"Nebula" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the account now generally accepted, the original material of the earth seems to have been a semi-solid or semi-fluid mass formed by the condensation of the still more fluid or even gaseous nebula out of which all the planets of the solar system have been formed and of which the sun is the still fiery core. As soon as the earth had cooled sufficiently its substances crystallized and wrinkled to form the first mountains and ridges; between and among these were the basins which soon ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... wherein thousands and thousands of tiny legs quiver and shake, while threads are extended along the way to be followed. The whole work resolves itself into a delicate veil which swallows up the scattered family. We then see an exquisite nebula against whose opalescent tapestry the tiny animals ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... aware she had scarcely given him a biography, but he liked to take her as a mystical figure floating out of a sort of nebula. Such personal details as might have been relatable of any other woman he did not want to know; they would have interfered with this purely artistic ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... shall have waned into everlasting silence; when "all the pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre;" when man with all his achievements and triumphs, his love and laughter, his songs and sighs, is forgotten even more completely than his Paleolithic ancestors; then, shall some portion of the nebula which now bejewels Andromeda's girdle become evolutionized into a flora and a fauna, a civilization and a spirituality unto which the visions of the wisest seers have never attained? Shall this subtle, evanescent mystery which we call life, which glorifies so many varied ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... illusion of the senses would make the stars stationary in the vault of heaven, Astronomy, by her aspiring labors, has assigned indefinite bounds to space; and if she have set limits to the great nebula to which our solar system belongs, it has only been to show us in those remote regions of our optic powers, islet on islet of scattered nebulae. The feeling of the sublime, so far as it arises from a contemplation of ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... disappeared, and on April 26th it was of the sixteenth magnitude; but on August 17th it brightened to the tenth, showing the principal nebular band in its spectrum, and no sign of approach or recession. It was as if it emerged from one part of the nebula, cooled down, and rushed through another part of the nebula, rendering the nebular gas more ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... the nebula of the first quarter of the century had condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period. When, a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the "Saturday Club" gathered about the long ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... when I knew my brother to be at no great distance, making observations with his various instruments on double stars, planets, and the like; and I could have his assistance immediately when I found a nebula, or cluster of stars, of which I intended to give a catalogue. I had the comfort to see," she continues, "that my brother was satisfied with my endeavours to assist him when he wanted another person either to run to the clocks, write down a memorandum, ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... by those who look through a telescope for the first time,—especially if it is directed upon a planet or nebula—is commonly one of disappointment. They have been told that such and such powers will exhibit Jupiter's belts, Saturn's rings, and the continent-outlines on Mars; yet, though perhaps a higher power is applied, they fail to detect these appearances, ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And I believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,—ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we call the nebula of Orion,—looking on, Sir, with what organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,—the stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... 1785, he attained a position among mathematicians and astronomers almost equal to Newton's; his "Three Laws" demonstrated the stability of the solar system; he published many treatises on lunar and planetary problems, electricity, magnetism, and a Nebula-hypothesis; his "Mecanique Celeste" is unrivalled in that class of work; surviving the Revolution he became implicated in politics without success or credit; he received his marquisate from Louis XVIII. in 1817, when he became President ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... miracles are there in coronium and nebulium which, as the child of nebula and sun, we inherit? Yes—and in Tycho's enigma which came from ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the Nebula in Orion, as forced to show out by Lord Rosse.