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Locomotion   /lˌoʊkəmˈoʊʃən/   Listen
Locomotion

noun
1.
The power or ability to move.  Synonyms: motive power, motivity.
2.
Self-propelled movement.  Synonym: travel.






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"Locomotion" Quotes from Famous Books



... progress of civilization. Lord Macaulay declares that of all inventions, the alphabet and printing-press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter

... and if his flatterers told lies, they had told more wicked ones. The pipes all went out, and the broken-nosed pitcher languished in disuse as he trotted from one pair of outstretched arms to another to give an exhibition of his progress in the noble art of locomotion; and if he now and again sat down, unexpectedly to himself and to the spectator, he was promptly put upon his feet again with spurious applause and encouragement. He gave an exhibition of his dancing—a funny little shuffle of exceeding temerity, considering ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... averaging in distance about two hundred miles a week, with as much regularity as is done today by the steam-car its five hundred miles a day; but those days are gone, and, though I recognize the great national advantages of the more rapid locomotion, I cannot help occasionally regretting the change. One instance in 1866 rises in my memory, which I must record: Returning eastward from Fort Garland, we ascended the Rocky Mountains to the Sangre-de- Cristo Pass. The road descending the mountain ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... regimentals. "I'd run away with him," she added, with animation, "if—if both his legs were shot off,"—not considering duly, I dare say, how greatly such a dreadful mutilation, however glorious in itself, would conflict with the rapid locomotion essential to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... beautifully. The ashes of him and Keats sleep together in the Protestant chapel at Rome. I am resolved once more to visit Lirici, where the funeral pile of his relics were lighted. I am never so happy as when I am travelling on the Continent; the mere change of air, and locomotion, gives me vigour. I saw old Sir William Wraxall at Dover, a few days before he died, and meant to have accompanied him to Paris. He was still full of anecdote, to which it was necessary to listen with caution; but his information was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various

... inspiration in the matter; although, on the other hand, his sanguinary and despotic government was not, to my humble thinking, entirely devoid of reproach. Once only in my life have I used that method of locomotion, and I can truly say I found it far superior, in spite of its inferior relative rapidity, to the headlong course of what in England are called railways; where speed is attained only at the price ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... imperious every moment. He felt that he must do something to relieve it. He knew where the interview with Dino was taking place. Mrs. Luttrell had lately been growing somewhat infirm: a slight stroke of paralysis, dangerous only in that it was probably the precursor of other attacks, had rendered locomotion particularly distasteful to her. She did not like to feel that she was dependent upon others for aid, and, therefore, sat usually in a wheeled chair in her dressing-room, and it was the most easily accessible room from her sleeping apartment. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... directions; changes in dress and appliances of all kinds are comparatively inexpensive to him owing to the cheapness of manufactures and their variety; change of scene is easy from the conveniences of locomotion. But a barbarian has none of these facilities: his interests are few; his dress, such as it is, is intended to stand the wear and tear of years, and all weathers; it is relatively very costly, and is ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... ammunition will depend upon a reply to these questions, and the purchaser should strongly resist the delusion that any one particular description will be perfect as a so-called general rifle. You may as well expect one kind of horse or one pattern of ship to combine all the requirements of locomotion as to suppose that a particular rifle will suit every variety of game or condition ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... Caoutchouc City. There are many, of course, who go their ways, making money, without turning to the right or the left, but there is a tribe abroad wonderfully composed, like the Martians, solely of eyes and means of locomotion. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... dismounted, with the laborious clumsiness of the man brought up to other means of locomotion, tied Jane to a tree, and threw himself down at the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... apparition (entered in various log-books) agreed in most respects as to the shape of the object or creature in question, the untiring rapidity of its movements, its surprising power of locomotion, and the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. If it was a whale, it surpassed in size all those hitherto classified in science. Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times—rejecting ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... time that I understand the nervous system well enough to direct the laboratory of nature and cause it through its skilled arts to unload, or reduce, he who is over-burdened with a super-abundance of flesh, and add to the scanty muscle a sufficiency to give power of comfortable locomotion and other forces, by opening the gate of the supply trains ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... then, that our problem of individual and national economy is solely that of the maximum of pounds raisable against gravity, the maximum of locomotion, or of agitation of any sort, that human beings can accomplish. That might signify little more than hurrying and jumping about in inco-ordinated ways; whereas inner work, though it so often reinforces outer work, quite as often means ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... way. It then becomes a work of charity for the more opulent of the faithful to speed them on the journey. But that they depend on such means of travelling is reason sufficient to account for long in their line of locomotion, and for their congregating here in considerable numbers. Of all places likely to maintain the constant infection of plague, this must be one of the first: for notoriously among no people is the disease so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... coign of vantage, and from the Grand Stand in Donegal Place the sight was truly wonderful. The vast space, right, left, and front, was from 10 o'clock closely packed with a mighty multitude that no man could number, and locomotion became every moment so painful as to threaten total stagnation. The crowd was eminently respectable and perfectly orderly, and submitted to the passage of innumerable musical organisations with charming good humour. Never ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... could not help passing a remark to Mr Verloc that "mother has been spending half-crowns and five shillings almost every day this last week in cab fares." But the remark was not made grudgingly. Winnie respected her mother's infirmities. She was only a little surprised at this sudden mania for locomotion. Mr Verloc, who was sufficiently magnificent in his way, had grunted the remark impatiently aside as interfering with his meditations. These were frequent, deep, and prolonged; they bore upon a matter more important than five shillings. Distinctly ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... appears from the chronicles the most complicated to unravel of that of any of the kingly suburbs of old Paris, though in the days of the old locomotion a townlet twenty-six kilometres from the capital was hardly to be thought ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... readily to their various hosts, hence we have a great variety of forms. But they all agree in certain characters; all take their food and oxygen and carry on excretory processes by osmosis, i.e., through the body-wall; all are capable of some kind of locomotion, some have one or more flagella, others move by a pseudopod movement. Some are capable of moving from cell to cell in the body as do the white blood-corpuscles. They all agree in the production ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... the bar-keeper had gone off with the horses. I had not descended from the carriage; but there I was, planted alone,—the President of the Republic left on the top of the hill in his carriage without means of locomotion! On looking round I saw Jack, and with Jack I saw also a lady, shrouded from head to foot in black garments, with a veil over her face, whom I knew, from the little round hat upon her head, to be Eva. Jack came up to me, but where Eva went I could not see. "Shall we walk down ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope

... prison-cell she might hold over him in terrorem the threat of making known to Ida's mother the secret of her child's existence. All was not lost. She walked quietly to the carriage in waiting, while her companions, in an ecstasy of terror, seemed to have lost the power of locomotion, and had to be ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger

... view of life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law's landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... it is not entirely idle to consider the effect of scientific progress on the march of human affairs, as so often exemplified in history. Whether that half-century of continuous war would have been possible with the artillery, means of locomotion, and other machinery of destruction and communication now so terribly familiar to the world, can hardly be a question. The preterhuman prolixity of negotiation which appals us in the days when steam and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... troublesome creature gained admission to the hive, which, from its unwieldiness, they could not remove, and which, from the impenetrability of its shell, they could not destroy: here then their only resource was to deprive it of locomotion, and to obviate putrefaction; both which objects they accomplished most skilfully and securely—and as is usual with these sagacious creatures, at the least possible expense of labor and materials. They applied their cement where alone it was required, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... done to favor their intellectual development; indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant. Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields. Intercommunication and locomotion, which tend so powerfully to expand the ideas, received no encouragement; the majority of men died without ever having ventured out of the neighborhood in which they were born. For them there was no hope of personal improvement, none of the bettering of their lot; there ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... modern labor digs deep in ruined cities, because it cannot equal them from its own genius; it had roads, which are almost eternal, and which, for their purposes, show a luxury of wealth and labor that our boasted locomotion cannot rival. These are its works of a larger scale. And if you enter the palaces, you find pictures of matchless worth, rich dresses which modern looms cannot rival, and sumptuous furniture at which ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... pitching downward in the most headlong manner, taking on at the same time a sharp lateral slant. The brake creaked, and screamed, the wheels scraped and wabbled in their loose-jointed fashion, the horses, almost on their haunches, gave up their usual mode of locomotion, and coasted unceremoniously along, their four feet gathered together in ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... "The Breath of a Bird," from which we make a brief quotation. "Birds require, comparatively, a vastly greater strength and 'wind' in traversing such a thin, unsupporting medium as air than animals need for terrestrial locomotion. Even more wonderful than mere flight is the performance of a bird when it springs from the ground, and goes circling upward higher and higher on rapidly beating wings, all the while pouring forth a continuous series of musical notes.... A human singer is compelled ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch

... American slave? Where may he assemble? Where is his Conciliation Hall? Where are his newspapers? Where is his right of petition? Where is his freedom of speech? his liberty of the press? and his right of locomotion? He is said to be happy; happy men can speak. But ask the slave what is his condition—what his state of mind—what he thinks of enslavement? and you had as well address your inquiries to the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved. We are left to gather his feelings ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... too.... She is playing cat and mouse with me ... still she can hardly wish me harm. I will give myself up to her for the last time—and then.... But if she is drinking my blood? That's awful. Besides, such rapid locomotion cannot fail to be injurious; even in England, I'm told, on the railways, it's against the law to go more than one hundred ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev

... that the advance of flying machines will be so rapid that within the next decade they will be used with as much ease and safety as any other means of present locomotion. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... He had just come from a feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... dishes. [458] Diamonds and amethysts are plentiful as blackberries. If you are a poet, and you make good verses, it is likely enough that some queen will stuff your mouth with balass rubies. How poorly our modern means of locomotion compare with those of the Nights. If you take a jinni or a swan-maiden you can go from Cairo to Bokhara in less time than our best expresses could cover a mile. The recent battles between the Russians and the Japanese are mere skirmishes compared ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... of Hipparitherium. Each foot possesses three complete toes: while the lateral toes are much larger in proportion to the middle toe than in Hipparion, and doubtless rested on the ground in ordinary locomotion. The ulna is complete and quite distinct from the radius, although firmly united with the latter. The fibula seems also to have been complete; its lower end, though intimately united with that of the tibia, is clearly united with that of the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... fain to journey like the rest on horseback, but she was so well accustomed to that mode of locomotion that she suffered much less than might have been expected. Besides, her son had taken care to secure for her the quietest, meekest, and most easy-going horse belonging to the tribe—a creature whose natural spirit had been reduced by hardship and age to absolute quiescence, ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne

... necessary to admit a prosaic fact hitherto concealed from the Reader. Narcissus rode a bicycle. It was, I must confess, a rather 'modern' thing to do. But surely the flashing airy wheel is the most poetical mode of locomotion yet invented, and one looks more like a fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious, county—road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans to his mystic tryst; ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... was not only healthful in itself, but it was acknowledged that, in case of necessity, it might become a very useful means of locomotion. As Captain Servadac remarked, it was almost a substitute for railways, and as if to illustrate this proposition, Lieutenant Procope, perhaps the greatest expert in the party, accomplished the twenty miles to Gourbi Island and back in ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... consistent. Who ever is or can be? Every extreme—every opinion carried to its logical end—will prove to be an absurdity. Plants throw out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion; and as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril without regarding it as a melancholy ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... "But will God dwell on the earth? (37) Behold the heavens and earth cannot contain thee," inasmuch as they do not expressly state that God does not move from place to place, but only imply it, must be explained away till they have no further semblance of denying locomotion to the Deity. (38) So also we must believe that the sky is the habitation and throne of God, for Scripture expressly says so; and similarly many passages expressing the opinions of the prophets or the multitude, which reason and philosophy, ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza

... Its mode of locomotion marks it as an idiosyncratic, exceptional, fantastic creature, having no fellow, that I know of, in the insect world. Though endowed with legs—a trifle short, it is true, but after all as good as those ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... the last chapter, France was destined to receive a more urgent stimulus than ever before to develop the resources of ballooning, and, in hot haste, to turn to the most serious and practical account all the best resources of aerial locomotion. The stern necessity of war was upon her, and during four months the sole mode of exit from Paris—nay, the only possible means of conveying a simple message beyond the boundary of ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... Prometheus created the first man, Momus considered his work incomplete because there was no aperture in the breast through which his inmost thoughts might be read. He {150} also found fault with a house built by Athene because, being unprovided with the means of locomotion, it could never be removed from an unhealthy locality. Aphrodite alone defied his criticism, for, to his great chagrin, he could find no fault ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens

... subsequent hot march—as men always will, under like circumstances—and now they found themselves blanketless, stockingless, overcoatless,—in cold and damp trenches, and compelled by the steady firing to lie still, or adopt a horizontal, crawling mode of locomotion, which did not admit of speed enough to quicken the circulation of the blood. Some took clothing from the dead and wrapped themselves in it; others, who were fortunate enough to procure spades, ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill

... reasonably sure means of getting over the country—always ready when you are ready, subservient to your whim to visit some inaccessible old ruin, flying over the broad main highways or winding more cautiously in the unfrequented country byways—and is, withal, a method of locomotion to which the English people have become tolerant if not positively friendly. Further, I am sure it will be welcome news to many that the expense of such a trip, under ordinary conditions, is not at all exorbitant or out of the reach of ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... occasionally a specimen of the old days: rickety cab, thin horse and fat, red-faced cocher; but such an equipage seems to be in demand only by the very timid who are afraid to trust themselves to the modern means of locomotion. Those poor souls are not, as a rule, on the boulevards at this hour, but shut snugly behind doors, locked and barred, safe from the "dread Apaches and all the ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed

... his pranks before him. Whether we call it snake or devil matters little. I could but admire his terrible beauty, however; his black, shining folds, his easy, gliding movement, head erect, eyes glistening, tongue playing like subtle flame, and the invisible means of his almost winged locomotion. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... development; but in fact the embryo, during its growth, may become less, as well as more, complicated{465}. Thus certain female Epizoic Crustaceans in their mature state have neither eyes nor any organs of locomotion; they consist of a mere sack, with a simple apparatus for digestion and procreation; and when once attached to the body of the fish, on which they prey, they never move again during their whole lives: in their embryonic condition, on the other hand, they ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... the purpose of these spirited tales to convey in a realistic way the wonderful advances in land and sea locomotion. Stories like these impress themselves on the youthful memory and their reading ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton

... In another section, locomotion is effected by a modification of ciliary apparatus. We have a familiar example in the Beroe of our own seas, a most attractive little being, and a prime favourite with naturalists, who have described its habits and celebrated its beauty with enthusiasm. We shall not soon forget the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... recommended in the case of citizens of the United States destitute or sick under such circumstances. It is well known that such citizens resort to foreign countries in great numbers. Though most of them are able to bear the expenses incident to locomotion, there are some who, through accident or otherwise, become penniless, and have no friends at home able to succor them. Persons in this situation must either perish, cast themselves upon the charity of foreigners, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant

... to the front by carrying parties. Company commanders made a last reconnaissance of their positions. For Private Cowan it was a moment of double waiting. Waiting for battle was now secondary. In a tiny slit trench on the forward edge of a railway embankment Private Brennon remarked upon the locomotion of ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... particulars he has evolved, what are the conditions which distinguish him from the lower animals. Four marked distinctions may be named: his erect attitude, with the freeing of the fore limbs from use as agents in locomotion; his employment of natural objects, instead of his bodily organs, as tools and weapons; his development of vocal language; and his great mental superiority, with the general use of the mind in his dealings ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... education and refined tastes,—the intense community of ideas, through the all-pervading influence of a daily press reaching with simultaneous diffusion over thousands of square miles,—the facilities of locomotion,—all inevitably cooperate with commercial necessities to create great cities,—not merely as the homes of the mercantile and wealthy class, but as centres where the leisure, the tastes, the pride, and the wants of the people at large repair more and more for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... travelled to —— in a stupendous machine, of which now I recollect only that it seemed to take years out of my little life in arriving at its destination, and that, on its broad, substantial rear, it bore the effigy of "an ancient Briton." Locomotion then, like me, was in a state of infancy. On the occasion of my second visit to the city, I had hardly time to wonder at the velocity with which I was borne along. Distance was annihilated. The two hundred miles ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... colours of folly, to arrest evanescence, to give to bubbles the globular consistency as well as form, to exhibit on the stage the piebald denizen of the stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application of satire, and too humble for the ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... her full size, she still possesses the power of locomotion, and her six legs are easily distinguishable in the under surface of her corpulent body; but at no period of her existence has she wings. It is about the time of her obtaining full size that impregnation takes place[1]; after which the scale becomes somewhat more conical, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... unlike the celebrated animal on which Don Quixote rode in pursuit of wind-mills, and things of that sort. But she had one peculiarity which is not set down in the description of Rozinante, to wit: the faculty of diagonal or oblique locomotion. This mare of Uncle Peter's went forward something after the fashion of a crab, and a little like a ship with the wind abeam, as the sailors would say. It was a standing topic of dispute among us school-boys, whether the animal ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth

