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More "Optical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stimulants affect the medulla oblongata principally, opium acts chiefly on the cerebrum, and excites reverie, dreamy ideality, optical delusions, and the creative powers of the imagination; some of these hallucinations are said to be grotesquely beautiful and enjoyable. The effects of this agent differ from those of alcoholic intoxication by not deadening the moral sensibilities, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... view, scene or scenery; an optical device which gave a distortion to the picture unless seen from a particular point; a relief, modelled to produce ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... fear. She thought she saw the light behind the curtains grow to a blaze, as if blown up by a pair of bellows; in another moment the gleams of flame grew brighter, and she fancied that three masked figures suddenly flashed out; but the terrible vision disappeared so swiftly that she took it for an optical delusion. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... cruel contest, an uncanny stillness fell upon the scene. Meanwhile the hidden face had flushed to the ears, and, when at length it was raised to mine, its crimson calm was as incongruous as an optical illusion. ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... apparently, in many matters that now bulk very large in the minds of men; a small theater, equal to none but very modest demands; a few engravings and plaster-casts and paintings—many of them very poor—to serve as a basis for theories of art; a little optical apparatus, a few minerals and plants and bones, to aid in the advancement of science; everything material on a small scale,—this was Weimar a hundred years ago. Truly a restricted outlook upon this spacious world as ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Miss Rhody," said the cowpuncher earnestly. "When me and my roan come up this fur and seen we didn't see nothin', I was plumb twisted. Says I to me: 'Here, Tom Collins, is where you got to go an' see a spectacles man 'cause you got optical delusions' And I sure thought ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... Rhythm, the harmonious flow of vocal sounds. Rhyme, a word answering in sound to another word. Surge, a great, rolling swell of water. 3. Ves'per, pertaining to the evening service in the Roman Catholic Church. 6. Mi-rage' (pro. me-razh'), an optical illusion causing objects at a distance to seem as though suspended in the air. 7. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... more than an atom in immensity. What you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... The progress of optical science, however, has given us the means of determining this apparently insoluble question. It is well known, that physicists are enabled at present to distinguish two kinds of light—natural light and polarised light. A ray of the former exhibits ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... wonderful optical experiments by Roger Bacon (who died in 1292), and in the sixteenth century by Digges, Baptista Porta, and Antonio de Dominis (Grant, Hist. Ph. Ast.), have led some to suppose that they invented the telescope. The writer considers that it is more likely that these notes refer ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... just as the brass meridian encompasses a terrestrial globe. The resplendency of its light enchanted 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, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... and palms with long drooping creepers, and a blaze of brilliant orchids. Smoking-room, house, England, all were gone, and he sat on a settee in the heart of a virgin forest of the Amazon. It was no mere optical delusion or trick. He could see the hot steam rising from the tropical undergrowth, the heavy drops falling from the huge green leaves, the very grain and fibre of the rough bark which clothed the trunks. Even as he gazed a green mottled snake curled noiselessly over a branch above ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I am to die at the time I mentioned, although I am sure, when I tell you how I came to know it, you will call me superstitious. For you fellows of the present day are so sceptical and matter-of-fact that you refuse to believe in anything that cannot be proved by optical inspection or by evidence. It was, as I said, just four years ago, on my ninety-third birthday, when St. John the Nepomuc appeared to me in a dream, and said—'Dionysius, my good fellow, make the best of your time! There are only five more years for you in ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... appearances, to speak of the five hundred witnesses of whom she was weary of hearing. Her mind was proof against all this; what could be more probable than that a number of devoted followers should be the victims of some optical delusion, especially when their minds were disturbed by grief. Here was a miracle supported on one side by the testimony of five hundred and odd spectators all longing to see their late Master, and contradicted on the other side by common sense and the experience of the remainder ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... slope inward and so do the principal surfaces of the building, while the anta-capitals slope forward. These refinements, or some of them, have been observed in several other buildings. They are commonly regarded as designed to obviate certain optical illusions supposed to arise in their absence. But perhaps, as one writer has suggested, their principal office was to save the building from an appearance of mathematical rigidity, to give it something of the semblance ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... is true of the cultivation of science for its own sake. The stargazer with his telescope, the chemist with crucible and retort, the physiologist with his chemical and optical aids, the purely scientific thinker—all who prosecute science for the love of it—have wrought out results which are breaking as light of the clear morning sun upon the history of nations, thus enabling us to avail ourselves of the past in order to comprehend the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... beauty. Accordingly scientific inquiry was made, and in due time there was collected and tabulated a list of places from whence these effects were seen, together with the dates of such occurrences. Eventually it was concluded that such optical phenomena had a common cause, and that it must be the dust of ultra-microscopic fineness at an enormous altitude. All the facts indicated that such a cloud started from the Sunda straits, and that the prodigious force of the Krakatoa eruption could ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... do not fit you, you are lost in the garments, or you cannot get into them at all; this is not your suit of clothes, it must be another's:—alas, these are not your dimensions, these are only the optical angles you subtend; on the whole, you will never get ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and the creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her beauty. In short, deep feeling for Nature always proves considerable culture ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... provide them; but the energetic citizens were soon on hand. There was much difficulty in finding where the fire was, and heads and feet were turned in various directions, till at length some wight of superior optical powers discovered a faint, ruddy light in the rear of West College. It was an ancient building,—a time-honored structure,—an edifice erected by our forefathers, and by them christened LEMUEL, which in the vernacular tongue is called Lem "for short." The dimensions ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival,— was there already long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in these things? We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical; for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good pairs of eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... our attention. It presents the most perfect optical illusion imaginable; in looking up to the ceiling, which is here very high, you seem to see the very firmament itself, studded with stars; and afar off, a comet with its long, bright tail. Not far from this Star Chamber, may be seen, in a cavity in the ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... and perfect crystals, may partly explain the discordant results at which experienced chemists have arrived in their analysis of the same mineral. For the reader will often find that crystals of a mineral determined to be the same by physical characters, crystalline form, and optical properties, have been declared by skilful analysers to be composed of distinct elements. This disagreement seemed at first subversive of the atomic theory, or the doctrine that there is a fixed and constant relation between the crystalline form and structure of a mineral and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Maturity of mind consists in taking part in the prescribed game as seriously as though one believed in it. Good-humored compliance, tempered by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to take; one lends one's self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary concession has an air of liberty. Once imprisoned in existence, we must submit to its laws with a good grace; to rebel against it only ends in impotent rage, when once we have denied ourselves the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dim the senses of the soul; that a body must act as a veil to the spirit, and shut out much knowledge. It is not so here. Matter helps us in the acquisition of knowledge, as, for example, glass in optical instruments. The telescope, with its lenses, gives the eye vast compass; the microscope gives it a power, equally wonderful, of minute vision. True, in these cases it is matter helping matter—glass assisting the eye; the analogy is not perfect between this and ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... An optical instrument, which serves for discovering and viewing distant objects, either directly by glasses, or by reflection. The invention of the telescope is one of the noblest and most useful of which modern ages can boast, since by means of this instrument ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... promontory have gradually faded away, until nothing has remained but the blue sky above, and the deep blue water below. Hence it was termed by the geographers of old, Aprositus, or the Inaccessible; while modern navigators have called its very existence in question, pronouncing it a mere optical illusion, like the Fata Morgana of the Straits of Messina; or classing it with those unsubstantial regions known to mariners as Cape Flyaway, and the Coast ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... hypothesis therefore must be classified under Xenogenesis, rather than under Abiogenesis. Such as it was, I think it will appear, to those who will be just enough to remember that it was propounded before the birth of modern chemistry, and of the modern optical arts, to be a most ingenious and ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... something of the man's intrinsic nature was revealed to me. His strength, of which we had heard much from travelers in his own land, lay in an almost scientific lack of concentration, backed up by a vocabulary of tremendous scope, and a condition of optical near-sightedness that enabled him to see but obscurely further than the end of his nose. These attributes gave him the power to discuss innumerable subjects coeternally, if not coherently, using his vocabulary with such skill that his meaning depended entirely upon the interpretation ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... the field was blurred, for a while, by the smoke from so much firing, which floated in thickening clouds over all the open spaces and the edges of the forest. It produced curious optical illusions. The French loomed through it, increased fourfold in numbers, every