What is "contrivance"

Usage examples of "contrivance".

A magnificent, an unforeseen destiny now engrossed him, a destiny owed not wholly to his own merit nor to Angevin contrivance, but also to some happy conjunction of the planets.

Though I no longer approached the work with the passion I had formerly brought to it, every brushstroke seemed a contrivance of passion, to be the product of an emotion that continued to act through me despite the fact that I had forgotten how to feel it.

That they were built subsequently to the main clusters is also indicated by the abundant use of oblique openings and roof holes, where there is very little necessity for such contrivances.

His idea was to heat the Collegia with the waste hot water from his boiler, while using the steam-piston contrivances attached to it to drive a water pump bringing water up from wells, and to do other mechanical work needed at the complex.

But with most of the Cucurbitaceae there is a curious special contrivance for bursting the seedcoats whilst beneath the ground, namely, a peg at the base of the hypocotyl, projecting at right angles, which holds down the lower half of the seedcoats, whilst the growth of the arched part of the hypocotyl lifts up the upper half, and thus splits them in twain.

As we are not writing a teleological argument, but only producing evidence that Darwinism excludes teleology, we cannot follow the details which prove that the wing of the gannet or swift is almost as wonderful and beautiful a specimen of contrivance as the eye of the eagle.

For an icy moment Mr Southern wondered if she knew why, if her compliance was no more than a contrivance to get him to confess to her why he was in Guernsey, as he had got Sally Gallienne to confess her guilt.

The Invigilator, wearing the mysterious contrivance, played himself, though with only such verve as we ordered him to display.

This device you see then is merely a contrivance for producing these charges and microstates without the necessity for the time-consuming external stimulation.

YOUNG MAN, if you have, through ignorance, fallen into practices that have arrested your physical growth and development in any of your organs or parts, shun all such unscientific and worse than worthless contrivances as you would shun a pestilence.

I suppose we criminals will have to set up a factory and make them, and then visit all the three hundred million inhabited planets, one by one, and drop one little contrivance on every one.

Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

She was more formed than Cecilia, although one year younger, and seemed anxious to convince me of her superiority, but, thinking that the fatigue of the preceding night might have exhausted my strength, she unfolded all the armorous ideas of her mind, explained at length all she knew of the great mystery she was going to enact with me, and of all the contrivances she had had recourse to in order to acquire her imperfect knowledge, the whole interlarded with the foolish talk natural to her age.

I could not help laughing at the contrivance, which struck me as at once ingenious and diabolical, but I could not make up my mind to avail myself of it.