"Refraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day the horizon was occupied by haze, and produced a very remarkable effect upon the land, which was so raised above the horizon by refraction that many distant objects became visible that could not otherwise have been seen. This mirage had been frequently observed by us on various parts of the coast, but never produced so extraordinary ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... Composition.—Reference should be made to the article REFRACTION for the general discussion of the phenomenon known as the refraction of light. It is there shown that every substance, transparent to light, has a definite refractive index, which is the ratio ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... from the shore where none exist; islands clothed with verdure, or girt with cliffs, rise up from the bosom of the lake, remain awhile, and disappear. Hardly a day passes, during the summer, without a more or less striking exhibition of this kind. The same phenomena of rapidly varying refraction may often be witnessed at sunset, when the sun, sinking into the lake, undergoes a most striking series of changes. At one moment it is drawn out into a pear-like shape; the next it takes an elliptical form; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... flashing as it turned over, while two merry little young scamps were diving down after it, racing to see which would get first to the coin. This soon disappeared in the disturbed water, while the figures of the boys grew more and more shadowy and distorted by the varying refraction. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the two regiments engaged in the flanking movement pushed on to gain the bluff. Just as they reached the crest of the ridge the moon rose from behind, enlarged by the refraction of the atmosphere, and as the attacking column passed along the summit it crossed the moon's disk and disclosed to us below a most interesting panorama, every figure nearly being thrown out in full relief. The enemy, now outflanked on left and right, abandoned his ground, leaving us two ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... before the table on which the bride's jewels were displayed, and Lily's heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces—the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... they saw lakes of water in the distance, and hastened on to them; and then they fancied they were close to rivers and islands, covered with luxuriant foliage, but still were doomed to disappointment; as all was the result of the highly-rarefied air, and the refraction of the sun's rays on the sultry plain. What would they have given for a bush even to afford them any shelter from the noonday sun, for the crowns of their heads appeared as if covered with live coal, and their minds began to wander. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... not be frightened at the complexity; but, on the other hand, do not hope to render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see, and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be, first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by refraction, so that if the general structure of the stone shows straight parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the water crosses and interferes with the part that is seen through it, so that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... peaks were beautifully tinged by the fading sunlight. The illusion regarding distances was difficult to overcome, and could only be realized by observing how very slowly we neared the mountains we were approaching. The atmosphere was of remarkable purity, and its powers of refraction reminded me of past experience in the Rocky Mountains. We had sunset and moon-rise at once. 'Adam had no more in Eden save the head of Eve upon ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Professor of Optics and Refraction; formerly Physician in Philadelphia Hospital; Member of Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania State and ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... no time for aim, but seeing a vague shadow below the boat, he allowed for the refraction of the water, and threw the small barbed spear with all his might. His cast was as clean as though he were experienced, and as he grasped the rope he cried to the boatman with ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... hummocks beat up by the occasional fury of the Atlantic gales—arid, bare, and without the slightest appearance of vegetable life. The inland prospect is shrouded over by a dense mirage, through which here and there are to be discovered the stems of a few distant palm-trees, so broken and disjoined by refraction that they present to the imagination anything but the idea of foliage or shade. The water in the bay is calm and smooth as the polished mirror; not the smallest ripple is to be heard on the beach, to break through the silence of nature; not a ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... cloud impress'd, Bent in vast curve, the watery meteor shines Delightfully, to th' levell'd sun opposed: Lovely refraction ! while the vivid brede In listed colours glows, th' unconscious swain, With vacant eye, gazes on the divine Phenomenon, gleaming o'er the illumined fields, Or runs to catch ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... guessed that this extraordinary appearance was caused by refraction; but the figure of the ship puzzled me. It was so perfect in every respect, that I was convinced that it could not be an ocular illusion, and that there must be some real ship, and that this was her reflection in the clouds. I pointed her out to my companions; and when they saw that all the objects ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... of having stepped into an old Flemish painting. The hall in which he stood was cool and rather dark, though a bright refraction of light tossed from some upper window upon a tall mirror filled the shadow with broken spangles. Through an open doorway at the rear was the green glimmer of a garden. In front of him was a mahogany sideboard. On its polished top ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... to remark that as another result of the thinness of the Martian atmosphere twilight is much shorter than on the earth, the light being less diffused when the sun is below the horizon, and refraction also considerably less ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... charts were studied. The atmospheric conditions were such that it was very possible that due to refraction Venus would have been visible just on the horizon. The fact that the UFO faded so fast would bear this out because the conditions for such refraction are critical and a slight change in atmospheric conditions could easily have ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... conditions are entirely different. As we ascend the air becomes rarer. It has less moisture, because a wet atmosphere, being heavier, lies nearer the surface of the earth. Being rarer the action of sunlight on the particles is less intense. Reflection and refraction of the rays acting on the light atmosphere do not produce such a powerful effect as on the ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... Resemblance of some thing visible: In which sense the Phantasticall Formes, Apparitions, or Seemings of Visible Bodies to the Sight, are onely Images; such as are the Shew of a man, or other thing in the Water, by Reflexion, or Refraction; or of the Sun, or Stars by Direct Vision in the Air; which are nothing reall in the things seen, nor in the place where thy seem to bee; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object; but changeable, by the variation of the organs of ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... time there is a train of thought suggested by Number Seven and his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less. There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You wonder at the eccentricities of this or that connection of your own. Watch yourself, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... between Herald Island and Wrangell Land, which he said was first made public through this academy. The evidence of Capts. Williams and Thomas Long were recited and highly praised. One of the officers of Admiral Rodgers' expedition climbed to near the top of Herald Island, at a time of great refraction, when probably a false horizon existed, and hence did not see Plover Island, although ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... the white light of the sun is composed of the seven colors of the spectrum in combination, which colors may be readily separated by the refraction of the prism. All objects possess, in a greater or less degree, the power of decomposing light and absorbing colors. Now a ray of sunlight falling upon any given object is in a measure decomposed, a portion of its integral colors is absorbed, and the remainder or complementary colors thrown ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... difference between chalk and cheese, except in the price?" "But, if it's green cheese the moon is made of," asks your opponent, "why does it look yellow?" "Only the natural effect of atmospheric refraction," you reply calmly; "remember how a politician's badly soiled reputation will shine out a brilliant white, through the favourable atmosphere that surrounds a Congressional investigating committee. Recall how a lady who is ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... height of 5000 ft. forty or fifty miles inland. The accurate estimation of heights and distances in the Antarctic is always difficult, owing to the clear air, the confusing monotony of colouring, and the deceptive effect of mirage and refraction. The land appeared to increase in height to the southward, where we saw a line of land or barrier that must have been seventy miles, and ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... went to work—like a slave. And I had hardly worked and thought about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books—the books that tramp has hidden—there are marvels, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my diary that I saw the sun's disk shining through the trees. Although fully half a degree of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout Alaska, is broken and ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... colors of the rainbow? Isn't it fine?" "That is the very thing I want to tell you about. The sun, shining upon vapor and falling water, makes all these beautiful colors. That is the way I mix the rainbow. The science which teaches about the rays of light, their reflection and refraction, and the coloring they give to different objects, is called Optics: it is an interesting study, and I wish you to be a proficient in it." "Optics, is it? That seems to me very different from blowing soap-bubbles. I do hate to be cheated into learning big words, and understanding ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... Partial Differential Equations, Tides, Sound, Calculus of Variations, Composition of rotary motions, Motion in resisting medium, Lhuillier's theorem, Brightness of an object as seen through a medium with any possible law of refraction (a good investigation), star-reductions, numerical calculations connected with them, equilibrium of chain under centripetal force (geometrically treated, as an improvement upon Whewell's algebraical method), investigation of the magnitude ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... cried, and his cheeks flushed with annoyance. "Think of my wasting three cartridges in that fashion! If I had him at Bisley I'd shoot the turban off him, but this vibrating glare means refraction. What's the matter ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the crystalline lens becomes opaque and loses its transparency, the power of refraction is lost—the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... a platoon became a company for an instant under favorable light refraction. The object of British khaki, French blue and German green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed that will not be visible under certain conditions. A motley such as the "tanks" were painted would be best, but the most utilitarian ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown law of refraction." ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... of skylight, the greatest stumbling-block has hitherto been, that, in accordance with the law of Brewster, which makes the index of refraction the tangent of the polarising angle, the reflection which produces perfect polarisation would require to be made in air upon air; and indeed this led many of our most eminent men, Brewster himself among the number, to entertain the idea of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... give a full denial to sin and sorrow. The sun was just mounting over the horizon, looking up the clear cloud-mottled sky. From millions of water-drops hanging on the bending stalks of grass, sparkled his rays in varied refraction, transformed here to a gorgeous burning ruby, there to an emerald, green as the grass, and yonder to a flashing, sunny topaz. The chanting priest-lark had gone up from the low earth, as soon as the heavenly light had begun to enwrap and ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... the sun's disc, enlarged by refraction, was dipping blood-red below the horizon. The distant waves glittered in the west, and sparkled like sheets of liquid silver. Nothing was to be seen in that direction but sky and water, except one sharply-defined ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... idea, and settled in Paris (June 1625), in the quarter where he had sought seclusion before. By this time he had ceased to devote himself to pure mathematics, and in company with his friends Mersenne and Mydorge was deeply interested in the theory of the refraction of light, and in the practical work of grinding glasses of the best shape suitable for optical instruments. But all the while he was engaged with reflections on the nature of man, of the soul and of God, and for a while he remained invisible even to his most familiar friends. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... abruptly destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process of synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In front and rear of China the English ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... and autumn so as to kill off the old tufts and allow of the new shoots growing for hay. The fires look like one long streak of quivering flame, the forked tips of which flash and quiver in the horizon, magnified by refraction, and on a dark night are lovely. In the day-time one only sees volumes of smoke which break the monotony of the landscape, though I don't know that it is picturesque. With a slight breeze the fires spread in a marvellous ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... long a resident in Holland, and a keen and observing artist, remarked that the skies in the pictures of Backhuysen, though dark and inky, were precisely what we see now—the deep Zuyder Sea swallowing up any refraction of light which would otherwise have illuminated the clouds; while the skies of Cuyp, receiving the coruscations arising from the meeting of the two rivers, the Meuse and the Waal, the scenes of most of his pictures, exhibit that luminous reflection and unsteady appearance ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... amount of sand has somewhat the same effect. Potassium glass is largely 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 ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... next morning the sun was pouring in between her curtains of old brocade, and its refraction from the ripples of the Canal was drawing a network of golden scales across the vaulted ceiling. The maid had just placed a tray on a slim marquetry table near the bed, and over the edge of