individual man magnified in size. He saw them lurid and gigantic, pulling the triggers of their rifles or muskets, or working the batteries. The cannon also grew from twelve-pounders or eighteen-pounders into guns three ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to suggest that the scene is viewed through a telescope; or a mask with hair-line bars, which will suggest that you are looking through a window. We examined a script a short while ago in which a travelling salesman for an optical goods house amused himself in the interval before train time by watching through a pair of binoculars the street below and the buildings opposite his hotel window. The scene enacted in an office of a building not far away led him to believe that a murder ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... cramped position, and as he did so he caught a glimpse of a figure on the south face of the wall. But it was so fleeting he was not sure. If he had only brought his glasses with him he might have decided, but he was without them, and he concluded finally that it was merely an optical illusion. He and the Indian had the mountain walls to themselves, and the warrior could not have moved around ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... masters, it is beyond the scope of the present paper, and even now I can only hope to call your attention to one phase of this important subject. For a number of years I have been practically interested in the subject of the production of plane and curved surfaces particularly for optical purposes, i.e., in the production of such surfaces free if possible from all traces of error, and it will be pleasant to me if I shall be able to add to the interest of this association by giving you some of my own practical experience; and may I trust that it will be an incentive to all engaged ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... order, till the smallest conceivable "vital unit" is reached in the universe of organic matter. To begin, therefore, with microscopic observation, at a point in the ephemeromorphic world where that optical instrument fails to give back any intelligible answer, and synthetically follow this chain of causation upward and outward to Dr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud of mist," in which it is assumed that all the diversified possibilities ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... &c. (small quantity) 32; fragment &c. (small part) 51; powder &c. 330; point of a pin, mathematical point; minutiae &c. (unimportance) 643. micrometer; vernier; scale. microphotography, photomicrography, micrography[obs3]; photomicrograph, microphotograph; microscopy; microscope (optical instruments) 445.. V. be little &c. adj.; lie in a nutshell; become small &c. (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c. (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c. (unimportant) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... my best to induce the poor viscount to listen to reason. I made him touch the mirrors and the iron tree and the branches and explained to him, by optical laws, all the luminous imagery by which we were surrounded and of which we need not allow ourselves to be the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... telescope, and I noticed that Torribio also seemed very anxious to try the instrument. I told the boy to lend it to him. Our guide, seeing trees brought so close to him, could not at first account for this optical effect. I then directed the glass so that he could see the group of Indians, and I never saw any human face manifest such complete surprise. The Indian, who appeared perfectly charmed, could not long maintain his gravity. Every time he succeeded in ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... their author to the name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be said: and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration, led him to just conclusions; but to calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help of others, notably on that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... button, bubble. point; atom &c (small quantity) 32; fragment &c (small part) 51; powder &c 330; point of a pin, mathematical point; minutiae &c (unimportance) 643. micrometer; vernier; scale. microphotography, photomicrography, micrography^; photomicrograph, microphotograph; microscopy; microscope (optical instruments) 445. V. be little &c adj.; lie in a nutshell; become small &c (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... small white stone, not ten inches high, appeared to be several feet in height, at the distance of a quarter of an hour's ride. And so of the few other discernible objects on this wide expanse of optical delusion. Mirage was seen at times, but nothing pretty. We encamped late, midway through the vast plateau, when shadowy night began to establish her sable throne, in "rayless majesty," over this silent, sombre Desert. On such a horrid waste as this, when crime and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... which they were physically capable; in making of gauges, forging billets, making fuses, cartridges, bullets—"look what they can do," said a foreman, "ladies from homes where they sat about and were waited upon." They also made optical glass; drilled and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric wires and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered guards for lamps and radiator fronts; repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments, automatic searchlights. ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... complete in its harmony of parts, is perfect in its mathematical proportions, and beautiful in its geometrical designs. And yet each creation, each form, and each combination of forms, are produced by the same little pieces of glass; and all of them, in reality, are optical illusions; i.e., natural phenomena, which deceive the physical senses. So ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... perhaps even more friends, and it is supported by the remarkable discoveries of the lamented Moseley. But we must not take such theories too seriously. As Kayser has said, any true theory of the make-up of the atoms must assume an absolutely full and perfect knowledge of all electrical and optical processes, and is therefore beyond our dreams. Or as Professor Planck said in his Columbia lectures, we are not entitled to hope that we shall ever be able to represent truly through any physical formulae the internal structure ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... estimate based upon this belief cannot agree with the facts. Again, the corpuscular theory of light, namely, that the physical cause of light is a stream of fine particles projected in straight lines from the luminous object, though it seemed adequate to the explanation of many optical phenomena, could not be made to agree with the facts of interference ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... illness. There are four ways of treating such stories—the first is to deny their truth, which is, to say the least, not only grossly uncharitable, but an absurd and impertinent caprice adopted in order to reject unpleasant evidence; the second is to account for them by an optical delusion, accidentally synchronising with the event, which seems to me a most monstrous ignoring of the law of chances; a third is to account for them by the existence of some exquisite faculty, (existing in different degrees of intensity, and in some people not existing ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... logically, so there was nothing the matter with the brain. It was only my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision, one of those visions which lead simple folk to believe in miracles. It was a nervous seizure of the optical apparatus, nothing more; the eyes were rather ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... believe that"—under variation proceeding long enough, generation multiplying the better variations times enough, and natural selection securing the improvements—"a living optical instrument might be thus formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... phantoms. Like a picture from the ghost world, it flickered for a few minutes like heat lightning, then disappeared, leaving the night as dark as before. It was a night mirage, and something more than an optical illusion. It was a rare thing on the plain. The Kid knew that it meant something. That glow was the reflection in the sky of a camp fire! Those shadows were men! The ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... afford. There are a great many excellent makes of lenses on the market and even the stock types that are supplied with moderate-priced cameras are of very good quality. The two distinct types of lenses are the "rapid rectilinear" and the "anastigmatic," which names refer to their optical properties in distributing the light. For our purpose all we need to know is that the higher price we pay the better our lenses will be, and in addition to this the further fact that the best kind of results can be obtained by any lens provided ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... falsehood unerringly, that, in fact, she should follow the example of the scientist, who takes account of every minute particle of matter, every elementary and embryonic form of life, but eliminates all optical delusions, all the confusion which impurities and foreign substances might introduce into the search for truth. To achieve such an attitude long practise is necessary, and a wide observation of life under the guidance of the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... just then. While congratulating myself on having escaped death on the roadside, I opened my eyes to behold a tray brought to my bedside with a variety of refreshments. Coffee! Bread! Loaf-sugar! Preserves! I opened my mouth to make an exclamation at the singular optical illusion, but wisely forbore speaking, and shut it with some ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... S. Weir Mitchell's attention was called "to the marked relief of headache, insomnia, and other reflex symptoms following the correction of optical defects by glasses." In 1874 and 1876 he wrote two articles that "impressed upon the general profession the grave significance of eye strain." Since that time, "in Philadelphia at least, no study of the rebellious cause of headache or of the obscure nervous ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... was the lock with the key on the inside. Without being a spiritualist, Jean felt that nobody but spirits could come out of a room leaving the doors locked and the keys on the inside. But for that lock, he might have even set it down to optical illusion and have persuaded himself that perhaps she had really never entered that ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... How strong the feeling is my boatman gave me proof within ten minutes after his failure with the cotton-mouth. He had pulled out into the middle of the river, when I noticed a beautiful snake, short and rather stout, lying coiled on the water. Whether it was an optical illusion I cannot say, but it seemed to me that the creature lay entirely above the surface,—as if it had been an inflated skin rather than a live snake. We passed close by it, but it made no offer to move, only darting out its tongue as the boat slipped past. I spoke ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... I hadn't realized I was approaching Biddy Maloney's cottage until I saw her coming out of it and I certainly hadn't thought of Biddy Maloney until my eye fell upon her. And it's a funny optical illusion that deceives one into seeing an old lady opening gates, crossing railways and ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... clear for actual work without further experiment. I have not been able by any arrangement of reflected light to get power enough to print negatives of the ordinary density, and have only succeeded by causing the light to be equally dispersed over the negative by a lens as used in the optical lantern, but the arrangements required are somewhat different to that of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... the Gramophone.