I am extremely glad to hear that you are going to publish a work on the more ancient fossil plants; and I thank you beforehand for the volume which you kindly say that you will send me. I earnestly hope that you will give, at least incidentally, the results at which you have arrived with respect to the more recent Tertiary plants; for the close gradation of such forms seems to me a fact of paramount importance for the principle of evolution. Your cases are like those on the gradation in the genus Equus, recently discovered by Marsh in North America.英文原著 · 《More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume I》
She told him to lie down. "Has the time come?" asked Maskull. "Yes."
He lay there waiting in the darkness, ignorant of what was going to happen. He felt her hand clasping his. without perceiving any gradation, he lost all consciousness of his body; he was no longer able to feel his limbs or internal organs. His mind remained active and alert. Nothing particular appeared to be taking place. Then the chamber began to grow light, like very early morning.英文原著 · 《A Voyage to Arcturus》
The rest were players or lookers-on; most of whom, by well-known gradations of curiosity and weakness, to describe which minutely would be to write a little comedy that others have already written, were drawn into playing at last. So fidgets the moth about the candle before he makes up what, no doubt, the poor little soul calls his mind.英文原著 · 《A Woman-Hater》
He was king. And from one gradation to another, they entered Cologne with Severne seated between the two girls, each with a hand in his, and a great disposition to pet him and spoil him; more than once, indeed, a delicate head just grazed each of his square shoulders; but candor compels me to own that their fatigue and the yawing of the carriage at the time were more to blame than the tired girls; for at the enormity there was a prompt retirement to a distance. Miss Maitland had been a long time in the land of Nod; and Vizard, from the first, had preferred male companions and tobacco.英文原著 · 《A Woman-Hater》
That throughout the whole visible world, an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which cause is a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that Reason alone countervails all the other faculties, v.207.英文原著 · 《An Essay on Man》
'Tis the curse of service; Preferment goes by letter, and affection, Not by the old gradation, where each second Stood heir to the first.英文原著 · 《Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare》