"Prismatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are extremely varied in form, but, as a rule, they may be referred to four distinct habits, namely: rhombohedral, prismatic, scalenohedral and tabular. The primitive rhombohedron, r {100} (fig. 1), is comparatively rare except in combination with other forms. A flatter rhombohedron, e {110}, is shown in fig. 2, and a more acute one, f {11-1}, in fig. 3. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... which we found in a rough stream-bed, and brought the party to it. This afternoon went with Jemmy to the summit of Yeadie, and took a round of angles. The local attraction was so great on this hill that the prismatic compass was useless; luckily I had my pocket sextant with me, by which I obtained the included angles. From the summit of Yeadie the view was very extensive. The great lake that we had already followed for forty miles ran as far as the eye could reach to the east ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... succession of singular prismatic tints, flush after flush suffusing our horizon, does the Era of Hope dawn on towards fulfilment. Questionable! As indeed, with an Era of Hope that rests on mere universal Benevolence, victorious Analysis, Vice cured of its deformity; and, in the long run, on Twenty-five ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... sensation of being lifted up or rising slowly and becoming lighter in body. A rush of power that I have no way of describing to you filled me. I seemed to be a tremendous dynamo in the air several inches above the ground and still ascending. When I noticed everything around me becoming prismatic and more or less translucent, I could have walked on water without sinking, and I had distinct understanding that matters seemed to be disintegrating and dissolving around me. I was frightened but self-conscious and quiet. I remained in this state for about three hours, my consciousness ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... walls, and on the very floors—were representations, in velvet or in metal, of birds, of trees; of luxuriant vegetation, picked out in reliefs of lacework; tables covered with jet carvings, representing warriors, queens, and tritons armed with the scaly terminations of a hydra. Cut crystals combining prismatic effects with those of reflection. Mirrors repeated the light of precious stones, and sparkles glittered in the darkest corners. It was impossible to guess whether those many-sided, shining surfaces, where emerald green mingled with the golden hues of the rising ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... wealth and would swell the revenues of the King and Queen of Spain. A brief survey of this first island was all he could afford time for; and after the first exquisite impression of the white beach, and the blue curve of the bay sparkling in the sunshine, and the soft prismatic colours of the acanthus beneath the green wall of the woods had been savoured and enjoyed, he was anxious to push on to the rich lands of the Orient of which he believed this island to ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... There was always his garden—there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, and their fragrance, and their music; there was his tinkling fountain, in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... moved to a new point, and Captain Heath was again talking. Other guns were fired, after the discharge of this one; the last shot being sent from a twelve-inch rifle with a charge of four hundred and seventy-five pounds of Dupont brown prismatic powder and a projectile weighing one ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... if the golden eagles, with all their wonderful prismatic binocular vision, made out the cat, as man could. Birds have not that power, as man has. The twitching they were instant to see. The cause of it they must have, equally instantly, suspected. Certainly, however, was ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... predetermined position both vertically and longitudinally, and the charge so fixed in its containing case that the centre of gravity cannot shift. The difficulty of ensuring this with a large torpedo charge built up from a number of discs and segments is well known. Even with plain cylindrical or prismatic charges a marked saving in the process of production is effected by this new system. The charges being in one block they are more easily handled for the usual periodical examination, and they do not break or chafe at the edges, as in the case of discs and cubes in built-up charges. A general ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... passed, a minute of wonder, admiration, allurement, but at last he ventured to lift the diamond from the box. It was perfect, so far as he could see; perfect in cutting and color and depth, prismatic, radiant, bewilderingly gorgeous. Its value? Even he could not offer an opinion—only the appraisement of his expert would be worth listening to on that point. But one thing he knew instantly—in the million-dollar stock of precious stones stored away in the vaults of the H. Latham Company, ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... furnace, page 420. e. Bright tongues of fiery cloud burning and quivering about them, page 420. f. A clear metallic voice, page 420. g. Like that of a kettle on the boil, page 421. h. As smooth and polished as a river, page 421. i. The prismatic colors gleamed over it, as if on a surface of mother-of-pearl, page 422. j. In order to allow time for the consternation ... to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... what we saw in the distance between these two mountains was the great plateau itself. The question, then, was to find a way up, and to conquer this last obstruction in the easiest manner. In the radiantly clear air we could see the smallest details with our excellent prismatic glasses, and make our calculations with great confidence. It would be possible to clamber up Don Pedro himself; we had done things as difficult before. But here the side of the mountain was fairly steep, and full of big crevasses and a ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... in it, watched its lustre, which seemed to him to grow greater day by day, as if it imbibed the sunlight into it. Never was there anything so bright as this. It changed its hue, too, gradually, being now a rich purple, now a crimson, now a violet, now a blue; going through all these prismatic colors without losing any of its brilliance, and never was there such a hue as the sunlight took in falling through it and resting on his floor. And strange and beautiful it was, too, to look through this medium at the outer world, and see how it was glorified and made anew, and ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at the bottom of the orchard is like a small frozen sea, now; and that is the present scene of our heroic games. Sometimes, in the splendor of the dying light, we seem sporting upon transparent gold, so prismatic becomes the ice; and the snow takes opaline hues, from the gems that float above as clouds. It is eminently the hour to see objects, just after the sun has disappeared. Oh, such oxygen as we inhale! Often other skaters appear,—young men and boys,—who principally interest me as foils to my husband, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... any rate, will be proof against bad luck," she said, as she undid the case, and drew out a prismatic compass. She adjusted the eye-piece, in which was a slit and a glass prism and lifted the sight-vane, down the centre of which a horsehair stretched perpendicularly to the card of