the tray Susy discovered the small ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... to determine the exact positions of celestial objects correction has to be made for the effects of refraction, according to the apparent elevation of these objects in the sky. Such effects are least when the objects in question are directly overhead, for then the rays of light, coming from them to the eye, enter the atmosphere perpendicularly, and ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... eyeball is essential to ocular refraction, and closely related to ocular nutrition. Fully to understand the mechanism for its regulation would carry us far toward an understanding of the causes of glaucoma. Normal tension is maintained with a continuous flow of fluid into the eye and a corresponding outflow. Complete interruption of the ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... dark eyes seemed to gleam with a strange but enticing lustre. Even in the unsearching moonlight, which is after all rather deceptive than illuminative, I could not but notice one rare quality of her eyes. Each had some quality of refraction which made it look as though it contained a star. At every movement she made, the stars exhibited new beauties, of more rare and radiant force. She looked at me imploringly as the heavy curtain rolled back, and in eloquent gestures implored me to admit ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... number of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... genius lies in the power of conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common days, generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to [214] the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a variety of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or persons open to them is as ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... their counterparts and coevals in tragedy: there is more in Benedick and Beatrice than this simple quality of love that clothes itself in the strife of wits; the injury done her cousin, which by the repercussion of its shock and refraction of its effect serves to transfigure with such adorable indignation and ardour of furious love and pity the whole bright light nature of Beatrice, serves likewise by a fresh reflection and counterchange of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the stature of her lover's spirit after a fashion beyond ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Now it is reputed to be a fact by several people of apparent truthfulness that it is possible, in circumstances such as these, for each watcher to see the other man's eyes reflected from the mirrors of the periscopes; and it is an undoubted fact that the laws which govern the refraction of light would allow of this phenomenon. Personally, I am glad to say I have never seen a German's eye through a periscope; but then personally I am inclined to doubt if any one has. It must be quite dreadful to see a thing like a poached egg regarding you balefully from the ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... refraction introduces another error by altering the apparent position of the sun; but the effect is too small to need consideration in the construction of an instrument which, with the best workmanship, does not after all admit of very ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... to enter into an elaborate description of this piece of mechanism, as every student of philosophy, who is well acquainted with the reflection and refraction of rays of light, will understand how an ingenious contrivance produced the results spoken of. The same principle enters into the arrangement of the camera obscura. There was an aperture very artfully cut through ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... entirely disappeared, and again on the starboard hand shone a vision of the land; this time not in the sharp peaks and spires we had first seen, but in a chain of pale blue egg-shaped islands, floating in the air a long way above the horizon. This peculiar appearance was the result of extreme refraction, for, later in the day, we had an opportunity of watching the oval cloud-like forms gradually harden into the same pink tapering spikes which originally caused the island to be called Spitzbergen: nay, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... in detail a few of the savage stories of the Origin of Death. That told by the Australians may be regarded with suspicion, as a refraction from a careless hearing of the narrative in Genesis. The legend printed by Mr. Brough Smyth {183a} was told to Mr. Bulwer by 'a black fellow far from sharp,' and this black fellow may conceivably have distorted what his tribe had heard from ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... "Highland-looking." Over the hill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast. As I came down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different from the day before. The cold fogs were all blown away; and there was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain tops of Arran, veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue land of Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood, in a great castle, over the top of Arran, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought that the sun moved round the earth every day, and that on that particular occasion it stood still for a time, thus causing the light to remain longer; and I would say that they did not conjecture that, from the amount of snow in the air (see Josh. x. 11), the refraction may have been greater than usual, or that there may have been some other cause which we will ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... surmises. At first it was announced as the sea serpent, but its true nature was soon obvious. At midnight, March 1st, Nassau light hove in sight, dimmed by a thin, soft haze, which hung over the water, and through which the light, by some law of refraction, seemed to be coming out to meet the ship. Overhead all was bright,—almost dazzling with unnumbered stars and familiar constellations, like silver spangles on a background of blue velvet. We anchored off the island an hour before daylight, the harbor being too shallow to admit ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... them, its pure softness delighted them, its perfect regularity astonished them. What was it? they asked Barbican. In a few words he explained it. The beautiful luminous ring was simply an optical illusion, produced by the refraction of the terrestrial atmosphere. All the stars in the neighborhood of the Earth, and many actually behind it, had their rays refracted, diffused, radiated, and finally converged to a focus by the atmosphere, as if by a double ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the field of sight, without the slightest alteration in the line of vision, he will find that it takes in the entire breadth of a large room, and that up to a very short distance before him; and imperfectly, by a refraction, I believe, in the eye itself, to a point very near indeed. Next to nothing that passed in the room, therefore, was hidden ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... were precisely what the Grecian did not know, and first learned from Herodotus.] The very truth, and mere facts of history, reaching Herodotus through such a haze of remote abstraction, and suffering a sort of refraction at each translation from atmosphere to atmosphere, whilst continually the uninteresting parts dropped away as the whole moved onwards, unavoidably assumed the attractions of romance. And thus it has happened that the air of marvellousness, which seems connected with the choice and preferences ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the speculum metal that he abandoned its use, and betook himself to glass. He found that before he could make a good achromatic telescope it was necessary that he should calculate his curves from data depending upon the nature of the glass. He accordingly