—You see a head thrown back, and raising its face, (or eyes, if eyes it had,) in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown heavens. What should be its skull wears what might be an Assyrian tiara, only ending behind in a floating ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... with their planet. As for the cloudy atmosphere, they could have developed some system of radio or radar investigation of the universe. The Navy research units, I knew, were probing the far-off Crab nebula in the Milky Way with special radio devices. This same method, or something far superior, could have been developed on Venus, or other planets surrounded ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... invisible emanation radiating from every individual. An ethereal radiation. The egg-shaped human nebula. Psychic atmosphere sensed by everyone, but seen by but few. The clairvoyant vision. The phosphorescent flame, and luminous cloud. The colors in the aura and what they mean. Effect of mental states, emotion and passion, upon its aura. The human aura is a very important and interesting ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... a hot volume of rotating liquid, and that as this further contracted and cooled, the planets, and moons, and planetary rings fell off from it and gradually solidified, the sun being left as the solitary comparatively uncooled portion of the original nebula. In partial illustration of this, he caused a little globe of oil, suspended in an aqueous liquid of nearly its own specific gravity, to rotate, and as it rotated it was seen, by means of its magnified image upon the screen, to throw ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... when the telescope of her infallible reason was brought to bear upon the coldly glittering points, they flickered and went out. More than once a flaming comet, of German manufacture, trailed in glory athwart her dazzled vision; but close observation resolved the gilded nebula, and the nucleus mocked her. Doubt engendered doubt; the death of one difficulty was the instant birth of another. Wave after wave of skepticism surged over her soul, until the image of a great personal God was swept from its altar. But atheism never yet usurped the sovereignty of the human mind; ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... statement concerning the creation of the universe as the one here given is found in I King (Eeki-kyo). The primordial substance is not exactly 'gas,' but we may conceive it as being something like a nebula. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... 8. Suck, or Nebula, currents form in the Milky ways (the same as two or more currents of air coming together and making a whirlwind), which concentrates the material into bodies, thus forming constellations and comets; also rings ...
— ABC's of Science • Charles Oliver
... and you only smooth away all obstacles to tyranny to-morrow. A nation that aspires to EQUALITY is unfit for FREEDOM. Throughout all creation, from the archangel to the worm, from Olympus to the pebble, from the radiant and completed planet to the nebula that hardens through ages of mist and slime into the habitable world, the first ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving more annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while tears rolled profusely down my face, from mere muscular irritation. Had I stirred a finger, the whole battalion would have been slapping its cheeks. Such enemies were, however, a valuable aid to discipline, on the whole, as they abounded in ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... shown that the whole stellar universe is made up of the same chemical materials as those with which we are familiar upon the earth. A part of the dazzling brilliance of the noonday sun is due to the vapor of iron floating in his atmosphere, and the faint luminosity of the remotest cloudlike nebula is the glow of just such hydrogen as enters into every drop of water ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Arcot, leaning back comfortably in his chair. "We're sorry you're so busy. We were thinking of going out to see what Antares, Betelguese, or Polaris looked like at close range. And, if we don't get too bored, we might run over to the giant model nebula in Andromeda, or one of the others. Tough about your being busy; you might have helped us by designing the ship and earned your board and passage. Tough." ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... example, of the earth and the moon and of their motion about the sun; of the atom, as we imagine it, the molecule and the cell. For is not the sphere, or ovoid, the unit form of nature; and is not the spiral vortex its characteristic motion, from that of the nebula in the sky to the electron in the atom? Thus, on the hypothesis that our space is traversing four-dimensional space, and that the forms of our space are cross-sections of four-dimensional forms, the unity and harmony of nature would be accounted for ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Whether at the present time the sun was getting hotter or colder we did not certainly know. We could reason back to the time when the sun was sufficiently expanded to fill the whole space occupied by the solar system, and was reduced to a great glowing nebula. Though man's life, the life of the race perhaps, was too short to give us direct evidence of any distinct stages of so august a process, still the probability was great that the nebular hypothesis, especially in the more precise form given to it by Roche, did represent broadly, notwithstanding ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... that I saw the dark nebula—at first, an impalpable cloud, away to my right. It grew, steadily, to a clot of blackness in the night. How long I watched, it is impossible to say; for time, as we count it, was a thing of the past. It came ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... "Here are our reference points. Here's Andromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own Milky Way." He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. "Now we can check some of these high magnitude reference stars with ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... conceptions, have never been able to see how stupendous an anachronism they committed (without even taking the trouble to analyse Time) when they placed God prior to His Created Universe in the void and formless Nebula. Such a God would not have been worth the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... on up the hill to Charlotte Barnard's. The spring was advancing. All the trees were full of that green nebula of life which comes before the blossom. Little wings, bearing birds and songs, cut the air. A