To-all-intents-and-purposes meaning

The Russians in Turkestan form only about 5% of the total pop., and since most of the rural Mussulman pop. take no part in the voting, the country is governed to all intents and purposes by men elected by the very small proportion of Russians of the lower classes living in the towns.

As thus traced, the boundary in Central Asia includes the two khanates of Bokhara and Khiva, which, though nominally protected states, are to all intents and purposes integral parts of the Russian empire.

Corstorphine (pop. 2725), once noted for its cream and also as a spa, is now to all intents and purposes a western suburb of the capital.

Natives were openly transferred from one Boer to another, and the fact that they were described as apprentices by the farmers did not in the least alter the status of the native, who to all intents and purposes became the property of his master.

The first volume, Vegetable Staticks (1727), contains an account of numerous experiments in plant-physiology - the loss of water in plants by evaporation, the rate of growth of shoots and leaves, variations in root-force at different times of the day, &c. Considering it very probable that plants draw "through their leaves some part of their nourishment from the air," he undertook experiments to show in "how great a proportion air is wrought into the composition of animal, vegetable and mineral substances"; though this "analysis of the air" did not lead him to any very clear ideas about the composition of the atmosphere, in the course of his inquiries he collected gases over water in vessels separate from those in which they were generated, and thus used what was to all intents and purposes a "pneumatic trough."