Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:38

Excerpt #1, from Radioisotopes and Life Processes (Revised), by Baserga and Kisieleski

…if the untwisting does take place, how it is accomplished. Much that has been said in the last few paragraphs is therefore purely speculative. It is, however, based on sound observation and is a more logical explanation than others that have been advanced.) [Illustration: Figure 12 The pairing of the nucleotide bases that make up DNA.] [Illustration: Figure 13 The DNA molecule and how it replicates. (a) The constituent submolecules. (b) Assembly of subunits in complete DNA molecule. (c) “Unzipping” of the double nucleotide strand. (d) and (e) The forming of a new strand by each individual strand. (f) DNA molecule in twisted double-strand configuration. Adapted from Viruses and the Nature of Life, Wendell M. Stanley and Evans C. Valens, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1961, with permission.] Labeling DNA with a Radioactive Isotope Of the four bases in DNA, three are also found in the other nucleic acid, RNA; but the fourth, thymine, is found only in DNA. Therefore, if thymine could be labeled and introduced into a number of cells, including a cell in which DNA is being formed, we would specifically label the newly synthesized DNA, since neither the old DNA nor the RNA would make use of the thymine. We could in this way mark cells preparing to divide. (Actually, thymine itself is not taken up in mammalian cells,…

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Excerpt #2, from Burgess Unabridged: A new dictionary of words you have always needed, by Burgess

…69. =Skyscrimble.= To go off at a tangent, mentally; to escape logic. 70. =Slub.= A mild indisposition which does not incapacitate. 71. =Snosh.= Vain talk; a project that is born dead. 72. =Spigg.= A decoration of overt vanity; to attract notice, paint. 73. =Spillix.= Accidental good luck, uncharacteristically skilful. 74. =Splooch.= One who doesn’t know his own business; a failure. 75. =Spuzz.= Mental force, aggressive intellectuality, stamina. 76. =Squinch.= To watch and wait anxiously, hoping for a lucky turn. 77. =Tashivation.= The art of answering without listening to questions. 78. =Thusk.= Something that has quickly passed from one’s life. 79. =Tintiddle.= An imaginary conversation; wit coming too late. 80. =Udney.= A beloved bore; one who loves but does not understand. 81. =Uglet.= An unpleasant duty too long postponed. 82. =Unk.= An unwelcome, inappropriate or duplicate present. 83. =Varm.= The quintessence of sex; sex hatred or antipathy. 84. =Vilp.= An unsportsmanlike player, a bad loser, a braggart. 85. =Voip.= Food that gives no pleasure to the palate. 86. =Vorge.= Voluntary suffering, unnecessary effort or exercise. 87. =Voriander.= A woman who pursues men or demands attentions. 88. =Whinkle.= Hypocritical graciousness; to glow with vanity….

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Excerpt #3, from A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

…of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die. Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty. “I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, “to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?” The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker. “What did you say?” “You can bear a little more light?” “I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the second word.) The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that…

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Excerpt #4, from Postal Riders and Raiders, by W. H. Gantz

…clerks and postmasters–postmasters, from Hiram Hairpin at Crackerville, Ga., all the way up–fourth, third, second class postmasters to the first-class postmasters in our larger cities–why, I ask, is Mr. Hitchcock working so strenuously to get the vast political machine of his department lined up against the protest of millions of our people, unless he is still after those pestiferous, independent magazines? Why, again, it may be asked, are he and his assistants coaching the 220,000 clerks of his department and the 60,000 postmasters, assistant postmasters, etc., on his “staff” to put up a promotion talk for a one-cent rate on first-class (letter or sealed) matter? It should be a one-cent rate. Nobody at all informed as to mail service rates and revenues will question that. But it is equally true that, up to a recent date, there have been, comparatively speaking (the comparison being with the millions protesting against an increase in the second-class rate) but few complaints and complainants against the present rate of two cents for carrying and handling a letter. Why, then, I ask, is Mr. Hitchcock so actively cranking up his departmental political machine to make neighborhood runs and do some hill climbing in advocacy of that one-cent rate for first-class matter? Yes, why? Is it a legitimate assumption to say that the present agitation for a…

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Excerpt #5, from The Story of the Great War, Volume 1, by Churchill, Miller, and Reynolds

…which patrolled the mountains of the territory assigned to them. Numbering all the way from ten men to fifty each, these bands protected the villages from the bandits and even hunted them down. And, naturally, when the terrorist bands of the Greek Church became active, they were confronted by the armed bands of the committee. It is notable that when the existence of the Macedonian Committee and its small local armed forces first became known to the outside world, it was not the Turkish Government which showed most animosity. In fact, for a long time the Turks rather treated the committee much as they had treated the brigands; that is, let them alone, so long as they did not cross their path, and the committee did not set out to molest the Turks. It was the Greek Church, and the Greek and Serbian Governments that became most excited. Both the Greeks and the Serbians had been making every effort to arouse a “spirit of nationalism” of their own brand among the Macedonians. The committee was distinctly going to counteract their influence and efforts by arousing a spirit of nationality among the Macedonians which was neither Serbian nor Bulgarian nor Greek. And when the Bulgarian Government understood this thoroughly it showed itself equally unfriendly. For Prince Ferdinand and his clique dreamed of the Greater Bulgaria which they…

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Excerpt #6, from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

…tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on…

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Excerpt #7, from Mr. Midshipman Easy, by Frederick Marryat