the compass. Putting the instrument to her eye, Rose took the bearing of one of the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... were handsome women handsomely dressed; he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had August and Bernard, but inherited it with ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... infinite beauty and tenderness, came like a reproach that year to Virginia. The foliage, touched here and there with prismatic tints, drooped motionless in the golden haze. The delicate Virginia creeper was almost minded to put forth its scarlet buds again. No wonder the lovely phantom—this dusky Southern sister of the pale Northern June—lingered ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... always found where the palm is; but their original home is the foot of the Himalayas. The banana (by some botanists considered a different species from the plantain) is about four inches long, and cylindrical, and is eaten raw. The plantain is twice as large and prismatic, and uncooked is unhealthy. There is another variety, platanos de Otaheite, which resembles the banana in size and quality, but ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... steady herself on her feet, the last filmy veil that hid the face of the moon glided ethereally by. The moon was on the wane, golden and mysterious, and now, as she appeared high in the heaven, surrounded by a halo of prismatic light, she threw a cold radiance on everything around, picking out every tree and cottage with unfailing sharpness and casting black, impenetrable shadows which made the light, by contrast, appear yet more vivid and ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... water reflected every shade and tint—now a rich green, then a deep blue and again a dirty gray as the sun hid for a moment behind a cloud, and as a gust of wind caught the top of the combers decapitating them at one mad rush, the spray was dashed high in the air, flashing out all the prismatic colours. Here and yonder, the white caps rose, disappeared and came again, and the waves grew and then diminished in size. Then others rose, towering, became larger, majestic, terrible; the milk-like comb rose proudly, soared a brief moment, ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... Ruhmkorff's coil, increased tenfold by the myriad of prismatic masses of rock, sent its jets of fire in every direction, and I could fancy myself traveling through a huge hollow diamond, the rays of which produced myriads ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... spool under your wheels were winding it up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer; details emerge. You see the great square chimney; the tiny window-panes, six to a sash, some of them turned by time, not into the purple of Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen like oil on water; the bit of classic egg-and-dart border on the door-cap; the aged texture of the weathered clapboard; the graceful arch of the wide woodshed entrance, on the kitchen side; the giant elm rising far above the roof. You rush on so near to the house, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... winking eyelid, haw, etc., is placed at the inner angle of the eye, whence it extends over the eyeball to relieve it from foreign bodies which may fall upon it. It has for its framework a fibro-cartilage, irregular in shape, thick, nearly prismatic at its base, and thin anteriorly where it is covered by the conjunctiva; behind, it is loosely attached to a ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... misrepresented childhood to Pemberton. Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in translation. To-day, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens. If it were not for a few tangible tokens—a lock of Morgan's hair cut by his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were disjoined—the whole episode and the figures peopling ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... the basis of efficiency. The helical construction of the filament made it possible to confine the filament of a high-intensity tungsten lamp in a small space and for the first time a high degree of control of the light of street lamps was possible. Prismatic "refractors" were designed, somewhat on the principle of the lighthouse refractor, so that the light would be emitted largely just below the horizontal. This type of distribution builds up the illumination at distant points between ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... whiter heat, with language and imagery so befitting impassioned thought. Tried by the rule that a true poet is at his best with the greatest theme, Lowell's strength is indisputable. The ode is no smooth-cut verse from Pentelicus, but a mass of rugged quartz, beautiful with prismatic crystals, and deep veined here and there with virgin gold. The early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt line, 'weak-winged is song,' are scarcely firm and incisive. Lowell had to work up to his theme. In the third division, 'Many loved Truth, and ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,—with its enchanted islands, its jewelled city, its flowery villages, all bedecked and bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light and shade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of perpetual festivity and singing,—when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up the mountain, and, seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... your back toward the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving us the same prismatic effect. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the outer caves where we are standing, with a massive lintel of rocks overhead, all black but for a few purple and gray tints scattered across the blackness. Behind us the sea is glistening, and prismatic colors play upon the cliffs. Shadows fall from rocks we cannot see. Olivia stands before me, pale and terrified, the water running from her heavy dress, which clings about her slender figure. She shrinks away from me a pace ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... rose to the height of twenty feet, and, returning in a shower of prismatic globules, stole away through a bed of water-lilies and other aquatic plants, losing itself in a grove of lofty plantain-trees. These, growing from the cool watery bed, flung out their broad glistening leaves to ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... and organ-music.) I bless you, sweet sounds, for your visiting. What friends I have! Prismatic harmonies Have just departed in the sun's bright coach, And fair, convolved sounds troop in to me, Stealing my soul with faint deliciousness. Would they took shapes! What levees I should hold! How should my cell ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... happy to observe or speculate. I received merely the impression, but was too much occupied in arranging for my wedded life, too much absorbed in the feeling of bliss, to analyze it. I believed in her love,—that was sufficient for me. In after years I resolved the impression into its prismatic elements, and thus it is I am able ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Vladimir of Russia wore a magnificent robe of pink satin trimmed with sable, with a tiara of diamonds and a stomacher of diamonds and emeralds. From the neck and forehead of the Queen of Roumania flashed a thousand prismatic hues; and the Green Vault of Dresden sent some of its most precious treasures to keep company with the fair Queen of Saxony in adding brilliance to ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... A flash of