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More "Optical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... awake; the moon and the stars were above her; they surrounded the luminous figure. Her brain struggled for intelligence. Was this the spirit of some great king of Egypt, or of a high priest, or what was it? Was it an optical delusion? If it was a spirit, why had it ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... part of the materials in the erection of the lightkeepers' houses. After the removal of the bridge, the aspect of things at the rock was much altered. The beacon-house and building had both a naked look to those accustomed to their former appearance; a curious optical deception was also remarked, by which the lighthouse seemed to incline from the perpendicular towards the beacon. The horizontal rope-ladder before noticed was again stretched to preserve the communication, and the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been said, blindly into vacancy. It may have been an optical illusion, it may have been a mere vagary born of an over-wrought brain; but a picture formed before him. In the distance, toward the west, he saw something that looked like a great arch of stone, a natural bridge, rugged with crags and dark with pine. Beneath it swept a wide blue river, and ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... visible, which to the Courtiers there present were invisible. For indeed it is well said, 'in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.' To Newton and to Newton's Dog Diamond, what a different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely, the same! Let the Reader here, in this sick-room of Louis, endeavour to look with the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... a model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom these ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... telescope with the eyes of their prisoner, they saw them approach, all unsuspecting. DuQuesne recognized all five persons in the Skylark and Dunark and Sitar in the Kondal; such was that unearthly optical instrument and so clear was the impression upon the mind before him. They saw the attack and the battle. They saw the Skylark throw off her zone of force and attack; saw this one survivor standing directly in line with ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... recurred to by phantasmagorists is further increased by the mystery that conceals, from the eyes of the public, their operations and optical instruments: but it is easy for the showman to snatch from them this superiority, and to strengthen the illusion for the children whom you choose to amuse with this sight. For that purpose, he has only to change the arrangement of the sheet, by requiring it to be suspended ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... that I am about to relate will be interpreted in a different manner by different people. Rationalists who pin their faith on Sir Walter Scott and his "Demonology" will say it was only an optical illusion; the incredulous, who believe in nothing, will declare it was but a dream; while Spiritualists, who follow Mr. Robert Dale Owen in his "Footprints on the Boundaries of Another World," will be ready to declare that it was the apparition of a spirit; I commit myself to no ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... extinguished by the distance, and only the general figure of the condensed parts being discernible. It is under the appearance of objects of this character that all the greater globular clusters exhibit themselves in telescopes of insufficient optical power to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... terror, she struck her hands to her eyes, as if to dispel an optical illusion, and sank half fainting, to be caught in the arms of her uncle and laid against the side of the rocks, while he sprinkled her face ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... 9: Now in MS. Vespas. A. II. art. 12, "Joannes Dee, 1555." This is an extremely curious and valuable tract in the history of optical science, and is similar to the curious treatise by Gogava De speculo ustorio. The focus of the parabola is here for the first time indicated, a circumstance which has escaped the ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... secured and classified over five hundred distinct species of fishes from this very division of the Indian Ocean; many of which are characterized by colors as gay and various as those of tropical birds and flowers. Mirage played us strange tricks, in the way of optical delusion, in these regions. We seemed constantly to be approaching land that was never reached, and which, after assuming the undulating shore-lines of a well-defined coast, at the moment when we should ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... used in making chemical glassware, since it resists the action of reagents better than the softer sodium glass. If lead oxide is substituted for the whole or a part of the lime, the glass is very soft, but has a high index of refraction and is valuable for making optical instruments ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little Alps, below the twinkling stars. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... at the bottom of a huge gulf. Thus the whole visible earth appears as a vast bowl or basin. This is extremely ingenious reasoning, and not to be disregarded; but the fact remains that in the experience of the writer and of many others whom he has consulted, there is no such optical illusion as I have just discussed, and to their vision it is impossible to regard the earth ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... thinking that I was the victim of some hallucination, or that the refraction from the intense light produced an optical delusion; and, as I did so, the flaming pillar slowly twisted and thundered off whithersoever it passes to in the bowels of the great earth, leaving Ayesha standing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... looking into a tunnel from without can see nothing therein, though the open country beyond is plainly visible, so, standing in that submarine shadow, all around is dark, though beyond the sable curtain of the shadow the view is clear. Apply this optical fact to the ghastly story of a diver's alleged experience in the cabin of a sunken ship. It is narrated that there was revealed to his appalled sight the spectacle of the drowned passengers in various attitudes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... was a waving of her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell in the tower. It said, to an understanding unpractised in the feminine mysteries: 'I can sleep through anything.' What that revealed of her state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely optical figure blocked his guessing. He was with her friends, who liked her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 105, we saw that two rays determine the position of any point of our image; hence in order to locate the image of the top of the arrow, we need to consider but one more ray from the top of the object. The most convenient ray to choose would be one passing through O, the optical center of the lens, because such a ray passes through the lens unchanged in direction, as is clear from Figure 74. The point where AC and AO meet after refraction will be the position of the ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... striking optical effect may frequently be observed from the shadows of the higher mountains while the sunbeams are pouring past overhead. Then every insect, no matter what may be its own proper color, burns white in the light. Gauzy-winged ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... humanity has stalked into manhood. By the use of wheels we are rapidly rolling into a race of commercial travellers, touts, gad-abouts, and members of parliament, folk with the hanging jaws of astonishment, avid for curios, and with mental, moral and optical indigestion. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with the aid of the telescope; and the telescope was an outcome of the new study of optics which had been inspired in Roger Bacon and other medieval scholars by the optical works, directly founded on the Greek, of the Spanish Moors. Giordano Bruno still further enlarged the system; he pictured the universe boldly as an infinite ocean of liquid ether, in which the stars, with retinues of inhabited planets, floated majestically. Bruno was burned at the stake (1600); ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Peer," broke in Mr. Smith, turning to a second scientist. "Optical science defective! Optical science is your specialty. But," he continued, again addressing William Cooley, "failing with Jupiter, are we getting any ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... account of the optical, mechanical, and electrical arrangements employed, written by Mr. Cole, will be found in Nature, vol. i., p. 222 (July ...
— The Splash of a Drop • A. M. Worthington
... Topandy and Lorand were amusing themselves at greater length with optical experiments in the lonely scientific apartment, Lorand took the liberty ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... which blazed a, huge fire (summer though it was) of dried peat. The smoke sought egress where it might, but still left a sufficient canopy over the heads of the occupants, as completely to hide the dingy and charred rafters, and did not seem in the slightest degree to annoy the optical powers of any one, so accustomed where they to this kind of atmosphere. Round this fire about ten were seated or squatted down, and were all at the time busily employed in some noisy and apparently angry disputation. ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Chamber next attracted our attention. It presents the most perfect optical illusion imaginable; in looking up to the ceiling, which is here very high, you seem to see the very firmament itself, studded with stars; and afar off, a comet with its long, bright tail. Not far from this Star Chamber, may be seen, in a cavity in the wall on the right, and about twenty ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... establish was a Canterbury gallop with the hind legs, in which those more forward assisted for doubtful moments, though generally content to maintain a loping trot. Perhaps the rapidity of the changes from one of these paces to the other created an optical illusion, which might thus magnify the powers of the beast; for it is certain that Heyward, who possessed a true eye for the merits of a horse, was unable, with his utmost ingenuity, to decide by what sort of movement his pursuer worked his sinuous way on his footsteps ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... speaking, to laugh at the failings of others that we ought to forgive the ridicule our own absurdities excite, and be annoyed only by calumny. But in this instance the eyes of the good vicar never reached the optical range which enables men of the world to see and evade their neighbours' rough points. Before he could be brought to perceive the faults of his landlady he was forced to undergo the warning which Nature gives to ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... of the field was blurred, for a while, by the smoke from so much firing, which floated in thickening clouds over all the open spaces and the edges of the forest. It produced curious optical illusions. The French loomed through it, increased fourfold in numbers, every individual man magnified in size. He saw them lurid and gigantic, pulling the triggers of their rifles or muskets, or working the batteries. The cannon also grew from twelve-pounders or eighteen-pounders into ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... interrupted agricultural domains and forests was in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... round, and among other things showed them the store-room in the lower part of the building, where the great drums of crystal oil for trimming the lamps were lifted into the tank. Yes, of course they burned paraffin oil in the great optical lanthorn; but though it was tremendously hot there, when the light was in full play, there was scarcely any odour, while now it smelt ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... them; but the energetic citizens were soon on hand. There was much difficulty in finding where the fire was, and heads and feet were turned in various directions, till at length some wight of superior optical powers discovered a faint, ruddy light in the rear of West College. It was an ancient building,—a time-honored structure,—an edifice erected by our forefathers, and by them christened LEMUEL, which in the vernacular tongue is called Lem "for short." The dimensions of the edifice were about ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... a convoy either by showing too much of her periscope or by a misdirected torpedo, the guard-ships on the flank attacked immediately dropped their smoke buoys as they continued moving at full speed. By this means an impenetrable optical barrier was interposed between the attacking submarine and the fleet of merchantmen under convoy. When thus shielded from attack—a submarine values her small stock of torpedoes (six to ten) too highly to risk the loss of one or more on something she cannot even see—the mercantile fleet ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... further, I was horrified to find that the young woman's name was Arletta Fogg, and that she was murdered in her own rooms, at the Seraglio Apartments, Central Park West. I could hardly believe my eyes saw the thing aright. I felt sure that it must be an optical illusion wrought by my constant thought of Arletta. I looked again and again, yet read ever the same words, and, laboring under tremendous excitement, I hurriedly perused the account of the murder. ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... induce the poor viscount to listen to reason. I made him touch the mirrors and the iron tree and the branches and explained to him, by optical laws, all the luminous imagery by which we were surrounded and of which we need not allow ourselves to be the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... for the news you again send me. Good news, good new friends; nothing that is not good comes to me across these waters. As if the "Golden West" seen by Poets were no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and coining itself into solid blessings! To me it seems very strange; as indeed generally this whole Existence here below more and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... basaltic rock, with ferns growing out of every crevice in its ragged but perpendicular sides. At its feet is a cleft about 60 feet long, 16 wide, and 18 deep, full of water at a temperature of 90 degrees. This has an absolute transparency of a singular kind, and perpetrates wonderful optical illusions. Every thing put into it is transformed. The rocks, broken timber, and old cocoa nuts which lie below it, are a frosted blue; the dusky skins of natives are changed to alabaster; and as my companion, in a light print holuku, swam to and fro, her feet and hands became ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... ordinary flight, beats many hundred times in a second? or that there exist animated and regularly organised beings, many thousands of whose bodies laid close together would not extend an inch? But what are these to the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries have disclosed, which teach us that every point of a medium through which a ray of light passes is affected with a succession of periodical movements, regularly recurring at equal intervals, no less than 500 millions of millions of times in a single ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... from the following account, of one of his appearances on a reduced scale. The description is given by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, who, along with Mr Grant of Ballindalloch, had ascended Ben Muich Dhui:—"On descending from the top, at about half-past three, P.M., an interesting optical appearance presented itself to our view. We had turned towards the east, and the sun shone on our backs, when we saw a very bright rainbow described on the mist before us. The bow, of beautifully ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... light is produced by the automatic action of a screen, which is made to revolve by the ascent of the heated air produced by the light. To mark the outer end of a cutting or narrow channel, the Trotter-Lindberg light might be utilised instead of a lightship. A lantern, with optical apparatus complete, costs about L100 to ...