bluebird shone on a glistening fence-rail, like a jewel on a turned hand. Over across the fields red oxen were moving down ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... suppose—which was not the case—they had never heard of one another before, is it not possible that they were brought together by a law as unevadable as gravity? There would be nothing more miraculous in such attraction than there is in that thread which the minutest atom of gas in the Orion nebula extends across billions of miles to the minutest atom of dust on the road under my window. However, be all this as it may, it would be wrong to say that the meeting between Catharine and Mr. Cardew was prevented by accident. She loitered: she went up Fosbrooke Street: if she had gone straight to ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... of many suns—one of the countless stars in that enormous starry wreath that surrounds us, and which we call the Milky Way. And we direct our telescopes to this Milky Way and find that what we took for nebula is for the most part an accumulation of countless millions of suns, each perhaps with its planets. Then, as we sweep the sky with our glass, we discover numberless little wreath-like spiral cloudlets, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... a circle which ever grew smaller, with a stubborn whirl which increased the dizziness of the weary pilgrims and the violence of their chants. And soon the circle formed a nucleus, the nucleus of a nebula, so to say, around which the endless riband of fire began to coil itself. And the brasier grew larger and larger—there was first a pool, then a lake of light. The whole vast Place du Rosaire changed at last into a burning ocean, rolling its little sparkling ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the matter up, at all events," said the professor, taking another peep through the telescope. "For the present the Martian philosophers appear to have shut up shop; and, as my nebula has now risen, I should like to do a little work on it before daybreak. Look here, if it's a fine night, can you join me to-morrow? We shall then continue our observations; but, in the meanwhile, you had better say ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... also found that many of the nebulae have not a symmetrical form, as they appear to have in inferior instruments; for instance, Fig. 81 is a cluster with long resolvable filaments from its southern extremity, and Fig. 85 is an oblong cluster with a bright centre. Fig. 45 is an annular nebula, like Herschel's drawing of the annular nebula in Lyra. I have sent drawings of a few of these objects to the Royal Society, they were forwarded a few days ago. We have upon the whole as yet observed but little with the telescope of 3 feet aperture. You recollect ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... acanthus leaf, for example, express the idea of successive impulses, mounting, attaining a maximum, and descending—expanding from some focus of force in the manner universal throughout nature. Science recognizes in the spiral an archetypal form, whether found in a whirlpool or in a nebula. A fret is a series of highly conventionalized spirals: translate it from angular to curved and we have the wave-band; isolate it and we have the volute. Egg and dart are phallic emblems, female and male; or, if you prefer, as ellipse and straight line, they ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... unsettled, attached to the one instinct of living: a series of habits of our sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. "As an English poet has very truly ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... street we heard the softened strains of wind-blown music, and saw a cloud of lancers moving, the sun glowing with a subdued light upon the massed armor, but striking bright upon the soaring lance-heads—a vaguely luminous nebula, so to speak, with a constellation twinkling above it—and that was our guard of honor. It joined us, the procession was complete, the first war-march of Joan of Arc was begun, the curtain ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "I begin to understand how it was. The shock, the struggle within himself and the revulsion of his conscience from the victory won by the worse side of his nature started up a new center, or threw off a new nebula, of consciousness—we can only vaguely guess at the process. It proved strong enough to form within his brain ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... into little groups, and into the saloons and gambling halls of the town. And when the blizzard was spent, and the cold stars were dropping their frozen light, these dull-witted things began to move, slowly at first, circling about like a great forming nebula, but gaining momentum and power with each revolution. More than a thousand strong, they circled out into the frozen streets of the little town, and up along the main thoroughfare. Their dull murmurs slowly gained volume. Their low curses welled into a roar. And then, like the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... born out of my mother, generations guided me; My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it, For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long low strata piled to rest it on, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care; All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... being at the end of the upper Thames. Oxford, were there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we have explored the denser portion—the nucleus of the nebula of historic stars that stretches into the western sky as seen from the metropolis. We lay aside our little lorgnette. It has shown us as much as we can map in these pages, and that we have endeavored to do with at least the merit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to cyclonic storms of atomicity; it means that