prismatic color had caught the girl's eye, and, one transparent structure thus revealed to her sight, there had burst into view a city of crystal. Low buildings of hexagonal shape, arranged in irregularly variant ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... olive-green, and the collar turned up over his ears was of a shiny-looking brown fur, which, to the confiding mind of the populace, is known as imitation sable. Inside this fur collar the Major wore a shawl-patterned scarf of all the colours in the prismatic scale, across which his nose lacked its usual brilliancy of hue by force of contrast. Major Vernon had a very big cigar in his mouth, and a very big cane in his hand, and the quiet City men turned to look at him as he stood upon the pavement talking ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... something crept into my mind and drove the fear out. I did not grasp what this was at first, it was like the first staining of wine on the eastern sky to one who sees a sunrise. And then the thought grew even as the light grows, tinged by prismatic colors, until at length a memory struck into my soul like a shaft of light. I spoke ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the same cause, differences are observed that only have arisen from great differences in the circumstances under which the eruption has taken place. In many of the ancient volcanoes, we find the emitted streams are arranged in prismatic forms, constituting basalt, and frequently passing into what under other circumstances would be styled trap by the Wernerians. Now, we know that when streams of lava enter the sea, they spontaneously assume the prismatic ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... synopsis of the effects and uses of the prismatic colors, we shall be enabled the better to understand both the ancient and modern popular ideas as to colors as representatives and correspondences. Colors have a mental, moral, and physical significance—a good and a bad import. The one to which I shall first direct your attention ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is so dense that the objects are seen, like Captain Scoresby's ship, snatched up into the regions of the air, thirty or forty feet above the level of the sea; and in cloudy weather, nearer to the surface, bordered with vivid prismatic colours. Sometimes colonades of temples and churches, with cross-crowned spires, are all represented as floating on the sea, and by a sudden change of representation, the pillars are curved into arcades, and the crosses are bent into crescents, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... going on steadily.—I was consulted about an Observatory at Oxford, where I supported the introduction of the Heliometer.—The stipend of the Bakerian Lecture was paid to me for my explanation of Brewster's new prismatic fringes.—The business of the Cape Observatory and Survey occupied much of my time.—In 1838 the Rev. H. J. Rose (Editor of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana) had proposed my writing a Paper on Tides, &c.; In Oct. 1840 I ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... of complete honesty, "before we were married, while we were engaged, we had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sea-ice, the ice of a glacier is a marvel of prismatic colour and glassy brilliance. This is more noticeable near the surface when the sun is shining. Deep down in a shaft, or in an ice-cavern, the sapphire reflection gives to the human ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... you could see the beautiful prismatic tints I have knocked into this ice, you would laugh out of the other side of your bill. The splendour of your tail ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... and grew, and glittered every day with fresh prismatic radiance; while Hypatia sat at home, with a heavy heart, writing her ode to Venus Urania, and submitting ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the sea. It is as if an aurora had fallen from Arctic skies, living, changeful, evanescent, athwart sea, plain, and mountain. Here is sore temptation for the colorist; more, perhaps, than by the wealth and combination of tints, he is affected by their celestial quality. All is prismatic, or like those hues produced by the interference of rays of light as seen in the colors of stars. Gorgeous as are these phenomena, they are also as transitory; and although the scene is repeated, it is with such subtile and such great changes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... the music changes, Like a prismatic glass, It takes the light and ranges Through all the moods that pass; Dissects the common carnival Of passions and regrets, And gives the world a glimpse of all ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... most common of these interior cell crystals are those composed of calcium oxalate and calcium carbonate. Others composed of calcium phosphate, calcium sulphate and silica are sometimes found. These crystals may occur singly or in clusters of greater or less size. In shape they are prismatic or needle-like. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... was of a filmy and prismatic beauty that was sufficient evidence of her Cohltar origin—our mother, of course, was a Cohltar. I never thought her mind the equal of my own. Indeed, at the moment of going to press I have not yet met the mind ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... the attention of all men until 1865 A.D. The answer came from the diagonal joints themselves, on discovering that the stone between them was opposite to the butt end of the portcullis of the first ascending passage, or to the hole whence the prismatic stone of concealment through 3000 years had dropped out almost before Al Mamoun's eyes. Here, therefore, was a secret sign in the pavement of the entrance-passage, appreciable only to a careful eye and a measurement by angle, but made in such hard material that it ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... sharp, irregular declivity reflected many cold, prismatic lights, and down, far down where the eye could no longer distinguish shapes and outlines, there lay a shadow like steam from some vast, subterranean cauldron, blue, dense, impenetrable. It fascinated Pearl and she stood there trying to pierce the depths ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Ormond. I am a worshipper of hard facts and however hideous they may be I prefer them to the prismatic colours ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... probably the trout average two to the pound, and a pounder or two may be in the dish. But three to the pound is decidedly nearer the average, at least in April. The flies commonly used are larger than what are employed in Loch Leven. A teal wing and red body, a grouse hackle, and the prismatic Heckham Peckham are among the favourites; but it is said that flies no bigger than Tweed flies are occasionally successful. In my own brief experience I have found the trout "dour," occasionally they would rise ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... first viewed under plain transmitted light, secondly, polarized light and selenite plate. Since silk and cotton are polarizing bodies, "cottonized silk," if such could be made as described, would give, in this case, the prismatic colors of both fibers, and the complementary colors would differ greatly because of the great disparity of their respective polarizing and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... the lane showed all its white features, and Tess showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside, still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... that