I The limited and peculiar activity which arises in matter and which we call vital; which comes and goes; which will not stay to be analyzed; which we in vain try to reproduce in our laboratories; which is inseparable from chemistry and physics, but which is not summed up by them; which seems to use them and direct them to new ends,—an entity which seems to have invaded the kingdom of inert matter at some definite time in the earth's history, and to have set up an insurgent movement there; cutting across the circuits of the mechanical and chemical forces; turning them about, pitting one against the other; availing itself of gravity, of chemical affinity, of fluids and gases, of osmosis and exosmosis, of colloids, of oxidation and hydration, and yet explicable by none of these things; clothing itself with garments of warmth and color and perfume woven from the cold, insensate elements; setting up new activities in matter; building up myriads of new unstable compounds; struggling against the tendency of the physical forces to a dead equilibrium; indeterminate, intermittent, fugitive; limited [Pg 160] in time, limited in space; present in some worlds, absent from others; breaking up the old routine of the material forces, and instituting new currents, new tendencies; departing from the linear activities of the inorganic, and setting up the circular activities of living currents; replacing change by metamorphosis, revolution by evolution, accretion by secretion, crystallization by cell-formation, aggregation by growth; and, finally, introducing a new power into the world—the mind and soul of man—this wonderful, and apparently transcendental something which we call life—how baffling and yet how fascinating is the inquiry into its nature and origin!
— from The Breath of Life by John Burroughs

[ 23 ] All this reproof and warning, however, only produced a partial repentance, and in July following acts of violence began to be perpetrated upon the Saints by the old settlers of Missouri, and in the month of November, under circumstances of great cruelty, all the Saints were driven from Jackson county, and later more than two hundred of their homes, together with their public improvements, were destroyed.
— from History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Volume 3 by Smith, Joseph, Jr.

Hugo had fully exposed himself in all his unfitness of the man of narrow upper class prejudices, the man of no instinct or enthusiasm for right, justice and liberty.
— from The Conflict by David Graham Phillips

It was just six o'clock when we left Truro; the shades of evening were closing round us, and our road lay over fifty miles of nearly uninhabited country; but there was so much to learn and hear, that we kept up an animated and unflagging conversation hour after hour.
— from The Englishwoman in America by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird

378 In 1883 they began setting these nets at Point Barrow about March 4, and probably about the same date the year before, though we did not happen to observe this method of netting until considerably later.
— from Ethnological results of the Point Barrow expedition Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887-1888, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1892, pages 3-442 by John Murdoch

This doesn't make much sense out here in the middle of nowhere, unless careless loss is the answer.
— from Jack of No Trades by Charles Cottrell