Crushing

“ To burst is to break by pressure from within, as a bombshell, but it is used also for the result of violent force otherwise exerted; as, to burst in a door, where the door yields as if to an explosion. To crush is to break by pressure from without, as an egg-shell. To crack is to break without complete severance of parts; a cracked cup or mirror may still hold together. Fracture has a somewhat similar sense. In a fractured limb, the ends of the broken bone may be separated, tho both portions are still retained within the common muscular tissue. ”

“ The crush on the paths higher up on the hillside was not so great, but the fighting of man against man was incessant and bitter. I could see them clambering up the steep sides of the ledges, with bleeding nails, distorted features and locked teeth. ”

“ A few years after this time, when stooping forward to examine an opening fissure in a rock front, at which I was engaged in quarrying, a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet, and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There was nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence; but the gush of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set at nought the scepticism which should have held that there was no Providence in it. ”

“ It is a wonderful example of Nature's mechanism thus to see how simple are the means by which this end is accomplished. The same inevitable crush that dislocates the solid shell along certain lines, produces the heat necessary to expel to the surface the material crushed. ”

“ By the end of three days it was noticed that the shocks were increasing in violence much more swiftly than previously, as if the earth's crust had been so weakened that it could no longer resist the hammering. ”

“ When, as yesterday, every sixteen minutes a tremendous jarring crash tells you that a shell has fallen somewhere in the city,—and the concussion is so great that it always sounds as if it had fallen in the next block!—you see people turn their heads as they walk, staring in the direction of the explosion ”

“ Imagine forces of some kind, acting laterally, to compress those layers. There will be corrugations, sometimes actual fractures, the two sides of which, sliding one against the other, will be either raised or depressed. Faults is the name which we give to the fractures that penetrate the terrestrial shell and separate two masses of rock, one of which slides over the plane of fracture. The fault, therefore, reveals an edge, a lower lip produced by the subsidence of the soil, and an upper lip produced by an elevation. ”

“ She is here driven to make fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges with moss, or round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots. She is bound to produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual 194 breaking away of substance. And behold—so soon as she is compelled to do this—she changes the law of fracture itself. "Growth," she seems to say, "is not essential to my work, nor concealment, nor softness; but curvature is: and if I must produce my forms by breaking them, the fracture itself shall be in curves. ”

“ The breeze was keen and so cutting, that one felt as if that part of the person exposed to it had undergone the process of excoriation, and when a stronger blast than usual swept over the naked and desolate-looking fields, its influence actually benumbed the joints, and penetrated the whole system with a sensation that made one imagine the very marrow within the bones was frozen. ”

“ But now, caught in the tremendous crush of humanity, by the thousands upon thousands of human beings who thronged the streets, carried this way and that by currents and counter-currents, they were likely to be carried anywhere. And should the crush become too great, they might well be rendered unconscious by the vise-like pressure of the throng. ”

“ On the instant there came a crackling, tearing sound—a heaving roll—a splintering crash and uproar. The man aloft was seen to make a flying leap—or was it only a hurled fragment of the falling chimney?—and white dust rose in a fog once more and blotted out all the tragedy that might be enacting behind it. ”

“ After grinding and tearing onward for several miles, or perhaps less than one, the furious impulse is again checked by another solid barrier, which must in turn be broken down and swept away, its added weight giving increased energy to the mighty force. ”

“ A little girl, quite a little girl in a blue-hooded cape, and a white apron, was walking with crutches over a plain. With every step she took her crutches grew and raised her like stilts. They soon became higher than the poplars on the river's bank. A woman who saw my surprise said to me: "Don't you know that in the spring crutches grow? But there are times when the size increases with alarming rapidity." ”

“ Accompanying the cracking in many instances there seemed, according to one observer, "a blowing out of the earth, bringing up coal, wood, sand, etc., accompanied with a roaring and whistling produced by the impetuosity of the air escaping from the confinement... trees being blown up, cracked and split, and falling by thousands at a time. ”

“ It is so very easy, when examining the scene of an explosion, for the first cause of rupture to be confounded with the causes of the subsequent mischief, that in many cases erroneous conclusions have been arrived at in this way. ”

“ They grappled and fell, rolling in a tangle of rope, Klusky fighting with ratlike fury, whining odd, broken curses. The larger man crushed him in silence, beating him into the snow, bent on killing him with his hands. ”

“ These illustrations show Groin Rupture as it first appears, and how it gradually grows worse and descends into the privates (both male and female) when neglected or not properly protected, as when a worthless truss or other appliance is worn which frequently or occasionally lets the rupture come out. ”

“ The blow on the sledge is vibration and crystallization; but there are two effects, but only one blow. When we consider the nature of the blow as action and reaction, we are considering force; but when we consider the effect we are considering causation. ”

“ Whenever it is fractured, the fracture is a clean cut, as if made by a saw, and through both pebbles and cement, and the ends present the appearance of a composite cake filled with almonds and cut with a knife. ”

“ Often, if the drive was made over a high bluff, the fall killed many of the beasts, and even when this did not take place, many of the younger and weaker animals were destroyed by their fellows in the tremendous crush which took place within the pen. ”

“ Suppose he lost his chance, and some other man won her, and all his life was blighted! It was a ghastly thought—almost unbearable. His hair, disturbed doubtless by the agonised turmoil taking place beneath it, recovered from the effects of the grease and began to rise. ”