you live in New York and enjoy yourself as I have always wished to do. I want you to be my representative, to spend this money for me as I should do myself. I want you to plunge into the gay, prismatic life of New York. I want you to be the life and soul of brilliant ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one; that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... nevertheless, I reopened my eyes, for through my eyelashes I still beheld her, all sparkling with prismatic colours, and surrounded with such a penumbra as one beholds in gazing ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... denied. In vain I drew my hands across my drooping eyelids, in vain I tried to master my knees that knocked together. The spell of the love-drink that Heru, blushing, had held to my lips was on me. Its soft, overwhelming influence rose like a prismatic fog between me and my enemy, everything again became hazy and dreamlike, and feebly calling on Heru, my chin dropped upon my chest, my limbs relaxed, and I slipped down in drowsy oblivion before ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... enchanted islands, half-transparent with the prismatic lights of precious stones, of amethysts and emeralds. Odours of bewildering fragrance rose from the rounded shores; some of these islands showered on us a rain of roses and valley lilies; from others birds darted up, with long wings of ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... to the education of the child. Shall blackboards be of slate, composition board, or glass? Shall they be colored black, green, or ivory white? Is light chalk on a dark ground better or worse than dark chalk on a light ground? Is prismatic window glass superior to plain? To what extent is glare from polished desks detrimental to eyesight? How large must be the type in textbooks in order that young children may easily read it? What variations from the present school program are necessary ...
— Health Work in the Public Schools • Leonard P. Ayres and May Ayres
... hundred yards beyond the last sentinel the trio paused, and stood listening and gazing as far as they could across a rock chamber whose sides glittered with double prismatic crystals. ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... constructed for me—and a well-made hypsometrical apparatus with six boiling-point thermometers, duly tested at the Kew Observatory, were carried in order to determine accurately the altitudes observed. Then I possessed two prismatic and six other excellent compasses, chronometers, six photographic cameras, specially made for me, with the very best Zeiss and Goertz lenses, and some 1,400 glass photographic plates—including some for ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... spirit, "and I have given myself visible and tangible form to warn you of danger. My colleagues and I watched you when you left the cylinder and when you shot the birds, and, seeing your doom in the air, have been trying to communicate with you." "What were the strange shadows and prismatic colours that kept passing across our table?" asked Bearwarden. "They were the obstructions and refractions of light caused by spirits trying to take shape," replied the shade. "Do you mind our asking you questions?" said Cortlandt. "No," replied their visitor. "If I can, I will answer them." ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... to ceiling and from side to side in endless repetition. The inside of this chilly abode was divided into several compartments of every fantastic shape; in some the glittering icicles hung like curtains from the roof; in others the vault was smooth as glass. Beautifully brilliant were the prismatic colours reflected from the varied surface of the ice, when the torches flashed suddenly upon them as we passed from cave to cave. Around, above, beneath, every thing was of solid ice, and being unable to stand on account of its slippery nature, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... were cultivated fields, and figures at work on the fields. In the distance shone a stream. It flowed meandering into a wide lake. There were two villages, not clear in the haze. At the distant lake, some kind of larger structure lifted tall towers, shining with prismatic glitter, ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... the rule, it was only right and proper that there should be prizes for the best costumes; and since the lady who shed her beneficence over this prismatic throng does nothing by halves, she had called in the assistance of two artists to adjudicate. I will not make public their names; that would be to overstep the boundaries of decorum and turn this book into sheer journalism. But I will say that one of them is equally renowned ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... in the fellow's simile. When an idea gets hold of us in Troy, we puff at it, we blow it out and distend it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us—an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... orchestra paints incessantly; moods that are prevalent for a moment do not suffice the eager illustrator. The passing word seizes his fancy. Herod describes the jewels which he promises to give to Salome so she relieve him of his oath, and the music of the orchestra glints and glistens with a hundred prismatic tints. Salome wheedles the young Syrian to bring forth the prophet, and her cry, "Thou wilt do this thing for me," is carried to his love-mad brain by a voluptuous glissando of the harp which is as ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... our prow as it cuts through the waves. The sun shines through it and breaks it up into a number of miniature rainbows—"sun-dogs," the sailors call them. I stood on the fo'csle-head for several hours to-day watching the effect, and surrounded by a halo of prismatic colours. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... are ever admitted into heaven we shall find very odd people there; but perhaps they will have dropped their trying ways and peculiarities, as the chrysalis drops its case, and may develop all sorts of new prismatic glories. I once heard a lady say that she was afraid the society there would be rather mixed; she was a very exclusive person; but Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun, so I suppose we shall ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... you thereby reduce the reluctance offered by the air gap to the flow of the magnetic lines. Du Moncel also tried the difference between round armatures and flat ones, and found that a cylindrical armature was only attracted about half as strongly as a prismatic armature having the same surface when at the same distance. Let us examine this fact in the light of the magnetic circuit. The poles are flat. You have at a certain distance away a round armature; there is a certain distance between its nearest side and the polar surfaces. If you have at the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... blue of the sea, and blurred the architecture of the cliffs. On the sea's edge lay a long grey cloud, a long, low, soft cloud, flat, like a band of soft grey velvet. The cloud was grey indeed; but (as if prismatic fires were smouldering there) its grey held in solution all the colours of the spectrum, so that you could discern elusive rose-tints, fugitive greens, translucent reflections ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... correspond to precious things of the mind, so must brilliant jewels. The diamond! How wonderful is its affection for light—taking in the rays eagerly, dissolving them, and sending them forth again to gladden the eyes in rich prismatic beauty! And to what mental quality must the diamond correspond? As it loves the sun's rays, in which are heat and light—must it not correspond to the affection of things good and true?