... is helplessly intoxicated may almost immediately restore the faculties and powers of locomotion by taking half a teaspoonful of chloride of ammonium in a goblet of water. A wineglassful of strong vinegar will have the same effect and is frequently resorted to by drunken ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... the heart out of him. "I'm a waster!" he said aghast. And then, at the sound of his own voice, a fear came over him, a fear of his own nature; and he started to his feet and strode feverishly, as if by mere locomotion, to escape from his clinging and inherent ill. It was as if he were trying ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... concludes by citing the same number thirteen. The soul which is essentially unaffected, becomes subject to happiness and misery through the thirteen, viz., the ten organs of locomotion and sense, and intellect mind and egoism. But Atichhanadas, i.e., those that have surmounted ignorance, namely, the twelve, virtue, etc. destroy those ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... joke, and we have only drawn attention for an instant to the errors of the past in order to draw a warning for the future. It must ever be lamented that the introduction of so stupendous and useful a thing as locomotion by rail, should have become the occasion of such widespread cupidity and folly; for scarcely ever had science offered a more gracious boon to mankind. It is charitable to think that the foundation of the great error that was committed, lay in a miscalculation as to the relation ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various

... indeed a busy week. Each of the three boys was to take his dog-train. They would be expected to take on their own sleds their beds, clothing, and part of the supplies. Snowshoes were made for them, and every day they diligently practiced this new method of locomotion. They had many amusing tumbles. Sometimes, where the snowdrifts were deep, when they attempted to pass over, they somehow or other would get the snowshoes so tangled up that over they would go on their heads. The more they ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... the meetings varied according to the distance to be traversed. In an immense majority of cases the means of locomotion are not even mentioned, presumably therefore the witches went on foot, as would naturally be the case in going to the local meeting or Esbat, which was attended only by those who lived near. There are, however, a few instances ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... benedictions or bows. I shall be at peace with all, and shall not accept gifts. I shall not mock anybody, nor shall I knit my brows at any one, but shall be ever cheerful and devoted to the good of all creatures. I shall not harm any of the four orders of life gifted with power of locomotion or otherwise, viz., oviparous and viviparous creatures and worms and vegetables. But on the contrary, preserve an equality of behaviour towards all, as if they were, my own children. Once a day shall I beg of five ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... dislocation at the hip and flexion ankylosis at the knees; should the child survive, the degree of crippling may be pitiable in the extreme; prolonged orthopaedic treatment and a series of operations—arthroplasty, osteotomies, and resections—may be required to restore even a limited capacity of locomotion. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... may, in the bleak short days, we behold men of weight and influence threading the great vortex of French Locomotion, each on his several line, from all sides of France towards the Chateau of Versailles: summoned thither de par le roi. There, on the 22d day of February 1787, they have met, and got installed: Notables to the number of a Hundred and Thirty-seven, as we ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... notorious Dr. Fian ran thus: "Fylit for suffering himself to be careit to North Berwik kirk, as if he had bene souchand athoirt [whizzing above] the eird."[2] Most effectual ointments were prepared for effecting this method of locomotion, which have been recorded, and are given below[3] as an illustration of the wild kind of recipes which Shakspere rendered more grim in his caldron scene. The efficacy of these ointments is well illustrated by a story narrated by Reginald Scot, which unfortunately, on ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... Quebec to Lorette, all of them good for carriages except one, which, from its extreme destitution of every condition essential to easy locomotion on wheels, is called, in the expressive language of the French colonists, La Misere. And yet this is the only road which, from touching various points of the River St. Charles, affords the traveller compensating glimpses of the picturesque windings of that stream. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... Under these circumstances we loitered but little on the Northern roads. At the end of May we reached Yrun. Here we sold our ponies - now quite worn out - for twenty-three dollars - about five guineas. So that a thousand miles of locomotion had cost us a little over five guineas apiece. Not counting hotels at Madrid and such smart places, our daily cost for selves and ponies rarely exceeded six pesetas, or three shillings each all told. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... Mr. Olmney was walked off to be "made acquainted" with all, or with all the chief of his parishioners then and there assembled. Fleda watched him going about, shaking hands, talking and smiling, in all directions, with about as much freedom of locomotion as a fly in a spider's web; till, at Mrs. Evelyn's approach, the others fell off a little, and taking him by the arm, she ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... as soon as possible; but, as soon as the excitement of the fight was over, Ensign Macshane was found to have no further powers of speech, sense, or locomotion, and was carried by his late antagonist to bed. His sword and pistols, which had been placed at his side at the commencement of the evening, were carefully put by, and his pocket visited. Twenty guineas in gold, a large knife—used, probably, for the cutting of bread-and-cheese—some ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... applied in the form of electrical energy, but he got 50 horse power out of the same quantity of iron and copper where Edison could only get 20 horsepower—and, though the efficiency of this generator is perfect, it could not be called an efficient motor, suitable for locomotion by land or water, because it is still too heavy. An efficient motor for locomotion purposes must not only give out in mechanical work as nearly as possible as much as the electrical energy put in, but it must be of small weight, because it has to propel itself ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various