—The gramophone, by virtue of its table revolving at a controllable speed, comes in useful for a series of optical experiments made with coloured discs ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... equal interest and absorption at a chorus girl or at a man painting a liver pill sign. They will form as deep a cordon around a man with a club-foot as they will around a balked automobile. They have the furor rubberendi. They are optical gluttons, feasting and fattening on the misfortunes of their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed perch at the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... industry, secured and classified over five hundred distinct species of fishes from this very division of the Indian Ocean; many of which are characterized by colors as gay and various as those of tropical birds and flowers. Mirage played us strange tricks, in the way of optical delusion, in these regions. We seemed constantly to be approaching land that was never reached, and which, after assuming the undulating shore-lines of a well-defined coast, at the moment when we should ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Spherical vapor and atmospheric space give but a faint idea of its range. We find it a leading science in Physics, and having intimate relations with heat, light, electricity, magnetism, winds, water, vegetation, geological changes, optical effects, pneumatics, geography,—and with climate, controlling the pursuits and affecting the character of the human race. It is so intimately blended, indeed, with the other matters here named, as scarcely to have any positive boundary of its own; and its ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... and uninitiated in the mystery of the arts that were practised upon them. Such was no doubt the case with the speaking heads and statues, which were sometimes exhibited in the ancient oracles. Such was the case with certain optical delusions, which were practised on the unsuspecting, and were contrived to produce on them the effect of supernatural revelations. Such is the story of Bel and the Dragon in the book of Apocrypha, where the priests daily placed before the idol twelve measures of flour, and forty sheep, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... horses. On every hand might be seen the optical illusions of the plain. Beautiful lakes, placid and blue, forests and white-capped mountains, invited the horsemen to turn aside and rest. But the allurement of the mirage was an old story, and holding the objects in view, they jogged on, halting from ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... in the launching of an optical-glass industry; this trade has also been in Teutonic hands. I could cite many other instances, but these will show the new spirit of British commercial enterprise ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... direction to be heightened, and some of the children to be myopic at an earlier age or in a higher degree than their parents. Thirdly, squinting is a familiar example of hereditary transmission: it is frequently a result of such optical defects as have been above mentioned; but the more primary and uncomplicated forms of it are also sometimes in a marked degree transmitted in a family. Fourthly, CATARACT, or opacity of the crystalline lens, is commonly observed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... of the average individual. Longer gastroscopes are used, when necessary, to explore a ptosed stomach. Various lens-system gastroscopes have been devised, which afford an excellent view of the walls of the air-inflated stomach. The optical system, however, interferes with the insertion of instruments, so that the open-tube gastroscope is required for the removal of gastric foreign bodies, the palpation of, or sponging secretions from, gastric lesions. The open-tube gastroscope may be closed ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... the person. The familiar experiment of the person crossing his first two fingers, and placing them on a small object, such as a pea or the top of a lead-pencil, shows us how "mixed" the sense of feeling becomes at times. The many familiar instances of optical delusions show us that even our sharp eyes may deceive us—every conjuror knows how easy it is to deceive the eye by ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... gobbling of the great animals in the river below them was so prodigious they could not grasp it. It seemed it must be optical illusion. In a few moments, the dead had been eaten, swallowed whole, and fights were progressing between ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a thousand deviations, in which his thought ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... it is certain that, although not an intellectual woman, she was not without some taste for pursuits in consonance with those of Goethe. It was for her that he wrote the "Metamorphoses of Plants," and in her company he pursued his optical and botanical researches. Had she shown no comprehension of these things, assuredly Goethe would never have persisted in instructing her in them. It was for her, too, that he wrote the "Roman Elegies," which shows that he did not esteem her a ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... exclaimed, "it is wonderful! I have succeeded! I have changed the principles of a lifetime, made the most brilliant optical experiment which any man of science has ever ventured to essay, with the result—well, you shall see. I have wired to the Admiralty, wired for more work-people. Captain Chalmers, is it not?" he went on. "You must tell your men to ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are well known: the Scriptores Logarithmici[468] is a set of valuable reprints, mixed {207} with much which might better have entered into another collection. It is not so well known that there is a volume of optical reprints, Scriptores Optici, London, 1823, 4to, edited for the veteran of ninety-two by Mr. Babbage[469] at twenty-nine. This excellent volume contains James Gregory, Des Cartes, Halley, Barrow, and the optical writings ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... incapable of deformation, in which the material is utilised in the best conditions of resistance. For a standard with ends has been substituted a standard with marks, which permits much more precise definition and can be employed in optical processes of observation alone; that is, in processes which can produce in it no deformation and no alteration. Moreover, the marks are traced on the plane of the neutral fibres[2] exposed, and the invariability of their distance apart is thus assured, even when a change ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... instrument which he called a Zoopraxiscope for the optical projection of his zoetrope photographs. The succession of positives was arranged in proper order upon a glass disk about 18 inches in diameter near its circumference. This disk was mounted conveniently for rapid revolution so that each picture would pass in front of the ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... do this by supposing that the world, including God, consists of nothing but 'idea'-creating minds, operating like the human mind as man himself perceives it. His world picture, based (as is well known) entirely on optical experiences, is the perfect example of a philosophy contrived by the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... in a condition of astonishment that engendered, almost, a doubt of my eyes; for if my sight was unimpaired and myself not subject to optical or mental delusion, neither boy nor dog nor bird nor cat, nor any other object of this visible world, had entered that opened door. Was my "finest" house, then, a place of call for wandering ghosts, who came home to roost at four ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... stunted trees, at times appeared suspended in the air, and magnified far beyond natural size. High up in the air could be seen the reflection of animals that were many miles distant from the place they appeared to be occupying. These optical illusions were the cause of much annoyance to the thirsty travellers,— especially to their animals, unable to understand them. Excited with the hope of quenching their thirst, they were with much difficulty prevented ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... with huge strides, in a line parallel to their own course, the opposite ridge of a mountain, when divided from it by a narrow glen; and indeed the fact of the apparition is so generally admitted, that modern scepticism has only found refuge by ascribing it to optical ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... an optical illusion," said the young captain. "Although the swell seems to carry the waves landward, it does not really move at all. It is mere undulating molecular motion, nothing more. Throw a piece of wood overboard and you will see that it will remain quite stationary except ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... meteorology have not, up to the present day, classified with sufficient regularity the divers optical phenomena of the air. Some of these phenomena have, however, been seen but rarely, and have not been sufficiently studied to admit of their classification. We have examined the common phenomenon of the rainbow and we have seen that it is due to the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... it, and behold! instead of twinkling points of light, he saw a round mass—a world—moving through space, and not a scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points, were merely an optical illusion of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... all, we seem to be drifting up-stream, until on glancing at the shore the hills appear to be swiftly going down and the willow fringes up,—until the sight makes us dizzy, and we are content to be at quits with these optical delusions. ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... that he could establish was a Canterbury gallop with the hind legs, in which those more forward assisted for doubtful moments, though generally content to maintain a loping trot. Perhaps the rapidity of the changes from one of these paces to the other created an optical illusion, which might thus magnify the powers of the beast; for it is certain that Heyward, who possessed a true eye for the merits of a horse, was unable, with his utmost ingenuity, to decide by what sort ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Channel Tunnel; A Town of Dwarfs; Whooping Cough; British Association Notes; An English Crop; Influence of White Colors; An Involved Accident; An Old Aqueduct System; Galvanism Cannot Restore Exhausted Vitality; Curious Optical Experiments; Ice Machines; American Antiquities; Protection from Lightning; Steam Machinery and Privateering; Man and Animals; The Limbs of Whales; Our Educational Standing; Surface Markings; The Oldest Stone Tools; ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... in making chemical glassware, since it resists the action of reagents better than the softer sodium glass. If lead oxide is substituted for the whole or a part of the lime, the glass is very soft, but has a high index of refraction and is valuable for making optical instruments and artificial jewels. ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... generically called Las Canadas; but, whilst the volcanic ridge of the Isle of Wood runs in a latitudinal line, the Junonian Cordillera has a whorl, the ancient as well as the modern seat of eruption. Around the island appeared to be a rim, as if the sea-horizon formed a raised saucer—a common optical delusion at ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... are rendered more so by the variations of the atmosphere, of the eye, and of the glass. But after these are all accounted for, there is still a real difference. Two stars of the class known as double stars, that is, so little separated that considerable optical power is necessary to divide them, show these different tints very nicely in the same field ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... to keep the object-glass upon the black spot, and she had a great deal of trouble in the matter of focusing, pulling out and pushing in the smaller cylinder in a manner which showed that she was not accustomed to the use of this optical instrument. ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... see him agoing in the direction of the billiard-room, saving your presence, sir,' says Wickersmith to me." Adrian pantomimed the supposed deference of the butler. Then, loftily, "But, 'Shoo' says I. 'An optical delusion, my excellent Wick. A Christian man would be incapable of such a villainy. The billiard-room, that darksome cavern, on a heaven-sent day like this? Shucks,' says I. Yet"—his attitude became exhortative—"see how mighty is truth, see how she prevails, see how the scoffer ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... member of a committee, to which Sir John Herschel and Mr. Dollond also belonged, appointed by the Royal Society to examine, and if possible improve, the manufacture of glass for optical purposes. Their experiments continued till 1829, when the account of them constituted the subject of a 'Bakerian Lecture.' This lectureship, founded in 1774 by Henry Baker, Esq., of the Strand, London, provides that every year a lecture shall be given ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... has thus arisen appears to be a kind of metaphysic narrowed to the point of view of the individual mind, through which, as through some new optical instrument limiting the sphere of vision, the interior of thought and sensation is examined. But the individual mind in the abstract, as distinct from the mind of a particular individual and separated from the environment of circumstances, is a fiction only. Yet facts which are partly ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... would be intolerably hideous if you did not look through their spectacles. With infinite pains you have turned away your eyes from the external light. It is with relief, not regret, that you discover that the sun shines, and that the world is beautiful without the help of these optical devices which you had been taught to regard ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... two convex lenses. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that he applied the micrometer to the telescope, and was the first to use telescopic sights, by means of which he was able to fix the optical axis of his telescope, and ascertain by observation the apparent ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... experiments of Mr. Dutrochet day after day, and scrupulously following his directions, we have, in the presence of our results, that were exactly identical with his, almost been tempted to believe ourself to be the victim of some occult power, or at least of some optical illusion, the true cause of which remained a mystery to us. Finally, after many fruitless attempts to find a key to the enigma that engaged our attention, the light finally dawned upon us, and then ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... not infallible, are our only guides in their sphere; so our perceptive faculties are good and safe, but not perfect, guides. These perceptive faculties, in a measure, help and correct each other's impressions; and through optical illusions, expectant attention, dreams, etc., we learn that their dictates must be carefully watched and verified. The latest voice of science is that all the sensation produced by physical stimulants can also be produced by the imagination; ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend, in the one instant of its duration. For the moment, it required all my knowledge of the settled calmness of his countenance, to convince me that my eyes must have been only dazzled by an optical illusion produced ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... growing down to the water. Here the reflections were so brilliant that the dividing line between shore and water was difficult for the untrained eye to make out. The boys seemed to be gazing upon an optical illusion. From the water's edge the mountains rose sheer to a great height, their distant peaks capped with snow glistening in the morning sunlight, while glacial streams flashed over the open spaces on ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... general way, of the mechanism for accomplishing the result, was made many years before the instantaneous photograph became possible. While the first motion picture was not actually produced until the summer of 1889, its real birth was almost a century earlier, when Plateau, in France, constructed an optical toy, to which the impressive name of "Phenakistoscope" was applied, for producing an illusion of motion. This toy in turn was the forerunner of the Zoetrope, or so-called "Wheel of Life," which was introduced into this country about the year 1845. These ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... great distinctness, but it will not present them in their natural size, for it can not change the angle of vision. The villages upon the table-land were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women, surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is, by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist placed himself where we now stood, he would have more than realized the picture which his fancy painted. He might have seen the marshaled hosts of Liliput ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of the heavenly bodies in the speculations of the old Greek thinkers. Galilei (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with the aid of the telescope; and the telescope was an outcome of the new study of optics which had been inspired in Roger Bacon and other medieval scholars by the optical works, directly founded on the Greek, of the Spanish Moors. Giordano Bruno still further enlarged the system; he pictured the universe boldly as an infinite ocean of liquid ether, in which the stars, with retinues of inhabited planets, floated ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... closely. Nothing! But now against the aperture I saw a score or more of tiny, dancing sparks. An optical illusion, I thought, and turned the crystal in another direction. There were no sparklings there. I turned it back again—and there they were. And what were they like? Realization came to me—they were like the little, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... he, "my ideas of natural beauty and those of the aesthetic Wilde may be entirely false; or the whole scene may be an optical illusion; or—Rosenduft und Maienblumen, observe me ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... me," he said, pettishly; "I don't think that the harbor-master is a spirit or a sprite or a hobgoblin, or any sort of damned rot. Neither do I believe it to be an optical illusion." ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... Did you think both were the same? Take a ruler and actually measure them. You'll find line AB longer than CD. "But," you reply, "every other time both lines were the same." This is a familiar optical illusion which is used many times in basic courses in psychology. It is known as the Muller-Lyer illusion. My contention is that if you said, "Both are the same size," you are potentially a good subject. You respond perfectly to previous conditioning; thus, you are responding as anticipated. ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... nothing the matter with the brain. It was only my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision, one of those visions which lead simple folk to believe in miracles. It was a nervous seizure of the optical apparatus, nothing more; the eyes were ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... incredulous and fascinated awe, as one watches the confused, swift movements of some deed of violence done in the dark. As if at a given signal, the run of the smooth undulations seemed checked suddenly around the brig. By a strange optical delusion the whole sea appeared to rise upon her in one overwhelming heave of its silky surface, where in one spot a smother of foam broke out ferociously. And then the effort subsided. It was all over, and the smooth swell ran on as before from the horizon in uninterrupted cadence of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... I cannot make them out. I want you to get for me the spectacles which Swedenborg used to wear; not the smaller pair—those he gave to Hans Christian Andersen—but the large pair, and these seem to have got mislaid. I think they are Spinoza's make. You know he was an optical-glass maker by profession, and the best we have ever had. See if you can get them for me." When I looked up after reading this letter, I saw the postman hastening away across the sands, and I cried out to him, "Stop! how am I to send the answer? Will ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... vision; seeing, view, perception; visibility; spectacle, phenomenon, panorama, vista, gapeseed, cynosure; (Colloq.) great number, many, multitude, great quantity. Associated Words: optics, optical, optic, ocular, optician, caligo, astigmatism, perimeter, perimetry, amaurosis, visual, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... stratification, by its veins of quartz that strewed the sand, and by its quaint weathering—one rock exactly resembled a sitting eagle; a second was a turtle, and a third showed a sphinx in the rough. The Bad plain is backed by a curtain so tall that we seemed, by a common optical delusion, to be descending when ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... her tricks for summoning her swains, the male, on his side, is provided with an optical apparatus suited to catch from afar the least reflection of the calling-signal. His corselet expands into a shield and overlaps his head considerably in the form of a peaked cap or eye-shade, the object of which appears to be to limit ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... circle was drawn on the ground, surrounded with the customary astrological signs, the invocation commenced, the spirit appeared, and Plotinus stood face to face with his own soul. In this successful experiment it is needless to inquire how much the necromancer depended upon optical contrivances, and how much upon an alarmed imagination. But if thus the spirit of a living man could be called up, how much more likely the souls of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... great quantity of arms and other war material. In another sector they captured 30,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, 300 boxes of machine-gun ammunition, 200 boxes of hand grenades, 1,000 rifles in good condition, four machine guns, two optical range finders, and even a brand-new Norton well, a portable contrivance for the supply ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... "The observer is the periscope itself. Any of the various fluorescing substances placed in the focus of the object-glass, or at the optical image in front of the eyepiece, will show the picture in the color peculiar to the fluorescing material. The color ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... by jabers that's not what we're afther, We'd breed for ourselves if they'd give us a chance. BALFOUR, ye stand there wid an oi full o' laughter. Ye divil, we know that cool optical dance. Come the comether on us then, would ye, ye wag, Wid this "ginerous" gift ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... and remorse were already busy within me, and in the lurking shadows about the fireplace I thought I saw the long and narrow slit made by the half-closed panel standing open between me and the secret place of her entombment. And though it was but an optical delusion, the panel being really closed, it might as well have been the truth, for I have never been able to rid myself of the sight of that chimerical strip of darkness, with its suggestions of guilt and death. It haunted my vision; it ruined my ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... explained the Shaggy Man, "is