proceeded to study the optical laws of refraction, in which his knowledge of geometry and mathematics greatly helped him. And in course of time, by his rare and exquisite manipulative skill, he succeeded in constructing a four-inch refractor, or achromatic ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... matter of fact it would not be, because the air, by bending the sun's rays, throws the sun apparently somewhat above his true position. Apart from this, at the time of true spring or autumn, the sun does not seem to rise due east, or set due west, for he is raised above the horizon by atmospheric refraction, before he has really reached it in the morning, and he remains raised above it after he has really passed below—understanding the word "really" to relate to his actual geometrical direction. Thus, at true spring and autumn, the sun rises slightly to the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... of guilt came from the pale image of it lifted above her horizon by the refraction of her sympathy. She did not know, perhaps never would understand the ghastly horror of conscious guilt, besides which there is no evil else. Agonies of injury a man may endure, and, so far from being overwhelmed, rise above them tenfold a man, who, were he to awake to the self-knowledge of a crime, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... swimming down, down, down under the ship's bilge, growing to a faint brownish yellow speck which wavered and shook with the refraction of the disturbed surface. Then while I looked the line slacked, and the brownish yellow object beneath wavered into a larger size. Evidently he was coming up and had failed to make the five fathoms necessary to go clear of the keel. I hauled in the line rapidly, for ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... sought. The day had been hot and almost cloudless. The shimmer of heat along the lazy roll of the land to the south had often baffled their blinking eyes. But now the sun was well to the west, and the refraction seemed diminishing, and away over to the northeast a dull-colored cloud seemed slowly rising beyond the ridges. It was this that Sergeant Bruce was studying when he murmured ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... wound up, as the pecuniary affairs of their former owners, there was always great choice in Mr Brogley's shop; and various looking-glasses, accidentally placed at compound interest of reflection and refraction, presented to the eye an eternal perspective of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of half a degree or so are accounted for. Refraction at the horizon amounts to about 35' of arc; if we assume that the Egyptian (?) astronomers took it roundly at 30', and that they intended to observe the stars on the true and not the apparent horizon, we find the azimuths would have been ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... is the cause of the rainbow? It is evident that what apparent things we see come to our eyes in right or in crooked lines, or by refraction: these are incorporeal and to sense obscure, but to reason they are obvious. Those which are seen in right lines are those which we see through the air or horn or transparent stones, for all the parts of these things are very fine and tenuous; ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... on the 21st November, and it reappeared on the 19th January. On the 15th May the sun no longer set. The temperature was then under the freezing point of mercury. That the upper edge of the sun should be visible on the 19th January we must assume a horizontal refraction of nearly 1 deg.. The islands on the Yenisej are so low that there was probably a pretty ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... with open wings, The beauteous image, in fruition sweet Gladdening the thronged spirits. Each did seem A little ruby, whereon so intense The sun-beam glow'd that to mine eyes it came In clear refraction. And that, which next Befalls me to portray, voice hath not utter'd, Nor hath ink written, nor in fantasy Was e'er conceiv'd. For I beheld and heard The beak discourse; and, what intention form'd Of many, singly as of one express, Beginning: "For that I was just and piteous, l am exalted ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... it is not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense vapor formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated by refraction. A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but it is not necessary. The thing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... normal course, so that on emerging we have each of these coloured rays travelling in its own direction, vibrating in its own plane. It is well to remember that the bending off, or deflection, or refraction, is towards the thick end of the prism always, and that those of the coloured rays in that analysed band, the spectrum, most bent away from the original line of direction of the white light striking the prism, are said to be the ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... 'subjective' colours, since their origin is traced to events within the organ of sight. The next chapter deals with an actual physics of colour - that is, with the appearance of colours in external space as a result of the refraction, diffraction and polarization of light. The third chapter treats of material colours in relation to chemical and other influences. After two chapters which need not concern us here comes the sixth and last chapter, entitled 'Physical-Moral Effect of Colour' ('Sinnlich-sittliche ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... o'clock in the morning, and the rays of the sun struck the surface of the waves at rather an oblique angle; at the touch of the light, decomposed by [v]refraction as through a prism, flowers, rocks, plants, and shells were shaded at the edges by the seven solar colors. It was a marvelous feast for the eyes, this complication of colored tints, a perfect [v]kaleidoscope of green, yellow, ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... feelings, and gentler yet in her attendance on her patron's obsequies, in the discovery that all of which he died possessed he'd left to her, but it is the duller surfaces that are slowest to give refraction, the least used springs that are least pliant. She was come a long road from her first signs of hardening. She was past, now, the stage where, when grieving for the little old man, she would have felt contrition that her first thought at his death had been, not of him, but of ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... said. "That's all right. In fact I've been able to improve it greatly. You remember the trouble I had with the refraction from the second prism. The adjustment of the angles—— The ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... to in the 'Chorographical description of West, or H-Ier-Connaught', of R. O'Flaherty—was caused by the peculiar angle of the light from the setting sun, the reflection of the water of the Solway, and the refraction of the vapour and clouds above the Solway. These aerial and visionary horsemen were being exercised somewhere above the Kirkcudbright shore. It was not the first time the phenomenon had been seen within historic times, on the same fell-side, and at the same ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... sought on the basis of alcoholic homes driving the children out into the streets. This was found to be markedly the case, the children of alcoholic parents spending much more of their spare time in the streets. An examination, however, of the vision and refraction of children with regard to the time they spent in-and out-of-doors, showed no clear and definite result, the children who spent the whole or most of their spare time in the streets having the most myopia and also most normal sight. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... bunkers were replenished with bituminous coal from a seam in the cliff above Cape Lisburne, that an effort was made to reach the island. During the run westward—a distance of 245 miles—the fine weather enabled us to witness some curious freaks of refraction and other odd phenomena for which the high latitudes are so remarkable. On July 30, the fine weather continuing, everybody was correspondingly elate and merry when both Herald and Wrangel islands were sighted from the "cro'-nest" ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... obliquely from one obtuse corner of the prism to the other, in the direction of its length. The surfaces of this section, after having been carefully polished, are cemented together again by means of Canada balsam. A ray of light, on entering the prism, is separated by the double refraction of the calc-spar into an ordinary and an extraordinary ray; the former undergoes total reflection at the layer of balsam at an incidence which allows the extraordinary ray to be transmitted; the latter, therefore, passes through ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... two other curious accounts of the effects of mirage and refraction in Sturt's Expeditions in Australia, vol. ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... as the organ of vision, for instance, of the water salamander (the triton) or of the so-called axolotl, for it exists only in a kind of embryonic development, and contains neither a vitreous humor nor a lens for the refraction of the rays of light. As, however, the nerve of vision exists, it is possible that this salamander may be able to discern in some manner between ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... tuft of grass, or a tree, or other most dissimilar object, for his companion, or his horse, or game. An old traveller is rarely deceived by mirage. If he doubts, he can in many cases adopt the following hint given by Dr. Kane: "Refraction will baffle a novice, on the ice; but we have learned to baffle refraction. By sighting the suspected object with your rifle at rest, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... analogous to those which fixed my attention during a long abode at Mexico and Quito. These meteors are perhaps modified by the nature of the soil and the air, like certain effects of the looming or mirage, and of the terrestrial refraction peculiar to the coasts of Calabria ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... at the side of a mirror where the laws of incidence and refraction would unfortunately not permit her to ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... latitude and time, and these latter in turn upon the fixing of a true meridian, that the novice can find neither beginning nor end. When to these difficulties are added the corrections for parallax, refraction, instrumental errors, personal equation, and the determination of the probable error, he is hopelessly confused, and when he learns that time may be sidereal, mean solar, local, Greenwich, or Washington, and he is referred to an ephemeris and table of logarithms for data, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... "Refraction of light," said Thorn hurriedly. "The light rays strike this film, hurtle around the object, it coats—at increased speed, probably, but there are no instruments accurate enough to check that—and emerge on the other side. Thus, you can look at a body so filmed, and not see it: your gaze travels ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... in truth, neither more nor less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and shadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere, under the strange laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought—philosophic, [164] poetic, theological—has been greatly influenced; by the intense subjectivities, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... have known it from the first," he muttered. "Reciprocal refraction was the one thing to ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... spearing fish, but found it difficult in consequence of the allowance necessary for the refraction of the water and the movement of the fish. There is a great temptation to strike in an apparently direct line with the fish, which I need hardly say, even if the fish be stationary does not go near it. I only succeeded in piercing two. But I afterwards went ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... in fixing the orientation of the island, or, in other words, the precise spot where the sun rose. The day before he had noted exactly the hour when the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, making allowance for the refraction. This morning he noted, no less exactly, the hour at which it reappeared. Between this setting and rising twelve hours, twenty-four minutes passed. Then, six hours, twelve minutes after its rising, the sun on this day would exactly pass ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... it has ever occurred to a novelist to dispense with it. I scarcely think that Marius ever speaks or is spoken to audibly in the whole course of the book; such at least is the impression that it leaves. The scenes of the story reach the reader by refraction, as it were, through the medium of Pater's harmonious murmur. But scenes they must be; not even Pater at his dreamiest can tell a story without incident particularized and caught in the act. When Marius takes a journey, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... state of mind which might be called the refraction of an idea by the presence of another idea. An example is the habit of saying, "Unprepared, as I have—'' before beginning a speech. The speaker means to say that he has not prepared himself, but, as he really has prepared himself, both ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of the tempest, mounted towards them and, as if a humid fog had been projected into the air, the atmosphere sensibly freshened. Below were the liquid masses. They seemed like an enormous flowing sheet of crystal amid a thousand rainbows due to refraction as it decomposed the solar ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... curious freak of nature, the tendency of the channel of the Mississippi is always toward one or the other of its banks, being influenced by the direction of its bends. The principle is one of nicely regulated refraction. If the river were perfectly straight, the gravity and inertia of its waters would move in a right line, with a velocity beyond all control. But we find the river very sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... taken out of the illusory surroundings, it would be incapable of recognizing them until the matter had been properly explained. There are similar dangers of illusion to those who have developed spiritual sight, until they have been trained to discount the refraction and to view the life which is permanent and stable, disregarding the form which is evanescent and changeable. The danger of getting things out of focus always remains however and is so subtle that the writer feels an imperative ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... myself, for it seemed for an instant as if the stranger had great eyes like burning flames, but a second look dispelled the illusion. The red sunlight was shining on the windows of St. Mary's Church behind our seat, and as the sun dipped there was just sufficient change in the refraction and reflection to make it appear as if the light moved. I called Lucy's attention to the peculiar effect, and she became herself with a start, but she looked sad all the same. It may have been that she was thinking of that terrible night up there. We never ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... eye is next described; this is done well and evidently at first hand, though the functions of the parts are not given with complete accuracy. Many other points of physiological optics are touched on, in general erroneously. Bacon then discusses vision in a right line, the laws of reflection and refraction, and the construction of mirrors and lenses. In this part of the work, as in the preceding, his reasoning depends essentially upon his peculiar view of natural agents and their activities. His fundamental physical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... all cautions regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... of perfect inky darkness (save when the moon has a northern declination) in the period of a typical year. During the period of a little over four days, the sun shines continuously on both the North and South Poles at the same time, owing to refraction parallax, semi-diameter, and dip of ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... Man said, "the sun has gone below the horizon at least two minutes before you see it disappear. You're looking at a sun that isn't there at all. That's due to refraction. The reason of the pink glow is that when you see it, the earth and the air for several thousand feet above you are in the shadow of the edge of the earth. The sun, therefore, is not shining on the thicker dust of ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... that the name was used in its present sense. The mineral had, however, long been known under the names calcareous spar and calc-spar, and the beautifully transparent variety called Iceland-spar had been much studied. The strong double refraction and perfect cleavages of Iceland-spar were described in detail by Erasmus Bartholinus in 1669 in his book Experimenta Crystalli Islandici disdiaclastici; the study of the same mineral led Christiaan Huygens to discover in 1690 the laws of double refraction, and E.L. Malus in 1808 the polarization ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... And this double refraction of his mind by which a concentrated and individualised Britling did but present a larger impersonal Britling beneath, carried with it a duplication of his conscience and sense of responsibility. To his personal conscience he was answerable for his private honour and his debts and the ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... every commander has to deal with some refraction of this kind of problem. When it comes, moralizing and generalizing about the weakness of human nature does no good whatever. To call the man a fool is as invidious as to waste indignation upon the cause of his misfortune. Likewise, any frontal approach to the problem, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... opposite to the doctrine I have been hitherto inculcating, at least, admits of no solution from it. In short it is this. Before the double convex glass or concave speculum EBF, let the point A be placed at such a distance that the rays proceeding from A, after refraction or reflection, be brought to unite somewhere in the AxAB. And suppose the point of union (i.e. the image of the point A, as hath been already set forth) to be Z; between which and B, the vertex of the glass or speculum, conceive the eye to be anywhere placed. The question now ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... (lib. xvi. ed. 1807, p. 1106) gives various explanations of the name, assigning the supposed redness to the refraction of the rays of the vertical sun; or to the shadow of the scorched mountain-sides which form its shores; or, as Ctesias would have it, to a certain fountain which discharged red oxide of lead into its waters. "Abyssinian" Bruce ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... explained. "Bose was the first one to invent a wireless coherer and an instrument for indicating the refraction of electric waves. But the Indian scientist did not exploit his inventions commercially. He soon turned his attention from the inorganic to the organic world. His revolutionary discoveries as a plant physiologist are outpacing even his ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... contraction, both press back the crystalline lens nearer the retina, and also flatten it; the vitreous humor, in which the crystalline lens lies, a fine, transparent humor, about as thick as the white of an egg, giving way behind it, and also slightly altering its form and power of refraction to suit the case. Thus, that which the astronomer, or the microscopist, performs by a tedious process, and then very imperfectly, we perform perfectly, easily, instantly, and almost involuntarily, with that perfect compound microscope and telescope invented by the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... upper one throws its light to the lower one, down through the immense cylinder. Around each oval is built a series of fin protectors, which is the only part about the telescope I could not fully understand. They seemed to counteract the refraction of the water, and yet the water must be in the pipe ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... little journey more pleasing than you can possibly conceive: the serene blue sky above, the dazling brightness of the sun, and the colors from the refraction of its rays on the transparent part of these ridges of ice, the winding course these oblige you to make, the sudden disappearing of a train of fifteen or twenty carrioles, as these ridges intervene, which again discover themselves on your rising to ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... apparatus was arranged so as to cause a series of eight lenses one foot in diameter and three feet focal distance to revolve with any velocity up to sixty revolutions per minute round a central lamp. The light from this lamp being concentrated by refraction through the eight lenses into eight pencils, having a divergence of about eight degrees each, illuminated when at rest not quite fifty degrees of the horizon; but when this system of lenses was put into rapid motion, every ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... immeasurable heights to show where life was. As she travelled deeper and deeper, it was a wonder to see how far that little ray penetrated down and down through gulfs of darkness, blue and cold like the shimmer of a diamond, and even when it could be seen no more, sent yet a shadowy refraction, a line of something less black than the darkness, a lightening amid the gloom, a something indefinable which was hope. The rocks were more cruel than imagination could conceive,—sometimes pointed and sharp like knives, sometimes smooth and upright as a wall with no hold for the climber, sometimes ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... the way for the reform of physical science and for its immense modern advance. In his optical investigations he established the law of refraction of light. His ingenious theory of the vortices—tracing gravity, magnetism, light, and heat, to the whirling or revolving movements of the molecules of matter with which the universe is filled—was accepted as science for about ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... float over all like golden gauze. Not only was the sun encircled by a beautiful halo, but also by those lovely lights of the Arctic regions known as parhelia, or mock-suns. Four of these made no mean display in emulation of their great original. On the horizon, refraction caused the ice-floes and bergs to present endless variety of fantastic forms, and in the immediate foreground—at the giant's feet— tremendous precipices of ice went sheer down into the deep water, while, away to the right, where a bay still retained ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... (Laughter) Lord Rayleigh's brilliant piece of mathematical work on the dynamics of blue sky is a monument to the application of mathematics to a subject of supreme difficulty, and on the subject of refraction of light he has pointed out the way towards finding all that has to be known, though he has ended his work by admitting that the explanation of the fundamentals of the reflection and refraction of light is still wanting and is a subject for ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... importance, because thereby the theory is excluded, or at least made extremely improbable, that the phenomenon of refraction is to be ascribed to, a ring of vapor surrounding the sun for a great distance. Indeed, such a refraction should cause a deviation in the observed direction, and, in order to produce the displacement of one of the stars under observation itself a slight proximity of the ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... all the colors. And the white light may be broken up (separated by refraction or the turning aside of light rays from their true course) into the colors of the rainbow, which is itself only this same decomposition of light by atmospheric refraction. Black is the absence of light, and consequently of color. This is not the case ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... following cases, it is probable that the vibrations, to which the furniture in every room is continually liable, aids in bringing the particles into contact with the glands. But as it was sometimes difficult, owing to the refraction of the secretion, to feel sure whether the particles were in contact, I tried the following experiment. Unusually minute particles of glass, hair, and cork, were gently placed on the drops round ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... the pure blue forty-five degrees under it, toward the west; and in the very west the dark veil of night still lingering on the horizon. I think I have remarked this progression between the tropics, where there is scarcely any horizontal refraction to make the light prematurely encroach on the darkness, as in ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... rays than happened with the crown-glass prism. Look at Fig. 112. The red rays passing through the flint glass are but little deflected, while the violet rays turn suddenly outwards. This is just what is wanted, for it counteracts the unequal inward refraction by B, and both sets of rays come to a focus in the same plane. Such a lens is called achromatic, or colourless. If you hold a common reading-glass some distance away from large print you will see that the letters are edged with ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... curious about these pools. Our guide saw us measuring the depth of one of them, which was full of greenish-blue water, colored only by the refraction of the light. He took our long alpenstock, and poising it, sent it down into the water, as a man might throw a javelin. It disappeared, but in a few seconds leaped up at us out of the water, as if thrown back again by ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... occurrences were as simple as the alphabet to Uncle Robin. He would explain it as a sight reflected on the cloud and thrown on a sea of mist or a desert as on a screen, using difficult words, like "refraction," and words from Euclid, like "angles." But Uncle Alan would object, Uncle Alan mistrusting difficult words and words from Euclid. Alan would raise his head from splicing a fishing-rod or cleaning the lock of a gun or ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... was glad that Hadley had grasped the idea. It was a slim chance, but such as it was it was worth trying. If the plane were invisible for a time, then it would be proof of some opaque obstruction between the plane and the eye of the beholder on the surface of the Earth. Refraction had to be figured, perhaps. Oh, there were ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... great—brilliancy—and refraction of light, on this angle, where the stone has got polished by rubbing against other stones, in the course of ages, I'm inclined to think ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... qu'ils sont les causes naturelles de tous les changements qui arrivent a la matiere; ce que je confirme par i'explication des effets les plus generaux de la Physique, tels que sont la durete des corps, leur fluidite, leur pesanteur, legerete, la lumiere et la refraction et reflexion de ses rayons."—Malebranche, "Recherche de la ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... Sound Reflections. Resonance. Echos. Speaking Trumpet. The Stethoscope. The Vitascope. The Phonautograph. The Phonograph. Light. The Corpuscular Theory. Undulatory Theory. Luminous Bodies. Velocity of Light. Reflection. Refraction. Colors. The Spectroscope. ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... again straight to the horizon from which it rose; at the nightward edge, once in eighty-eight days, the sun peeps above the horizon and quickly sinks from sight again. The result is that, neglecting the effects of atmospheric refraction, which would tend to expand the borders of the domain of sunlight, about one quarter of the entire surface of Mercury is, with regard to day and night, in a condition resembling that of our polar regions, where there is but one ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... or refraction, the snows of Monte Sfiorito had become bright green, as if the light that fell on them had passed through emeralds. They both paused, to gaze and marvel for a little. Indeed, the prospect was a pleasing one, as well as a surprising—the sunny lawns, the high trees, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... eyes looking down on the quiet blackness of the garden; and over all, the sky, that wonderful London sky, dusted with the innumerable reflection of countless lamps; a dome woven over between its stars with the refraction of human needs and human fancies—immense mirror of pomp and misery that night after night stretches its kindly mocking over miles of houses and gardens, mansions and squalor, over Forsytes, policemen, and patient watchers ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the condition of the man who could accept ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... what has been called the "raw material" of the positions of the heavenly bodies.[64] A number of highly complex corrections have to be applied before their mean can be disengaged from their apparent places on the sphere. Of these, the most considerable and familiar is atmospheric refraction, by which objects seem to stand higher in the sky than they in reality do, the effect being evanescent at the zenith, and attaining, by gradations varying with conditions of pressure and temperature, a maximum at the horizon. Moreover, the points to which measurements are referred ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of the long-boat." They went forward accordingly, and the captain was surprised to find the sailors, instead of spinning their long yarns, earnestly engaged with book, slate, and pencil, discussing the high matters of tangents and secants, altitudes, dip, and refraction. Two of them, in particular, were very zealously disputing,—one of them calling out to the other, "Well, Jack, what have you got?" "I've got the sine," was the answer. "But that ain't right," said the other; "I ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... he comes to September 22—'the Bishop of Aquila reported that there were anxious meetings of the Council, the courtiers paid a partial homage to Dudley.'* This appears to be a refraction from the abstract of the letter of October 13 or 14: 'he relates the manner in which the wife of Lord Robert came to her death, the respect (reverencia) paid to him immediately by members of the Council ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the aesthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... hit the slippery fish with such precision and force as to impale it. He will harpoon a turtle as it rushes away from the boat, 5 feet beneath the surface, with the coolness of a billiard-player, and with unerring accuracy "taking off" for the speed of the boat and the refraction of the water. All the ways and habits of fish, and their favourite feeding-grounds, are to him as ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... motion in the atoms of the material that is in synchronism with the frequency of ultra-violet light, which is invisible to the human eye. All visible colors are absorbed, or more accurately, none are reflected excepting the ultra-violet. Perfect transparency is obtained since there is neither refraction nor diffraction of the visible colors. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... the writhing sun glare played the same trick with his own vision. Something a dirty white quivered above the black lava table like the loose canvas top of a tented wagon. The Ranger side-stepped the trail for a different angle of refraction. The object blurred, then reappeared, a leaf from a note book not thirty yards away. Wayland went quickly forward. He was aware as he walked that the shrivelled earth heaved and sank so that he had the sensation of staggering. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... of those halos peculiar to the desert," was the professor's rejoinder; "it is caused by heat refraction or something of the sort. I recall I did read a lengthy explanation of it somewhere once, ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... say that the highest divine being of American or African native peoples has been borrowed from Europeans, and is, especially, a savage refraction from the God of missionaries. If this can be proved, the shadowy, practically powerless "Master of Life" of certain barbaric peoples, will have degenerated from the Christian conception, because of that conception he will be only a faint ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... eleven before he peeps over a small ridge of hills opposite to the house, and he sinks in the horizon at half-past two. On the 28th Mr. Hood, in order to attain an approximation to the quantity of terrestrial refraction, observed the sun's meridian altitude when the thermometer stood at 46 degrees below zero, at the imminent hazard of having ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... it, blurred and indistinct, but in the calm splendor of its own thallassphere. The first thought is one of unspeakable admiration of the miraculous beauty of everything around him—a glory and a splendor of refraction, interference and reflection that puts to shame the Arabian story of the kingdom of the Blue Fish. Above him is that pure golden canopy with its rare glimmering lustrousness—something like the soft, dewy effulgence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... in constructing a telescope of 6 feet aperture and 52 feet focus, and it would have been impossible to have bestowed the necessary attention upon it had we made a business of observing. That instrument is nearly finished, and I hope it will effect something for astronomy. The unequal refraction of the atmosphere will limit its powers, but how far remains to be ascertained.... Lady Rosse joins me in very kind remembrances and ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... intelligible only by an intimate acquaintance with the very matters defined. It would be tedious to enumerate the countless absurd explanations given in elementary text-books of the phenomena of interference, polarization, and double refraction,—explanations as enigmatical as the inscriptions at Memphis and Karnak,—explanations useless to the optician because needless, and to the student because obscure. It would seem that subjects so simple and beautiful as these could not be rendered difficult of comprehension, except ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... affair of the refraction shall be regulated in all equity and justice, by the magistrates of cities respectively, where it shall be judged that there is any room to complain ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... cold winds while he kept watch over the sea and the icebergs in view, and from which he signalled danger and sometimes gave orders to the crew. The nights were short; the sun had reappeared since the 31st of January in consequence of the refraction, and seemed to get higher and higher above the horizon. But the snow impeded the view, and if it did not cause complete ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... Very little is known of Thomas Hariot; his only published works are the 'Briefe and true report' (PG4247) and the posthumous 'Praxis', a handbook of algebra. He anticipated the law of refraction, corresponded with Kepler, observed comets, and may have been the first to recognize that the straight line paths of comets might be segments of elongated ellipses. The lost 'ephemera' referred to in the text have since been found (since ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... appearance of some individuals,—utility, and not beauty, was, however, generally voted the great essential in our bachelor community; and good looks, by general consent, put away for a future day. Great reflection, as well as refraction, existed for the time we remained beset in this position; and the refraction on one occasion enabled us to detect Captain Penny's brigs as well as the whalers, although they must have been nearly ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... stand out as mile-posts in the history of Science Fiction. The rest are not far behind, though, as a matter of fact, "Beyond the Heaviside Layer" and "Earth, the Marauder" have more discernible flaws than the rest. Just for example, a layer of organic matter would raise Cain with astronomy, due to refraction. Air is bad enough. But the writing overwhelms the error. You have certainly assembled a group of excellent authors, new and old, and I am glad to see the promise of R. F. Starzl in the next issue. His "Madness of the Dust" is one of the most naturally written interplanetary ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... of these Vapours, and the Circumstance attending their Passage, they appear to us differently below. For if they be extremely subtile they mount very high, and there, according to the Sentiment of Sir Isaac Newton, form by Refraction the Azure, or blue Colour, that over-spreads the Sky in serene Weather. Clouds, while they remain visible, do not rise above the Height of a Mile; and we always observe, that the highest are of a very light Colour, and hardly seen. If, therefore, small Clouds increase, it shews, ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... field was opened to hygiene in connection with the most fertile source of professional disease, and reading and writing were carefully studied in relation to pedagogical methods, and in relation to spinal curvature and defective refraction of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... will also keep the few adventurous discoverers in, where you can neither kill nor eject. Likewise you are deprived of your pipe; and the common homely comfort of spitting on your bait is totally denied you. The landscape takes on the prismatic colours of refraction, so that, while you can easily make out red, white, and blue Chinese dragons and mythological monsters, you are unable to discover the more welcome succulence, say, of a partridge on a limb. And the end of that head-net ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... scene-painters, had classes, lectures, receptions, and exhibitions, made models of each other, and rendered their walls hideous with bad likenesses of all their friends. Their conversation ceased to be intelligible to the uninitiated, and they prattled prettily of "chiaro oscuro, French sauce, refraction of the angle of the eye, seventh spinus process, depth and juiciness of color, tender touch, and a good tone." Even in dress the artistic disorder was visible; some cast aside crinoline altogether, and stalked about with ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... Experiment Early Scientific Notions Sciences of Observation Knowledge of the Ancients regarding Light Defects of the Eye Our Instruments Rectilineal Propagation of Light Law of Incidence and Reflection Sterility of the Middle Ages Refraction Discovery of Snell Partial and Total Reflection Velocity of Light Roemer, Bradley, Foucault, and Fizeau Principle of Least Action Descartes and the Rainbow Newton's Experiments on the Composition of Solar Light His ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall |
