The sciences of modern astronomy and modern mechanics 145 could not exist without them, and would not now exist unless Newton (or someone else) had invented them.
— from Invention: The Master-key to Progress by Bradley A. (Bradley Allen) Fiske

The judge may distort or delay the justice which he should render us; the lawyer may support an unjust demand; the merchant may help us to squander our estate, and, in a word, all those with whom we have to deal in common life may do us more or less injury; but to kill us without fear and standing quietly at his ease; unsheathing no other sword than that wrapped in the folds of a recipe, and without being subject to any danger of punishment, that can be done only by the physician; he alone can escape all fear of the discovery of his crimes, because at the moment of committing them he puts them under the earth.
— from The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

"As early as 1800," writes Davy, "I had found that when separate portions of distilled water, filling two glass tubes, connected by moist bladders, or any moist animal or vegetable substances, were submitted to the electrical action of the pile of Volta by means of gold wires, a nitro-muriatic solution of gold appeared in the tube containing the positive wire, or the wire transmitting the electricity, and a solution of soda in the opposite tube; but I soon ascertained that the muriatic acid owed its existence to the animal or vegetable matters employed; for when the same fibres of cotton were made use of in successive experiments, and washed after every process in a weak solution of nitric acid, the water in the apparatus containing them, though acted on for a great length of time with a very strong power, at last produced no effects upon nitrate of silver.
— from A History of Science — Volume 4 by Edward Huntington Williams

At every unusual noise or sudden jolt, they would look frightened and she would clasp still more closely the bundle in her lap.
— from In Kali's Country: Tales from Sunny India by Emily Churchill Thompson Sheets

And further than either unavoidable necessity, or some evident further good of thy neighbour carries it, desire to be unknown and unseen in this.
— from Female Scripture Biography, Volume II Including an Essay on What Christianity Has Done for Women by F. A. (Francis Augustus) Cox

He wanted to assemble something capable of emitting underwater noises of special quality and unprecedented power.
— from Creatures of the Abyss by Murray Leinster

Such is the penalty of being of a fastidious, exclusive, uncompromising nature; of seeing things not simply and sharply, but in perverse relations, in intertwisted strands.
— from The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) by Henry James