In order to justify this assertion, and yet, at the same time, not to claim more for Professor Wyville Thomson and his colleagues than is their due, I must give a brief history of the observations which have preceded their exploration of this recondite field of research, and endeavour to make clear what was the state of knowledge in December, 1872, and what new facts have been added by the scientific staff of the Challenger.

Literature exhausted, we may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus.

Insistent questioning did develop, further, that "cold tea" was one of these; but cold tea did not make plain its recondite potenciesdid not explain why a beverage so unassuming to the taste should inspire one with a wish to partake of it continuously.

Her occupation and rather recondite learning?

Hitherto, these recondite histories had been far beyond my ken.

To him, a perfectly unintelligible will is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever; especially if associated with some kind of recondite knavery.

Neander has written one of the most searching and recondite histories of modern times; but it is too dry, too deficient in art, to be cherished, and may pass away like the voluminous writings of Varro, the most learned of the Romans.

The "right thing" in regard to baptism is a recondite point; but we are not going to enter into any controversy about it.

That the reviews in the British Critic are, however, what Copleston is parodying in the critique of L'Allegro is abundantly clear, but what he says about voyages and travels and about science and recondite learning appear to have reference to articles particularly characteristic of the Edinburgh Review.

Beatrice and Peter and Benedict alike discourse on the recondite subjects of the Bible in the style of Mediaeval doctors.

The recondite romance of existence was not hidden from her.

He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose.

And, curiously enough, the more difficult, recondite, and perplexing the questions or hypotheses are, such, for instance, as those about organic Nature, the more impatient they are of suspense.

This leads to the question of individuality, a subject quite too large and too recondite for present discussion.

In his later years he was given (perhaps a little ostentatiously) to prefixing quotations from Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and oven more recondite authors, to the successive sections of The Borough But wherever he found booksespecially poetryhe read them and remembered them.

And that those philologists who had represented it as an agglutinated mass, and capable of the most recondite, pronominal, and tensal meanings, exceeding those of Greece and Rome, had no clear conceptions of what they were speaking of.

But although this speech is remarkable for the number of law-terms used in it, only one of them seems to evince any recondite knowledge of the law.

" Another seemingly recondite law-phrase used by Shakespeare, which Lord Campbell passes entirely by, though Mr. Rushton quotes three instances of it, is "taken with the manner."

These were Parry's "King Saul"a very recondite, musicianly compositionbut too long; "The Swan and the Skylark," a fanciful little cantata by Goring Thomas; and a "Stabat Mater" by G. Henschel.

It may, indeed, contain some recondite and malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's Prayer.

The most recondite principles of practical science were his toys; the deepest intricacies of abstract science his diversions.

Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch of English literature was curiously minute, thus describesno doubt from authentic sourcesa family dinner at the end of the eighteenth century: "The ample tureen of potage royal had a boned duck swimming in its centre.

If, however, a more recondite authority for the explanation of the word, as formerly used in England, be desired, I would refer your querist to the pages of the Promptorium Parvulorum, where may be found"Bruwyn ale or other drynke, Pandoxor.

To the former class belonged Charles Seager, and John Brande Morris, of Exeter College, both learned Orientalists, steeped in recondite knowledge of all kinds; men who had worked their way to knowledge through hardship and grinding labour, and not to be outdone in Germany itself for devouring love of learning and a scholar's plainness of life.

One could almost see a small throng of serious men and women wending their way up the still plainly marked path to the chapel, and catch the measured tones of the lecturer as he expounded theories too recondite for this practical age and generation.