The local forms are moderately constant and distinct in each separate island; but when all from the several islands are compared together, the differences are seen to be so slight and graduated that it is impossible to define or describe them, though at the same time the extreme forms are sufficiently distinct.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

He'll make a circuit with ten thousand men and hit 'em on the right flank, and at the same time I'll go around with my cavalry and dig into 'em on the left.
— from Before the Dawn: A Story of the Fall of Richmond by Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler

Was I right in my calculations, Amy?’ ‘Did I ever doubt it?’
— from New Grub Street by George Gissing

I suppose myself to be alluding here to a very oppressive statute, passed to clip the wings of such gentlemen as Mr. Snap, by which it is enacted that, in actions for slander, if the jury find a verdict under forty shillings, e. g. as in the case in the text, for one farthing, the plaintiff shall be entitled to recover from the defendant only as much costs as damages, i. e. another farthing; a provision which has made many a poor pettifogger sneak out of court with a flea in his ear.
— from Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. by Samuel Warren

Public opinion, the constraint of law, hereditary notions, are more effective in preventing the outbreak of evil passions into criminal acts in very many cases and districts in England.
— from Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

The friends of the Ti-pings comprised:—Many humble, devout missionaries, who rejoiced at the result of their indirect contact with the Chinese; many large-minded, large-hearted men, who admired the cause of a people and the welfare of an oppressed nation more than the favourable articles of the Elgin treaty; all persons who deprecated Europeans becoming the hired mercenaries of the most corrupt Asiatic despotism in existence; and all merchants not addicted to opium-smuggling, but satisfied with more honourable and righteous branches of commerce.
— from Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-Ping Revolution (Volume I) by Augustus F. Lindley

The results of these different trials will naturally be different, since the indeterminate modifying causes are different in each; if, then, we do not find these results to be progressive, but, on the contrary, to oscillate about a certain point, one experiment giving a result a little greater, another a little less, one a result tending a little more in one direction, another a little more in the contrary direction; while the average or middle point does not vary, but different sets of experiments (taken in as great a variety of circumstances as possible) yield the same mean, provided only they be sufficiently numerous; then that mean, or average result, is the part, in each experiment, which is due to the cause A, and is the effect which would have been obtained if A could have acted alone; the variable remainder is the effect of chance, that is, of causes the co-existence of which with the cause A was merely casual.
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive by John Stuart Mill