or less convincing contentions of ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... Reformers no break with the past could be too abrupt and precipitous: the framers of the English Liturgy had rather adopted the principle of evolution than of development by catastrophe, and had wedded what was noblest in old Latin forms and prayers to music of the choicest English speech. To this service, for which their fellow-religionists in England were dying at the stake, the non-Frankfortian exiles were attached. ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... woman at the table. She turned a curious yellow colour, and her golden-brown eyes appeared to perform an evolution in her head that, for a moment, showed nothing of them but ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... in the world will not help him to them. But give him a dictionary catalogue, and he has, in the same alphabet with his Darwin, (if the library is large) dozens of books discussing the theory of that great naturalist, under species, evolution, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... judiciously and on so grand a scale as Sainte-Beuve; in this respect, we are all his pupils; literary, philosophic, and religious criticism in books, and even in the newspapers, is to-day entirely changed by his method. Ulterior evolution must start from this point. I have often attempted to expose what this evolution is; in my opinion, it is a new road open to history and which I shall strive to describe more ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... The evolution of the violin is a matter which can be traced back to the dark ages, but the fifteenth century may be considered as the period when the art of making instruments of the viol class took root in Italy. It cannot be said, however, that the violin, with the modelled ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee

... manifold ways, nature and life witness to the universality of vicarious service and suffering. Indeed, the very basis of the doctrine of evolution is the fact that the life of the higher rests upon the death of the lower. The astronomers tell us that the sun ripens our harvests by burning itself up. Each golden sheaf, each orange bough, each bunch of figs, costs the sun thousands of tons ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... to have undergone a change similar to that produced by boiling.' Judging from the results, Professor Erni believes 'that alcoholic fermentation is caused by the development of fungi. He could never trace the process without observing at the very first evolution of carbonic acid, the formation of yeast-cells, although it is very difficult to decide certainly which precedes the other.' His own opinion is in favour of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various

... clearly portrayed. In the nature of the case, for a modernist Christian, such a person is to be found alone in our Lord Jesus Christ. By such he is now hailed, and continually announced, as the advanced man, the quintessent demonstration of evolution as applied to humanity, the way-shower, the exemplar and true copy. He is incarnate altruism. His whole life was self-denial. His daily interest was in social conditions. To him society was the objective, the individual an incident. ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... evolution—it must be given many times before it becomes a part of the man himself. Oratory is the ability to weld a mass of people into absolutely one mood. To do this the orator must lose himself in his subject—he must cast ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... general tendency in the evolution of legislative courts is to provide for tenure during good behavior. This is true of the judges of the Court of Claims, the Customs Court, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. The terms of the judges of the Tax Court are limited to twelve years and the judges ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... the stranger at this present stage of their evolution were not, like those of Amanda and Rebecca, the mere instinctive feminine craving for masculine admiration. She did not think of herself in relation to him at all. A great hunger possessed her to know him—all his thoughts, his emotions, the depths and the ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin

... submitted the question of lay representation. It failed of securing a majority vote. Had it carried, there would have been plausibility in the argument this day made against the eligibility of women to seats in this General Conference. The evolution of the succeeding eight years lifted woman to a higher appreciation of her position in the Methodist Church, and her rights and privileges became the theme of discussion throughout the bounds of the Church. Among the champions for woman was that magnificent man, ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... been comparatively recent that the seminaries of America have begun what they term a reconstruction of the seminary curriculum. The most of these men and women were middle-aged persons and had taken their courses before the evolution took place. Of the sixty-four who have had professional training, forty-five have had the traditional seminary courses which contained no work in "scientific religious education." I am not at this point arguing whether they were ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... a conviction that heredity plays its part in the evolution of genius, and her belief that the world will be inspired by the possession of her Thoughts is too artless to be offensive. She evidently has respect for rich material confided to her teacher, and one can imagine Miss Dearborn's woe had she been confronted by Rebecca's ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... This movement, under the guise of Christian Science, and ingenuously calling out a closer inquiry into Oriental philosophy, prefigures itself to us as one of the most potent factors in the social evolution of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. History shows the curious fact that the closing years of every century are years of more intense life, manifested in unrest or in aspiration, and scholars of special research, like Prof. Max Muller, assert that ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy

... Christianity, divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purely natural and human terms. Another chapter has fixed the general trend of the universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement, under the name of Evolution. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... the progress of the fable more clearly than could be affected by the ordinary course of narration. In fact every lover of our old poetry will recollect a hundred pieces in which the same form of evolution is observed. Thus in 'Johnie ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal,—that all are equally "lineal descendants of sense few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... that we may know in life is this, that it is impossible for man to know anything absolutely. The power of reasoning is a mere "by-product in the process of Evolution." It is but an instrument to help out the confusion of the senses, and it is conditioned by the accuracy of the sense-perceptions with which it deals. There is no appeal from experience to reason, for reason is powerless to act ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan



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