Fluke

“ Fluid, flōō′id, adj. that flows, as water: liquid or gaseous.—n. a substance in which the particles can move about with greater or less freedom from one part of the body to another.—adjs. Flu′idal; Fluid′ic; Fluid′iform.—vs.t. Fluid′ify, Flu′idise, to make fluid.—ns. Flu′idism; Fluid′ity, Flu′idness, a liquid or gaseous state.—adv. Flu′idly. [Fr.,—L. fluidus, fluid—fluĕre, to flow.]
Fluke, flōōk, n. a flounder: a parasitic trematoid worm which causes the liver-rot in sheep, so called because like a miniature flounder: a variety of kidney potato. [A.S. flóc, a plaice; cf. Ice. flóke.] ”

“ So be Flukey. Can ye tell me anything 'bout Flukey?"
The woman frowned. "Flukey, Flukey, yer brother," she repeated. "I ain't a likin' boys, 'cause they throw stones at me."
"Flukey never throwed no stones at ye, Screechy, an' he's unhappy now. He'll bring ye a lot more fagots sometime to heat yer bones by."
"Aye, I'm a needin' heat. My bones be stiff, and my blood's nothin' but water, and my eyes ain't seein' nothin'."
"Don't they see things in the dark," asked the girl, superstitiously, "ghosts and things?"
"Aye, Flea ”

“ It is a mixture of fog and storm; and even in our own day we cannot well account for the phenomenon. Hence many disasters.
We try to explain all things by the action of wind and wave; yet in the air there is a force which is not the wind, and in the waters a force which is not the wave. That force, both in the air and in the water, is effluvium. Air and water are two nearly identical liquid masses, entering into the composition of each other by condensation and dilatation, so that to breathe is to drink. Effluvium alone is fluid. The wind and the wave are only impulses ”

“ The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So, if you are close behind the endless clamour, the sight cannot recognise liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible plane of air. ”

“ The flux is to the right rather than to the left because the veins there are more capacious and numerous than on the left side, for on the one side they spring from the liver, and on the other from the spleen. The defluxion and melting down take place most especially in the case of children in whom the head is heated either by the sun or by fire, or if the brain suddenly contract a rigor, and then the phlegm is excreted. ”

“ It had two fins, one on each side, just behind the head. With these, and with its tail, the whale swims and fights. Its tail is its most deadly weapon. The flukes of this one measured thirteen feet across, and with one stroke of this it could have smashed our largest boat in pieces. Many a boat has been sent to the bottom in this way. ”

“ A wild gust of wind shrieks angrily above board as the smack rises and plunges in the trough of a choppy sea. The blood-red sun has vanished, an inky darkness has set in, and the wind is rapidly increasing from a fresh breeze into a regular fierce and nasty gale. ”

“ Now when a Person throws a Stone into Water, these Undulations or Waves are raised in the Fluid for some Distance, by the Force and Action of one Wave upon another. This is the Case with regard to Sound; only the Air being an elastic Fluid, these Undulations are more quick and brisk in their Motions than in Water. So much for Sound itself. Now for the Cause of this Sound, or of these Undulations.
These Undulations are caused by the Vibration of some elastic Body, which is put into Motion by a Stroke of another Body against it. ”

“ The flux and reflux, when seen were quite regular. Every flood began gently, its velocity increasing by degrees, until at length it rushed in with great impetuosity, till it had attained its full hight. Having remained for a little time stationary, it then retired, ebbing gently at first, but afterward sinking away with great swiftness. At every flux the whole body of water seemed to be violently thrown against the bank; but neither during the time of the flux, nor that of the reflux, did there appear even the least wrinkle of a wave on the other parts of the moat. ”

“ Now and again as they fed, the whole flock would rise momentarily into air and float up as though blown from the earth by some invisible breath, and then, as silently and simultaneously, sink to earth again. ”

“ At one moment it bursts upon these icy fragments and buries them many feet beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoyancy of the depressed body struggles for reascendancy, the water rushes in foaming cataracts over the edges, while every individual mass, rocking and laboring in its bed, grinds against and contends with its opponent, until one is either split with the shock or upheaved upon the surface of the other. ”

“ Each year the fog horn blows a louder blast, until finally the softened haze of creeping years, like a white fog in the sea air, muffles the sound, and we sink to rest at last, some of us with the wild clamor hushed to the measure of a good-night song. ”

“ In a whirlwind of dust raised by an impetuous wind, however confused it may appear to our eyes; in the most dreadful tempest excited by opposing winds, which convulse the waves, there is not a single particle of dust or of water that is placed by chance that has not its sufficient cause for occupying the situation in which it is, and which does not rigororously act in the mode it should act. ”

“ Few gamblers but would stare if they were told that the falling of a die on a particular face is as much the effect of a definite cause as the fact of its falling; it is a proverb that "the wind bloweth where it listeth;" and even thoughtful men usually receive with surprise the suggestion, that the form of the crest of every wave that breaks, wind-driven, on the sea-shore, and the direction of every particle of foam that flies before the gale, are the exact effects of definite causes ”

“ The wind, too, was very warm, and it came in sudden gusts and died again, and she did not know which was sweeter, the deep warm silence when the wind died and the smell of the earth came up from the ploughed fields, or the windy fragrance of the gusts. But walking thus in the silences and in the sudden winds, she felt her body strong and full and young, and a great new longing seized her for the man. ”

“ Another prominent theory throughout the Hippocratic books is that of Fluxions, meaning thereby about what we would call congestions, or conditions which we would say were ordinarily caused by cold, though certain fluxions were supposed to be caused by heat, because the tissues thereby became rarefied, their pores enlarged, and their humor attenuated so that it flowed easily when compressed. The whole theorv of fluxion was founded on the densest ignorance of tissues and the laws of physics, the body of man being sometimes likened to a sponge and sometimes to a sieve. ”

