a. [see -ARY.]
1. = FLUXIONAL 1.
1734. Berkeley, Analyst, § 10. Such reasoning as this, for Demonstration, nothing but the obscurity of the Subject could have encouraged or induced the great Author of the Fluxionary Method to put upon his Followers, and nothing but an implicit deference to Authority could move them to admit.
1763. W. Emerson, Meth. Increm., Preface, p. vii. Some fluxionary quantities have no fluents, but what are expressed by series.
1831. Brewster, Newton (1855), I. ii. 35. We find him occupied with his fluxionary calculus.
2. Of the nature of, or subject to ‘fluxion’ or continuous change, fluctuating.
1748. Lond. Mag., June, 255/2. Ether thus universally diffused by the earth, serves as the general ferment, spirit and cause of action in matter, whereby all bodies are kept in a constant oscillating motion, and disposed to undergo those fluxionary changes necessary to their generation, growth and corruption.
1826. De Quincey in Blackw. Mag., XX. Nov., 738. All appearances in nature, which bear the character to our understanding of sudden birth and sudden extinction, and which, by their very essence, are fluxionary, become unnatural when fixed and petrified, as it were, into the unchanging forms of art.
1841. Blackw. Mag., XLIX. March, 416/1. All other wealth was fluxionary, liable to endless subdivision or dispersion, and not embodied at that time in any stable class.
