What is "superficial"

Usage examples of "superficial".

Revenues adequate for the exercise of central government could not be collected out of conditions of anarchy, and the authority of the Emperor was too superficial to control the situation.

In the epidermis of the apophysis functional stomata, similar to those of the higher plants, are present and, since cells containing chlorophyll are present below the superficial layers of the apophysis and capsule, the sporogonium is capable of independent assimilation.

The superficial apothecial characters are so much alike in many of the species that one cannot always feel certain even of the genus of unfamiliar forms until he has studied them microscopically.

Only a superficial view could attach importance to words, phrases, even vocabularies, or to quaint social customs that the receiving race may adopt from the newcomers in the process of assimilating them.

The identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel is in no way whatever connected with that of the Baron de Batz, and even superficial reflection will soon bring the mind to the conclusion that great fundamental differences existed in these two men, in their personality, in their character, and, above all, in their aims.

Gordon, in spite of his announcement that he had a good deal to say, confined himself at first to superficial allusions, and Bernard after a while had the satisfaction of perceiving that he was not likely, for the moment, to strike the note of conjugal discord.

It was inevitable that a symbolic logic should come into being, with Boole, at precisely that period when languages were becoming philological objects: for, despite some superficial resemblances and a few technical analogies, it was not a question, as it had been in the Classical age, of constituting a universal language, but of representing the forms and connections of thought outside all language.

Saudi regime has pursued very superficial political and economic reforms, the government in Tehran has removed many of the religious restrictions, especially those on women, and helped to reinvigorate a quite lively parliamentary and political debate, which culminated in the critical parliamentary election in April 1992.

He is no sciolist himself, and he does not believe in merely superficial attainments in his pupils.

He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome, more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though in an essential nobleness and singleness, which consisted with a great deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of Louise.

In this connection it is interesting to notice a case of what might be called acute symptomatic transitory pseudoacromegaly, reported by Potovski: In an insane woman, and without ascertainable cause, there appeared an enlargement of the ankles, wrists, and shoulders, and later of the muscles, with superficial trophic disturbances that gradually disappeared.

Beyond a very vague knowledge of what has been taught to them in a superficial manner in our schools and colleges, and the fragmentary reminiscences that may have been recounted to them by their sires and grandsires who passed through these troublous times, it is doubtful whether even one-tenth of our present population have any idea of just how near Canada came to being absorbed by the United States in that critical period.

I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a woman, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to reason back from effects to their causes.

As it is, we are merely bolting our lives--gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in--because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being.

For the signs scratched upon the reverse of the medallion seemed to bear at least a superficial relationship with what had already been discovered about the country whereover the mental supermen ruled.