(1) Crescent, increase, decrease, concrete, recruit, accrue, crew; (2) crescendo, excrescence, accretion, increment.

Turning now to "revelation" in the stricter sense of a preternatural enlightenment of the mind, it might conceivably be either by way of a real accretion of knowledgean addition to the contents of the mindor else by way of manipulating contents already there, as we ourselves do by reminiscence, by rumination, comparison, analysis, inference.

There are two senses in which we can understand an evolution of this idea of God; first, as Mr. Tylor understands it, in the sense of a development by accretion from a simple germ, from the idea of a phantasm nowise a god, to that of a spirit still lacking divinity, thence to that of a Supreme Spirit in whom first the essential definition of God is somewhat fulfilled.

Samuel Butler once noted that: "All our limbs and sensual organs, in fact, our whole body and life, are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa.

Soft itself, yet with immense wedging power, from the gradual accretion of tiny cells, it pierces the wood, and then rends right and left the tough fibrous coat.

Increase N. increase, augmentation, enlargement, extension; dilatation &c (expansion) 194; increment, accretion; accession &c 37; development, growth; aggrandizement, aggravation; rise; ascent &c 305; exaggeration exacerbation; spread &c (dispersion) 73; flood tide; gain, produce, product, profit.

Coherence N. coherence, adherence, adhesion, adhesiveness; concretion accretion; conglutination, agglutination, agglomeration; aggregation; consolidation, set, cementation; sticking, soldering &c v.; connection; dependence.

germination, growth, upgrowth^; accretion &c 35; budding, gemmation^. overgrowth, overdistension^; hypertrophy, tympany^. bulb &c (convexity) 250; plumper; superiority of size.

I pass over other literary arguments which hardly admit of this form of expressionsuch as the improbability that the Preface or Prologue was not part of the original Gospel, but a later accretion; or, again, from Marcion's treatment of the Synoptic matter in the third Gospel, both points which might be otherwise worth dilating upon.

It has shown that the meager Vita is a conglomeration of a few chance facts set into a mass of later conjecture derived from a literal-minded interpretation of the Eclogues, to which there gathered during the credulous and neurotic decades of the second and third centuries an accretion of irresponsible gossip.

The fire that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole mass so fully; if a pearllazy growth and accretion of amorphous lifeshould fuse and form again in sparkling crystals, the miracle would be less.

That new words, however compounded, carried these meanings to the Indian ear, and were understood by it in all possible forms of accretion and syllabication.

I am older than Sophie was when you took her in where I have not been; why will you not make me your friend?"and some sudden collision of watery powers among the window-drops, whether from accretion or otherwise, sent a glistening rivulet down to the barrier of the sash.

In my judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable under the mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on with it as long as he can.

Sometimes I go into a library, the slow accretion of a couple of centuries, or perhaps the mushroom growth from a rich man's grave, a great collection magically convoked by the talisman of gold.

This accretion of female population added very much to the charms of frontier society.

A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened into fruit.

My theory is that the mound was built by gradual accretion in the following manner: That when a death occurred a funeral pyre was erected on the mound, upon which the body was placed.

The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms.

Since it appears that the accretion of calcareous matter is continually going on at the present time, and has probably taken place at all times, the stone thus formed, independent of the organized bodies which it envelopes, will afford no criterion of its date, nor give any very certain clue to the revolutions which have subsequently acted upon it.

After the cutting through of this portion of the left bank in 1833 by the United States Engineers employed to construct a harbor at this point, and the throwing out of the piers, the water overflowed this long tongue of land, and, continually encroaching on the southern bank, robbed it of many valuable acres; while, by the same action of the vast body of the lake, an accretion was constantly taking place on the north of the harbor.

The work is indeed a composite piece, a masque grown into a play through the accretion of foreign matter, and was probably in its original state a far simpler composition than it now appears.

Moreover, I have actually traced (in 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion') some plausible processes of mythical accretion.

The labor expended in preparing the work must have been immense, and, unlike most of our stereotyped medical literature, it has increased by true interstitial growth, instead of by mere accretion, or of remaining essentially stationarywith the exception of the title-page.

The people, too, though the cobbler only dimly saw that, were as much the deposit and accretion of all dead ages as was the coal that lay bedded in the fencing hills.