— Report on the Department of Ports and Harbours for the Year 1890-1891 • Department of Ports and Harbours
... that the cause which we have hitherto found to determine Progress holds in these cases also. We might demonstrate in detail how, in Science, an advance of one division presently advances other divisions—how Astronomy has been immensely forwarded by discoveries in Optics, while other optical discoveries have initiated Microscopic Anatomy, and greatly aided the growth of Physiology—how Chemistry has indirectly increased our knowledge of Electricity, Magnetism, Biology, Geology—how Electricity has reacted on Chemistry and Magnetism, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... mentioned, is that they are meteorological or similar type balloons. This, however, does not explain reports that they travel at high speed or maneuver rapidly. But 'Saucer' men point out that the movement could be explained away as an optical illusion or actual acceleration of the balloon caused by a gas leak and later exaggerated by observers. . . . There are scores of possible explanations for the scores ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two feet at arm's length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the western horizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but by that time Beta, the planet's G-class primary, would be at its midafternoon hottest. He ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... would not be so pleasing. The broken heart can be repaired, but the broken nose—" Monsieur made an expressive gesture and rose. "But, as you have said, we must hope for the best. It is always well to take an optical view of the future—is it not? And now, Mr. Caw"—he became nervous and produced a jeweller's package—"before I go I give you a small momento. My clock has brought you dangers, for which forgive. We ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... with bromide of silver emulsion, which is entirely free from nitrate of silver, no eosine silver can form; it acts, therefore, only as an optical sensitizer. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... be in either place by a sort of mental shift, something like staring at one of the geometrical optical illusions you can find in any psychology textbook in the chapter on illusions, and seeing ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... Palace almost as he was taken to see the King driving out of Buckingham Palace. Hence the first effect of the enlargement of the armies was something almost like a fairy-tale—almost as if the streets were crowded with kings, walking about and wearing crowns of gold. This merely optical vision of the revolution was but the first impression of a reality equally vast and new. The first levies which came to be called popularly Kitchener's Army, because of the energy and inspiration with which he ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... of the barn was an optical lantern, fitted with the usual mechanism for the exhibition of films. Half way down the room was a camp bedstead, covered with one brown blanket. Tim invited us ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... dramatic talent has come to its fullest maturity. Mr. Sheridan would possibly never have exceeded what he had already done, and his celebrity had now reached that point of elevation, where, by a sort of optical deception in the atmosphere of fame, to remain stationary is to seem, in the eyes of the spectators, to fall. He had, indeed, enjoyed only the triumphs of talent, and without even descending to those ovations, or minor triumphs, which in general ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... centre. This tetrahedral configuration is based on the existence of only one methylene dichloride, two being necessary if the carbon valencies were directed from the centre of a plane square to its corners, and on the existence of two optical isomers of the formula C.A.B.D.E., C being a carbon atom and A.B.D.E. being different monovalent atoms or radicals (see STEREO-ISOMERISM). The equivalence of the four hydrogen atoms of methane rested ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... is not denied," he says, "that there is a portion of extension which to the naked eye appears an indivisible point; it has been called by philosophers the minimum visibile. This minimum we can indefinitely magnify by means of optical instruments, making visible the still smaller parts which compose it. In each successive experiment there is still a minimum visibile, anything less than which cannot be discovered with that instrument, but can with one of a higher power. Suppose, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... fine, and quite sufficient for poetical purposes; nor should the old poet's philosophy have thought proper to gainsay it. Nevertheless, as the mysteries of the conscience are more awful things than any merely gratuitous terror (besides leaving optical phenomena quite as real as the latter may find them), even the supernatural part of the story becomes probable when we consider the agitations which the noble mind of Wallace may have undergone during such trying physical circumstances, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... ACHROMATIC. An optical term applied to those telescopes in which aberration of the rays of light, and the colours dependent thereon, are partially ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... carriage and placed on the ground at a distance of about a hundred yards from the machine, and be connected therewith by a conductor. Col. Mangin's projector consists of a glass mirror with double curvature, silvered upon its convex face. It possesses so remarkable optical properties that it has been adopted by nearly all powers. The fascicle of light that it emits has a perfect concentration. In front of the projector there are two doors. The first of these, which is plane and simple, is used when it is desired to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... domain. Advantages of general views which impart an exalted and solemn character to natural science. The possibility of separating generalities from specialties. Examples drawn from astronomy, recent optical discoveries, physical geognosy, and the geography of plants. Practicability of the study of physical cosmography — p. 33-54. Misunderstood popular knowledge, confounding cosmography with a mere encyclopedic ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... especially, but also in lesser degree in other temples, the seemingly straight lines of the building were all slightly curved, and the vertical faces inclined. This was done to correct the monotony and stiffness of absolutely straight lines and right angles, and certain optical illusions which their acute observation had detected. The long horizontal lines of the stylobate and cornice were made convex upward; asimilar convexity in the horizontal corona of the pediment counteracted the seeming concavity otherwise resulting ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... you; the inability to awake; even the grappling at your throat, and the swift disappearance of the vision immediately upon your full awakening—all well-known features of incubus," replied Mr. Berners. But again he thought of the shadow he had seen; now, however, only to dismiss the subject as an optical illusion. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Cambridge in 1666 his attention was occupied with optical discoveries; but he had no sooner brought them to a close than his mind reverted to the great subject of the planetary motions. Upon the death of Oldenburg in August, 1678, Dr. Hooke was appointed secretary to the Royal Society; and as this learned body had requested the opinion of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... made small beads; and the fuppialume, who made large blown beads. Each man was a skilled artist, you see, and did some one special thing. The phiolari made vases, cups, and glass for windows; the cristallai optical glass; and the specchiai mirrors. No strangers were allowed to visit the glass works, and all apprentices must pass a rigid examination not only as to their skill, but as to their previous personal history. In 1495 the glass houses at Murano extended for a mile along a single ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... display, indeed, that when Mademoiselle Marguerite took a seat at the table, between the General and his wife, and opposite Madame Leon, she asked herself if she had not been the victim of that dangerous optical delusion known as prejudice. She noticed that the supply of knives and forks was rather scanty; but many economical housewives keep most of their silver under lock and key; besides the china was very handsome and marked with the General's monogram, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... an organ which is very easily deceived, and needs constant training to enable it to judge correctly of the relative proportions of objects of different forms. Most of our readers are probably familiar with the optical test of guessing the height of an ordinary stove-pipe hat by measuring off the supposed height on the wall of a room. Those who have not heard of it will find it interesting to try the experiment. Take a stick, or walking-cane, and measure ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... mathematical studies. Euclid he took in at a glance, and afterward proceeded to master Descartes's geometry. Isaac Barrow, then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, became his friend and tutor; and the pupil repaid the master's kind attention by services rendered to him in connection with his optical lectures. In 1669, Newton succeeded Barrow in his professorship. He rose to eminence in the university, and in 1688 was chosen its representative in the Convention parliament. In 1695 he was appointed Warden of the Mint, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... admitted his power and acknowledged him as a man; for Mme. d'Espard he had positively no existence. This was a sentence, it was a refusal of justice. Poor poet! a deadly cold seized on him when he saw de Marsay eying him through his glass; and when the Parisian lion let that optical instrument fall, it dropped in so singular a fashion that Lucien thought of the knife-blade ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... them in the act of tacitly combining to ignore him—as if he had, after so long, begun to give on their nerves. Or is that absurdity but my shamefaced form of admission that, for all the wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? Frankly—I would put it at such moments—he becomes at last an optical ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... character. They bear to the former the analogy, as we may say, which a sudden and temporary fever-fit has to a serious feverish illness. But, even for this very reason, it is more difficult to bring such momentary impressions back to their real sphere of optical illusions, since they accord much better with our idea of glimpses of the future world than those in which the vision is continued or repeated for hours, days, and months, affording opportunities of discovering, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... "Oh! is that pretty little yellow dot a star?" exclaims the delighted child. Poor innocent! a star had always been to him a dim, cloudy spot, a little nebula, which the magic glass has now resolved; and he can hardly believe that this brilliant point is not an optical illusion. But when his mother assures him that the stars always appear so to her, and he turns to look in her face, he says, "Why, mother! how beautiful you look! Please to give me some little spectacles, all my own!" She could not resist this entreaty,—(who could?)—and little "Squire ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... when, on our return, each of our wagoners affirmed that the guns had pointed at him and no one else, I came to the conclusion that this many-sidedness must be part of the idiosyncrasy of guns—a sort of optical unmannerliness that ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... that matter). And those hills that at first are so attractive—they hem in the entire city, which is bowl-shaped, in a valley—become monotonous. They stifle you. To live up there on the heights is another thing; then the sky is an accomplice in your optical pleasures, but below—especially when the days are rainy and the nights doleful, as they are in November—oh, then you cry: Let me see once more summer-sunlit Holland and its wide plains punctuated only by church spires ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... observe that the colour of green suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal lights.]; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks in massy blackness: these optical splendours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, theatrical and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted; and immediately from a dismantled stall in the street, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... replaced by a gaze of mute astonishment as he observed that he had depicted Waller's right eye upon his chin, close beneath his nose! There seemed to be some sort of magic here, and he felt disposed to regard the thing in the light of some serious optical illusion, when, on closer inspection, he discovered Waller's mouth drawn altogether beyond the circle of his countenance, a foot or so above his head, on the stem of the tree against which he leaned. This changed the current of his ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... of enterprise, commercial ability, or intellectual energy are they inferior to any of their contemporaries, or to their own great progenitors. "Holland," says Professor Thorold Rogers, "is the origin of scientific medicine and rational therapeutics. From Holland came the first optical instruments, the best mathematicians, the most intelligent philosophers, as well as the boldest and most original thinkers. Amsterdam and Rotterdam held the printing presses of Europe in the early days of the republic; ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... harmonious flow of vocal sounds. Rhyme, a word answering in sound to another word. Surge, a great, rolling swell of water. 3. Ves'per, pertaining to the evening service in the Roman Catholic Church. 6. Mi-rage' (pro. me-razh'), an optical illusion causing objects at a distance to seem as though suspended in the air. 7. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Bacchic afflatus, imagined they saw in his form the appearance of a wild beast, might be adduced as an example at once of the furious character of the frenzy, and of the liability of the afflated to optical illusions. Has what we read of fairy-gifts and glamour any foundation in this alleged power of the biologist to make his patient imagine different forms for the same object? But we are still among the mountain tops, and must descend to the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... the Squire had seen, just under his nose, a very long pair of soles inserted in the apertures—that sight had only confused and bewildered him, unaccompanied as it ought to have been with the trunk and face of Lenny Fairfield. Those soles seemed to him optical delusions, phantoms of the overheated brain; but now, catching hold of Stirn, while the Parson in equal astonishment caught hold of him—the Squire faltered out, "Well, this beats cock-fighting! The man's as mad as a March hare, and has taken ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... quivered and danced, in the noon-day heat and mid-air, the green heights of New Jersey; and by an optical delusion, the blue sea seemed ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... tales as these they lured on the Pole from day to day; and at last persuaded him to be a witness of their mysteries. Whether they played off any optical delusions upon him; or whether, by the force of a strong imagination, he deluded himself, does not appear; but certain it is, that he became a complete tool in their hands, and consented to do whatever they wished him. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... alphapicoline, 380 grammes being obtained. This was heated with paraldehyde, whereby it was converted into allylpyridine (48 grammes), and this by reduction with sodium yielded alpha-propylpyridine, a body in almost every respect identical with coniine. The more important difference was its optical inactivity, but he succeeded in splitting up a solution of the acid tartrate of the base by means of Penicillium glaucum. Crystals separated which had a dextro-rotatory power of [a]{D} 31 deg. 87' as compared with the [a]{D} 13 deg. 79' of natural coniine. This brief account ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... to look at the box. There could be no doubt about it; the noise was louder. And, if I could trust my eyes, the box was moving—giving a series of little jumps. This might have been an optical delusion, but it seemed to me that at each tick the box gave a little bound. During the screeches—which sounded more like the cries of an animal in an agony of pain even than before—if it did not tilt itself ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... almost palpable. Sometimes it seemed as if the vessel were rushing against a mighty rock, that towered high above the masts, but this was only optical illusion, or, perhaps, a denser storm-cloud than usual passing by, for the steamer continued to plough her onward way unchecked, save, now and then, by the bursting on her bows of a monster billow, which caused her to quiver from stem to stern, ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... creature, and so on, in the analogical order, till the smallest conceivable "vital unit" is reached in the universe of organic matter. To begin, therefore, with microscopic observation, at a point in the ephemeromorphic world where that optical instrument fails to give back any intelligible answer, and synthetically follow this chain of causation upward and outward to Dr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud of mist," in which it is assumed that all the diversified possibilities and potentialities of the universe once lay latent, may answer the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... off this morning, I hear—somebody yesterday called the telescope an 'optical delusion,' anticipating many more of the kind! So much for ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... combine the scientific and the artistic efforts of the new and the old world, we may tell the history of the moving pictures by the following dates and achievements. In the year 1825 a Doctor Roget described in the "Philosophical Transactions" an interesting optical illusion of movement, resulting, for instance, when a wheel is moving along behind a fence of upright bars. The discussion was carried much further when it was taken up a few years later by a master of the craft, by Faraday. In the Journal of the Royal Institute of Great Britain he writes in 1831 ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... telescope upon these lines, yet he seems to have kept the matter so much to himself that it was not until the year 1758 that the first example of the new instrument was given to the world. This was done by John Dollond, founder of the well-known optical firm of Dollond, of Ludgate Hill, London, who had, quite independently, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... "my ideas of natural beauty and those of the aesthetic Wilde may be entirely false; or the whole scene may be an optical illusion; or—Rosenduft und Maienblumen, observe me this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... contemplation he grew restful; his thoughts ceased feverishly to race along that one hateful groove; the bright star seemed to soothe him. As a result of his fixed gazing, it now appeared to have increased in size. This was a common optical delusion, upon which he scarcely speculated at all. He recognised the welcome approach of sleep, and deliberately concentrated his mind upon the globe ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... connecting St.-Gobain with Chauny, where the plate glass cast at St.-Gobain is polished and the mirrors are silvered. At St.-Gobain, besides the plate glass mirrors, glass is made for roofs, for floors, for pavements, for optical instruments, including the finest lenses used in the lighthouses of France. Here, as I have said, the lens was made now used at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, from which, night after night, a gigantic auroral ray of electric light leaps into space and shoots for miles athwart ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled to produce an ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... alone it is visible. Consequently during recent solar eclipses this has been the point to which the attention of astronomers has been especially devoted. The eclipse of December, 1870, decided one point, that the corona was a truly solar phenomenon, and not, as some astronomers imagined, an optical phenomenon, produced by our own atmosphere. The corona presents the appearance of nebulous light, fading as it becomes more remote from the sun, of very irregular outline, at some points not extending more than 15', at others as ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... variable-speed drives of the flight-angle directors in the hour and declination ranges; before his eyes was the finely marked micrometer screen upon which the guiding goniometer threw its needle-point of light; powerful optical systems of prisms and lenses revealed to his sight the director-angles, down to fractional seconds of arc. It was the task of the chief pilot to hold the screened image of the cross-hairs of the two directors in such position relative to the ever-moving ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... uniformly level, like the under sides seen from the earth, but they are of a conical or pyramidal shape. These imposing masses seem to precipitate themselves upon the earth, as if to engulf it, but this optical illusion was due to the apparent immobility of the balloon, which at the moment was rising at the rate of about twenty feet ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... of the cultivation of science for its own sake. The stargazer with his telescope, the chemist with crucible and retort, the physiologist with his chemical and optical aids, the purely scientific thinker—all who prosecute science for the love of it—have wrought out results which are breaking as light of the clear morning sun upon the history of nations, thus enabling us to avail ourselves of the past in order to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... followed by a succession of optical questions, which are discussed and answered in true scholastic style, with no little acuteness of observation. Thus: "Utrum visus fiat intus suscipiendo?" Is vision accomplished by something received into the eye? "Utrum color fit de nocte?" Does color exist ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... contrived to exhibit the fixed spectrum on the principle of a portable camera, so that, without wearying the eye, the changes of the distant telegraph might have been exhibited on a plain surface, and seen with both eyes like the leaf of a book. The application of optical instruments, between a fixed station and fixed object, ought to have been made in an appropriate manner, and not influenced by the practices which prevail in regard to moveable telescopes ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... to some special objections. It requires no small strength of nerve steadily to conceive not only of the variation, but of the formation of the organs of an animal through cumulative variation and natural selection. Think of such an organ as the eye, that most perfect of optical instruments, as so produced in the lower animals and perfected in the higher! A friend of ours, who accepts the new doctrine, confesses that for a long while a cold chill came over him whenever he thought of the eye. He has at length got over that stage of the complaint, and is now in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... on Mars may be only an optical illusion was demonstrated in an article in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times, by means of material obtained from a report of the section for the Observation of Mars, a division of the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are my Alps; little ones, it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size? A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the great animals in the river below them was so prodigious they could not grasp it. It seemed it must be optical illusion. In a few moments, the dead had been eaten, swallowed whole, and fights ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... telephones; highly developed; extensive cable and microwave radio relay networks; large-scale introduction of optical-fiber systems; satellite systems for domestic traffic local: NA intercity: microwave radio relay, optical fiber cable, and domestic satellites international: 2 INTELSAT earth stations (with total of 5 antennas - 2 Indian Ocean and 3 for Atlantic Ocean); ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... the world. Many of these effects were of extraordinary beauty. Accordingly scientific inquiry was made, and in due time there was collected and tabulated a list of places from whence these effects were seen, together with the dates of such occurrences. Eventually it was concluded that such optical phenomena had a common cause, and that it must be the dust of ultra-microscopic fineness at an enormous altitude. All the facts indicated that such a cloud started from the Sunda straits, and that the prodigious force of the Krakatoa eruption could at that time alone account ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... tour, particularly at the Descent, we undergo an optical illusion which often seems to be incredible. All the shrubs, fir trees, stables, houses, etc., seem to be bent in a slanting direction, as by an immense pressure of air. They are all standing awry, so much awry that the chalets and cottages ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... allowance from the British tax-payer of 5M. a week, cannot buy food at less than cost price, nor go to a sanatorium (at the expense of the British tax-payer) when sick; have not the benefit of expert dental and optical treatment, have no public libraries, lectures, schools, debates, or camp newspapers, have not seven tennis courts, three football fields, athletic games, cricket, golf and hockey, are not amused ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... wisdom of the adoption of the metric system. The country, as a whole, must be educated up to the notion that sooner or later it is sure to be universally adopted, that it is only a question of time when this will be done. Already electrical, chemical and optical manufacturing concerns use the metric units and system exclusively. The system is also used widely in medicine and still other arts. Then all institutions of learning use the metric system exclusively whenever this is possible. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... roar, and Lane clutched at a piece of the rock, and closed his eyes, feeling that all was over, but opened them again directly to see that the bridge before him was not undulating, and he knew that it was an optical illusion due to the heat and the giddiness from which he ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... the forenoon, as we were jogging along, I saw a deer standing just at the edge of the road and looking across it, as if in fear of its blazing publicity. It seemed for a moment as if he were an optical illusion, so beautiful, so shapely, and so palpitant was he. I had no desire to shoot him, but, turning to Burton, called in a low ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... fairy island of Rivegliano with its old tower, the smoking crater of Vesuvius, the bold forms of Mount Lactarius and Cape Minerva, stood out full and clear under the cloudless sky: as we returned, I saw the sun sink behind Capri, which appeared by some optical illusion like a glorious crimson transparency suspended above the horizon: the sky, the earth, the sea, were flushed with the richest rose colour, which gradually softened and darkened into purple: the short twilight faded away, and the full moon, rising over Vesuvius, lighted up ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... expression in the one case and the arch look in the other? Then look again at the stork (13), and see how it is suggested to the mind that the leg is actually much more slender than any one of the pieces employed. It is really an optical illusion. Again, notice in the case of the yacht (14) how, by leaving that little angular point at the top, a complete mast is suggested. If you place your Tangrams together on white paper so that they do not quite touch one another, in some cases ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... wind before which all life goes down like a straw, that raged here in the winter. On every side, as far as the eyes could reach, wide white plains of undulating ice and snow, broken here and there by patches of barren rock, that seemed now by some optical delusion, against the glaring white, to be of the brightest mauve and violet tints. Only that; ice and snow and rock for mile upon mile, until the tale of three hundred and fifty is told. No track or trace of bird, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... so obstinate, I thought it better to tell him what I really had seen. Of course with him it was held to be another effect of the same cause: it was all optical illusion—nervous malady, and so on. Not one bit did I believe him; but I dared not contradict: doctors are so self-opinionated, so immovable in their dry, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the properties of light itself, it would appear that we cannot hope to be able to perceive objects which are much less than 1/100000 of an inch in diameter. Our microscopes may, no doubt, be improved, but the limitation lies not in the imperfection of our optical appliances, but in the ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... the sky, which was so brightly blue that it made his eyes blink. He sought optical relief in the dark green of the woods. Then, in steadying his pail of cherries between his legs, he turned his glance to the ground in front ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... growing down to the water. Here the reflections were so brilliant that the dividing line between shore and water was difficult for the untrained eye to make out. The boys seemed to be gazing upon an optical illusion. From the water's edge the mountains rose sheer to a great height, their distant peaks capped with snow glistening in the morning sunlight, while glacial streams flashed over the open spaces on the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... perversion and delusion. As the conscience and sentiments although not infallible, are our only guides in their sphere; so our perceptive faculties are good and safe, but not perfect, guides. These perceptive faculties, in a measure, help and correct each other's impressions; and through optical illusions, expectant attention, dreams, etc., we learn that their dictates must be carefully watched and verified. The latest voice of science is that all the sensation produced by physical stimulants can also be produced by the imagination; ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... there need for optical demonstration of the conditions. It was there to faculties of scent. It was there in the swarms of night flies. It was there in the howl of the scavenging camp dogs, seeking, in their prowling pack, that which the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... related. The operations of the mind which are essential to its progress are touched upon. The intense labor and peculiar intellectual qualifications incident to and required for its successful pursuit are intimated. Nor are the inventors of those optical instruments, who had contributed to the advancement of this science beyond all previous anticipation, omitted in this extensive survey of its nature, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... perceptible degrees; and Paul, looking toward the speaker, now was able to discern him as a shadowy bulk, without definite outline, but impressive, pagan—as a granite god, or one of those broken pillars of Medinet Habu. Either because Jules Thessaly had moved nearer to him, or by reason of an optical delusion produced by the half-light, the space between them seemed to have grown less—not only physically, but spiritually. The curves of their astral selves were sweeping inward to a point of contact which Paul knew subconsciously would ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... capable; in making of gauges, forging billets, making fuses, cartridges, bullets—"look what they can do," said a foreman, "ladies from homes where they sat about and were waited upon." They also made optical glass; drilled and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric wires and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered guards for lamps and radiator fronts; repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments, automatic searchlights. "We can hardly believe our eyes," said another foreman, ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... into two or three smaller stones, so as to lessen the risk of detection. The Heredith blue diamond is known to many connoisseurs. It is cut in an unusual form—a kind of irregular rosette, in order to display its fire and optical properties to the best advantage. If it were cut it would lose a great deal of its value. The money value of one large diamond of first quality is very much greater than the same stone cut into three. But it would be difficult to sell the diamond in its present form. The chances ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... comets, and could foretell their reappearance. "A lens of considerable power was found in the ruins of Babylon; it was an inch and a half in diameter and nine-tenths of an inch thick." (Layard's "Nineveh and Babylon," pp. 16,17.) Nero used optical glasses when he watched the fights of the gladiators; they are supposed to have come from Egypt and the East. Plutarch speaks of optical instruments used by Archimedes "to manifest to the eye the largeness of the sun." "There are actual astronomical calculations in existence, with calendars formed ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Hildreth repeated the words in an awestruck tone. Did she see him cower in his chair? It must have been an optical illusion. The storm outside was making the house ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... exhibited in the interior of this structure could, indeed, bear a comparison with those offered in a realm of enchantment. The optical illusions, produced by ingeniously arranged mirrors, were a pleasing surprise to the visitor. Luxuriant palms decorating the labyrinthian garden appeared to be endless in number—casting their shade over hundreds of life-like figures in gaudy costumes. Each of these groups in wax, ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... some less showy, but more solidly useful articles. Various kinds of iron, copper, zinc, lead, silver, and gold ores are displayed, with oils, quartz, stones, coal, &c. There are lanterns on a new plan, microscopes, barometers, optical and philosophical instruments, farming implements, machines for melting metals;—besides hundreds of other articles which we cannot stop to notice more particularly. There are two or three very interesting models of mines, with mining machinery, and plans for improving ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... and depend on transverse vibrations of the ether. Light itself—whatever else it be—is always and everywhere an electrical phenomenon. The ether itself is no longer hypothetical; its existence can at any moment be demonstrated by electrical and optical experiment. We know the length of the light wave and the electric wave. Indeed, some physicists believe that they can even determine approximately the density of ether. If by means of the airpump ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... Gramophone.—The gramophone, by virtue of its table revolving at a controllable speed, comes in useful for a series of optical experiments made with coloured discs bearing ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... is seen to revolve round the other, which remains stationary, the moving mark passing further from the centre in places. When the spar is cut and used in a certain direction, we see but one mark, and such a position is called its optical axis. ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... number, until, as Sir William Crookes says, we seem to be witnessing a bombardment of flying atoms hurled from the radium against the surface of the blende. A little instrument called a spinthariscope, devised by Dr. Crookes and on sale at the instrument and optical-goods shops, may be had for a trifling sum. It is fitted with a lens focused upon a bit of Sidot's blende and radium nitrate, and in a dark room shows these beautiful scintillations "like a shower of stars." A still less expensive but similar ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... fantastic form was there; there seemed in the distance cities and palaces as white as chalk; pillars and reversed cones, pyramids and mounds of every shape, valleys and lakes; and under the influence of the optical delusions of the locality, green fields and meadows, and tossing seas. Here the whole party rested soundly, and pushed on hard the next ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... sky covered with great fleecy patches, through which the full moon, just fairly risen, appeared to be racing, under the effect of that optical illusion caused by the rapidly moving clouds. The coyotes had commenced their nocturnal concert in the timbered recesses of the creek not far away, and on the battle-field a short distance beyond, as they battened and fought over the dead warriors and the carcasses of twelve hundred ponies ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... on optical delusions, but Mrs. Berry described him as the Colossus who had marched them into the library, and vowed that he had recognized her and quaked. "Time ain't aged him," said Mrs. Berry, "whereas me! he've got his excuse now. I know I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... any truth and sincerity, but mere envy and design. Then into the Great Garden up to the Banqueting House; and there by my Lord's glass we drew in the species very pretty. [This word is here used as an optical term, and signifies the image painted on the retina of the eye, and the rays of light reflected from the several points of the surface of objects.] Afterwards to nine- pins, Creed and I playing against my Lord ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... remembrance of that horror filled me with self-pity. Then, as the roots of my hair began to stir, my feet set themselves instinctively for flight. This instinct, however, I promptly and sternly repressed. I knew all about these optical illusions, and tried to congratulate myself on this opportunity for investigating one so interesting and vivid. At the same time I gave a hasty side-thought to what would have happened had I been one of the superstitious farmhands or fishermen of the district. I should ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and more dignified word than lie. Falsehood and lying are in utterance; deceit and deception may be merely in act or implication. Deception may be innocent, and even unintentional, as in the case of an optical illusion; deceit always involves injurious intent. Craft and cunning have not necessarily any moral quality; they are common traits of animals, but stand rather low in the human scale. Duplicity is the habitual speaking or acting with intent to appear ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... But it was at length discovered by the learned, that Sun junior, viz., the newspaper, did sometimes indulge in fibbing. The ancient prejudice about the solar truth broke down, therefore, in that instance; and who knows but Sun senior may be detected, now that our optical glasses are so much improved, in similar practices? in which case he may have only been "keeping his hand in" when operating upon that one feature of the mouth. The rest of the portrait, we all agree, does credit ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... location, the sphere, the extent, of the social. If we can agree where it is, we may then proceed to discover what it is. The social, then, is the term next beyond the individual. Assuming, for the sake of analysis, that our optical illusion, "the individual," is an isolated and self-sufficient fact, there are many sorts of scientific problems that do not need to go beyond this fact to satisfy their particular terms. Whether the individual can ever be abstracted from his conditions and remain himself is not ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—so ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... about these observations. They are stupendous, they are wonderful, but whether they are true or false I cannot tell." He concludes, "I will never concede his four new planets to that Italian from Padua, though I die for it." So he published a pamphlet asserting that reflected rays and optical illusions were the sole cause of the appearance, and that the only use of the imaginary planets was to gratify Galileo's thirst ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... July 19. Str. Sierra Nevada, Ar. single; newspaper proprietor, from San Francisco. retired Humphreys, Dec. 28. Overland, from California. Ar. single; gold miner, William. now in Customs Lombard, Charles. August. Str. Oregon, from San Francisco. Ar. with father and mother; now in the optical business Marvin, July. Str. Pacific, from San Francisco. Ar. with husband and son Mrs. Edward. McPhadden, Mrs. July. Str. Brother Jonathan, Ar. with father, mother and brother. from S. Francisco. Maiden name Harrison Moore, John. July. Str. Cortez, from San Francisco. Ar. with father, mother and ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... cutting him out, Tom keeps as sharp a lookout after her as she does after him. He's fierce on it, and looks pistols at any one that attempts putting his comether on the widow, while she looks 'as soon as you plaze,' as plain as an optical lecture can enlighten the heart of man: in short, Tom's all ram's horns, and the widow all sheep's eyes. Good bye, squire." And Murtough put his spurs to his horse, and cantered down the avenue, whistling the ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... became steady from north-east. On the 2nd of December we descried Cape Beata, in a spot where we had long observed the clouds gathered together. According to the observations of Acherner, which I obtained in the night, we were sixty-four miles distant. During the night there was a very curious optical phenomenon, which I shall not undertake to account for. At half-past midnight the wind blew feebly from the east; the thermometer rose to 23.2 degrees, the whalebone hygrometer was at 57 degrees. I had remained upon the deck ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... from the wash. Nay, heretical and damnable as is the