“ The explosion, as it is nothing else, generally takes place when this finely balanced equilibrium tilts for one reason or another. A stone is thrown into a sheet of water in perfect stillness, and the disturbance at once spreads all 243over the surface. ”

“ Treads, blows, and bruises, EXTERNALLY, and a lodgment of gravel, or other extraneous substance, having insinuated itself INTERNALLY, from the bottom of the foot, and working upwards, are principally the means by which such misfortune is too frequently and unluckily produced. ”

“ Beating against cliffs and other obstructions, they will cause shocks and concussions, fissures, and a partial local falling of the internal vault, the effects of which will be felt at the surface as undulations and tremblings. ”

“ Instead of the explosive charge augmenting in quantity for countless ages, it finds relief continuously, or by a succession of shocks of moderate violence, so as never to burst or blow up the covering of incumbent rock in one grand paroxysmal convulsion. ”

“ Such shocks may cause an accumulation of set which finally leads to rupture in a way that is not to be confused with ordinary fatigue of strength. The effects of the accumulation may be removed by annealing. ”

“ But dangerous things to play tricks with. There are great cracks in them, you know—deep cracks with walls of solid ice. If a man falls down on cracks, unless help is forthcoming he won't live long, Carl. ”

“ Men are ground to powder, the dust becoming ants, fleas, and lice; pestled in a mortar, and mashed to jelly in iron mortars; chopped in slices with a knife and hacked to pieces with hatchets; the tongue of deceit and lying pulled out; sawn asunder; the bones and flesh crushed by falling mountains; women cast into a lake of blood; crossing the narrow bridge and falling among fiery serpents ”

“ I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body. ”

“ Amongst many other stones thrown to a considerable distance by these explosions, one weighing above seventy pounds was removed fifty yards Eastward from the steeple, where it fell through the roof of a house. ”

“ The blood will follow where the knife is driven, The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear, And sighs and cries by nature grow on pain. ”

“ The more energetic the effort has been to recover from this state, and to shake off all appearance of poverty, the more assuredly the curse seems to fasten on the scene, and the unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and ghastly desolation of incompleteness entangled in decay, strike a deeper despondency into the beholder. ”

“ A chilly twilight reigned in the ravine, and the noise that came up from the ruin of the torrent seemed doubly accented by reason of it. The sound of water moving in darkness has always conveyed to me an impression of something horrible and deadly, be it nothing of more moment than the drip and hollow tinkle of a gutter pipe. But the crash in this echoing gorge was appalling indeed. ”

“ Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air,
Or all the elements by scruples, I know not,
Nor greatly care.—Shoot! shoot!
Of all deaths, the violent death is best;
For from ourselves it steals ourselves so fast,
The pain, once apprehended, is quite past. ”

“ Learned bodies, like the French Academy and the Royal Society of London, have gravely asserted that, in the fall, swallows plunge into the mud of marshes and mill-ponds, become torpid, and hibernate like frogs and snakes. ”

“ And the vindictive brute is ready to repeat its bite. For a moment it rears back, trembling with excitement, and, if felled by a blow of its victim's stick, will snap away savagely at stumps and stones, or even, like a wounded panther, at its own body. ”

“ The walls are cracked and water runs upon them in thin threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. ”

“ One floats and wavers like a spineless ribbon of seaweed in the water; another burns with a steady radiance; a third blares from its fissure like a flame driven by the blowpipe. It is all a question of the under-draught, and some may feel it a little, and some a little more or a little less. ”

“ Yes, there are some backs on the street which cry for the knife. ”

“ A great mass of foam was around its mouth, and it was brandishing a marline spike, and bellowing. A terrifying spectacle in the half light of dusk—a spectacle to put the fear of God into any man. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. ”

“ It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! ”

“ The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him—for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity—when suddenly the figure of a man, formed as of heated metal—the figure of what seemed to be a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace—sprang up out of the darkness ”

“ Now the reaper rested on his scythe, as if unexpectedly acquitted of a part of his labour; but the corn flamed up in these five or six directions, and was consumed in each to the compass of a single sheaf: whereat the fire died away. And with its dying the faces of those that had ventured went black as coal; and they flung up their arms, screaming, and fell prone where they stood, and were hidden from our view.
Then, indeed, despair seized upon all of us that survived, and we made no doubt but that we were to be exterminated and wiped from the earth for our sins, as were the men of Anathoth. ”

“ burning are the drops
That wounded love will shed—like to the dew
Falling from off the poison tree, the blight
Still following the touch;—ah! other tears
Soften and bless—but these destroy the heart. ”

“ The undergrowth grew denser and more fantastic; the murmur filled out, increased and resolved itself into a sound of falling water that ever took shape, and volume, and depth, till its crash shook the ground at our feet. Then in a moment a white blaze of sky came at us through the trunks, and we burst through the fringe of the wood to find ourselves facing the opposite side of a long cleft in the mountain and the blade's edge of a roaring cataract. ”

“ She wanted to destroy something. The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear. ”

“ Flung down the precipice and forced into this contracted space, it fumes and tosses and rages with vindictive fury, driving on in a passion that has almost a human quality in it. Restrained by the walls of stone from being destructive, it seems to rave at its own impotence, and when it reaches the whirlpool it is like a hungry animal, returning and licking the shore for the prey it has missed. ”