“ Another important point is that the flue be not too large, or currents of cold air descending will interfere with the ascending heated air. In old buildings flues are found of large size—as 18 in. by 12 in.—with wide throats, funnel-shaped, diminishing upward. But the fuel used in them was wood, and abundant, and men were more hardy, and minded not the roaring of wind in the chimney, or cowered over the embers within the vast embrasure of the fireplace, which formed an inner room of itself. ”

“ Well, just at the last moment there came a sudden flush of current, dredging through the tangles like a wave. I lost one hold, was flung sprawling on my side, and, instinctively grasping for a fresh support, my fingers closed on something hard and cold. ”

“ On warm days she feared he would suffer from thirst, and when it stormed, she was afraid he would be struck by lightning. When she harkened to the wind that rattled in the chimney and dislodged the tiles on the roof, she imagined that he was being buffeted by the same storm, perched on top of a shattered mast, with his whole body bend backward and covered with sea-foam ”

“ For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase, interprets the elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory, a thing of endless, deep, humming roar, moonlight, and a spoken sentence. ”

“ We have all noticed the effect produced by drops of rain falling on water which the absence of wind leaves perfectly tranquil. Each drop forms a circle, but the causes of perturbation of an aqueous surface are infinite; the dip of an insect, the leap of a fish, all ceaselessly cause new circles, which follow each other, become wider, and finally lose themselves in each other under our eyes; the water is apparently a prey to shivering fits; this is a type of the vibrations whose percussions are felt by the whole world. ”

“ As you look down into a glass containing one fluid while drop after drop of another is falling, you perceive fresh currents and curves in every direction. Watching one of these, it has changed places with another, you lose trace of it, each drop is lost in the commingling of the whole. ”

“ An instant ago the mist opened and I caught a glimpse of the streets below.
“The fog is not simply vapor—it lives. By the side of each moaning and weeping human is a companion figure, an aura of strange and varicolored hues. How the shapes cling! Each to a living thing!
“The men and women are down. Flat on their faces. The fog figures caress them lovingly. ”

“ Then ether herself, the fraught-with-fire, were all
Left with their liquid bodies pure and free,
And each more lighter than the next below;
And ether, most light and liquid of the three,
Floats on above the long aerial winds,
Nor with the brawling of the winds of air
Mingles its liquid body. It doth leave
All there--those under-realms below her heights--
There to be overset in whirlwinds wild,--
Doth leave all there to brawl in wayward gusts,
Whilst, gliding with a fixed impulse still,
Itself it bears its fires along. ”

“ Heat and cold are thus combined; the equilibrium is distributed by a shock, the wave of wind issues forth and is distended, scattered and broken up in every direction in fierce streams. The dispersion of the gusts shakes the streaming locks of the wind upon the four corners of the horizon. ”

“ For a moment chaos reigned. Some enormous clouds, like huge blots of ink, swept through a host of smaller ones, which were scattered and floated like shreds of rag which the wind tore to pieces and carried off thread by thread. ”

“ The persistence of these fog wreaths is always remarkable when one considers that the particles of a fog cloud, however small they may be, must be continually sinking through the air which holds them, and that unless some upward motion of the air keeps at least a balance against this downward fall, the particles of the cloud must reach the earth or water and to that extent the cloud must disappear. ”

“ What had been a gentle ten-miles-an-hour breeze on the river above began resolving itself into a succession of fitful gusts of twenty or thirty as I approached the rock-walled bend. Even a steady head-wind makes steering awkward in going into a rapid; a gusty one is a distinct nuisance. ”

“ There was a dead weight to the shocks that could not conceivably be delivered by so unsubstantial a substance as air, yet which was the wind itself, lifting abruptly to enormous heights, then hurling its full force downward. ”

“ A dense fog has descended on us by way of variety. With a stinking coal fire, with the gas lit and the curtains drawn at half-past eleven in the forenoon, I feel that I am in my own country again at last. ”

“ But this I aver, whatever the cause, upon such nights of storm, the sensoria of some men are crossed by such wild variety and succession of images, as amounts very nearly to the Walpurgis of a fever. It is not the mere noise—other noises won't do it. The air, to be sure, is thin, and blood-vessels expand, and perhaps the brain is pressed upon unduly. ”

“ But violent as were the internal and alimentary fluids, the tide became still more violent when the body came into contact with flaming fire, or the solid earth, or gliding waters, or the stormy wind; the motions produced by these impulses pass through the body to the soul and have the name of sensations. ”

“ No wind: fog flows in where the wind is not. Under the fog, no weakening of the rolling invisible currents that could drag man's creation into the snag teeth of a reef or against the crushing mass of a dead hulk. ”

“ The sensation of floating in equilibrium was delightful and soothing; and yet I felt that it would be a relief to touch something solid. As soon as my candle lighted up the cavity, I saw that the walls of my strange abode were perforated in various places by holes, some of which were large enough to admit my body. ”

“ The sun and the air absorb or suck up the water and carry it off to their homes. Now, the bubbles are made of a little water and a little air. The water is on the end of the pipe, and Tommie blows the air into the pipe, and the bubble grows big and round. When it breaks, the air sucks up the water, which was the outside of the bubble, and the air which was inside mixes with the air in the room. ”

“ Although enveloped in a cloud of spray, we could distinguish without difficulty the direction of our path, and the nature of the cavern we were about to enter. Our guide warned us of the difficulty of respiration which we should encounter from the spray, and recommended us to look with exclusive attention to the security of our footing. Thus warned we pushed forward, blown about and buffeted by the wind, stunned by the noise, and blinded by the spray. Each successive gust penetrated us to the very bone with cold. ”