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lar steps or orderly arrangement; the state of being graded or arranged in ranks; as, the gradation of castes.

By regular steps or gradations; of or pertaining to gradation.

asing; a lowering from one's standing or rank in office or society; diminution; as, the degradation of a peer, a knight, a general, or a bishop. He saw many removes and degradations in all the other offices of which he had been possessed. Clarendon.

Degradation; a stripping of titles and honors.

The act of retrograding, or moving backward.

The act of degrading one's self, or the state of being so degraded.

A low or downcast state; meanness of spirit; abasement; degradation. That this should be termed baseness, abjection of mind, or servility, is it credible Hooker.

ighest rank; a naval officer of high rank, of which there are different grades. The chief gradations in rank are admiral, vice admiral, and rear admiral. The admiral is the commander in chief of a fleet or of fleets.

Injury; degradation; ruin. [Obs.] You might wrest the caduceus out of my hand to the adultery and spoil of nature. B. Jonson.

An apparent motion of a planet toward the west; retrogradation.

ments. This doctrine forbids concubinage and polygamy, and frees women from many of the degradations imposed upon them among the orthodox Mohammedans. Mendicancy, the use of intoxicating liquors and drugs, and slave dealing, are forbidden; asceticism is discountenanced. --Bab"ist, n.

The quality or condition of being base; degradation; vileness. I once did hold it a baseness to write fair. Shak.

upriors. -- Canonical punishments, such as the church may inflict, as excommunication, degradation, penance, etc. -- Canonical sins (Anc. Church.), those for which capital punishment or puplic penance decreed by the canon was inflicted, as idolatry, murder, adultery, heresy.

Upward movement; steady increase; gradation; ascent. Glanvill.

The act or state of growing worse, or the state of having become worse; decline; degradation; debasement; degeneracy; deterioration. Our degeneration and apostasy. Bates.

A believer in the theory of degeneration, or hereditary degradation of type; as, the degenerationists hold that savagery is the result of degeneration from a superior state.

Deprivation of rank or office; degradation. [R.] Milton.

or downward, in quality, rank, acquirement, and the like; a stage in progression; grade; gradation; as, degrees of vice and virtue; to advance by slow degrees; degree of comparison.

The act of going downward; descent; falling or sinking; declension; degradation. Oblique descension (Astron.), the degree or arc of the equator which descends, with a celestial object, below the horizon of an oblique sphere. -- Right descension, the degree or arc of the equator which descends below the horizon of a ri…

A step or remove downward in any scale of gradation; a degree in the scale of genealogy; a generation. No man living is a thousand descents removed from Adam himself. Hooker.