—heat being of love, and light ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... capable of penetrating 35 in. of unbacked wrought iron at a distance of 1,000 yards. The projectile fired from the 67 ton guns of the Empress of India will have much less penetrating power, being only equal to 27 in. of wrought iron with a full charge of 520 lb. of prismatic brown powder, the missile weighing 1,250 lb. or about one-half less than the weight of the shot used with the 110 ton gun. It will thus be seen that the ordnance of the Benbow can penetrate armor that would defy the attack of the guns ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... mineral species consisting of a basic copper sulphate Cu4(OH)6SO4, crystallizing in the orthorhombic system. The crystals are usually small and are prismatic or acicular in habit; they have a perfect cleavage parallel to the face lettered a in the adjoining figure. They are transparent to translucent, with a vitreous lustre, and are of an emerald-green to blackish-green colour. Specific gravity 3.907; hardness 31/2-4. The mineral ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in objects around us, are not differences in substance, but differences of vibration in one substance. Take a copper wire; pass electrical currents through it, gradually increasing their intensity, and phenomena of sound, heat and light will be manifest, the prismatic colours appearing one after the other. Similarly by an increased intensity in the performance of every action, the consciousness is gradually transferred from the lower to the higher planes. In order to give ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... value books, as women men,{5} for dress: Their praise is still,—the style is excellent; The sense, they humbly take upon content.{6} Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found: False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, In gaudy colors spreads on ev'ry place; The face of nature we no more survey, All glares alike, without distinction gay: But true expression, like th' unchanging sun, Clears and improves whate'er ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange, predominate, and ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... eternal secrecy, and promised to disclose the mystery to me. I pledged myself, of course, to all. With an uneasy look in his eyes, and hands unsteady with drink and nervousness, he drew a small case from his breast and opened it. Heavens! How the mild lamplight was shivered into a thousand prismatic arrows, as it fell upon a vast rose-diamond that glittered in the case! I was no judge of diamonds, but I saw at a glance that this was a gem of rare size and purity. I looked at Simon with wonder, and—must I confess it?—with envy. How could he ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... it in a pewter tankard, exquisitely polished. The polish of it caught and cast back the sunlight in prismatic circles on the scoured deal table. The girl—Margaret—stood for a moment in the fuller sunlight by the window, lingering there to pick a dead leaf from ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... particularly on the Kaumayok side, from whence several waterfalls rush into the sea, with a roar, which quite fills the air. The singular appearance of these cataracts is greatly increased when illuminated by the rising sun, the spray, exhibiting the most beautiful prismatic colours. Below them huge masses of ice are formed, which seem to lean against the sides of the rocks, and to be continually increasing during the winter, but when melted by the power of a summer's sun, and disengaged by their weight, are carried off by the tides, and help to form floating ice-mountains. ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch
... see the greatest number of hours; consequently the light should be intercepted by the smallest quantity of glass. Dollond's achromatics contain, however, six lenses, and possess no recommendation but their enlarged field, and their freedom from prismatic colours in that field; points of no consequence in looking through a fixed glass at a fixed and circumscribed object. The field of the Galilean telescope is quite large enough, and, having but two lenses, one of which is ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... opposite, was the Moss Trail. Sunlight fell on the hills above him. He halted, looking up at the tree-tops. Twig, branch, and trunk glowed with the fire of diamonds through a lacy necking of hoar frost. Every tree had put on a jacket of ice and become as a fountain of prismatic hues. Here and there a dead pine rose like a spire of crystal; domes of deep-coloured glass and towers of jasper were as the landmarks of a city. Allen climbed the shore, walking slowly. He could see no track of sleigh or dog or any living thing. A frosted, icy ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... across the black, silent sweep of the river three giant prismatic searchlights were playing high toward the polestar, such searchlights as the gods might be using in some monstrous game. They wavered here and there, shifting and dodging, faded and sprang up again, till Bennie, dizzy, closed his eyes. The lights were still dancing in the ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... constructed for very great altitudes; two aneroids, one to 20,000 feet, the other to 25,000 feet; three artificial horizons (one mercury, the others plate-glass with levels); a powerful telescope with astronomical eyepiece and stand; a prismatic, a luminous, a floating, and two pocket compasses; maximum and minimum thermometers, a case of drawing instruments, protractors, parallel rules, tape rules, a silver water-tight half-chronometer watch and three other watches, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... ready. So, while the angular clergyman ruffled into the front of the pew, with Irons on one side, a little in the rear, both books open; the plump little undertaker, diffusing a steam from his moist garments, making a prismatic halo round the candles and lanterns, as he moved successively by them, whispered a word or two to the young gentleman [Mr. Mervyn, the doctor called him], and Mr. Mervyn disappeared. Dr. Walsingham and John Tracy got into contiguous seats, and Bob Martin went ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... but twenty-five thousand Robert Bruces inspired the Scottish spider to that homely instance of perseverance, which served for an example for a king. As he hangs his drapery from one cornice to another, the prismatic scenes that come before him serve to lengthen that life which might seem to be cut off before its time. It is not one, but twenty-five thousand brooms which advance to destroy his airy home; to invade his household gods, and bring to the ground ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... they are shown in bewildering variety. The molecules of snow arrange themselves in crystals of the hexagonal system, every angle exactly sixty degrees. The white color of the snow is caused by a combination of the prismatic colors of these snow crystals. Some of them are regular hexagons, with six straight sides; others are like a wheel with six spokes, with jewels clinging to each spoke. Many men have spent a lifetime in the study ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... mythologies of antiquity furnish no allegory more