fact, his father's surplice was as a moth-eaten garment from the repeated and insidious attacks of this young philosopher. The burning-glass decided his fate. He was bound apprentice to an optical and mathematical instrument maker; from which situation he was, if possible, to emerge into the highest grade of the profession; but somehow or another, a want of ambition or of talent did not permit him to ascend the scale, and he now kept a shop in the small seaport town of Overton, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the face and person seemed gradually to grow less strange; to change as he looked, to subside and soften into lineaments that were familiar, until at last they resolved themselves, as if by some strange optical illusion, into those of one whom he had known for many years, and forgotten and lost sight of for nearly as ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... heightened, and some of the children to be myopic at an earlier age or in a higher degree than their parents. Thirdly, squinting is a familiar example of hereditary transmission: it is frequently a result of such optical defects as have been above mentioned; but the more primary and uncomplicated forms of it are also sometimes in a marked degree transmitted in a family. Fourthly, CATARACT, or opacity of the crystalline lens, is commonly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... luminist - has been chosen sometimes by them and by their admirers. The neo-impressionists in pictorial principle do not differ from the impressionist. Their technical procedure is different, and based on an optical law which proves that pure primary colours, put alongside of each other in alternating small quantities, will give, at a certain distance, a freshness and sparkle of atmosphere not attained by the earlier ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... vision exactly what the eye is to optical vision, and just as the eye borrows its visual action from external light, so reason borrows its power of clear and correct vision from traditional experience. The similarity ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... degrees; and Paul, looking toward the speaker, now was able to discern him as a shadowy bulk, without definite outline, but impressive, pagan—as a granite god, or one of those broken pillars of Medinet Habu. Either because Jules Thessaly had moved nearer to him, or by reason of an optical delusion produced by the half-light, the space between them seemed to have grown less—not only physically, but spiritually. The curves of their astral selves were sweeping inward to a point of contact which Paul knew subconsciously would be electric, ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... which they often treat us even when they are not in the presence of works of art, had not the professor followed up his clue with the utmost gravity, assuring me at last that no picture in the gallery was beyond the reach of optical diagnostic. Still suspicious of his good faith, I suggested, tentatively, that perhaps the discrepancies between the normal man's vision and the pictures on the wall were the result of intentional distortion on the part of the artists. At this the professor became passionately ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... optical effect then occurred. The room, which had been previously partially lighted by the sunbeam, grew darker and darker as the star increased in radiance, until we found ourselves in an Egyptian gloom. The star twinkled, trembled, and turned, at first with a slow, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... individual. Longer gastroscopes are used, when necessary, to explore a ptosed stomach. Various lens-system gastroscopes have been devised, which afford an excellent view of the walls of the air-inflated stomach. The optical system, however, interferes with the insertion of instruments, so that the open-tube gastroscope is required for the removal of gastric foreign bodies, the palpation of, or sponging secretions from, gastric lesions. The open-tube gastroscope may be closed with a window plug (Fig. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... found that he had a two-hour wait until the Mons Capa ferry left for Tangier, and spent the time wandering up and down Main Street, staring into the Indian shops with their tax-free cameras from Common Europe, textiles from England, optical equipment from Japan, and cheap souvenirs from everywhere. Gibraltar, the ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the vision immediately upon your full awakening—all well-known features of incubus," replied Mr. Berners. But again he thought of the shadow he had seen; now, however, only to dismiss the subject as an optical illusion. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... as these they lured on the Pole from day to day; and at last persuaded him to be a witness of their mysteries. Whether they played off any optical delusions upon him; or whether, by the force of a strong imagination, he deluded himself, does not appear; but certain it is, that he became a complete tool in their hands, and consented to do whatever they wished him. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... optics to the astronomical theory, showing the true orbits of the heavenly bodies to be perfectly circular, and their orbital motions to be perfectly uniform." all irregularities being, I suppose, optical delusions. Mr. Von Gumpach is a learned man; what ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... drugstore was, talking to fellows he knew, giggling when the girls who lived in the street, walking arm and arm, twined in couples or trios, passed by affecting ignorance of the glances that followed them. Or perhaps he would have gone walking with Al, who worked in the same optical-goods store, down through the glaring streets of the theatre and restaurant quarter, or along the wharves and ferry slips, where they would have sat smoking and looking out over the dark purple harbor, with its winking lights and its moving ferries spilling swaying reflections in the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... Rhythm, the harmonious flow of vocal sounds. Rhyme, a word answering in sound to another word. Surge, a great, rolling swell of water. 3. Ves'per, pertaining to the evening service in the Roman Catholic Church. 6. Mi-rage' (pro. me-razh'), an optical illusion causing objects at a distance to seem as though suspended in the air. 7. Aye (pro. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... museum. Such was the display, indeed, that when Mademoiselle Marguerite took a seat at the table, between the General and his wife, and opposite Madame Leon, she asked herself if she had not been the victim of that dangerous optical delusion known as prejudice. She noticed that the supply of knives and forks was rather scanty; but many economical housewives keep most of their silver under lock and key; besides the china was very handsome and marked with the General's monogram, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... watched it with incredulous and fascinated awe, as one watches the confused, swift movements of some deed of violence done in the dark. As if at a given signal, the run of the smooth undulations seemed checked suddenly around the brig. By a strange optical delusion the whole sea appeared to rise upon her in one overwhelming heave of its silky surface, where in one spot a smother of foam broke out ferociously. And then the effort subsided. It was all ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the other hand, the place of the different instruments will be determined by a classification according to methods, such as weighing and measuring, observations of time, optical and electrical methods ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... few honourable debts—by being harsh and severe to a private supplicant, while he is publicly a liberal subscriber to a person he never saw—by leaving his vis-a-vis at the door of a well-known courtesan, in order to have the credit of an intrigue—in making use of an optical glass for personal inspection, though he can ascertain the horizon without any—by being or seeming to be, every thing that is in opposition to nature and virtue—in counting the lines in the Red Book, and carefully watching the importation of figurantes ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... halted their horses. On every hand might be seen the optical illusions of the plain. Beautiful lakes, placid and blue, forests and white-capped mountains, invited the horsemen to turn aside and rest. But the allurement of the mirage was an old story, and holding the objects in view, they jogged on, halting from ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... danced, in the noon-day heat and mid-air, the green heights of New Jersey; and by an optical delusion, the blue sea seemed to flow ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... making a blue check on the bill of lading and the other taking note of each article on his long list. Suddenly a small box comes to light, which has been waiting patiently since yesterday under the sheltering tarpaulin. "A box of optical instruments," says the customs officer, making a blue check. "A box of optical instruments," repeats the overseer, making a mark with his moistened pencil-stump: "Careful!" he adds, as a workman is on the point of tipping the heavy box over. Then the hook of the crane seizes ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... them together. Keep on drawing them out and doubling them up and twisting them together. It would soon require a microscope to distinguish the red and white glass, which would be drawn out into thinner and thinner filaments if the matter were continuous. But it would be always only a matter of optical power to distinguish perfectly the portion of red and white glass. The stirring up of water from two pails would not really mix them but only entangle filaments from ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... human intellects, and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of men? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the natural effects of architecture, optical science, and house decoration; one short, decisive, terrible word, of history made on the spot. The work which contains this instructive page is sold at number 76 Rue de Richelieu, where above an elegant ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... lime named Iceland-spar. Transparent and colourless, like glass, this mineral possesses the property of double refraction—any small object viewed through it in a particular direction appearing double. It is much used for optical purposes—especially for obtaining ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... do you? I suspected them at once. Still I pretended to turn Martha's whole story into a joke, and tried to explain to her how the darkness made us liable to have all kinds of optical illusions; so that when I left, and a servant was sent with a candle to light me on my way, the countess was quite sure that I had no suspicion. I had none; but I had more than that. As soon as I entered the garden, therefore, I dropped a piece of money which I had kept in my hand for the purpose. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... Patty solemnly; "it's an optical illusion. Don't you know how the Indian jugglers make you see flowers growing, when there aren't any flowers there? Well, this ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... electric motors, television sets, refrigerators and freezers, petroleum refining, shipbuilding (small ships), furniture making, textiles, food processing, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, optical ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "It was an optical illusion!" While the other contended that, "It was an acoustical illusion!" And so they disputed. Something, however, was, it will be seen, common to both "It was ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... town had not neglected to provide them; but the energetic citizens were soon on hand. There was much difficulty in finding where the fire was, and heads and feet were turned in various directions, till at length some wight of superior optical powers discovered a faint, ruddy light in the rear of West College. It was an ancient building,—a time-honored structure,—an edifice erected by our forefathers, and by them christened LEMUEL, which in the vernacular tongue is called Lem "for short." The dimensions ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... This extraordinary optical illusion was the dawn opening on the coast, then actually ten miles away, and in a very few minutes, as the cloud lifted, the land seemed to rush off to its proper distance, until at last the curtain split ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... ecstasy shone in his expression as he uttered these words. Shocked and grieved as I was, I made no attempt to remonstrate or to reason with him. It would have been useless to have referred to any of the usual commonplaces about optical delusions or diseased imaginations—worse than useless to have attempted to account by natural causes for any of the extraordinary coincidences and events of which he had spoken. Briefly as he had referred to Miss Elmslie, he had said enough ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... all-pervading whiteness, lay spread out solitary and dazzling, like an Olympian acropolis above the silent city. The edifices surrounding it reared their stately proportions into the deep sky; Bernini's great portal to the royal palace surmounted by the loggia offered an optical delusion by seeming to detach itself from the building and stand out all alone in all its unwieldy magnificence, like some mausoleum sculptured out of a meteoric block of stone. The rich architraves to the Palazzo della Consulta were curiously transformed by the accumulated masses of snow. Sublime ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... is simple enough. Of the mirage the dictionary says it is "an optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere, causing images of remote objects to be seen double, distorted or inverted as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... kind friend, for the news you again send me. Good news, good new friends; nothing that is not good comes to me across these waters. As if the "Golden West" seen by Poets were no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and coining itself into solid blessings! To me it seems very strange; as indeed generally this whole Existence here ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phaenomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. The optical phaenomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation, which not ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fooling, Miss Rhody," said the cowpuncher earnestly. "When me and my roan come up this fur and seen we didn't see nothin', I was plumb twisted. Says I to me: 'Here, Tom Collins, is where you got to go an' see a spectacles man 'cause you got optical delusions' And I ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... Chalons, passing by the wholly ruined village of Clermont in Argonne. The forest ran past us, a wintry fairyland, dimly lit by our quickly moving lamps, and apparently impenetrable beyond their range, an optical effect, however, that may be produced in darkness by a mere fringe of trees along the roadside. But I knew while I watched the exquisite effects of brown and silver, produced by the succession of tall, pale trunks rising above the lace-work of the underwood, as scene after ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... need for optical demonstration of the conditions. It was there to faculties of scent. It was there in the swarms of night flies. It was there in the howl of the scavenging camp dogs, seeking, in their prowling pack, ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... altogether, and started for the head of a gorge, down which I thought it would be possible to climb to the nearest timber. Nothing definite could be seen. The clouds on the snowy surface and the light electrified air gave the eye only optical illusions. The outline of every object was topsy-turvy and dim. The large stones that I thought to step on were not there; and, when apparently passing others, I bumped into them. Several times I fell headlong by stepping out for a drift and finding ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long time I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves into the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... undestroyed germs in the air inside the flasks. If the air were absolutely germless and pure, would the myriad-life appear? He manipulated his experimental vessels in an atmosphere which under the high test of optical purity—the most delicate known test—was absolutely germless. Here not a vestige of life appeared. He varied the experiment in every direction, but matter in the germless air never ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... carrying for her. There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination. None of them seemed to satisfy her. After a minute's effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... surfaces of these clouds are not uniformly level, like the under sides seen from the earth, but they are of a conical or pyramidal shape. These imposing masses seem to precipitate themselves upon the earth, as if to engulf it, but this optical illusion was due to the apparent immobility of the balloon, which at the moment was rising at the rate of ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... products, ceramics, pharmaceuticals, food products, precision instruments, tourism, optical instruments ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... flight, beats many hundred times in a second? or that there exist animated and regularly organised beings, many thousands of whose bodies laid close together would not extend an inch? But what are these to the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries have disclosed, which teach us that every point of a medium through which a ray of light passes is affected with a succession of periodical movements, regularly recurring at equal intervals, no less than 500 millions of millions of times in a single second! that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... an optical deception, depending upon principles which I cannot well explain to you till you know more of that branch of science. But what a number of new ideas this afternoon's walk has afforded you! I do not wonder that you found it amusing; it has been very instructive, too. Did you ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... classified over five hundred distinct species of fishes from this very division of the Indian Ocean; many of which are characterized by colors as gay and various as those of tropical birds and flowers. Mirage played us strange tricks, in the way of optical delusion, in these regions. We seemed constantly to be approaching land that was never reached, and which, after assuming the undulating shore-lines of a well-defined coast, at the moment when we should fairly make it, faded into thin air. Sometimes at night the marvelous phosphorescence ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Among the optical applications we may cite Mr. Leon Laurent's apparatus for controlling plane, parallel, perpendicular, and oblique surfaces, and magic mirrors obtained with an ordinary light; Mr. S.P. Thompson's apparatus for demonstrating the propagation of electro-magnetic waves ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... trust of being a Parliament-man, because he says nothing is done, that he can see, out of any truth and sincerity, but mere envy and design. Then into the Great Garden up to the Banqueting House; and there by my Lord's glass we drew in the species very pretty. [This word is here used as an optical term, and signifies the image painted on the retina of the eye, and the rays of light reflected from the several points of the surface of objects.] Afterwards to nine- pins, Creed and I playing against my ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... the Washington university at St. Louis describes some optical illusions, easily tried and apparently very singular, as follows: 1. Fold a sheet of writing paper into a tube whose diameter is about three cm. Keeping both eyes open, look through the tube with one eye, and look at the hand with the other, the hand ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the value of these improvements entitle their author to the name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be said: and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration led him to just conclusions; but to calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she's nothing loth, and, for fear of any one cutting him out, Tom keeps as sharp a lookout after her as she does after him. He's fierce on it, and looks pistols at any one that attempts putting his comether on the widow, while she looks 'as soon as you plaze,' as plain as an optical lecture can enlighten the heart of man: in short, Tom's all ram's horns, and the widow all sheep's eyes. Good bye, squire." And Murtough put his spurs to his horse, and cantered down the avenue, ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... strange optical fluctuations, however, the column continued steadily to advance. Peter crossed the street from the corner near the old bridge, running on tip-toe, and with his body stooped to avoid observation, and took up a position upon the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... left hands were the double-series potentiometers actuating the variable-speed drives of the flight-angle directors in the hour and declination ranges; before his eyes was the finely marked micrometer screen upon which the guiding goniometer threw its needle-point of light; powerful optical systems of prisms and lenses revealed to his sight the director-angles, down to fractional seconds of arc. It was the task of the chief pilot to hold the screened image of the cross-hairs of the two directors in such position relative to the ever-moving point of light as to hold the mighty ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... conditions as S, save when letters with distinct serifs come closely against it at the bottom. Theoretically the right side of D would require similar treatment, but actually this is seldom found necessary. The pointed ends of [9] the letters V and W should, for similar optical reasons, be extended slightly below the bottom guide lines, the amount of this extension being determined by the letters on each side of them. In the A, the Roman letterer at first got over the optical difficulty ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... a time in Ashcroft there lived a lady who had the wool pulled over her husband's eyes to such an extent that he had optical illusions favorable to the "darling" who deceived him. His most alluring illusion was a booby idea that his "pet" was an invalid, and she kept pouring oil on the joke to keep it burning, and pulled the wool down further and further so that hubby could not see the combustible fluid ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... places, men in armour were seen in the air, who came down to the earth and faded; and in Sussex were three suns shining at once. John Avery made himself merry over these rumours, in which he had no faith. "The three suns," said he, "were but some matter of optical philosophy, which could readily be expounded of such as were learned in it; and for the men in armour, when he saw them he would believe them." Dr Thorpe considered the wonderful sights omens of coming ill, but from Esther they won ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... sprang up about him to the effect that his spirit still lingered in the neighborhood of its passing. Several credible persons claimed at different times to have met the Monk, and since by some unhappy chance these victims of an optical delusion were all subsequently visited by misfortune in greater or less degree, it soon began to be whispered about that to encounter the specter was a sure augury of impending calamity. A local poet, long since forgotten, was inevitably inspired to preserve the legend in his rustic doggerel. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... I told you of the singular experience I had some five or six years ago with an old astronomer, who thought he had established an optical telegraph to Mars?" ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... West, Galileo turned his tube upon it, and behold! instead of twinkling points of light, he saw a round mass—a world—moving through space, and not a scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points, were merely an optical illusion ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... frightened a strong man after such a dinner as had preceded it. Not so the Ruggleses—for a strong man is nothing to a small boy—and they kindled to the dessert as if the turkey had been a dream and the six vegetables an optical delusion. There were plum-pudding, mince-pie, and ice-cream; and there were nuts, and raisins, and oranges. Kitty chose ice-cream, explaining that she knew it "by sight, though she hadn't never tasted none;" but all the rest took the entire variety, ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... determine the position of any point of our image; hence in order to locate the image of the top of the arrow, we need to consider but one more ray from the top of the object. The most convenient ray to choose would be one passing through O, the optical center of the lens, because such a ray passes through the lens unchanged in direction, as is clear from Figure 74. The point where AC and AO meet after refraction will be the position of the top of the arrow. Similarly it can be shown that the center of the arrow will be at the point T, and ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... and each differs from every other in the amount of bending which it can bring about under given conditions. The accurate determination of the amount of bending in a given case requires very finely constructed optical instruments and also a knowledge of how to apply a certain amount of mathematics. However, all this part of the work has already been done by competent scientists, and tables have been prepared by them, in which the values for ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... hard basaltic rock, with ferns growing out of every crevice in its ragged but perpendicular sides. At its feet is a cleft about 60 feet long, 16 wide, and 18 deep, full of water at a temperature of 90 degrees. This has an absolute transparency of a singular kind, and perpetrates wonderful optical illusions. Every thing put into it is transformed. The rocks, broken timber, and old cocoa nuts which lie below it, are a frosted blue; the dusky skins of natives are changed to alabaster; and as my companion, in a light print holuku, swam to and fro, her feet ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... vaguely regarding the street I saw a house which amazed me. I thought I must be mistaken: I looked at it more closely,—looked at the houses near it, compared them with the first house and then with each other, and even then I believed that it was an optical illusion. I turned hastily down a side street, and still I seemed to see the same thing. At last I was persuaded that the fault was not with my eyes, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... Opportunity okazo. Oppose kontrauxmeti, kontrauxbatali. Opposed to, to be kontrauxstari. Opposite (in opposition) kontrauxa. Opposite facing) kontrauxe. Opposition kontrauxmeto—ado. Oppress subpremi. Oppressor tirano, subpremanto. Opprobrium malnobleco, malgloro. Optics optiko. Optical optika. Optician optikisto. Optimism optimismo. Optimist optimisto. Option elekto—ajxo. Opulence ricxeco. Opulent ricxa. Opusculum libreto, brosxuro. Or aux. Oracle orakolo. Oral vocxa, parola. Orange orangxo. Orange (colour) orangxkolora. Orangery orangxerio. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... munificent gifts and legacies, nearly all given or left for the benefit of "poor Jack" and his relatives; and to manage the almshouses; also the affairs of the House on Tower Hill, and the engineering department, with its superintendence of new works, plans, drawings, lanterns, optical apparatus, etcetera— the whole involving, as will be obvious to men who are acquainted with "business," a mass of detail which must be almost as varied as it ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... and as the pungent smoke filled my eyes to the exclusion of everything else except tears, I suggested to Dodd that he reverse the respective positions of his head and feet, and try it—he would escape the smoke and sparks from the fire, and at the same time obtain a new and curious optical effect. With the sneer of contempt which always met even my most valuable suggestions, he replied that I might try my own experiments, and throwing himself down at full length on the ground, he engaged in the interesting diversion of making faces at a Korak baby. Viushin's ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... color scheme is admirable in any room. In the dining room, however, a figured carpet is often preferred for practical reasons: it stands wear and tear around the table better. Well-chosen paper (See Chapter II) often improves a badly proportioned room by optical illusion. The ideal lightings for dining rooms are side lights. Dining-room drop lights or domes are very trying to the eyes of those who dine, and are unbecoming. Side lights (adding candles for grace and charm) are far pleasanter to ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... do not exist, all landscape being flat to the aviator's eye, as we know; but against reason some mental kink made me feel that this optical law should not apply to the chalk cliffs when we came to the coast, where only the green sward which crowns them was visible and beyond this a line of gray, the beach, which had an edge of white ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... its natural position. When he had repeated this experiment several times, he put the glasses down, looked at them curiously with his eyebrows raised, his mouth pinched, and his hands spread apart at about the height of his waist, and then looked at me. Again did he glance at the optical instrument, with his mouth wide open; then, making a comical movement of distrust, he quickly departed whence he had come. When he had got fairly into his row-boat, he entered into a most animated conversation with his fellows, ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... true in the end with looking which is analogous to touching. The manner in which the libidinous excitement is frequently awakened is by the optical impression, and selection takes account of this circumstance—if this teleological mode of thinking be permitted—by making the sexual object a thing of beauty. The covering of the body, which keeps abreast with civilization, serves to arouse sexual ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity. What you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a man; for Mme. d'Espard he had positively no existence. This was a sentence, it was a refusal of justice. Poor poet! a deadly cold seized on him when he saw de Marsay eying him through his glass; and when the Parisian lion let that optical instrument fall, it dropped in so singular a fashion that Lucien thought of the knife-blade of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... chemical works, of which they were physically capable; in making of gauges, forging billets, making fuses, cartridges, bullets—"look what they can do," said a foreman, "ladies from homes where they sat about and were waited upon." They also made optical glass; drilled and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric wires and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered guards for lamps and radiator fronts; repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments, automatic searchlights. "We ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... the gentle sea, the fairy island of Rivegliano with its old tower, the smoking crater of Vesuvius, the bold forms of Mount Lactarius and Cape Minerva, stood out full and clear under the cloudless sky: as we returned, I saw the sun sink behind Capri, which appeared by some optical illusion like a glorious crimson transparency suspended above the horizon: the sky, the earth, the sea, were flushed with the richest rose colour, which gradually softened and darkened into purple: the short twilight faded away, and the full ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... in Saxony by A. Breithaupt in 1817, and named by him from the Greek amblus, blunt, and gouia, angle, because of the obtuse angle between the cleavages. Later it was found at Montebras, dep. Creuse, France, and at Hebron in Maine; and on account of slight differences in optical character and chemical composition the names montebrasite and hebronite have been applied to the mineral from these localities. Recently it has been discovered in considerable quantity at Pala in San Diego county, California, and at Caceres in Spain. Amblygonite ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... logically, so there was nothing the matter with the brain. It was only my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision, one of those visions which lead simple folk to believe in miracles. It was a nervous seizure of the optical apparatus, nothing more; the eyes ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... quantity) 32; fragment &c (small part) 51; powder &c 330; point of a pin, mathematical point; minutiae &c (unimportance) 643. micrometer; vernier; scale. microphotography, photomicrography, micrography^; photomicrograph, microphotograph; microscopy; microscope (optical instruments) 445. V. be little &c adj.; lie in a nutshell; become small &c (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... beautiful), an optical instrument in which we see an endless variety of beautiful patterns by simple ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... was cold, the sky covered with great fleecy patches, through which the full moon, just fairly risen, appeared to be racing, under the effect of that optical illusion caused by the rapidly moving clouds. The coyotes had commenced their nocturnal concert in the timbered recesses of the creek not far away, and on the battle-field a short distance beyond, as they battened and fought over the ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... war will see the use of a great quantity of new aids to war, bicycles, pigeons, telegraph, telephones, optical instruments and photographic instruments for the purpose of mapping from a great distance the positions occupied by the enemy and means to observe the movements of the enemy such as observing ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... the function of the elder lady, and what had become of her argumentative daughter? Perhaps this was another, a younger daughter, though, indeed, she bore no resemblance to either of Longueville's friends. Gordon Wright, in spite of Bernard's interrogative glances, indulged in no optical confidences. He had too much to tell. He would keep his story till they should be alone together. It was impossible that they should adjourn just yet to social solitude; the two ladies were under Gordon's protection. Mrs. Vivian—Bernard felt a satisfaction in ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... special objections. It requires no small strength of nerve steadily to conceive not only of the variation, but of the formation of the organs of an animal through cumulative variation and natural selection. Think of such an organ as the eye, that most perfect of optical instruments, as so produced in the lower animals and perfected in the higher! A friend of ours, who accepts the new doctrine, confesses that for a long while a cold chill came over him whenever he thought of the eye. He has at length got over ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... necessary, and this is provided by means of the screws which fix the inclination of the eyepiece. This is set at such an angle that the instrument, when closed and reading 90 deg. on the divided limb, acts as an optical square. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... to the strain of incessant work, Mr. Dodgson about this period began to be subject to a very peculiar, yet not very uncommon, optical delusion, which takes the form of seeing moving fortifications. Considering the fact that he spent a good twelve hours out of every twenty-four in reading and writing, and that he was now well over fifty years old, it was not surprising that nature ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... condenser is a necessary part of the optical outfit. Its purpose is to collect the beam of parallel rays of light reflected by the plane mirror, by virtue of a short focus system of lenses, into a cone of large aperture (reducible at will by means of an iris diaphragm mounted as a part ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... career, and the lion gazed with his great grave eyes at the marble sphinx which lay half buried in the sand. The waters of the Nile had fallen, and the whole river bed was crowded with frogs, and this spectacle was just according to the taste of the stork family. The young storks thought it was optical illusion, they ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... we shall find those ugliest which have in them no expression nor life whatever, but a corpse-like stare, or an indefinite meaningless glaring, as in some lights, those of owls and cats, and mostly of insects and of all creatures in which the eye seems rather an external, optical instrument than a bodily member through which emotion and virtue of soul may be expressed, (as pre-eminently in the chameleon,) because the seeming want of sensibility and vitality in a living creature is the most painful of all wants. ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... repeated the words in an awestruck tone. Did she see him cower in his chair? It must have been an optical illusion. The storm outside was making the house shiver and ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... at the same time the most tormenting phenomenon occasioned by optical deception, is the "mirage," or, as commonly called by the Mexican travellers, "the lying waters." Even the experienced prairie hunter is often deceived by these, upon the arid plains, where the pool of water is in such request. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... metaphysicians. Thus you see I am not altogether blind; but to one of my profession, the eyes you speak of would be merely an incumbrance, liable at any time to be put out by a toasting-iron, or a pitchfork. To you, I allow, these optical affairs are indispensable. Endeavor, Bon-Bon, to use them well;—my vision ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... evidence;" and after traversing in detail all the arguments of his opponent, he declared it his firm conviction that the effects which Professor Gazen had thought fit to advance as a "discovery," were neither more nor less than an optical illusion, not to say a ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... and also on a deep wound just above his heart, from which the blood oozed redly, staining the grass on which he lay. Mastering the sick horror which seized me at this sight, I sprung forward—the shadow vanished instantly—it was a mere optical delusion, the result of my overwrought and excited condition. I shuddered involuntarily at the image my own heated fancy had conjured up; should I always see Guido thus, I ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... prepares a great variety of rouges. In some instances the coloring-matter of the cochineal is spread upon thick paper and dried very gradually; it then assumes a beautiful green tint. This curious optical effect is also observed in "pink saucers." What is known as Chinese book rouge is evidently made in the same way, and has been imported into this country for ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... means of retreat. He grinned wryly. In a guerrilla operation such as the one he was considering it would be wise to have a way out if things got too hot. The heavy parts, the engines and the controls, were in workable condition and would merely require cleaning and oiling. Some of the optical equipment would have to be replaced and fuel slugs would have to be obtained for the drive—but none of these would be too hard to accomplish. The slugs from any of the power reactors on the island ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... dissimilar workers I have had quite involuntary admirations. It isn't merely that I don't so clearly see how they are doing it, though that may certainly be a help; it is far more a matter of taste. As a writer I belong to one school and as a reader to another—as a man may like to make optical instruments and collect old china. Swift, Sterne, Jane Austen, Thackeray and the Dickens of Bleak House were the idols of my youthful imitation, but the contemporaries of my early praises were Joseph Conrad, W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane, all utterly remote ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... scientific and the artistic efforts of the new and the old world, we may tell the history of the moving pictures by the following dates and achievements. In the year 1825 a Doctor Roget described in the "Philosophical Transactions" an interesting optical illusion of movement, resulting, for instance, when a wheel is moving along behind a fence of upright bars. The discussion was carried much further when it was taken up a few years later by a master of the craft, by Faraday. In the Journal of the Royal Institute of Great Britain he writes in 1831 ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... speculations of the old Greek thinkers. Galilei (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with the aid of the telescope; and the telescope was an outcome of the new study of optics which had been inspired in Roger Bacon and other medieval scholars by the optical works, directly founded on the Greek, of the Spanish Moors. Giordano Bruno still further enlarged the system; he pictured the universe boldly as an infinite ocean of liquid ether, in which the stars, with retinues of inhabited ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... end of the barn was an optical lantern, fitted with the usual mechanism for the exhibition of films. Half way down the room was a camp bedstead, covered with one brown blanket. Tim invited us to sit ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... other species of antelopes. These animals, as well as some stunted trees, at times appeared suspended in the air, and magnified far beyond natural size. High up in the air could be seen the reflection of animals that were many miles distant from the place they appeared to be occupying. These optical illusions were the cause of much annoyance to the thirsty travellers,— especially to their animals, unable to understand them. Excited with the hope of quenching their thirst, they were with much difficulty prevented from rushing about in ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... III. An Optical Illusion.—In the sphere of vision many very interesting facts are constantly coming to light. Sight is the most complex of the senses, the most easily deranged, and, withal, the most necessary to our normal ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... to peer down at one of the great whirling pools beneath the rock, which was being undermined in this place more than ever; and as Saxe clung by him and gazed down too, there was the perfectly round pool of water, with its central pipe, which, by the optical illusion caused by the gloom and mist, looked reversed—that is, as if the concavity were convex, and he were gazing at the eye of some subterranean monster, the effect being made more realistic by the rock overhanging ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... goes through the proof for final cause and design, as given in a summary though clear, plain, and convincing form, in the pages of Paley and the "Bridgewater Treatises." The eye and the hand, those perfect instruments of optical and mechanical contrivance and adaptation, without the least waste or surplusage—these, say Paley and Bell, certainly prove a designing maker as much as the palace or the watch proves an architect or a watchmaker. Let this mind, in this state, cross Darwin's ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... airplane of the same division hovering over the Fort of the Malmaison just as the Giraud battalion of the 4th Zouaves Regiment took possession of it. At dawn it came to observe and note the site of the commanding officer's post, and to read the optical signals announcing our success. At each visit it seemed like the moving star of old, now guiding the new shepherds, the guardians of our dear human flocks—not over the stable where a God was born, but over the ruins where ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... the Gramophone.