…Mr Biggs recollected the day before–he cast a furious look at Jack, as he touched his hat to the captain, and then dived down to the lower deck. If anything could add to the indignation of the boatswain, it was to find that his trousers had come on board before him. He now felt that a trick had been played him, and also that our hero must have been the party, but he could prove nothing; he could not say who slept in the same room, for he was fast asleep when Jack went to bed, and fast asleep when Jack quitted the room. The truth of the story soon became known to all the ship, and “duty before decency” became a by-word. All that the boatswain could do he did, which was to revenge himself upon the poor boy–and Gascoigne and Jack never got any fishing-tackle. The boatswain was as obnoxious to the men as Vigors, and in consequence of Jack’s known opinions upon the rights of man, and his having floored their two greatest enemies, he became a great favourite with the seamen, and, as all favourites are honoured by them with a sobriquet, our hero obtained that of Equality Jack. CHAPTER TWELVE. IN WHICH OUR HERO PREFERS GOING DOWN TO GOING UP; A CHOICE, IT IS TO BE HOPED, HE WILL REVERSE UPON A MORE IMPORTANT OCCASION….

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Excerpt #8, from Middlemarch, by George Eliot

…Mechanics’ Institute. Good-by;” and he went quickly out of the room. Rosamond did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took her place before the tea-tray. She was thinking that she had never seen him so disagreeable. Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her as she delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners. For the moment he lost the sense of his wound in a sudden speculation about this new form of feminine impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like frame which he had once interpreted as the sign of a ready intelligent sensitiveness. His mind glancing back to Laure while he looked at Rosamond, he said inwardly, “Would she kill me because I wearied her?” and then, “It is the way with all women.” But this power of generalizing which gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals, was immediately thwarted by Lydgate’s memory of wondering impressions from the behavior of another woman—from Dorothea’s looks and tones of emotion about her husband when Lydgate began to attend him—from her passionate cry to be taught what would best comfort that man for whose sake it seemed as if she must quell every impulse in her except the yearnings of faithfulness and compassion. These revived impressions…

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Excerpt #9, from The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers

…bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was a canapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders’ meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold. She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child’s; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand. At last he whispered: “Sylvia, it is I.” Again he said, “It is I.” Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds. THE STREET OF THE FIRST SHELL…

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Excerpt #10, from Our Pirate Hoard, by Thomas A. Janvier

…“My dear Susan,–I have decided not to wait until I die to do what little good I can do in the world. You will be glad, I am sure, to learn that I have made arrangements for the immediate erection of the steam-laundry at the asylum, as well as for the material improvement in several other ways of that excellent institution.”At the same time I desire that you and your husband shall have the benefit immediately of the larger portion of the legacy that I always have intended should be yours at my death. It is here (in govt. 4’s), and I hope with all my heart that your trip to Europe will be a pleasant one. I am very affectionately yours, “Gregory Wilkinson.” “And to think,” said Susan–as we drove home through the twilight, bearing our sheaves with us and feeling very happy over them–“and to think that it should turn out to be your cousin Gregory Wilkinson who was the family pirate and had a hoard, and not your great-great-great-uncle, after all!” End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Pirate Hoard, by Thomas A. Janvier *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR PIRATE HOARD ** This file should be named 23804.txt or 23804.zip *****…

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Excerpt #11, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

…possibly let you stand in front of that picture.” “You will some day, surely?” “Never.” “Well, perhaps you are right. And now good-bye, Dorian. You have been the one person in my life who has really influenced my art. Whatever I have done that is good, I owe to you. Ah! you don’t know what it cost me to tell you all that I have told you.” “My dear Basil,” said Dorian, “what have you told me? Simply that you felt that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment.” “It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.” “It was a very disappointing confession.” “Why, what did you expect, Dorian? You didn’t see anything else in the picture, did you? There was nothing else to see?” “No; there was nothing else to see. Why do you ask? But you mustn’t talk about worship. It is foolish. You and I are friends, Basil, and we must always remain so.” “You have got Harry,” said the painter sadly. “Oh, Harry!” cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. “Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing what is…

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Excerpt #12, from The Heroes; Or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, by Charles Kingsley

…Then slowly rose up those three fair sisters, with a cruel smile upon their lips; and slowly they crept down towards him, like leopards who creep upon their prey; and their hands were like the talons of eagles as they stept across the bones of their victims to enjoy their cruel feast. But fairest Aphrodite saw him from the highest Idalian peak, and she pitied his youth and his beauty, and leapt up from her golden throne; and like a falling star she cleft the sky, and left a trail of glittering light, till she stooped to the Isle of the Sirens, and snatched their prey from their claws. And she lifted Butes as he lay sleeping, and wrapt him in golden mist; and she bore him to the peak of Lilybæum, and he slept there many a pleasant year. But when the Sirens saw that they were conquered, they shrieked for envy and rage, and leapt from the beach into the sea, and were changed into rocks until this day. Then they came to the straits by Lilybæum, and saw Sicily, the three-cornered island, under which Enceladus the giant lies groaning day and night, and when he turns the earth quakes, and his breath bursts out in roaring flames from the highest cone of Ætna, above the chestnut woods. And there Charybdis caught them in its fearful coils of wave, and rolled mast-high about them, and spun them round and round; and they could go neither back nor forward, while the whirlpool sucked them in….

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