tendencies survive sunburnings,—survive all cosmic evolutions and disintegrations. The elements are evolutionary products only; and the difference of universe from universe ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... quoe sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram et Gangem, pauci dignoscere possunt Vera bona, atque illis multum diversa, remota Erroris nebula— ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... be, we proceed to consider what it is. Some inquirers—arguing from the 'nebular theory,' which assumes the formation of the several planets, one after another, from nebulous matter—have supposed the zodiacal light to be a remnant of that matter yet unconcentrated. In this view, it may be a nebula, brightest in the centre, as is the case with most, and fainter towards the margin. According to Humboldt, 'we may with great probability attribute the zodiacal light to the existence of an extremely oblate ring of nebulous matter, revolving freely in space ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... resolved some of the patches of nebulous matter into multitudes of stars. The opponents of the nebular hypothesis were overjoyed; they now sang paeans to astronomy, because, as they said, it had proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to the conclusion that all nebula must be alike; that, if SOME are made up of systems of stars, ALL must be so made up; that none can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... one man, would be like picking out one star in the Andromeda nebula. Not impossible. Not ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... system, and, gazing thence still farther toward infinity, we watch with bated breath the birth, the progress, and the death of worlds. To one of the most distant objects in the depths of space, known as the Ring Nebula, the ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... hortis Hesperidum beatiora longo Ianiculi iugo recumbunt: lati collibus imminent recessus et planus modico tumore vertex caelo perfruitur sereniore et curvas nebula tegente valles solus luce nitet peculiari: puris leniter admoventur astris celsae culmina delicata villae. hinc septem dominos videre montes et totam licet aestimare Romam, Albanos quoque Tusculosque colles et quodcumque iacet ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... In the opinion of some the light here spoken of was a kind of luminous nebula, and that on the making of the sun this returned to the matter of which it had been formed. But this cannot well be maintained, as in the beginning of Genesis Holy Scripture records the institution ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... claim of the doodwallah to be reckoned among the nowkers. His right is more than doubtful, and I will yield no further. Nevertheless, there is a cluster of petty dependents, a nebula of minor satellites, which have us for the focus of their orbit, and which cannot be left out of a comprehensive account of our system. Whence, for example, is that raucus stridulation which sets every tooth on edge and sends a rheumatic shiver ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... for while it permits the accumulation of such particles around the equatorial plane of the sun, it allows no resting-place very far removed from this plane. The zodial light, therefore, is not the resisting medium, but the passage of the radial stream through a diffuse nebula of atoms, brought down the poles of the vortex by the polar current, and held in check along the central plane ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... appendix axis datum erratum focus formula genus larva medium memorandum nebula radius series species stratum ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... him." [6] Indeed, how could the universe "love" one of {51} its mere passing phases? Is it a wonder that this cheerless creed has "increasingly repelled rather than attracted religious people" when once they have understood its inwardness? We ask for bread and receive—a nebula; we call for our Father, and are told to content ourselves with a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... observatory of Cambridge in Massachusetts. This town, where the first University of the United States was founded, is justly celebrated for its astronomical staff. There are assembled the greatest men of science; there is the powerful telescope which enabled Bond to resolve the nebula of Andromeda and Clarke to discover the satellite of Sirius. This celebrated institution was, therefore, worthy in every way of the confidence of ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the somewhat similar anecdote of lynch-law in Balzac's Les Chouans, he ought to recognise the fact—good as that also is. Les Ames du Purgatoire is also "first choice." Of what may be called the satellites of the great Don Juan story—satellites with a nebula instead of a planet for their centre—it is quite the greatest. But of this group La Venus d'Ille is my favourite, perhaps for a rather illegitimate reason. That reason is the possibility of comparing it with ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... furthest extremities of the first crystal till the liquid is filled with loose feathery aggregations comparable in size with one another. In a similar way the crystallizing out of matter may have given rise, not to a uniform nebula in space, but to detached nebula, approximately of equal mass, from which ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... the particulars when we generalise. We cannot see the trees for the wood. We think of 'the Church,' and do not think of the thousands of men and women who make it up. We cannot discern the separate stars in the galaxy. But God's eye resolves what to us is a nebula, and to Him every single glittering point of light hangs rounded and separate in the heaven. Therefore this assurance of our text is to be taken by every single soul that loves God, and trusts Him through Jesus Christ, as belonging to it, as though ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... but I fancy Ooma may have been undergoing readjustment.