"Optical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... 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
... 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 at night? To the latter question ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 thoughts and led him to believe that he ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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
... optical contrivance we shall use," said Ostrog, "used by some of the posturers and women dancers. It may be novel to you. You stand in a very bright light, and they see not you but a magnified image of you thrown on a screen—so ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... an optical matter, a question of color. The pastel shades deceive him; the louder hues send him to his artillery. God help, I say, the red-haired girl! She goes into action with warning pennants flying. The dullest, blindest man can ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... 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 |