—The gramophone, by virtue of its table revolving at a controllable speed, comes in useful for a series of optical experiments made with coloured discs bearing ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... and Its Revelations, gives two drawings of it. Carpenter argues that it is impossible to accept that optical lenses had ever been made by the ancients. Never occurred to him—someone a million miles or so up in the air—looking through his telescope—lens ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... is the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy, that I know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical delusion concerning the Gallipagos. For, often in scenes of social merriment, and especially at revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions, so that shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... decreased in proportion as it recedes from our view. In our politics, as in our common conduct, we shall be worse than infants, if we do not put our senses under the tuition of our judgment, and effectually cure ourselves of that optical illusion which makes a brier at our nose of greater magnitude than an oak ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of thought, and the form, lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and minutely, as the optical instrument reproduces the sensible object; we must come to the teachers of wisdom to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... difficulty was that, as a matter of fact, the solitary mound of white earth which marked the entrance to the mine, suddenly appeared before his eyes in a double condition, and he beheld two Pactolus claims, which curious optical delusion rather confused him, inasmuch as he was undecided ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... farther and more essential ground of difference in system of shadow between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It is a well-known optical fact that the color of shadow is complemental to that of light: and that therefore, in general terms, warm light has cool shadow, and cool light hot shadow. The noblest masters of the northern and southern schools respectively adopted these contrary keys; and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... European Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Paris). Fiber-optic cable - a multichannel communications cable using a thread of optical glass fibers as a transmission medium in which the signal (voice, video, etc.) is in the form of ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... But now against the aperture I saw a score or more of tiny, dancing sparks. An optical illusion, I thought, and turned the crystal in another direction. There were no sparklings there. I turned it back again—and there they were. And what were they like? Realization came to me—they were like the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... described circle could possibly represent the motion of Mars. Either the orbit could not be circular, or else the angular velocity could not be constant about any point whatever. He determined to attack the "second inequality," i.e. the optical illusion caused by the earth's annual motion, but first revived an old idea of his own that for the sake of uniformity the sun, or as he preferred to regard it, the earth, should have an equant as well as the planets. From the irregularities ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... there are performances by slight of hand, and by persons acting in concert, that have a miraculous appearance, which, when known, are thought nothing of. And, besides these, there are mechanical and optical deceptions. There is now an exhibition in Paris of ghosts or spectres, which, though it is not imposed upon the spectators as a fact, has an astonishing appearance. As, therefore, we know not the extent to which either nature or art can go, there is no criterion to determine what a miracle is; ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... a circus or square of a diameter not less than six hundred and fifty-eight feet. This size of space will give the spectator an opportunity of viewing the erection at double the distance of its elevation, which is the optical distance that pictures, statues, and buildings ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... "That's an optical illusion. There are three parties, but each is dominated by the fifty families, and election laws are such that for all practical purposes it's impossible to start another party. Theoretically it's possible, ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the number of Christ's appearances, to speak of the five hundred witnesses of whom she was weary of hearing. Her mind was proof against all this; what could be more probable than that a number of devoted followers should be the victims of some optical delusion, especially when their minds were disturbed by grief. Here was a miracle supported on one side by the testimony of five hundred and odd spectators all longing to see their late Master, and contradicted ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... me, and the closer I watched him the more convinced I became, that this was no optical illusion, that a faint luminosity, a sort of elfin light, played eerily about ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... the effect of the MIRAGE," said the doctor, "and nothing else—a simple optical phenomenon due to the unequal refraction of light by different layers of the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... so far as is necessary in order to subserve my leading object, which is the preservation and improvement of this sense, and the means of rendering it tributary to intellectual and moral culture. The eye, which is the organ of vision, is an optical instrument of the most perfect construction. It is surrounded by coats, which contain refracting mediums, called humors. There are three coats, called the sclerotic, the choroid, and the retina; ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... a view, scene or scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... a silicate of Na and Ca; (3) bottle glass, a silicate of Na, Ca, Al, Fe, etc., a variety which is impure, and is tinged green by salts of Fe; (4) flint glass, a silicate of K and Pb, used for lenses in optical instruments, cut glass ware, and, with B added, for paste, or imitation diamonds, etc. Pb gives to glass high refracting power, which is a valuable property of diamonds, as well as ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... bank, the rocky one, I always had a curious optical illusion: it seemed to me that the town from which we had come, and whose gray ramparts we still could see, suddenly drew very far away from us, for in my young head distances exaggerated themselves strangely. Upon this side all was different, the soil, the grass, the wild ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... at the sky, which was so brightly blue that it made his eyes blink. He sought optical relief in the dark green of the woods. Then, in steadying his pail of cherries between his legs, he turned his glance to the ground ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... continues Mr. Darwin, "will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might be thus formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... between the physical and moral sciences there exists a broad line of demarcation. Moral facts have not less certainty than physical phenomena; but moral facts falling under the influence of liberty, all men cannot perceive them equally under all conditions. An optical experiment presents itself to the eyes, and all the spectators see it alike, if at least they have one and the same visual organization; but a case of moral experience has a personal character, and is only communicated to another ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... various types of algae. The body is pyriform, with the shell opening at the larger end. The chitinous shell is hyaline and plastic to a slight extent, so that the body is capable of some change in shape. The shell is thin and turned inwards at the mouth-opening, forming a tube (seen in optical section in fig. 4) through which the protoplasm passes to the outside. The walls of this tube are thicker than the rest of the shell, and in optical section the effect is that of two hyaline bars ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... attempt to go to sleep; he did not even unbutton the top button of his tunic. He sat in a chair and mused. Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a tenderness, indistinct and confused as ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Crimean War. As long as she remains inactive, the influence she exercises on general politics by her mere extent, and the mysterious power which seems to be the corollary of it, far exceeds her actual strength. On her descending into the arena, however, this optical illusion is dissipated, as was apparent in the recent Turkish War; her prestige was lessened. No steps will therefore be taken by her to increase England's difficulties by which she gains much without ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... on the difference that education makes, even pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and a spectre,—me who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep a few minutes after, convinced hat no phantom, the ghostliest that ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... masses are examined by more powerful instruments many of them lose their cloudy form, and are resolved into shining points, "like spangles of diamond dust." It is in this way several nebulae have yielded to the gigantic reflector of Lord ROSSE, and others with still greater optical resources may follow. This brings us to the first questionable and controversial ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... easy to pick up, and on this occasion we could plainly see a cairn over seven miles away, raised by the mirage; the only trouble about seeing things so far off is that they take such an awful time to reach. Mirage is a great feature down here and one of the most common of optical phenomena on the Barrier; it is often difficult to persuade oneself that open water does not lie ahead. We passed the scene of Weary Willie's fight with the dogs during the march and also had an amusing argument as to a dark object on the snow ahead. At first we thought it was the dog camp ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... company of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... gave me proof within ten minutes after his failure with the cotton-mouth. He had pulled out into the middle of the river, when I noticed a beautiful snake, short and rather stout, lying coiled on the water. Whether it was an optical illusion I cannot say, but it seemed to me that the creature lay entirely above the surface,—as if it had been an inflated skin rather than a live snake. We passed close by it, but it made no offer to move, only darting out its tongue ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... scarcely, without having experienced it, form any idea of the optical illusions, which are produced by mist, in regions where the size of the objects which are visible through the fog is not known beforehand, and thus does not give the spectator an idea of the distance. Our estimate of distance and size in ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... I saw houses squashed flat as if they had all fallen down from the skies; a smoke fog seemed to drown them. Over my head ragged clouds were drifting past, and by an optical inversion they seemed stationary, while the steeple, the ball and I were all spinning along with fantastic speed. Far away on one side was the green country, on the other the sea sparkled, bathed in sunlight. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... canals on Mars may be only an optical illusion was demonstrated in an article in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times, by means of material obtained from a report of the section for the Observation of Mars, a division of the British ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... moulding under the abacus of its cap. In this form, the Doric column was an absolutely fresh note in architecture. Archaic though they were, these columns at Corinth show that the Greeks were already on the track of those refinements of form, those optical corrections and compensations, which differentiate Greek architecture from that of any other race. The exaggeration in the entasis of the archaic column disappears, its tapering was diminished, its height increased, and ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Xenogenesis, rather than under Abiogenesis. Such as it was, I think it will appear, to those who will be just enough to remember that it was propounded before the birth of modern chemistry, and of the modern optical arts, to be a most ingenious and ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Court, applied to England in not many months hence, and got Williams sent away: ["22d January, 1751" (MS. LIST in State-Paper Office).] on to Russia, or I forget whither;—which did not mend the Hanbury optical-machinery on that side. The dull, tobacco-smoking Saxon-Polish Majesty, about whom he idly retails so many scandals, had never ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... lady's delicate white hand—so placed between the light and the deed as to obscure the spot on which he was engaged. The unaccountable hand, however, was gone almost as soon as noticed." The clerk concluding that this was some optical delusion, proceeded with his work, and had come to the clause wherein the Master of Draycot disinherited his son, when again the same ghostly hand was thrust between ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... is that they are meteorological or similar type balloons. This, however, does not explain reports that they travel at high speed or maneuver rapidly. But 'Saucer' men point out that the movement could be explained away as an optical illusion or actual acceleration of the balloon caused by a gas leak and later exaggerated by observers. . . . There are scores of possible explanations for the scores of ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... variety in the size will indicate a corresponding difference in the distance, and will measure that difference. Nor could we imagine any exception to these inferences from A or from B, whichever of the two were assumed, unless through optical laws that might not equally affect objects under different circumstances; I mean, for instance, that might suffer a disturbance as applied under hypoth. B, to different depths in space, or under hypoth. A, to different arrangements of structure in the star. But ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
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