—My dear, she has grown as pudgy as a Jupitan, and her clothes—but then she always did look more like a spiral nebula ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... world created in some fixed moment of time, on which had been placed by some outward agency all the forms and shapes of nature that we know, came the conception of a planet congealing out of a nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval form of life multiplying and diversifying itself through succeeding stages of development to form both the animal and the vegetable world. This conception not only enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a strange sense ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... York {311} looked up here. Poor dear Mr. Flamsteed does not know I am writing a letter to a gentleman on Valentine's day; he is walked out with Sir Isaac Newton (they are pretty good friends now, though they do squabble a little sometimes) and Sir William Herschel, to see a new nebula. Sir Isaac says he can't make out at all how it is managed; and I am sure I cannot help him. I never bothered my head about those things down below, and I ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Castle. This instrument cannot be turned about towards every part of the sky, like the equatorials we have recently been considering. The great tube is only capable of elevation in altitude along the meridian, and of a small lateral movement east and west of the meridian. Every star or nebula visible in the latitude of Parsonstown (except those very near the pole) can, however, be observed in the great telescope, if looked for ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesses ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody will pay for his own telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... vero et familia viri, ut et circumstantibus risum moveant sibique loquendo laudem comparent, facetiam in sermone plurimam observant; dum vel sales, vel laedoria, nunc levi nunc mordaci, sub aequivocationis vel amphibolae nebula, relatione diversa, transpositione verborum et trajectione, subtiles et dicaces emittunt." And he cites examples of their witticisms. "Descriptio Kambriae," chap. xiv., De verborum facetia et urbanitate. "Opera," Brewer, 1861-91, 8 vols., vol. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter were old friends in new surroundings, and were all dazzlingly dressed. The part of the Milky Way between the stars Sirius and Centaur was so rich in stars and crowded nebula: that it seemed a perfect blaze of illumination. And there were the Magellanic clouds, white-looking patches made up of countless stars individually unseen to the naked eye, and nebulae—mists of radiating light—all shining brilliantly and revolving around the starless South Pole. To ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... they were natural to us. His communication of the most subtle states of mind is complete. But in a Kipling we cannot pretend that there is infinite subtlety and elusiveness, that there is a cosmic condensing of a whole nebula of spiritual experience. His ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... names, it meant "the world," just as the natives' name for themselves, Falsethsa, meant "the people," or "us," or "the only race." To Commander Powers, fifty years old, with eleven of them in Survey work, the world was Planet Two of a star called something unpronounceable in the nebula of something else equally pointless. He had not bothered to learn the native name of Island Twenty-seven, because his ship had mapped one thousand three hundred and eighty-six islands, all small, and either rocky or swampy or both. Island Twenty-seven, to him, had only ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier
... of this word has been a great puzzle to the learned, who, however, connect it with nebula, a cloud, as the clouds come from the sea. He had his temple ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... are those, again, who are good enough to grant that the Catholic Church fostered knowledge and science up to the days of Galileo, and that she has only retrograded for the last several centuries. But the new teacher, whom I am contemplating in the light of that nebula out of which he will be concentrated, echoes the words of the early persecutor of Christians, that they are the "enemies of the human race." "But for Athanasius, but for Augustine, but for Aquinas, the world would have had its Bacons and ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... one beholds the perfidy darting into hidden places, young man, in which the defenders of foolish virgins are buffeted and browbeaten by counter-jumpers with craniums as big as the great nebula of Orion. The avenue named after a crumbled philanthropist, who could walk, sheeted, through the atrocious night could his sacred dust awake to the abominations that are perpetrated under the protection of his shadow. Let dragons lay it waste ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... bright and clear. Right ahead were Betelguese and Rigel, and the great nebula of Orion still beyond. There was no twinkling, but each star a bright, steady point of light. And if Garth's indicators were correct, we were moving toward them at a speed now seventy-five times that of light ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... Mr. Goil. You can see the debris floating down there." I pointed, and Goil looked at the little pin points of light reflecting from a great volume of dust, nebula-like in its dim luminosity. "When the crew starts actual operation, we will turn on the magnification screens and get some close-up views ...