what is called an optical illusion. It is quite real while you have your eyes open, but if you are not looking at it the barrier doesn't exist at all. It's the same way with many other evils in life; they seem to exist, and yet it's all seeming and not true. You will notice that the wall—or what we thought ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... much promise. The first of these seemed wanting in expression, and in the second a slight obliquity of the visual organs has been heightened (perhaps from an over-desire of force on the part of the artist) into too close an approach to actual strabismus. This slight divergence in my optical apparatus from the ordinary model—however I may have been taught to regard it in the light of a mercy rather than a cross, since it enabled me to give as much of directness and personal application to my discourses as met the wants of my congregation, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... so do the principal surfaces of the building, while the anta-capitals slope forward. These refinements, or some of them, have been observed in several other buildings. They are commonly regarded as designed to obviate certain optical illusions supposed to arise in their absence. But perhaps, as one writer has suggested, their principal office was to save the building from an appearance of mathematical rigidity, to give it something of the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... I tell you so—an overheated imagination. I have known more extraordinary optical illusions than that in my ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... of the greater concentration involved, the partial genius usually gets more recognition than the general—that is, if he gets any recognition at all. Thus, the mathematical and optical work of Sir Isaac Newton show true genius; his theological and political ideas weren't worth the paper he wrote them on. Similar accusations might be leveled ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... equipment was to provide himself with the contrivance known as the "cross-staff," which he used to observe the stars whenever opportunity offered. It must, of course, be remembered that in those days there were no telescopes. In the absence of optical aid, such as lenses afford the modern observers, astronomers had to rely on mechanical appliances alone to measure the places of the stars. Of such appliances, perhaps the most ingenious was one known before Tycho's time, which we have ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... also best made of glass, as garnet or any red stone will look almost black in such large pieces. Red carnelian has a sort of brick-red color, which has a cheap appearance. There is a new phosphorus glass used by optical instrument makers which is intensely hard, and if colored ruby-red makes a beautiful pallet jewel, which will afford as much service as if real stones were used; they are no cheaper than carnelian pallets, but much richer ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... the optical, mechanical, and electrical arrangements employed, written by Mr. Cole, will be found in Nature, vol. i., ...
— The Splash of a Drop • A. M. Worthington
... a study of its domain. Advantages of general views which impart an exalted and solemn character to natural science. The possibility of separating generalities from specialties. Examples drawn from astronomy, recent optical discoveries, physical geognosy, and the geography of plants. Practicability of the study of physical cosmography — p. 33-54. Misunderstood popular knowledge, confounding cosmography with a mere encyclopedic enumeration of natural sciences. Necessity for a simultaneous regard ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the ocean appears either flat or slightly concave, and aeronauts declare that this apparent concavity becomes more marked, the higher they ascend. It is only at those rare periods when the air is so miraculously clear as to produce the effect of no air—rendering impossible the slightest optical illusion—that our eyes can see things as they really are. So pure was the atmosphere to-day, that, at meridian, the moon, although a thin sickle, three days distant from the sun, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... treated with iodine. As degradation proceeds, and the products become more and more soluble and diffusible, the blue reaction with iodine gives place first to a purple, then to a reddish colour, and finally the coloration ceases altogether. In the same way, the optical rotating power decreases, and the cupric reducing power (towards Fehling's solution) increases, as the process of hydrolysis proceeds. C. O'Sullivan was the first to point out definitely the influence of the temperature of the mash on the character of the products. The work of Horace T. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... a solid mountain of green on each side, the trees growing down to the water. Here the reflections were so brilliant that the dividing line between shore and water was difficult for the untrained eye to make out. The boys seemed to be gazing upon an optical illusion. From the water's edge the mountains rose sheer to a great height, their distant peaks capped with snow glistening in the morning sunlight, while glacial streams flashed over the open spaces on ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... objections. It requires no small strength of nerve steadily to conceive not only of the variation, but of the formation of the organs of an animal through cumulative variation and natural selection. Think of such an organ as the eye, that most perfect of optical instruments, as so produced in the lower animals and perfected in the higher! A friend of ours, who accepts the new doctrine, confesses that for a long while a cold chill came over him whenever he thought of the eye. He has at length ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... whiteness, lay spread out solitary and dazzling, like an Olympian acropolis above the silent city. The edifices surrounding it reared their stately proportions into the deep sky; Bernini's great portal to the royal palace surmounted by the loggia offered an optical delusion by seeming to detach itself from the building and stand out all alone in all its unwieldy magnificence, like some mausoleum sculptured out of a meteoric block of stone. The rich architraves to the Palazzo della ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... merely spectators, and uninitiated in the mystery of the arts that were practised upon them. Such was no doubt the case with the speaking heads and statues, which were sometimes exhibited in the ancient oracles. Such was the case with certain optical delusions, which were practised on the unsuspecting, and were contrived to produce on them the effect of supernatural revelations. Such is the story of Bel and the Dragon in the book of Apocrypha, where the priests daily placed ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... is a farther and more essential ground of difference in system of shadow between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It is a well-known optical fact that the color of shadow is complemental to that of light: and that therefore, in general terms, warm light has cool shadow, and cool light hot shadow. The noblest masters of the northern and southern schools respectively adopted these contrary keys; and while the Flemings raised their lights ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... determine the position of any point of our image; hence in order to locate the image of the top of the arrow, we need to consider but one more ray from the top of the object. The most convenient ray to choose would be one passing through O, the optical center of the lens, because such a ray passes through the lens unchanged in direction, as is clear from Figure 74. The point where AC and AO meet after refraction will be the position of the top of the arrow. Similarly it can be shown that the ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... Wickersmith. 'Well, if you 'll pardon my saying so, sir, I think I see him agoing in the direction of the billiard-room, saving your presence, sir,' says Wickersmith to me." Adrian pantomimed the supposed deference of the butler. Then, loftily, "But, 'Shoo' says I. 'An optical delusion, my excellent Wick. A Christian man would be incapable of such a villainy. The billiard-room, that darksome cavern, on a heaven-sent day like this? Shucks,' says I. Yet"—his attitude became ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... the trails, but cut right through the forest to a place where, through an opening in the Foot Hills, the Plains stretched to the horizon covered with snow, the surface of which, having melted and frozen, reflected as water would the pure blue of the sky, presenting a complete optical illusion. It required my knowledge of fact to assure me that I was not looking at the ocean. "Jim" shortened the way by repeating a great deal of poetry, and by earnest, reasonable conversation, so that I was quite surprised ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... need for optical demonstration of the conditions. It was there to faculties of scent. It was there in the swarms of night flies. It was there in the howl of the scavenging camp dogs, seeking, in their prowling pack, that which the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... broken intermediate landscape, with interrupted agricultural domains and forests was in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... nevertheless far from being an invariable rule that the suitability is perfect. Thus, for instance, even in the case of the eye—which is perhaps the most wonderful and most highly elaborated structure in organic nature—it is demonstrable that the organ, considered as an optical instrument, is not ideally perfect; so that, if it were an artificial production, opticians would know how to improve it. And as for instinct, numberless cases might be adduced of imperfection, ranging in all degrees from a slight deficiency to ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... which we shall find those ugliest which have in them no expression nor life whatever, but a corpse-like stare, or an indefinite meaningless glaring, as in some lights, those of owls and cats, and mostly of insects and of all creatures in which the eye seems rather an external, optical instrument than a bodily member through which emotion and virtue of soul may be expressed, (as pre-eminently in the chameleon,) because the seeming want of sensibility and vitality in a living creature is the most painful ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Moscow before seeing it, may be worthy of repetition. The general colors of the buildings, roofs, and churches are light, gay, and sparkling, so that the whole, taken in one sweep of the eye, presents an exceedingly brilliant appearance, more like some well-contrived and highly-wrought optical illusions in a theatre—such, for example, as the fairy scenery of the "Prophete"—than any thing I can now remember. The vast extent of the city, compared with its population (the circuit of its outer wall being twenty miles, while the population is but ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... neglected to provide them; but the energetic citizens were soon on hand. There was much difficulty in finding where the fire was, and heads and feet were turned in various directions, till at length some wight of superior optical powers discovered a faint, ruddy light in the rear of West College. It was an ancient building,—a time-honored structure,—an edifice erected by our forefathers, and by them christened LEMUEL, which in the vernacular tongue is ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... increased each time that it returned from the wash. Nay, heretical and damnable as is the fact, his father's surplice was as a moth-eaten garment from the repeated and insidious attacks of this young philosopher. The burning-glass decided his fate. He was bound apprentice to an optical and mathematical instrument maker; from which situation he was, if possible, to emerge into the highest grade of the profession; but somehow or another, a want of ambition or of talent did not permit him to ascend the scale, and he now kept a shop in the small seaport town of Overton, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... to go into the evidence question, to quote the number of Christ's appearances, to speak of the five hundred witnesses of whom she was weary of hearing. Her mind was proof against all this; what could be more probable than that a number of devoted followers should be the victims of some optical delusion, especially when their minds were disturbed by grief. Here was a miracle supported on one side by the testimony of five hundred and odd spectators all longing to see their late Master, and contradicted on the other side by common sense and the experience of the remainder ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... theory of "Light," presenting in a popular form the latest conclusions of chemical and optical science on the subject, and elucidating its various points of interest with characteristic clearness and force. Its simplicity of language, and the beauty and appropriateness of its pictorial illustrations, make it a most attractive volume for young persons, ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell in the tower. It said, to an understanding unpractised in the feminine mysteries: 'I can sleep through anything.' What that revealed of her state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely optical figure blocked his guessing. He was with her friends, who liked her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their view of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gearing up for futures full of incurable aneurysms. The entire crew suffered from a nervous excitement that it's beyond me to describe. Nobody ate, nobody slept. Twenty times a day some error in perception, or the optical illusions of some sailor perched in the crosstrees, would cause intolerable anguish, and this emotion, repeated twenty times over, kept us in a state of irritability so intense that a reaction was bound ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... majority of instances, the dramatic talent has come to its fullest maturity. Mr. Sheridan would possibly never have exceeded what he had already done, and his celebrity had now reached that point of elevation, where, by a sort of optical deception in the atmosphere of fame, to remain stationary is to seem, in the eyes of the spectators, to fall. He had, indeed, enjoyed only the triumphs of talent, and without even descending to those ovations, or minor triumphs, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... Alexander's conquests in the East, the extension of the Roman Empire, the invention of the mariner's compass, the discovery of America, and the circumnavigation of the globe, together with the perfection of optical instruments by the use of which the true character of the celestial bodies was demonstrated, that the cosmical idea became truly a scientific one. (Humboldt.) Thus were the partial and fragmentary notions of early peoples at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... an inch apart; but owing to the properties of light itself, it would appear that we cannot hope to be able to perceive objects which are much less than 1/100000 of an inch in diameter. Our microscopes may, no doubt, be improved, but the limitation lies not in the imperfection of our optical appliances, but in the nature ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... strain produced by magnetic lines of force in substances exposed to their action. It is observed in substances placed between the poles of a strong electro-magnet, and evinces itself in the alteration of the optical properties of transparent substances. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... Wave-theory of Light Thomas Young Fresnel and Arago Conception of Wave-motion Interference of Waves Constitution of Sound-waves Analogies of Sound and Light Illustrations of Wave-motion Interference of Sound Waves Optical Illustrations Pitch and Colour Lengths of the Waves of Light and Rates of Vibration of the Ether-particles Interference of Light Phenomena which first suggested the Undulatory Theory Boyle and Hooke The Colours of thin Plates The Soap-bubble Newton's Rings Theory of 'Fits' Its Explanation ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... listening to the intercom. Our optical equipment isn't designed for close range work, but we've been doing the best we can, tried everything from infra-red through ultra-violet. If there is a ship out there I'm ...
— A Matter of Magnitude • Al Sevcik
... It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and the artistic efforts of the new and the old world, we may tell the history of the moving pictures by the following dates and achievements. In the year 1825 a Doctor Roget described in the "Philosophical Transactions" an interesting optical illusion of movement, resulting, for instance, when a wheel is moving along behind a fence of upright bars. The discussion was carried much further when it was taken up a few years later by a master of the craft, ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... at Greenwich was any optical search undertaken; but Professor Airy wrote to ask M. Leverrier the same old question that he had fruitlessly put to Adams: Did the new theory explain the errors of the radius vector or not? The reply ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... save in the imagination of the person. The familiar experiment of the person crossing his first two fingers, and placing them on a small object, such as a pea or the top of a lead-pencil, shows us how "mixed" the sense of feeling becomes at times. The many familiar instances of optical delusions show us that even our sharp eyes may deceive us—every conjuror knows how easy it is to deceive the eye by suggestion and ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... have not reached the ultimate accessible structure of this organ. If we place a portion of the surface under one of the finest of our most powerful lenses, this will be the result.[6] Now, without discussing the real optical or anatomical value of this result as it stands, what I desire ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... startled me. She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman. This optical trick gave her a sort of phantasmagoric brightness, and while I was still the victim of it I heard a whisper somewhere in the depths of my conscience: "Why not, after all—why not?" It seemed to me I was ready to pay the price. Still more distinctly however than the whisper I heard Miss Tita's ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... curved lips of a mouth which was small and rather compressed, and by a definite, symmetrical and graceful figure. Her eyes were grey, with a curious peculiarity in them. Ordinarily they were steady, strong eyes, excellent and renowned optical instruments. Over and over again she had detected, along the stretch of the Eastthorpe road, approaching visitors, and had named them when her companions could see nothing but specks. Occasionally, however, these steady, strong, grey eyes utterly changed. They ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... horror filled me with self-pity. Then, as the roots of my hair began to stir, my feet set themselves instinctively for flight. This instinct, however, I promptly and sternly repressed. I knew all about these optical illusions, and tried to congratulate myself on this opportunity for investigating one so interesting and vivid. At the same time I gave a hasty side-thought to what would have happened had I been one of the superstitious farmhands or fishermen of the district. I should have taken to my heels ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in 1666 his attention was occupied with optical discoveries; but he had no sooner brought them to a close than his mind reverted to the great subject of the planetary motions. Upon the death of Oldenburg in August, 1678, Dr. Hooke was appointed secretary to the Royal ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... electric motors, television sets, refrigerators and freezers, petroleum refining, shipbuilding (small ships), furniture making, textiles, food processing, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, optical equipment, electronic components, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... where the drugstore was, talking to fellows he knew, giggling when the girls who lived in the street, walking arm and arm, twined in couples or trios, passed by affecting ignorance of the glances that followed them. Or perhaps he would have gone walking with Al, who worked in the same optical-goods store, down through the glaring streets of the theatre and restaurant quarter, or along the wharves and ferry slips, where they would have sat smoking and looking out over the dark purple harbor, with its winking lights and its moving ferries spilling swaying reflections ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... computational hardware advances such as increasingly powerful workstations, reduced-cost image generators, massively parallel machines, compact displays, reduced-cost memory devices (i.e., DRAM, RAID, and optical jukeboxes) client/server-specific database engines, reconfigurable simulation cells, "wearable" PCs, advanced human-computer interface (HCI) techniques (i.e., voice interfaces and those coming to define "virtual reality"), and PCMCIA technology ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... receive an allowance from the British tax-payer of 5M. a week, cannot buy food at less than cost price, nor go to a sanatorium (at the expense of the British tax-payer) when sick; have not the benefit of expert dental and optical treatment, have no public libraries, lectures, schools, debates, or camp newspapers, have not seven tennis courts, three football fields, athletic games, cricket, golf and hockey, are not amused by dramas, comic operas ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... this morning, I hear—somebody yesterday called the telescope an 'optical delusion,' anticipating many more of the kind! So much ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... other bank, the rocky one, I always had a curious optical illusion: it seemed to me that the town from which we had come, and whose gray ramparts we still could see, suddenly drew very far away from us, for in my young head distances exaggerated themselves strangely. Upon this side all was different, the soil, the grass, the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... optical illusion. There are three parties, but each is dominated by the fifty families, and election laws are such that for all practical purposes it's impossible to start another party. Theoretically it's possible, ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... communications cable using a thread of optical glass fibers as a transmission medium in which the signal (voice, video, etc.) is in the form of a coded pulse ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... either case, whether the defect was in his mind or his morals, it is enough to greatly impair the value of his other "facts." Again, when James (p. 165) states that Decatur ran away from the Macedonian until, by some marvellous optical delusion, he mistook her for a 32, he merely detracts a good deal from the worth of his own account. When the Americans adopt boarding helmets, he considers it as proving conclusively that they are suffering from an acute attack of cowardice. On p. 122 he says that "had the President, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... now, when he looked out of a window, the sensation of a man who was passing in rapid motion all the old familiar objects, all the landmarks of his life, or rather—for one never rids one's self of that particular optical delusion—it was as if they were passing. The conviction of one's own transit is difficult to achieve. Harry gazed out of the window, and it was to him as if the familiar trees which bordered the sidewalk, the shrubs in the yard, the houses which ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... its way among the blocks of ice which were carried along in the current of the Angara. A moving panorama was displayed on both sides of the river, and, by an optical illusion, it appeared as if it was the raft which was motionless before a succession of picturesque scenes. Here were high granite cliffs, there wild gorges, down which rushed a torrent; sometimes appeared ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... hands were the double-series potentiometers actuating the variable-speed drives of the flight-angle directors in the hour and declination ranges; before his eyes was the finely marked micrometer screen upon which the guiding goniometer threw its needle-point of light; powerful optical systems of prisms and lenses revealed to his sight the director-angles, down to fractional seconds of arc. It was the task of the chief pilot to hold the screened image of the cross-hairs of the two directors in such position relative to the ever-moving point of light as ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... known: the Scriptores Logarithmici[468] is a set of valuable reprints, mixed {207} with much which might better have entered into another collection. It is not so well known that there is a volume of optical reprints, Scriptores Optici, London, 1823, 4to, edited for the veteran of ninety-two by Mr. Babbage[469] at twenty-nine. This excellent volume contains James Gregory, Des Cartes, Halley, Barrow, and the optical writings of Huyghens, the Principia of the undulatory theory. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... true in the end with looking which is analogous to touching. The manner in which the libidinous excitement is frequently awakened is by the optical impression, and selection takes account of this circumstance—if this teleological mode of thinking be permitted—by making the sexual object a thing of beauty. The covering of the body, which keeps abreast with civilization, serves to arouse sexual inquisitiveness, ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... article on this for the Journal of the Optical Society," Scotty said. "Works fine. Our buddy is a Sudanese, from the looks of him. Also, he has a comrade. A big, sloppy type in a black coat and a tarboosh. I'd hate to tangle ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... gentleman; all our reports should vary. But this does not occur. Most unluckily for Herr Parish, he illustrates his theory by telling a story which happens not to be correctly reported. At first I thought that a fallacy of memory, or an optical delusion, had betrayed him again, as in his legend of the waistcoat. But I am now inclined to believe that what really occurred was this: Herr Parish brought out his book in German, before the Report of the Census of Hallucinations was published. In his German edition he probably quoted a ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of artificial light which are impossible with natural light. Light-sources may be made of a vast variety of shapes, and those may be transported wherever desired. They may be equipped with reflectors and other optical devices to direct or to diffuse the light ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Optical Illusion.—In the sphere of vision many very interesting facts are constantly coming to light. Sight is the most complex of the senses, the most easily deranged, and, withal, the most necessary to our normal existence. The report ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... amazement. Look where he would all round were tree-ferns and palms with long drooping creepers, and a blaze of brilliant orchids. Smoking-room, house, England, all were gone, and he sat on a settee in the heart of a virgin forest of the Amazon. It was no mere optical delusion or trick. He could see the hot steam rising from the tropical undergrowth, the heavy drops falling from the huge green leaves, the very grain and fibre of the rough bark which clothed the trunks. Even as he gazed a green mottled snake curled noiselessly ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me that what I had just seen near Beddgelert was an optical illusion. I had become very learned on the subject of optical illusions ever since I had known Sinfi Lovell, and especially since I had seen that picture of Winnie in the water near Bettws y Coed, which I have ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... cosmopolitanisms. By the use of legs humanity has stalked into manhood. By the use of wheels we are rapidly rolling into a race of commercial travellers, touts, gad-abouts, and members of parliament, folk with the hanging jaws of astonishment, avid for curios, and with mental, moral and optical indigestion. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... introduced into the balance consists in the displacing of the center of gravity of the beam in such a way as to diminish the sensitiveness, and consequently to obtain a much greater velocity, and then, by optical means, to considerably increase the amplitude ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... noble Scotchman's dictum. I am compelled to report that they appeared never to have heard of his theory. At any rate they very plainly did fly tail foremost; and that not only in dropping from a blossom,—in which case the seeming flight might have been, as the duke maintains, an optical illusion merely,—but even while backing out of the flower-tube in an upward direction. They are commendably catholic in their tastes. I saw one exploring the disk of a sunflower, in company with a splendid monarch butterfly. Possibly he knew that the sunflower was just then in ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... of light broke upon him in a way not now intelligible, or barely intelligible. Half the extreme breadth intercepted between the circle and oval was 429/100,000 of the radius, and he remembered that the "optical inequality" of Mars was also about 429/100,000. This coincidence, in his own words, woke him out of sleep; and for some reason or other impelled him instantly to try making the planet oscillate in ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed by Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul grown familiar with the terrors of death. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of the Articulata, we may start from an optic nerve simply coated with pigment, the latter sometimes forming a sort of pupil, but destitute of lens or other optical contrivance. With insects it is now known that the numerous facets on the cornea of their great compound eyes form true lenses, and that the cones include curiously modified nervous filaments. But these organs in the Articulata ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... remained but the blue sky above, and the deep blue water below. Hence it was termed by the geographers of old, Aprositus, or the Inaccessible; while modern navigators have called its very existence in question, pronouncing it a mere optical illusion, like the Fata Morgana of the Straits of Messina; or classing it with those unsubstantial regions known to mariners as Cape Flyaway, and the ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... out of sight; then you throw up a clod and it doesn't. It comes down, every time. I have tried it and tried it, and it is always so. I wonder why it is? Of course it DOESN'T come down, but why should it SEEM to? I suppose it is an optical illusion. I mean, one of them is. I don't know which one. It may be the feather, it may be the clod; I can't prove which it is, I can only demonstrate that one or the other is a fake, and let a ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... mused on the difference that education makes, even pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and a spectre,—me who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spherical-shaped objects reported, as already mentioned, is that they are meteorological or similar type balloons. This, however, does not explain reports that they travel at high speed or maneuver rapidly. But 'Saucer' men point out that the movement could be explained away as an optical illusion or actual acceleration of the balloon caused by a gas leak and later exaggerated by observers. . . . There are scores of possible explanations for the scores ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... almost at the lowest point it is capable of attaining; but this was not the only point in which Professor Hall was favoured; he had the use of a telescope of magnificent proportions and of consummate optical perfection. His observatory was also placed in Washington, so that he had the advantage of a pure sky and of a much lower latitude than any observatory in Great Britain is placed at. But the most conspicuous advantage of all was the practised ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... "A curious optical effect then occurred. The room, which had been previously partially lighted by the sunbeam, grew darker and darker as the star increased in radiance, until we found ourselves in an Egyptian gloom. The star twinkled, trembled, and turned, at first with a ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... the young woman's name was Arletta Fogg, and that she was murdered in her own rooms, at the Seraglio Apartments, Central Park West. I could hardly believe my eyes saw the thing aright. I felt sure that it must be an optical illusion wrought by my constant thought of Arletta. I looked again and again, yet read ever the same words, and, laboring under tremendous excitement, I hurriedly perused the account of the murder. It stated that about eleven o'clock of the previous night Arletta ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... place the chair a steward was carrying for her. There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination. None of them seemed to satisfy her. After a minute's effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side of us. In other words, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... occasions, been employed in chemical processes, to keep a solution in a state of agitation. Another object to which a similar apparatus may be applied, is the polishing of small specimens of minerals for optical experiments. ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... epoch that even its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... by a series of ladders, each from twenty to thirty feet long,—but with regard to those near the top, Karl had great doubts. The shelves did not seem more distant from each other than those below, but their horizontal breadth appeared less. This might possibly be an optical delusion, caused by the greater distance from which they were viewed; but if so, it would not much mend the matter for the design which Karl had in view—since the deception that would have given him an advantage in the breadth would have been against him in the ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... conduct us to the supposition of some medium, having immediate communication with the eye; which medium, though we are far from saying that its existence is established, is rendered probable by the explanation it affords of optical phenomena. At the same time it is evident that the hypothesis of an undulating ether, assumes a fluid or some medium, the existence of which cannot be directly ascertained. Thus stands the hypothesis of a luminiferous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... was blurred, for a while, by the smoke from so much firing, which floated in thickening clouds over all the open spaces and the edges of the forest. It produced curious optical illusions. The French loomed through it, increased fourfold in numbers, every individual man magnified in size. He saw them lurid and gigantic, pulling the triggers of their rifles or muskets, or working the batteries. The cannon also grew from twelve-pounders or eighteen-pounders ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... entered, we saw a beautiful nosegay in a vase, which appeared to be composed of the rarest flowers. I approached it with an intention of inhaling its fragrance, when, lo! my hand passed through it. It was an exquisite optical illusion. "Ah!" said my elegant and moralising companion, Madame S——, smiling, "of such flowers has Happiness composed her wreath: it is thus she gladdens with it the eye of Hope; but the hand of Expectation can never ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... walk to the hamlet and ponder the optical problem, and the terms in which to refuse the Elector Palatine's offer. He set out at once, forgetting the dangers of the streets and in reality lulling suspicion by his fearless demeanor. The afternoon was closing ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... be in the sky—a faint red glow, across which shadows appeared to move like phantoms. Like a picture from the ghost world, it flickered for a few minutes like heat lightning, then disappeared, leaving the night as dark as before. It was a night mirage, and something more than an optical illusion. It was a rare thing on the plain. The Kid knew that it meant something. That glow was the reflection in the sky of a camp fire! Those shadows were men! The ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... half buried in the sand. The waters of the Nile had fallen, and the whole river bed was crowded with frogs, and this spectacle was just according to the taste of the stork family. The young storks thought it was optical illusion, they found ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... not at present our business to treat of empirical illusory appearance (for example, optical illusion), which occurs in the empirical application of otherwise correct rules of the understanding, and in which the judgement is misled by the influence of imagination. Our purpose is to speak ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Murray's. She leaned out and watched it till the cars swept round a curve, and lamp and figure and village vanished. How could he possibly be in Chattanooga? The conjecture was absurd; she was the victim of some optical illusion. With a long, heavily-drawn sigh, she leaned against the window-frame and looked at the dark mountain mass looming behind her; and after a time, when the storm drew nearer, she saw it only ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... they inferior to any of their contemporaries, or to their own great progenitors. "Holland," says Professor Thorold Rogers, "is the origin of scientific medicine and rational therapeutics. From Holland came the first optical instruments, the best mathematicians, the most intelligent philosophers, as well as the boldest and most original thinkers. Amsterdam and Rotterdam held the printing presses of Europe in the early days of the republic; the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... when efforts have been made to dot the island with sugar-plantations; but at the time we speak of, this was a solitary spot, behind which dark forests stretched upwards to the summit. Among these forests, on the shoulder of the hill, there occurs an optical phenomenon, not unknown in Europe, which is here an object of superstitious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... deeper far than the neolithic hunter could ever have imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of civilization; it brought the steam-engine, the telephone, woman's rights, and the county councillor directly in its train. With the eye of faith, had he only possessed that useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan might doubtless have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's sister looming dimly in the remote future. Till that moment human life had been almost stationary: thenceforth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds, like a kangaroo society, on its upward path towards ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Creator before the creature, and so on, in the analogical order, till the smallest conceivable "vital unit" is reached in the universe of organic matter. To begin, therefore, with microscopic observation, at a point in the ephemeromorphic world where that optical instrument fails to give back any intelligible answer, and synthetically follow this chain of causation upward and outward to Dr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud of mist," in which it is assumed that all ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... rest and of obscurity are the same." What is this art of meditation, but the power of withdrawing ourselves from the world, to view that world moving within ourselves, while we are in repose? As the artist, by an optical instrument, reflects and concentrates the boundless landscape around him, and patiently traces all nature in that ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... them. As usual, the garments do not fit you, you are lost in the garments, or you cannot get into them at all; this is not your suit of clothes, it must be another's:—alas, these are not your dimensions, these are only the optical angles you subtend; on the whole, you will never ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Begh (in Connemara), this summer, I passed through many spider-lines so strong as to offer a very sensible resistance before breaking. I don't remember to have ever before met with them so strong and tenacious, and the makers of optical instruments might there have found abundance of threads which I am told are valuable as cross-wires for transit- instruments and theodolites. I did not meet with any of the spiders that had thrown out these lines, but judging of them by their works ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... such tales as these they lured on the Pole from day to day; and at last persuaded him to be a witness of their mysteries. Whether they played off any optical delusions upon him; or whether, by the force of a strong imagination, he deluded himself, does not appear; but certain it is, that he became a complete tool in their hands, and consented to do whatever they wished him. Kelly, at these interviews, placed himself at a certain distance from the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Naples, appeared the two brothers, John Baptiste and John Vincent Porta, those twin spirits, the Castor and Pollux of the natural philosophy of that age, and whose scenical museum delighted and awed, by its optical illusions, its treasure of curiosities, and its natural magic, all learned natives and foreigners. Their names are still famous, and their treatises, De Humana Physiognomia and Magia Naturalis, are still opened by the curious, who discover these children of philosophy wandering in the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... pair of bellows; in another moment the gleams of flame grew brighter, and she fancied that three masked figures suddenly flashed out; but the terrible vision disappeared so swiftly that she took it for an optical delusion. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Provincial Photographic Association Mr. J. Traill Taylor, formerly of New York, commenced his lecture by referring to the functions of lenses, and by describing the method by which the necessary curves were computed in order to obtain a definite focal length. The varieties of optical glass were next discussed, and specimens (both in the rough and partly shaped state) were handed round for examination. The defects frequently met with in glass, such as striae and tears, were then treated upon; specimens of lenses defective from this cause were ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... I told you of the singular experience I had some five or six years ago with an old astronomer, who thought he had established an optical ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Esquimau snow goggle, which is simply a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and illuminated by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or kind of glass protection. A French metal device of the same order that is advertised in the dealer's catalogues was found to fail, perhaps owing to a wrong optical arrangement of the slits. It caused an eye-strain that brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically worked out and such a device perfected, it would be a boon to the traveller over sun-lit snow, for it would do away ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... able by any arrangement of reflected light to get power enough to print negatives of the ordinary density, and have only succeeded by causing the light to be equally dispersed over the negative by a lens as used in the optical lantern, but the arrangements required are somewhat different to that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... museum. Such was the display, indeed, that when Mademoiselle Marguerite took a seat at the table, between the General and his wife, and opposite Madame Leon, she asked herself if she had not been the victim of that dangerous optical delusion known as prejudice. She noticed that the supply of knives and forks was rather scanty; but many economical housewives keep most of their silver under lock and key; besides the china was very handsome and marked with the General's monogram, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... beating full on its smiling, dead face, and also on a deep wound just above his heart, from which the blood oozed redly, staining the grass on which he lay. Mastering the sick horror which seized me at this sight, I sprung forward—the shadow vanished instantly—it was a mere optical delusion, the result of my overwrought and excited condition. I shuddered involuntarily at the image my own heated fancy had conjured up; should I always see Guido thus, I thought, even ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... particularly at the Descent, we undergo an optical illusion which often seems to be incredible. All the shrubs, fir trees, stables, houses, etc., seem to be bent in a slanting direction, as by an immense pressure of air. They are all standing awry, so much awry that the chalets and cottages of the peasants seem to be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to his friend and assistant, Mr. James Cook, F.R.A.S, who gave him his first lessons in lens-making some twenty years ago. To Mr. John A. Brashear of Allegheny, Pa, thanks are due for much miscellaneous information on optical work, which is included verbatim in the text, some of it contained originally in printed papers, and some most kindly communicated to the writer for the purpose of this book. In particular, the writer would ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely still: a company of white hoods, a field full of little Alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them. [Mr. Herschel, speaking of a paper of Fresnel's, observes—"This memoir was read to the Institute, 7th of October, 1816; a supplement was received, 19th of January, 1818; M. Arago's report on it was read, 4th of June, 1821: and while every optical philosopher in Europe has been impatiently expecting its appearance for seven years, it lies as yet unpublished, and is only known to us by meagre notices in a periodical journal." MR HERSCHEL'S TREATISE ON LIGHT, p. ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty, came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... OPTICAL MANUAL; or, Handbook of Instructions for the Guidance of Surgeons in Testing Quality and Range of Vision, and in Distinguishing and dealing with Optical Defects in General. With 74 Drawings ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... were not using anything solid at all. Each defending vessel, depending upon its type and class, carried from four up to a hundred or so burnished-metal reflectors some four feet in diameter; each with a small black device at its optical center and each pouring out a tight beam of highly effective energy. It was at these reflectors, and particularly at these tiny devices, that the small-arms fire was directed, and the marksmanship of the Dilipics was very good indeed. However, each ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
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