... of Buddha[1], and the Mahawanso, describing the reign of Dhatu-Sena, A.D. 459, makes mention of "sixteen bronze statues of virgins having the power of locomotion."[2] ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... Colonel was a handsome man about forty, a gentleman Of wealth and high social position, a resident of New Orleans. He served with distinction in the confederate army, and received a wound in the leg from which he has never entirely recovered, being obliged to use a cane in locomotion. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon streaked with east wind. Glennard's cab advanced slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... to ride across Egypt or the Holy Land behind a locomotive; a prancing steed or a camel with tinkling bells seems the most fitting motive power. There is nothing sentimental about a railroad, but after all who would care to return to the old methods of locomotion? ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various

... within that height there are few places worth reaching that cannot be reached more safely. People used to harness them to balloons till we found means to drive these by electricity—the last great invention in the way of locomotion, which I think was completed within ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... the other extreme, most women stiffen the ankle-joint unduly, thus giving a straight up and down cramped walk, which is accompanied by coming down with all force upon the heel, thereby producing a jar throughout the entire nervous system, as well as an awkward locomotion. In this way all benefit of the strong, natural spring of the instep, which tends to lessen this jar and give grace and springiness to the step is lost, and much weariness of ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... to be done with the millions of Negroes at the South? The war had made them free. That was all. They could leave the plantation. They had the right of locomotion; were property no longer. But what a spectacle! Here were four million human beings without clothing, shelter, homes, and, alas! most of them without names. The galling harness of slavery had been cut off of their weary bodies, and like a worn-out beast of burden they stood in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... how obtained; the tongue; paws, including cushions; whiskers; teeth; action of tail; sounds; sharp hearing; sense of smell; cleanliness; eyes; looseness of the skin; quick waking; size of mouth; manner of catching prey; claws; care of young; locomotion; kinds of prey; enemies; protection by society for the prevention of cruelty to animals,—twenty-two topics in all. When I inquired if they would teach the length of the tail, or the shape of the head and ears, or ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... of this statement he will find ample evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on Industrial Biography, where facts and dates are adduced to show that steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised roads, coal gas, photography, anaesthesia, and even telegraphy are inventions which, so far as concerns the germ idea on which their success has been based, are of very much ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... December, 1774, Littleton Waller Tazewell first saw the light. He was a healthy child, and, like all the children who were born about that time between the waters of the York and the James, was destined to frequent locomotion to avoid the marauding parties of the British, who for several years afterwards infested that region. As his mother died when he was in his third year, and as his father, who was engaged during the youth of Littleton in the Conventions, in the House ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... locomotion, how streets, roads and paths should be laid out and maintained; the construction and use of carriages, cars, wagons, tramways, railroads, ships, steamers, propelling power; where bridges should be built, and how; viaducts and embankments to cross valleys, ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... are found in the limbs, where they act as levers to sustain the body and aid in locomotion. Eachlong bone is composed of a cylinder, known as the shaft, and two extremities. The shaft is hollow, its wails being thickest in THE middle and growing thinner toward the extremities. The extremities are usually considerably enlarged, for convenience ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... bodies in the direction our brains dictate, and that function we have reproduced and even improved upon in all the means of locomotion that we daily use and which we now consider as a "matter of fact" among the ordinary things of life. "Comparisons are odious" when we compare the awkward motion of Nature with the ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... offensive and defensive, the population of the North should be cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, it would fall back upon its rocks, bound hand and foot, to starve; or whether it would retain its power of locomotion to move southward by land. Mr. Calhoun replied, that in the latter event it would be necessary for the South to make their communities all military. Mr. Adams pressed the conversation no further, but remarked: "If the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... flying-jib, jib, fore-staysail, main-sail, mizzen, and spinnaker. There were six feet of head-room below, and she was crown-decked and flush-decked. There were four alleged WATER-TIGHT compartments. A seventy-horse power auxiliary gas-engine sporadically furnished locomotion at an approximate cost of twenty dollars per mile. A five-horse power engine ran the pumps when it was in order, and on two occasions proved capable of furnishing juice for the search-light. The storage batteries worked four or five times ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... na-ska-wa. I am afraid of the "grand medicine" woman; I go to her. [A leg is shown to signify locomotion. The singer fears the opposition of a Mid[-e] ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... interesting. But should I be willing to be so much beholden to him, and would not the wind to-day make our walk and talk difficult? Better postpone till summer weather. And after all there is Boston's most common mode of locomotion right at hand, the electric car. Strange it was not thought of before! The five-cent piece saved from the chocolates will carry me, ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... horse with a pair of saddle-bags containing his wardrobe, a stay of a day or two at some country neighbour's, or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry review, made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from Oxford, on grave nag, an old don, contemporary of the Squire; and were looked upon by the Brown household and the ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... skates, and, hurling them in the direction whence had arisen most of the remarks upon his uncertain locomotion, leaped up and charged headlong into the ranks of ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... Lamarck in his two fundamental laws (see p. 303), and when the word besoins is introduced it refers as much to the physiological needs as to the emotions of the animal resulting from some new environment which forces it to adopt new habits such as means of locomotion ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... in fortune. He had reached that period of drunkenness, and it took a vast quantity of stout liquor to bring him up to it, where his voice began to grow hoarse, his ready tongue to trip, his brain to be most completely muddled, and his legs to be most unreliable instruments of locomotion. The men about the table nodded and winked to each other, under his ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... his office, Nicholas sat himself down, to wait for school-time. He could not but observe how silent and sad the boys seemed to be. There was none of the noise and clamour of a school-room; none of its boisterous play, or hearty mirth. The only pupil who evinced the slightest tendency towards locomotion or playfulness was Master Squeers, and as his chief amusement was to tread upon the other boys' toes in his new boots, his flow of spirits was rather ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... All this is abolished now by the railway. The town itself stands on the side of a steep hill and consists of narrow streets paved with cobbles. Here as usual in the Congo, man is restricted to his primeval method of locomotion. Two iron piers jut into the stream and at their ends the European steamers discharge their cargoes into the railway trucks alongside. High up on the hill stands a capacious stone structure, the house of the Commissioner of the Matadi ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... and ringed under your own special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. But if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river, which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion scullers, you remember,) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... miles, and Longueville, who was an incorrigible stroller, felt a keen relish for the picturesqueness of the country. But it was not, on this occasion, of the charms of the landscape or the pleasures of locomotion that they chiefly discoursed. Their talk took a more closely personal turn. It was a year since they had met, and there were many questions to ask and answer, many arrears of gossip to make up. As they stretched themselves ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... Motion — N. motion, movement, move; going &c v.; unrest. stream, flow, flux, run, course, stir; evolution; kinematics; telekinesis. step, rate, pace, tread, stride, gait, port, footfall, cadence, carriage, velocity, angular velocity; clip, progress, locomotion; journey &c 266; voyage &c 267; transit &c 270. restlessness &c (changeableness) 149; mobility; movableness, motive power; laws of motion; mobilization. V. be in motion &c adj.; move, go, hie, gang, budge, stir, pass, flit; hover about, hover round, hover about; shift, slide, glide; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... reptiles. At the present day the Chelonia alone include oceanic, fresh-water, and terrestrial forms. Birds again have adapted themselves to oceanic conditions, to forests, plains, deserts, fresh waters. Mammals have repeated the process. The organs of locomotion in such cases show profound modifications, adapting them to their special functions. One thing to be explained ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... the quiver in the right hand, not only to prevent it interfering with locomotion, but to keep the arrows from rattling and falling out. When on the trail of an animal we habitually stuff a twig of leaves, a bunch of ferns or a bit of grass in the mouth of the quiver to damp the soft rustling of the arrows. Sometimes, in going through brush or ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... this locality, not being burdened with any means of locomotion beyond their own legs, usually came and went by way of the high iron bridge; their legal right of way however was by a neglected thoroughfare that had ambitiously set out to be a street, but having failed of its intention, ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester

... father were little better than prisoners as well, for no possible means of locomotion offered whereby they could get out of town; and all Heart's Desire remained aloof from them, not even the Littlest Girl coming across the arroyo to call on ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough

... Sept. 5th, 1861, and reached Utica Saturday afternoon in time to find that the stage down the valley had gone, and I must remain there until Monday morning, or use some other means of locomotion southward to Sherburne. The question I asked myself was, "Why not test your leg gear NOW, and see what you can do as a foot-man?" I answered "All right," and started out, though it was well into the afternoon. That evening I reached Oriskany ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller

... which they held themselves up as an example to the drunken had all the flavor of Phariseeism. To some the taste is not pleasing, to others the immediate effects are so terrifying as automatically to shut off excess. Many people become dizzy or nauseated almost at once and even lose the power of locomotion or speech. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... cripple—with fingers twisted out of all useful shape, and lower limbs paralyzed so that he had to drag them after him wearily when he moved through the short distances that limited his sphere of locomotion—a poor, unhappy, murmuring, and, at times, ill-natured cripple, eating the bread which a mother's hard labor procured for him. For hours every fair day, during spring, summer, and autumn, he might be seen in front of the little house where ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur

... and smoke, or read, or look out upon the passing boats, the houses, the bridges, the people, and enjoy ourselves much more than we could in a buggy jolting over our cobble-stone pavements at home. This is the gentlest, pleasantest locomotion ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... and green, and they frequently emit a pungent odour. The name has reference to the tongue-shaped muscular proboscis by which the animal works its way through the sand. The proboscis is not the only organ of locomotion, being assisted by the succeeding segment of the body, the buccal segment or collar. By the waves of contraction executed by the proboscis accompanied by inflation of the collar, progression is effected, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... your usual mode of locomotion?" said he. "Riding on a gun?" said he. "Like the Goddess of War," said he. "Perching on the belcherous ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... or the Scottish Thule, to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)—I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts settle (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... secured three kuruma,—the place stood on the limits of such locomotion,—and a crowd so dense collected about them that it blocked the way out. Everybody seemed smitten with a desire to see the strangers, which gave the inn servants, by virtue of their calling, an enviable ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... Professor Owen's "Memoir on Mylodon robustus.") The teeth indicate, by their simple structure, that these Megatheroid animals lived on vegetable food, and probably on the leaves and small twigs of trees; their ponderous forms and great strong curved claws seem so little adapted for locomotion, that some eminent naturalists have actually believed that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... ticks—a very complete form of female parasitism prevails; and while the male remains a complex, highly active, winged creature, the female, fastening itself into the flesh of some living animal and sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity and power of locomotion, having become a mere distended bladder, which, when filled with eggs, bursts and ends a parasitic existence that has hardly been life.[26] In many crustaceans, again, the females are parasitic, but this also is explained by their habit of seeking ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... times, and the greatest material force known to men, has been committed to the present generation. The progress of Steam, from the days of its first application to lifting purposes, through all of its gradations of application to railway locomotion and steamboat and steamship propulsion down to the present time, has been a series of splendid and highly useful triumphs, alike creditable to the genius of its promoters, and profitable to the nations which have ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey

... momentarily forgotten, we can quickly secure anything in the neighbourhood by a little judicious squalling. Why, then, should we whirl as bubbles or scurry as rabbits? Our conquering self-possession gives a masterful charm to life that the victims of perpetual locomotion never ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... what two inventions made within the century have wrought the greatest changes, the reply would be prompt that they are locomotion by steam and communication by electricity. The steam-engine and the steamship have made it possible to travel around the world, if not in the eighty days required of Jules Verne's hero, at least in a hundred; while the telegraph ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle

... was simply to ascend in a balloon, and wait there till the rotation of the earth conveyed the locality which happened to be his destination directly beneath him, whereupon he was to let out the gas and drop down! Ptolemy knew quite enough natural philosophy to be aware that such a proposal for locomotion would be an utter absurdity; he knew that there was no such relative shift between the air and the earth as this motion would imply. It appeared to him to be necessary that the air should lag behind, if the earth had been animated by ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... become hopeless, a new prospect was suddenly opened to us by railroads; which again, considering how much they have already exceeded the maximum of possibility, as laid down by all engineers during the progress of the Manchester and Liverpool line, may soon give way to new modes of locomotion still more astonishing to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... up his rooms there a week ago. All his letters were addressed to his club in Piccadilly. I drove thither. How has mankind contented itself for these thousands of years with a horse as its chief means of locomotion? Oh, the exasperation I suffered behind that magnified snail! I dashed into the club. Mr. Pasquale had not been there all day. No, he was not staying there. It was against the rules to give members' ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power, and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis



Words linked to "Locomotion" :   trot, lope, circuit, locomote, lap, jog, crawl, motion, stroke, move, dance step, circle, locomotive, run, motivity, creeping, walking, walk, mobility, step, movement, creep, gait, crawling, running, brachiation



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