beautiful; and a Painter who would embody the metaphor of an Artist instructed by Nature, could scarcely imagine any thing more picturesque than the real incident of the Indians instructing West to prepare the prismatic colours. The Indians also taught him to be an expert archer, and he was sometimes in the practice of shooting birds for models, when he thought that their plumage would look ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... their original tints, and the lofty conical domes seem to be huge sparry crystalizations, hung with dropping stalactites, rather than any work of the human hand. Each of these domes is composed of five thousand separate pieces, and the pendent prismatic blocks, colored and gilded, gradually resolve themselves, as you gaze, into the most intricate and elegant designs. But you must study long ere you have won all the secret of their beauty. To comprehend them, one should spend a whole day, lying ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... was concerned, I think I may say my education was a complete failure. For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all. The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never attained. Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest of them, which is saying ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... muriatic acid, and add pieces of common chalk until effervescence ceases; then filter through cotton cloth and evaporate it by placing it in all earthen or porcelain dish, over a slow fire, to the consistency of a syrup. When cooling, large prismatic crystals of chloride of calcium are formed. These must be quickly dried by pressing between folds of blotting paper and kept carefully excluded from the air, as it readily attracts hydrogen. For most daguerreotype purposes, the ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... also beautifully embroidered. But the triumph of forest art, as displayed on his person, lay in the wonderful painting of his entire body, which was covered with intricate designs in the most vivid colors on a background of black, and the prismatic effect was so bewilderingly gorgeous, that, as Christie said to Donald, "it was enough ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... slightest hope even to a young man thirsting for pleasure. Ignoring my tortured flesh, she shed the rays, undeviating, incorruptible, of the divine love, which satisfies the soul only. She rose to heights whither the prismatic pinions of a love like mine were powerless to bear me. To reach her a man must needs have won the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... may not, in their picturesque variety, be the most attractive. The palm, perhaps, would be given to the fish-mongers, with their exuberant exhibitions, grouped with skill, startling often with strange forms, dazzling with prismatic tints, and breathing the invigorating redolence of ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Confine with folds of air the lingering fires; O'er Eve's pale forms diffuse phosphoric light, And deck with lambent flames the shrine of Night. So, warm'd and kindled by meridian skies, 180 And view'd in darkness with dilated eyes, BOLOGNA'S chalks with faint ignition blaze, BECCARI'S shells emit prismatic rays. So to the sacred Sun in MEMNON's fane, Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain; 185 —Touch'd by his orient beam, responsive rings The living lyre, and vibrates all it's strings; Accordant ailes the tender tones prolong, And holy echoes ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the distance, where an intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... color elements, as shown by the phenomena of the rainbow or by experimenting with the prism. (See 7.) When a ray of sunshine passes through a glass prism it is decomposed or separated, and if the prismatic colors are received upon a white screen you will find on the spectrum among the colors generated a pure blue, a pure red and a pure yellow. These are the primary colors, and it is necessary when thinking color to bear these prismatic ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic; abdomen pointed, The Death's—headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... neared the north-west and the familiar landmarks of his childhood came into sight, flooded with the June sunshine—the ruined mine-shafts staring up so starkly, the glory of white cattle in the golden light, the first glimpse of the pale roofs of Cloom itself, prismatic as a wood-pigeon's plumage, all these things struck at his heart with a keener shock than did anything personal, and made thought of his mother sink away from him. Behind the cluster of grey buildings he saw the parti-coloured fields ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... glistened with the lustre of the pearl, or rather of the emerald, whose luminous transparency they seemed to emulate. The pupil is a fine black, and above each eye is a semilunar mark of the richest garnet. The body, nearly transparent, or of a pellucid green, is glossed with all the variety of prismatic tints, and thickly dotted with brown. At almost every effort of respiration, the little creature tossed its arms in apparent agony, and clung more firmly to the finger; while the dark-brown spots upon the body alternately ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... has been attempted in flowers, but with poor success. It will look like a ribbon—a very handsome ribbon, no doubt; but the arc-en-ciel evades reproduction, even in the transcendent prismatic colors of flowers. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... half-guineas; two hundred and ten pounds, in perfectly clean Bank notes; certain receipts for Bank of England stock; an old horseshoe, a bad shilling, a piece of camphor, and an oyster-shell. From the circumstance of the latter article having been much polished, and displaying prismatic colours on the inside, I conclude that Mr. Barkis had some general ideas about pearls, which never resolved themselves into ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... after a short interval, the search-lights were suddenly flashed on to the city of Sirapion; the beautiful buildings with their domes, towers, and minarets looking exquisitely ethereal as they were bathed in the beams of the glowing and ever-changing prismatic light. The beams were next directed downwards upon the assembly, and we gained a truer appreciation of the immense ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... of bed in a twinkling. Life was too full and rich now to waste it in sleep. Yesterday morning it had seemed drab and commonplace. To-day it sparkled with prismatic hues. He was a new man in a ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... the eleventh day that we really saw Terra in its full prismatic glory. For days it had loomed larger in our three-dimensional electro-cone, where we studied its continents and oceans to select the likeliest spot for a landing. Terra was intensely blue now, rivalling in color the priceless zafirines of our own Diskra. I hope in the humblest ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... to the right, past the shimmering silver disk of the propeller. Under the blue haze of ice-crystals in the air, the ice lay away in a vast undulating plain of black and yellow, broken with splotches of prismatic whiteness, lying away in frozen desolation to the rim of the cold violet sky. Rising against that sky I saw ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the creation, the poet's eyes consequently became "blue," and his hair "auburn." Colors, however, vary with the prejudice or partiality of the spectator; and, moreover, people do not agree even upon the most palpable prismatic tint. A writing-master whom we had at Enfield was an artist of more than ordinary merit; but he had one dominant defect: he could not distinguish between true blue and true green. So that, upon one occasion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... From here to the top we were to carry only such things as were absolutely necessary. They included the Mummery tent with pegs and poles, the mountain-mercurial barometer, the two Watkins aneroids, the hypsometer, a pair of Zeiss glasses, two 3A kodaks, six films, a sling psychrometer, a prismatic compass and clinometer, a Stanley pocket level, an eighty-foot red-strand mountain rope, three ice axes, a seven-foot flagpole, an American flag and a Yale flag. In order to avoid disaster in case ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve in a prismatic shimmer. ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... in Virginia, have been very poor since the distant war of the sixties, and it has been one of my luxuries to give Sally a lift over hard places. Always with instant reward, for the smallest bit of sunlight, going into her prismatic spirit, comes out a magnificent rainbow of happiness. So when the idea came that they might let me have the girl to take abroad that summer, her friend, the girl spirit in me, jumped for joy. There was no difficulty ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Sunday, I read through and made extracts from the gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic reactions through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand directions. It is the historical ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... different types of Christian conformity to Christ our Lord. The crystals that are set round a light do not quarrel with each other as to whether green, or yellow, or blue, or red, or violet is the true colour to reflect. We need all the seven prismatic tints to make the perfect white light. The gift of Christ is many-sided; try not to be one-sided in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... leaves, across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced waist of thinnest batiste. A square, deep emerald hung from a platinum chain about her neck; and a hand, stripped of its thick white glove, showed an oppressive, prismatic glitter of diamonds. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... upon the impatient imagination a building, a dome of crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this plunge and float ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... ancient chairs stood round, now occupied by the young people who ate and drank and chattered, the majority quite unmindful of their journey's object—Old Sol, in his departing splendor, glorifying the clouds with prismatic color, ere he sank beyond ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... violet, and rose, with the tints of beryl and topaz, sapphire and almandine and amethyst, each in due order and at proper distances. The fabled dolphin in its death could not have showed a more brilliant succession of splendours waning into splendours through the whole chord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Attic limestone to every modification of the sky's light gives a peculiar spirituality to the landscape. The hills remain in form and outline unchanged; but the beauty ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Oslers, of Broad Street, have attained a very high reputation for their cut and ornamental, as well as the ordinary, articles of flint glass. The have been especially successful in producing fine effects from prismatic arrangements. Their gigantic chandeliers of great size, made for Ibrahim Pacha, and the Nepalese Prince, were the steps by which they achieved the lofty crystal fountain, of an entirely original design, which forms one of the most novel and effective ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... distance, and that the Bay of Funchal of which I had seen pictures in books; and that the little nautilus or "Portuguese man-of-war" floating by the side of the vessel, now almost becalmed, with its cigar-shaped shell boat and pink membraneous sail all glowing with prismatic colouring? Was it an actuality that I saw all these things with my own eyes; or, was I dreaming? Was it really I, Allan Graham, standing there on the deck of the good ship Silver Queen, ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... must be set apart, and used for no other purpose. The five "sacred colors" are the prismatic hues arranged in a certain way, as these colors are very magnetic. By "malignant influences" are meant any disturbances through strifes, quarrels, bad feelings, etc., as these are said to impress themselves immediately ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... So shalt thou see the heights and depths of praise My love would render unto love's delight; For I would make each day an Alp sublime Of passionate snow, white-hot yet icy-clear, — One crystal of the true-loves of all time Spiring the world's prismatic atmosphere; And I would make each night an awful vale Deep as thy soul, obscure as modesty, With every star in heaven trembling pale O'er sweet profounds where only Love can see. Oh, runs not thus the lesson thou hast ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... have frightened them both had they been on the same psychic plane. Isaac had about the same regard for her that he might have had for a dear maiden aunt who would mend his old socks and listen patiently, pretending to be interested when he talked of parallelograms and prismatic spectra. But evidently Mary Story thought of him with a thrill, for she stoutly resented the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... ever, do I recall a more beautiful sunset than the one of current date. Merely to behold the orb of day descending beyond the western horizon in all its magnificence of prismatic colouring was sufficient to awaken within one's bosom the ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... unacquainted with these things, will he understand you? Talk to him of stamens, pistils, calyxes; of monandria, diandria, triandria; of gypsum, talc, calcareous spar, quartz, topaz, mica, garnet, pyrites, hornblende, augite, actynolite; of hexahedral, prismatic, rhomboidal, dodecahedral; of acids and alkalies; of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon; of the configuration of the brain, and its relative powers; do all this, and what will he know of your meaning? So of all science. Words are to be understood from the things ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... glittering Venice glasses stood upon the salver, casting prismatic radiance over the silver, as the sunbeams smote their slender fluted sides, and a pair of ruby tinted finger-bowls completed ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray, what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction. Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... tibiae, and knees, and the posterior tibiae outside, yellow; a black line on the intermediate tibiae beneath, and the apical joints of the tarsi fuscous; wings hyaline, the nervures ferruginous. Abdomen brightly prismatic; the margins of all the segments with a narrow yellow fascia, those on the second and third segments terminating at the sides in a large rounded macula; the fascia very narrow or obliterated on the sixth segment; the fasciae on the second and third ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... the South African form the cells are shorter, narrower, and more cylindrical, and the branches are terminated by two lanceolate tags, which are not present in the Australian species, in which latter the cells also are wider, longer, and prismatic, or subhexagonal, with very ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... inaugurated. He had taken forcible possession of two United States forts, of the money in the custom-house, of the custom-house itself, and of other national property in Charleston. He had closed the harbor, by destroying the costly prismatic lenses in the light-houses, and by withdrawing the warning light-ship from Rattlesnake Shoal. He had cut off all communication between us and the city, and had seized the United States mails. His steamboats, laden with war material to be used in erecting batteries against us, were ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... continued to advance. The lava was more glassy and transparent-looking, as if it had been fused at a higher temperature than usual; and the crystals of sulphur, alum, and other minerals, with which it abounded, reflected the light in bright prismatic colours. In places it was quite transparent, and we could see beneath it the long streaks of a stringy kind of lava, like brown spun glass, called ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... scales and the like. In these cases it is substituted for the needle. In like manner for calculating cross profiles by graphical methods, for reading parallel divisions, for estimating areas, or revising maps, a finely divided prismatic ivory rule, c, can be placed under the glass, B, and will do good service. In this case the plane of the lens must be perpendicular to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... insufficient to bear the weight of a man, they soon reached the berg. It was evidently of Arctic origin, for it was much larger than any of the many "pinnacles" in sight. It was composed of ice, which, wherever the snow had failed to lodge, appeared hard, transparent, and prismatic in the rays of the sun. Its sides were steep and precipitous, and at first the members of the party began to fear that they should be unable to mount the steep escarpment of eight or ten feet high, which formed its base, which was further defended by a moat of mingled sludge and rounded ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... books are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity, or discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their making. The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not something extraneous; it is a prismatic effect. So the color in my books is not paint; it is health. It is probably nothing to brag of; much greater books have been the work of confirmed invalids. All I can say is that the minds of these inspired invalids have not seemed ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... scoria or slag the superposition of the scoria on the gravel being visible in several places, showing that the former is of more recent origin. On the opposite side of the crater, overlooking the Rhine, we find the cliff of Rolandsec composed of hard vesicular lava, rudely prismatic, and extending from the summit of the hill to its base, about 250 feet below. This is the most northerly of the group of the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... changes do come over the Village like the waves of the sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their crests iridescent seaweed and glittering shells and now and then a pearl. The Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; never a phase touches it but leaves it ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree; and as the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them, every drop also radiated light, prismatic, and scintillating an almost audibly tinkling joy. So indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this scene—as of a mighty light informing the least atom of this tearful human existence—that the profoundest ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... know and love is not this Berlin, the Berlin of Americans, not the spangled Berlin, the hollow-laughing Berlin, the Berlin decked with rhinestones, set alight with prismatic electroliers and offered up as mistress to foreign gold. When the River Spree is amethystine under springtime skies and the city's lights are yellow in the linden trees, I like best the Berlin that sips its beer in the peace of the little by-streets, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... head a trifle up and now perceived that through the vapors a dim yet steady glow was beginning to shine, and on each side of it there stretched a line of other, smaller, blue-green lights. These, haloed by the vapor with the most beautiful prismatic rings, extended in an irregular ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... of true Pacific weather, with the wind blowing a merry breeze from about west-north-west; the sky, an exquisitely pure and delicate turquoise blue, flecked with patches of fleecy, prismatic-tinted cloud that here and there darkened the sapphire of the sparkling, foam-flecked ocean with broad spaces of deep, rich, violet shadow. As for the brig, she was swarming along at a nine-knot ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... burst suddenly upon our startled eyes the grandest exhibition of vivid dazzling light and colour of which the mind can conceive. The whole universe seemed to be on fire. A broad arch of brilliant prismatic colours spanned the heavens from east to west like a gigantic rainbow, with a long fringe of crimson and yellow streamers stretching up from its convex edge to the very zenith. At intervals of one or two seconds, wide, luminous bands, parallel with ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... almost childish, contours. He plucked another glossy leaf with his hard, veinous old hands. His hands would not change to suit his mood, but his limbs relaxed like those of a boy. He stared at the brook gurgling past in brown ripples, shot with dim prismatic lights, showing here clear green water lines, here inky depths, and he thought of the possibility of trout. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the conning-tower of the Flying Fish, looking down over sea and land through his prismatic binoculars, suddenly ground his teeth hard together, and sent a hearty Irish curse hissing between them. He had a complete plan of the operations in his possession, and knew perfectly what to ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... reddened in the cold, and b-Barbaloins, obtained from Socotrine and Zanzibar aloes, reddened by ordinary nitric acid only when warmed, or by fuming acid in the cold. Nataloin, 2C17H13O7.H2O, forms bright yellow scales, melting at 212 deg. -222 deg. ; barbaloin, C17H18O7, forms yellow prismatic crystals. Aloes also contain a trace of volatile oil, to which its ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... made extracts from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true image of the Founder behind all the prismatic refractions through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a thousand directions. It ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... bank of mist seemed not to dissipate in a normal fashion. Samples of the fog were being analyzed. It was probably akin to the Belgian fogs which on several occasions had caused much loss of life. The mist was especially interesting because in sunlight it displayed prismatic colorings. State troopers were warning ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins |
