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Mechanical   /məkˈænɪkəl/   Listen
Mechanical

adjective
1.
Using (or as if using) mechanisms or tools or devices.  "His smile was very mechanical" , "A mechanical toy"
2.
Relating to or concerned with machinery or tools.  Synonym: mechanically skillful.  "Mechanical design" , "Mechanical skills"
3.
Relating to or governed by or in accordance with mechanics.  "The mechanical pressure of a strong wind"



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"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books



... of ornaments. Large rings of this metal are worn round the neck, and upon the arms and ankles. Many of these ankle-rings are of extreme thickness, and would suffice for the punishment of prisoners. I was interested with the mechanical contrivance of the Lobore for detaching the heavy metal anklets, which, when hammered firmly together, appeared to be hopeless fixtures in the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... him, it was all the same, she thought. He cried so much, that Tom made it a reason with himself, and indeed gave it as one to Letty, for not coming home at night: the child would not let him sleep; and how was he to do his work if he had not his night's rest? It mattered little with semi-mechanical professions like medicine or the law, but how was a man to write articles such as he wrote, not to mention poetry, except he had the repose necessary to the redintegration of his exhausted brain? The baby went on crying, and the mother's heart was torn. The woman of the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... destitute of the mechanical or "doing" faculty of any man I ever saw, and never used his own hands if he could possibly help it. But ideas flowed freely upon all subjects in which he was interested, and he distributed them as freely, knowing that the reservoir ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various

... many of them having removed from their basements into new two- or three-roomed flats, and bought good furniture. They demanded more from life, but everything had become dearer, and they still lived from hand to mouth. He could see that the social development had not kept pace with the mechanical; the machines wedged themselves quietly but inexorably in between the workmen and the work, and threw more and more men out of employment. The hours of labor were not greatly shortened. Society did not seem to care ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... produced them from his pocket-book with an unshaken hand. No change of countenance, no tremulous hand, no broken voice, betrayed his apprehension. The one distinguishing mark of his manner was an absent, half-mechanical tone, as of a man whose mind is employed otherwise than in the conversation of the moment. Prompt at calculation always, he was at this crisis engaged in a kind of mental arithmetic. "The chances of defeat, so ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... Gowan had a remarkably good ear for music and knew even more than the girl about the masters and their works. There was a player attachment to the piano, and the girl and Gowan had a contest, playing the same selections in turn, to see which could get the most expression by means of the mechanical apparatus. If anything, the girl came out second best. At least she said so; but Ashton ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... again are darker-skinned than their eastern neighbours from the inner highlands. Their women are not so well dressed as the "ladies" of the Mpongwe, the chignon is smaller, and there are fewer brass rings. The men, who still cling to the old habit of hunting, cultivate the soil, practise the ruder mechanical arts, and trade with the usual readiness and greed; they asked us a leaf of tobacco for an egg, and four leaves for a bunch of bananas. Missionaries, who, like Messrs. Preston and Best, resided amongst ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... some secret mechanical contrivance, all wonders unknown to the ignorant being attributed by them to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... of the American, displayed through the nose, worries the Englishman. The unconscious self-assurance of the Englishman, not always unaccompanied by a sneer, irritates the American. They meet as might a lad from Harrow and another from Mr. Brumby's successful mechanical cramming establishment. The Harrow boy cannot answer a question, but is sure that he is the proper thing, and is ready to face the world on that assurance. Mr. Brumby's paragon is shocked at the other's inaptitude for examination, ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... of silicates of soda and potash one precaution is very necessary—viz., that you really have a soluble silicate, and not a mere mechanical mixture of ground flint and soda: this is a very different thing, and one, if it be not carefully guarded against, which will lead to nothing but disappointment. Again, the silicate may be properly ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray Macfarlane's trade; ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... premised, that this mechanical operation can only apply to those parts of the narrative which are at present composed out of commonplaces, such as the love-speeches of the hero, the description of the heroine's person, the moral observations of all sorts, and the distribution of happiness at the conclusion ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... cleanliness in the hay crop, therefore, the system which aims to sow clover seed on land to which clean cultivation has been given while growing on them a cultivated crop, as corn or field roots, meets with much favor. The mechanical condition of the soil immediately after growing these crops also favors the vigorous growth of the young clover plants, more especially when they are sown upon the surface of the land after some form of surface cultivation, rather than upon a surface made by plowing the land after ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw

... have been given to the type of scoliosis that develops in young girls and for which there is no mechanical explanation. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... long holding on, all absorbed in his work; and, from below, one could see the little white flame of the solder frizzling up beneath the carefully wielded iron. Gervaise, speechless, her throat contracted with anguish, had clasped her hands together, and held them up in mechanical gesture of prayer. But she breathed freely as Coupeau got up and returned back along the roof, without hurrying himself, and taking the time to spit once more ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... ordained that a century later it should reward its country with liberty. The people of the Netherlands united with the most fertile genius for inventions a happy talent for improving the discoveries of others; there are probably few mechanical arts and manufactures which they did not either produce or at least carry to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... became very famous; later poets, like Ausonius or Claudian, constantly imitate it. Its smooth versification, copious diction, and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. But, itself, it rises beyond the merely mechanical level. Without any quality that can quite be called genius, Statius had real poetical feeling. His taste preserves him from any great extravagances; and among much tedious rhetoric and cumbrous mythology, there is enough of imagination and pathos to make ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... advertisement. After despatch riding from August 16 to February 18 my judgment should be worth something. I am firmly convinced that if the Government could have provided all despatch riders with Blackburnes, the percentage—at all times small—of messages undelivered owing to mechanical breakdowns or the badness of the roads would have been reduced to zero. I have no interest in the Blackburne Company beyond a sincere admiration of the ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... Sedley Taylor and Professor Stuart, M.P., an old friend of former visits, and inspected the mechanical laboratory and workshops. There were about seventy university men, more or less, engaged in these, and it was interesting to see English Cambridge adopting the same line which we have already taken at Cornell against so much opposition, and surprising to find the Cambridge equipment ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... The question was mechanical. John was not thinking of Miss Martin. He was thinking of the faint rose upon Desire's half-turned cheek. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... and whirl beside his little brothers, and the driving wheels were beating round, and the steam in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been earlier in the evening. After all, from the mechanical point of view, it had been a most insignificant incident—the mere temporary deflection of a current. But now the slender form and slender shadow of the scientific manager replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd travelling up and down the lane of light upon the vibrating ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... as much amused as Crawford had been at seeing his sisters in their military attire. He fully approved of all Percy had done; and when he heard of the proposed dummies, he thought the idea excellent. While Crawford, who possessed a great deal of mechanical ingenuity, went in to assist Mrs Broderick, he hurried to the back of the house, where he found Mangaleesu and Kalinda employed in manufacturing Kaffir warriors. They had collected a number of poles and sticks, and had obtained from the storehouse a sufficient quantity of ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston

... discovery and invention; but idle hands make active heads. Science and the Arts are themselves the children of luxury, and they discharge their debt to it. The work which they do is to perfect technology in all its branches, mechanical, chemical and physical; an art which in our days has brought machinery to a pitch never dreamt of before, and in particular has, by steam and electricity, accomplished things the like of which would, in earlier ages, have been ascribed to the ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... the muscular around the osseous elements of the shoulder apparatus, forms a study for the surgeon as well in the abnormal condition of these parts, as in their normal arrangement; for in practice he discovers that that very mechanical principle upon which both orders of structures (the osseous and muscular) are grouped together for normal articular action, becomes, when the parts are deranged by fracture or, other accident, the chief cause whereby rearrangement is prevented, and the process of reunion obstructed. ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... are, and borrowers from other nations in every department of plastic, fictile, and pictorial art, as well as in religion, politics, and manufactures, the poetry of Japan is a true-born flower of the soil, unique in its mechanical structure, spontaneous and unaffected in its ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various

... or understanding. To these defects of his century we must add some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue" was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was only a broad way to the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... many words may we hope to choose with ease the one most suitable for the effective expression of the idea we wish to convey. To prepare a list of words that may apply and then attempt to write a theme that shall make use of them is a mechanical process of little value. The idea we wish to express should call up the word that exactly expresses it. If our ideas are not clear or our vocabulary is limited, we may be satisfied with the trite and commonplace; ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... A large Steam-Circus is revolving with its organ in full blast; near it is a "Razzle-Dazzle" Machine, provided with a powerful mechanical piano. To the combined strains of these instruments, the merrier hearts of Islington are performing a desultory dance, which seems to consist chiefly in the various couples charging each other with desperate gallantry. At the further ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various

... All that I have written so far is rubbish in comparison with what I should like to write and should write with rapture. It is all the same to me whether I write "The Party" or "The Lights," or a vaudeville or a letter to a friend—it is all dull, spiritless, mechanical, and I get annoyed with critics who attach any importance to "The Lights," for instance. I fancy that I deceive him with my work just as I deceive many people with my face, which looks serious or over-cheerful. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to "sympathize" with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is not so ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... in Industry, by Robert B. Wolf, vice-president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, member of the Federated ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... properties, lights, and music. In vain the audience awaits the coming of the author; he is behind the scenes, an anxious and watchful partner with the machinist in securing the proper working of these new mechanical appliances, and the smoothness of the scene shifting. The Queen is a connoisseur in these matters, and there ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan

... the lady soothingly of the "Spider," who by virtue of his mechanical experience in civil life had been given a first class rating, "Arn't you rather young to have so ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... after another in an almost constant stream, thinking his comparatively clumsy, bloated bulk easy prey, and then be gone. He snapped shut his face-plate under their assault. Sometimes there came different, more powerful wings, and he would duck in mechanical reaction, sensing the wings sweep past, often feeling them as, with sharp pecks and quick thudding blows, they sought to stun him. But the suit was stout; the repulsed attackers could only follow a little, glaring at him ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore

... inevitable, therefore, that attention should have been concentrated upon the material and mechanical side of production and distribution. Results there were so tangible, so easily figured. For example, if the speed of a drill or the strokes of a punch press were multiplied, the increase would be easily recognized. The whole country, too, was absorbed in invention, in the development ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... machinery could be adapted. But the curved and winding surfaces which form the hull of a boat or vessel, smooth and flowing as they are, and controlled, too, by established and well-known laws, bid defiance to all the attempts of mere mechanical motion to follow them. The superfluous iron, therefore, of these dies, must all be cut away by chisels driven by a hammer held in the hand; and so great is the labor required to fit and smooth and polish them, that a pair of them costs several thousand ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... are first written horizontally across the four sets of four squares, so that the series is repeated four times. It is then written vertically four times, care being taken to keep to the same order. In this simple mechanical way all the possible combinations are represented and in their ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett

... opportunities to watch the operation of the various engines and machinery connected with the mines. These had been erected by mechanicians of the highest scientific attainments, and presented a fine study to a mind of mechanical tendencies. Under such influences, his innate mechanical talent was early developed. At the age of ten years, he had constructed with his own hands, and after his own plans, a miniature sawmill, and had made numerous drawings of complicated mechanical contrivances, with instruments ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... money but because it is a demonstration that we are dependent upon some community on the other side of the world, that their damage is our damage, and that we have an interest in preventing it. It teaches us, as only some such simple and mechanical means can teach, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... their minds to it. We went through it, wagon by wagon. One wagon contains a wireless telegraphy station capable of receiving news from such distant stations as those of Carnarvon or Lyons. Another is fitted up as a newspaper office, with a mechanical press capable of printing an edition of fifteen thousand daily, so that the district served by the train, however out of the way, gets its news simultaneously with Moscow, many days sometimes before ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... "Last Monday evening" (14th May) "I finished the 50 Readings with great success. You have no idea how I have worked at them. Feeling it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be better than at first, I have learnt them all, so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated a self-possession not to be disturbed; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... time, as the people increased in riches and in mechanical skill, some of the more wealthy chieftains began to build houses so large and so handsome that they could not be conveniently taken down to be removed, and then they contrived a way of mounting them upon trucks placed at the four corners, and moving them bodily in this way ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... by the king of Spain, have considerably distinguished themselves, but without leaving the beaten track pursued by their forefathers; they chiefly display great aptitude in the arts of imitation; and in the purely mechanical arts. ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... his whole appearance that of a man well satisfied with his own exterior personality. Walden glanced at this great London literary light as indifferently as he would have glanced at an incandescent lamp in the street, or other mechanical luminary. He had not as yet spoken a word. Sir Morton had done all the talking; but the power of silence always overcomes in the end, and John's absolute non-committal of himself to any speech, had at last the effect he desired—namely that of making Sir Morton appear ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... his umbrella carefully by the wood, just below the crook of the handle, so as to keep the ferule off the ground, and not fray the silk in the middle. And, with his thin, high shoulders stooped, his long legs moving with swift mechanical precision, this passage through the Park, where the sun shone with a clear flame on so much idleness—on so many human evidences of the remorseless battle of Property, raging beyond its ring—was like the flight of some land bird across ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... captains of Fairfax's own horse-regiment, in which Desborough was Major. He had been a clerk in some iron-works in the west of England, and was "of very good natural parts, especially mathematical and mechanical." Before the war he and Richard Baxter had been bosom friends; but, since he had come into the Army and been much in the society of Cromwell, he had become, says Baxter, a man of new lights in religion, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... about his dressing, for he had overslept a little, and the 'bus passed the corner at 9.15. He was a tall, thin man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and in spite of the routine of the City, the counting of coupons, and all the mechanical drudgery that had lasted for ten years, there still remained about him the curious hint of a wild grace, as if he had been born a creature of the antique wood, and had seen the fountain rising from the green moss and ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... stirring affairs and inventions of his exciting time, with war making and breaking empires, and the foundations of this country's wealth and power being nobly laid, it would not be easy to show that we to-day are any the happier. Our own War was inherent in the inventions of mechanical cotton-spinning and the steam-engine—the need to compel foreign markets to buy the goods we made beyond our own needs. We know now what were the seeds the active and clever fellows of Gilbert's day were sowing for us. We were present at the harvesting. Why ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... in speaking of the "profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians" (p. 126) to arouse righteous anger against a certain class, to flatter his audience, or did ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... And yet such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly give more satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her beloved child. The likeness is indeed true; but it ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... rustling in the trees, caused by the freshening night breeze which Tom thought smelt of rain. And again the silent figure veered around with a kind of mechanical precision, the very perfection of clock-work German discipline, as if to give each point of the compass its ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... got thus much of (partly conjectural) idea of the mechanical structure of marrow, here follows the solitary vital, or mortal, fact in the whole business, given in one ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... or of the ends to which it may be rendered subservient. The base of an exogenous tree is not merely widened by the superposition of annual layers of wood over the first shoot, by which it gains greater mechanical power to support the extending head of wide-spreading branches, but the central portion is, in most cases, progressively rendered more and more solid by the deposition in it of various secretions prepared by the leaves, and transmitted from them through the medullary ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various

... little or no demand for free labor, and as prisoners taken in war were sold as slaves, the slave-market was always well supplied. The estates of the wealthy were cultivated by large gangs of slaves; and even the mechanical arts, which give employment to such large numbers in the modern towns of Europe, were practiced by slaves, whom their masters had trained for the purpose. The poor at Rome were thus left almost without resources; their ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence

... noise—the brazen clang of the furnace doors as they are flung open or slammed shut, the grating, teeth-gritting grind of steel against steel, of crunching coal. This clash of sounds stuns one's ears with its rending dissonance. But there is order in it, rhythm, a mechanical regulated recurrence, a tempo. And rising above all, making the air hum with the quiver of liberated energy, the roar of leaping flames in the furnaces, the monotonous throbbing ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill

... himself experienced the unremunerative character of scientific work, had a horror of his son's taking to it, especially as in his boyhood he was always constructing ingenious mechanical toys and exhibiting other marks of precocity. So the son was destined for business—to be, in fact, a cloth-dealer. But he was to receive a good education first, and was sent to an excellent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... his being dug up? The doctor brooded over the thing for one hour and a half (being exactly the length of time required to smoke out his large Turkey pipe), and then sauntered into Wilson's room. Wilson was busy, as usual, at some of his mechanical contrivances. ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... through chapter and verse; but before it was half told, Taltavull had sprung up from his seat, and was pacing backwards and forwards over the thick carpet, fiercely waving his long arms, and looking for all the world like a mechanical frock-coated skeleton. I broke off, and asked half-laughingly if ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... and if you can fix it up you're welcome to it. You have a mechanical bent, I know, and I guess if any one can fix it up, you can. Well, ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh

... done so much, and scientific men so little, for agriculture, may easily be explained. Countless millions of men, during many thousands of years, have incessantly been occupied in improving the processes of mechanical agriculture, which, as an art, has consequently been brought to a high degree of perfection: but scientific agriculture is a creation of almost our own time, and the number of its cultivators is, ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron

... before him for a space, then turned with a mechanical movement and dropped into a chair. He was sitting so, bent forward, his hands clasped in front of him when Saltash returned. He had the worn, grey look of a man ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... plenty for him to do—any number of mechanical contrivances to go on with, notably the one intended to move a boat without oars, sails, or steam, but they were not church clocks, and for the time being nothing interested him but the old clock whose hands were pointing absurdly as to the ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn

... corner below Miss Mapp's window, and went bobbing along down the steep hill. She walked with the motion of those mechanical dolls sold in the street, which have three legs set as spokes to a circle, so that their feet emerge from their dress with Dutch and rigid regularity, and her figure had a certain squat rotundity that suited her gait. She distinctly looked into Captain Puffin's dining-room ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... by intimate pain. Now she could go. Already the carpenters were beginning their nightly work of destruction, metamorphosing the so-lately brilliant stage into a vast unsightly cavern of gaunt timbers, creaking pulleys, noisy mechanical contrivances, gaudy painted surfaces of canvas and paper, piled-up properties, of uncertain lights and draughts many and chill. Careless of all save that determination of going, Poppy moved away. But still the unseen audience clamoured. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... the same moment the entrance of the chorus filled the lower plane with colour less brilliant but not less strong, the stage was full, not of things, but of people, and was wholly alive. The eye was not distracted by painted scenery—in the ordinary theatre a mechanical necessity, and partly excusable because it also supplies warmth and richness of tone—but was entirely at the service of the mind in following the dramatic action of the play. The setting being a reality, there was no need for mechanism to conceal a seamy ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... why Tom May, of all people in the world, should thrust himself into the discussion of her plans; but she could only submit to listen, or more truly to lean back with wandering thoughts and mechanical signs of assent, as he urged his numerous objections. Finally, she uttered a meek 'Thank you,' in the trust that ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... We fear there are mechanical difficulties (besides others) to prevent our adopting ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various

... DAUGHTER—I hope that the news I announce will give you as much joy as it has already given our dear Roland and me. Sir John, whose heart you doubted, claiming that it was only a mechanical contrivance, manufactured in the workshops at Vaucanson, admits that such an opinion was a just one until the day he saw you; but he maintains that since that day he has a heart, and that that heart ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... Italy to overcome the mechanical difficulties by making the bore of the bass clarinet serpentine. A specimen by Nicolas Papalini of Pavia[3] in the museum of the Brussels Conservatoire has the serpentine bore pierced through two slabs of pear-wood; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... and predicate transposed without any further change in the proposition. The forms also of Reduction (a term which will be explained later on) would be simplified; and generally the introduction of the quantified predicate into logic might be attended with certain mechanical advantages. The object of the logician, however, is not to invent an ingenious system, but to arrive at a true analysis of thought. Now, if it be admitted that in the ordinary form of proposition the subject is used in extension and the predicate in ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... was a lot of mechanical equipment and the trouble was a man who could handle the machinery cooked just like a machinist too. One cook got lost between the flour bin and the root cellar and nearly starved to death before he ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead

... touch with the whip. The noble horse instantly responded to his master's urge. He released fold after fold of knotted muscle, his stride increased, and when his hoofs descended, they seemed to spurn the ground. Now as steady as a Corliss engine this ultimate unit of the animal and mechanical world rushed on, and was seen to be ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick

... country. "The new colonists," says Dr. Cosmo Innes, "were of the 'upper classes' of Anglican families long settled in Northumbria, and Normans of the highest blood and name. They were men of the sword, above all service and mechanical employment. They were fit for the society of court, and many became the chosen companions of our princes. The old native people gave way before them, or took service under the strong-handed strangers, who held lands ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... bit.' His humped back, protruding under his mackintosh as he labored forward, bent into a hoop, must have suggested the idea which was accepted as fact until I pulled myself together at the next halt and heard the mechanical and unimaginative half of me repeat 'Four thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-one.' The man raised himself into erectness with a groan, and a crippled greengrocer whom I had known in my youth, to me the basic type of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... babies have to pay the penalty. Only to think of all this wretched business! I've done wrong and the child has a cruel fate before it. If I lay it at the Myelkins' door, they'll send it to the foundling hospital, and there it will grow up among strangers, in mechanical routine,... no love, no petting, no spoiling.... And then he'll be apprenticed to a shoemaker,... he'll take to drink, will learn to use filthy language, will go hungry. A shoemaker! and he the son of a collegiate assessor, of good family.... He is ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... poured into the mold inverted. A number of crooked pieces of wire are also placed in the mold to strengthen the figure. In about twenty minutes the plaster sets so as to allow the case to be opened, and the glue mold to be pulled off. To his proficiency in the mechanical part of his art Mr. Rogers attributes a considerable measure of his success, as it enables him to execute with facility every suggestion of his imagination, and to secure the perfect reproduction of his works by those to whom ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... interpreter, Hans Roorda, a fellow several years younger than I am, can speak five languages, all equally well, and I kept him busy talking French to me. We were in the country almost three weeks. The farmers haven't half the mechanical conveniences that we considered absolutely necessary even in our least prosperous days, but are marvels of order and efficiency, for all that. I believe one of the greatest mistakes that we New England farmers have been making is to assume that ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes

... from the philosopher, the man who wants to know how things ought to have been done—ought to know a little of the first of human arts—the art of killing. What little I know thereof I shall employ to-day, in explaining to you the invasion of the Teutons, from a so-called mechanical point of view. I wish to shew you how it was possible for so small and uncivilized a people to conquer one so vast and so civilized; and what circumstances (which you may attribute to what cause you will: but I to ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... on the stairs stood stunned. The noise was deafening; the appearance of the man, whose expression was one of settled rage but whose actions were of the coldest regularity, was most bewildering, partially obscured as it was by the flying billets of wood; the mechanical attempts of Miss Gould to rise from the soap-box, invariably checked by a fierce brandishing of the stick just taken from the lessening pile, were at once startling and fascinating, inasmuch as she was methodically waved back ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam

... "Also, if there were such things, that this was the very place for them. I have tried to think over the matter since you pointed out the configuration of the ground. But it seems to me that there is a hiatus somewhere. Are there not mechanical difficulties?" ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... they would obtain better prices for their furs and procure more valuable articles, upon fairer terms, in exchange. They would also be benefitted by observing our manners and customs, adopting our style of dress, learning the value of property, and gaining some knowledge of agriculture and the use of mechanical tools, and implements of husbandry. But the most important advantage to be gained by their trading within the United States, would be in their protection from imposition. It has ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake

... that, if the excellency of a painter consisted only in this kind of imitation, painting must lose its rank, and be no longer considered as a liberal art, and sister to poetry, this imitation being merely mechanical, in which the slowest intellect is always sure to succeed best: for the painter of genius cannot stoop to drudgery, in which the understanding has no part; and what pretence has the art to claim kindred with poetry, but by its ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... her half-way to the Hotel Cluny before she realized where she was going, and cried out to him to turn home. There was an acute irony in this mechanical prolongation of the quest of beauty. She had had enough of it, too much of it; her one longing was to escape, to hide herself away from ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton

... child led about upon the wide and withered common of knowledge, with the same sort of meagre fodder for all; we see it trained in mechanical memorizing, in barren knowledge concerning things and forms that are dead and gone; in ignorance concerning the life that is, in contempt for it, and in the consciousness of its privileged position, by dint of its possession ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... new wind is getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence

... and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... and dumb young man, the son of a poor widow living at Balbriggan, has just completed a miniature merchant ship, which in mechanical structure, symmetrical build, and neatness of finish, is not probably surpassed by anything of the kind to be seen in Ireland. It has been minutely inspected by competent judges, who assert that its tout ensemble a more perfect piece of ingenious workmanship they have never seen; nor could ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe

... was constantly engaged in poetical musings upon the moral affections, their pains and their pleasures; that of Stevenson was drawn by an inherent impulse to physical objects, and perseveringly devoted to the discovery of such mechanical combinations of them as might be of lasting benefit to society. There might be pointed out the cause of the difference of style which characterized the oratory of Mansfield and Erskine, of Canning and of Brougham: and that which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various

... the connexions, dependencies, and relations subsisting between the mechanical arts, agriculture, and manufactures of Great Britain, that it requires study, deliberation, and inquiry in the legislature to discern and distinguish the whole scope and consequences of many projects offered for the benefit of the commonwealth. The society of merchant adventurers in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... As with Denzil Quarrier (1892) and The Town Traveller (1898) this was one of the books which Gissing sometimes went the length of asking the admirers of his earlier romances 'not to read.' With its prefatory note, indeed, its cheap illustrations, and its rather mechanical intrigue, it seems as far removed from such a book as A Life's Morning as it is possible for a novel by the same author to be. It was in the South of France, in the neighbourhood of Biarritz, amid scenes such as that described in the thirty-seventh chapter of Will Warburton, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... properly speaking, not a swallow at all, though chimney swallow is its more popular name. Rowing towards the roof of your house, as if it used first one wing, then the other, its flight, while swift and powerful, is stiff and mechanical, unlike the swallow's, and its entire aspect suggests a bat. The nighthawk and whippoorwill are its relatives, and it resembles them not a little, especially in ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... Stillman, known in the last generation as the chief of the steam engineering of his day in the United States, the mentor of that profession, I can see more of my mother than in any other of the six brothers. He inherited, like all of us, his father's mechanical tendency and inventiveness, and added to it a persistency and constancy of purpose peculiarly hers, which none of the other children inherited to the same extent; and he had in its fullness the devotional sentiment, the absorption in religious duties, as the chief motive in life, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... gaily as she came down the steps. Her astonishment at what Fausch had said, overcame her so, that she was quite bewildered, and the motion of her head was the mechanical expression of her great satisfaction. Cain looked straight before him into the bright daylight, and his eyes were glistening. He felt as if he were entering into a ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... will suspend the likenesses of his mother and brother on his wall. He generally, you will find, tries to improve on you—which, of course, is not always hard to do. But sometimes he comes to grief in the attempt, as happened in the case of his wonderful "hanging shelves." Ted Hammer, quite a mechanical genius, had made to himself a set of these shelves, which for neatness, simplicity, and usefulness were the marvel of the school. Of course Ebby got to know of it, and was unhappy till he could cap it with something finer still. So he made ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... them adaptation, not indeed to the animal's or plant's own good, but to man's use or fancy. Some variations useful to him have probably arisen suddenly, or by one step; many botanists, for instance, believe that the fuller's teasel, with its hooks, which can not be rivalled by any mechanical contrivance, is only a variety of the wild Dipsacus; and this amount of change may have suddenly arisen in a seedling. So it has probably been with the turnspit dog; and this is known to have been the case with ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... impressed upon him the fact that his sex was abhorrent to her in all its physical, moral, and spiritual manifestations. Septimus, on thinking the matter over, agreed with her. Memories came back to him of the men with whom he had been intimate. His father, the mechanical man who had cogs instead of corpuscles in his blood, Wiggleswick the undesirable, a few rowdy men on his staircase at Cambridge who had led shocking lives—once making a bonfire of his pyjamas and a brand-new umbrella in the middle of the court—and ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... adze, a mallet and chisel, a millrind, an axe-pick of the kind used by millers for dressing the mill-stone, the coulter of a plough, a hammer and anvil (?), and an auger, indicating probably the various mechanical aptitudes of the deceased. The connection of the family of Reidheuchs or Ridochs with Strathearn began in 1502, when King James IV. granted a charter of confirmation of the lands of Tullychedile, Culturagane, &c., to ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... clonus. Tapping of one knee tended to set musculature of opposite knee in mild clonus of short duration. Knee kicks were definitely exaggerated. Tendo Achillis exaggerated. No ankle clonus. Muscular irritability to mechanical stimulation increased. Superficial reflexes were normal, except plantar defense reaction was slight. Cutaneous sensibility was unimpaired: heat and cold readily distinguished. Light touches of pin pricks were felt and localized all over the body. Sense of position normal. No ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... diligence till the 30th of January, 1862, when the ship was launched at Greenpoint, one hundred and one days from the execution of the contract, thus making the work probably the most expeditious of any recorded in the annals of mechanical engineering." ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... gratification of his energetic and vehement instinct. He requires also spiritual affinity and oneness with the being that he couples with. Is that not the case, then the blending of the sexes is a purely mechanical act: such a marriage is immoral. It does not answer the higher human demands. Only in the mutual attachment of two beings of opposite sexes can be conceived the spiritual ennobling of relations that rest upon purely physical laws. Civilized man demands ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... it is so—pleasant to be here!" she replied. But she spoke in a slow mechanical way, and seemed to the other strangely cold and irresponsive; she shivered a little, too, when the caressing hand touched her neck, as if the warm fingers had seemed ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... these features of the scene with mechanical glances, but his mind was still unable to piece together or draw a rational conclusion from what he saw. And when he heard footsteps advancing on the gravel, although he turned his eyes in that direction, it was with no thought either ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... keen-eyed men from the West and South begin to appropriate land. The Eastern and Middle States pilgrims take up trades and mechanical occupations. All classes contribute recruits to the scattered thousands of miners. Greedy officials and sly schemers begin to prey on the vanishing property rights of the Dons. A strange, unsubstantial social fabric is hastily ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... to observe the simple mechanical arrangement that had permitted the young circus performer to carry out ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... them in his laboratory. I moulded their limbs. I am sorry. I was thoughtless: I did not foresee that they would kill and pretend to be persons they were not, and declare things that were false, and wish evil. I thought they would be merely mechanical fools. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... had a theory, but he would say nothing about it. He amused himself by explaining that mechanical action, such as drawing meaningless lines and curves, as he had been doing, had the effect of giving the brain freedom to think, and declared that it was during times of this sort of freedom that inspiration ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... into his possession were mounted upon the Fort, and in many instances were manned by these aborigines. Hides were sent to Yerba Buena, a trade in furs and supplies was established with the Hudson Bay Company, and considerable attention was given to mechanical and agricultural pursuits. ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... matter,' Logotheti answered. 'All cyphers can be read by experts, if there is no hurry, except the mechanical ones that are written through holes in a square plate which you turn round till the sheet is full. Hardly any one uses those now, because when the square is raised the letters don't form words, and the cable companies will only transmit ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... to make clothing for defending themselves from the rigour of their climate, though furnished with the materials. The small stick, rudely pointed, which one of them carried in his hand, was the only thing we saw that required any mechanical exertion, if we except the fixing on the feet of some of them pieces of kangooroo skin, tied with thongs; though it could not be learnt whether these were in use as shoes, or only to defend some sore. It must be owned, however, they are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... of the mind they give the first and foremost place to the imagination. The reason, they say, is mechanical, and cannot rise above the known; that is to say, the real; whereas the imagination is creative and attains to the unknown, the ideal. Its highest work is the creation of beauty. Because it is unruly, and precarious in its action, however, the imagination ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... genius for scroll-work; a group of water-lilies in wax, floating on a mirror-lake and protected by a glass globe; a full-rigged schooner, built cunningly inside a bottle by a matricide serving a life-sentence in the penitentiary at San Quinten; and a mechanical canarybird in a gilded cage, acquired at the Philadelphia Centennial,—a bird that had carolled its death—lay in the early winter of 1877 when it was wound up too hard and its little insides snapped. In the parlour a few ornamental books were grouped with rare precision on the centre-table ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... associated with G.E. Stahl and revived by F. Bouillier (1813-1899), which makes life, or life and mind, the directive principle in evolution and growth, holding that all cannot be traced back to chemical and mechanical processes, but that there is a directive force which guides energy without altering its amount. An entirely different class of ideas, also termed animistic, is the belief in the world soul, held by Plato, Schelling ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... and, in a mechanical way, I watch my hand go forward, to undo the topmost bolt. It does so, entirely without my volition. Even as I reach up toward the bolt, the door is violently shaken, and I get a sickly whiff of mouldy air, which ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson

... in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of American independence, has proven a great success, and will, no doubt, be of enduring advantage to the country. It has shown the great progress in the arts, sciences, and mechanical skill made in a single century, and demonstrated that we are but little behind older nations in any one branch, while in some we scarcely have a rival. It has served, too, not only to bring peoples and products of skill and labor from ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant

... mechanical two paces] I don't deny there was a struggle, Your Worship, but it's my ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... whence the plant may derive its nourishment. Although the value of the manure is practically entirely due to the nitrogen it contains, it has been urged that the soda exercises a beneficial effect on the mechanical properties of the soil, by increasing its power of absorbing moisture, and in also rendering it more compact. This would partly explain how its results in dry seasons are so much better than those obtained from sulphate ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... faith, not without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... regular army, in which they must have served three years in the infantry and cavalry or four years in artillery and engineers. During this period they are given a practical education in books and in the mechanical duties of the soldier. They are taught to repair guns, manufacture powder, make harness, shoe horses, and do everything else that is likely to come within their experience in the field. This training is highly valued by the young men ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... which he was unable to give adequate utterance.[75] It was in his conversations with Herder, however, that he was introduced to those deeper conceptions of man and his possibilities which implied a complete emancipation from the mechanical philosophy which he had hitherto been endeavouring to ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... have formed but useless beings. What advantage could not be drawn from a multitude of cenobites of both sexes whom we see in so many countries, and who are so well paid to do nothing. Instead of occupying them with sterile contemplations, with mechanical prayers, with monotonous practices; instead of burdening them with fasts and austerities, let there be excited among them a salutary emulation that would inspire them to seek the means of serving usefully the world, which ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier

... at week-ends or in the evening, tramping down the lane to hail the house in absurd varieties of the latest New York slang, which, never failed to amuse Mary. The shy Jamie was often with her; they were now the most intimate of friends. He would show her primitive tools and mechanical contrivances of his own making, and she would tell him stories of Scotland, of Prince Charlie and Flora, of Bruce and Wallace, of Bannockburn, or of James, the poet king. Of these she had a store, having been brought up, as many English girls happily are, on the history ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... EMPHASIS ON INDIVIDUAL AND CLASS.—Under Traditional Management the gang, or the class, usually receives the chief emphasis. If the individual developed, as he undoubtedly did, in many kinds of mechanical work, especially in small organizations, it was more or less because it was not possible for the managers to organize the various individuals into classes or gangs. In the transitory stage the emphasis is shifting. Under Scientific Management the emphasis is most decidedly and emphatically ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth

... tract of Machometes Bragdedinus de superficierum divisionibus, Apollonius's Conics, or Commandinus's labours in that kind, de centro gravitatis, with many such geometrical theorems and problems? Those rare instruments and mechanical inventions of Jac. Bessonus, and Cardan to this purpose, with many such experiments intimated long since by Roger Bacon, in his tract de [3364]Secretis artis et naturae, as to make a chariot to move sine animali, diving boats, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... poor nigger. His foot is sure to go. It's in such a state that I believe the cleverest surgeon alive couldn't save it, and, even if he could, what's left of it would be of no use. You know I have a mechanical turn, and could make him a splendid wooden leg if you will pluck up courage ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne

... seem to us to be contrary one to the other: the one seeks itself, and the other gives itself. Still they are both necessary to life, for in order to give we must receive. In the accomplishment of the works of goodness, the soul would be impoverished and would end by drying up in a purely mechanical exercise of beneficence, had it no spring from which to draw forth the living waters. Man must himself find joy in order to diffuse it amongst his fellows. But mark the incomparable marvel of the spiritual ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... contours of her person, and on her thick plait, which reached to the floor. She was making sacks out of coarse hempen stuff. Her hands moved nimbly, while her whole body, her eyes, her eyebrows, her full lips, her white neck were as still as though they were asleep, absorbed in the monotonous, mechanical toil. Only from time to time she raised her head to rest her weary neck, glanced for a moment towards the window, beyond which the snowstorm was raging, and bent again over her sacking. No desire, no joy, no grief, nothing ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... transformed, for of course it is now well known that consumption of energy in the sense of absolute loss is impossible. Thus, when energy is expended in moving a body in opposition to the force of friction, or in agitating a liquid, the energy which disappears in its mechanical form reappears in the form of heat. The agitation of water by paddles moving through it warms the water, and the accession of heat thus acquired measures the energy which has been expended in making ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... hands, which is bad both for them and for him. The secret of life is in full occupation, isn't it? This world is not tenable on other terms. So while I lie on the sofa and rest in a novel, Robert has a resource in his drawing; and really, with all his feeling and knowledge of art, some of the mechanical trick of it can't be out ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... looked long at this strange mechanical eye. Shaped like a small pipe, it ran up from the conning tower and protruded above the vessel. A large lens at the top turned off as does an elbow in a stove pipe. This portion, when necessary, moved in all directions. When raised ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... leave very little to the differences of intellectual power: it was to level minds and capacities. It was to give all men the same sort of power which a pair of compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. "Absolute certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure" says Mr. Ellis, "such that all men should be capable of employing it, are the two great features of the Baconian system." This he thought possible, and this he set himself to expound—"a method universally applicable, and in all cases infallible." In this he saw the novelty ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... not asked any one to believe a single thing because he thinks it is so, or to change a single feature of design because in his judgment that feature is faulty. The facts given are exemplifications of elementary mechanical principles overlooked by other writers, just as early bridge designers and writers on bridge design overlooked the importance of calculating bridge pins and other details which would carry ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... a mechanical engineer, too," the girl admitted, without attempt at concealment "As you also doubtless know, he served, once, with a revolutionary army in Guatemala. It is in some sort of scrape like this that he finds ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham

... opened to women. The undergraduate departments are still closed to them. Other institutions are about equally divided among co-educational, for boys only and for girls only. The State Normal and Industrial School for Girls (white) and the Agricultural and Mechanical College for Boys (colored), both at Greensborough, offer excellent opportunities. There are four other universities ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... of Edmund, who has been basely slandered by his enemies, the baron asks him to spend three nights in the haunted apartment of the castle. Up to this point, there has been nothing to differentiate the story from an uneventful domestic novel. The ghost is of the mechanical variety and does not inspire awe when he actually appears, but Miss Reeve tries to prepare our minds for the shock, before she introduces him. The rusty locks and the sudden extinction of the lamp are a heritage from Walpole, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... controlled by priestly as well as by divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an independent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it says, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all meddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be by faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the spirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall be invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith and by no others. It ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... whole. When the child of the fine arts sets his hand to the same block, he has no scruples either in doing violence to it, he only avoids showing this violence. He does not respect the matter in which he works any more than the mechanical artist; but he seeks by an apparent consideration for it to deceive the eye which takes this matter under its protection. The political and educating artist follows a very different course, while making man at once his material and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... in it. Franklin, by the simple fact that he was a printer himself, has done more towards giving dignity and respectability to the employment of printing, than a hundred orations on the intrinsic excellence of the art. In fact all mechanical employments have, within a few years risen in rank, in this country, not through the influence of efforts to impress the community directly with a sense of their importance, but simply because mechanics themselves have ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days; you will say, "That is not the post, I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens!—delightful eternal common-places, which "having been will always be;" which no school-boy nor school-man can ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... Nut Pines are alike in leaf and cortex as well as in the peculiar seed-wing. The last often remains in the cone after the nut falls. The mechanical nature of this adhesion is apparent in P. Gerardiana, where the wing adheres not to its own, but to the adjacent scale. The two species are alike in their leaves but distinct in their ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw



Words linked to "Mechanical" :   mechanics, mechanistic, robotic, automatic, mechanism, robotlike, machinery, nonmechanical, mechanic, windup, machinelike, mechanized, automatonlike, mechanised



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