— Jack of No Trades • Charles Cottrell
... the intense heat which suddenly affected this star had its origin from without. At the same time, I cannot agree with Meyer and Klein in considering that the cause of the heat was either the downfall of a planetary mass on the star, or the collision of the star with a star-cloudlet, or nebula, traversing space in one direction while the star swept onwards in another. A planet could not very well come into final conflict with its sun at one fell swoop. It would gradually draw nearer and nearer, not by the narrowing ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the verdurous night With stars and pearly nebula o'erlay; Azalea-boughs half rosy and half white Shine through the green and clustering apple-spray, Such as the fairy-queen before her knight Waved in old story, luring him away Where round lost isles Hesperian billows break Or towers loom up ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... nimbus; cumulus, woolpack[obs3], cirrus, stratus; cirrostratus, cumulostratus; cirrocumulus; mackerel sky, mare's tale, dirty sky; curl cloud; frost smoke; thunderhead. [Science of clouds] nephelognosy[obs3]; nephograph[obs3], nephology[obs3]. effervescence, fermentation; bubbling &c. v. nebula; cloudliness &c. (opacity) 426[obs3]; nebulosity &c. (dimness) 422. V. bubble, boil, foam, froth, mantle, sparkle, guggle[obs3], gurgle; effervesce, ferment, fizzle. Adj. bubbling &c. v.; frothy, nappy[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Swam round, probably from exhaustion. Celsus; i. 3: "Si quando insuetus aliquis laboravit, aut si multo plus, quam solet, etiam is qui assuevit...... oculi caligant." The affection is well described by Caelius Aurol. Chron. i. 2: "Repentina visus tenebratio, atque nebula, cum ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... a text book on geology one should find stated the view concerning the creation and age of the earth that was held a hundred years ago, and this view gravely put forward as a possible or alternative hypothesis with the current one deducible from the nebula theory, one would be excused for smiling while he turned to the title page to see who in the name of geology should write such stuff. Nevertheless this is precisely similar to what one will find in most treatises on physics for schools and colleges if he turns to the subject of light. For ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... imagine, however, that concealed in the cargo of Hypothetic Nebula destined for the construction of the Terrestrial Globe was a Protoplasmic Stowaway that sprang to being in the shape of a Critic just as the work ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... languor all gone, her interest aroused. Something was rising in her mind; not a sun of hope ah! no—but nebula, obscure, unformed, indistinct, yet with possible suns of hope, worlds of happiness, within it. What did her grandfather mean? Had he heard ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... their purposeless sallies. They clotted on tiles and gutter-pipes, and began frenziedly to build a cell or two of comb ere they discovered that their queen was not with them; then flung off to seek her, or whirled, dishevelled and insane, into another hissing nebula on the false rumour that she was there. I scowled upon them with disfavour, and a massy, blue thunder-head rose majestically from behind the elm-trees of Sumtner Barton Rectory, arched over and scowled with me. Then I realised that it was not bees nor locusts that ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... quisque id quod quisque potest et valet edit, ferro ferit, tela frangunt, boat caelum fremitu virum, ex spiritu atque anhelitu nebula constat, cadunt ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... case, that of the world in which we live, but that this is inhabited we know absolutely, and without possibility of doubt. Now if on this evidence any one were to infer that every heavenly body without exception, sun, planet, satellite, comet, fixed star or nebula, is inhabited, and must be so from the inherent constitution of things, his inference would exactly resemble that of the writers who conclude that because volition is the efficient cause of our own bodily motions, it must ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... 28: Its appearance gave rise to much discussion among astronomers. On the 17th Sir John Herschel saw its nucleus from Collingwood in Kent, and on the following night a dim nebula only; so it was ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... from the consideration of orb-filled space and the character of the universal elements, to trace the history of our own globe. And we find that this falls significantly into connection with the primary order of things suggested by Laplace's theory of the origin of the solar system in a vast nebula or fire-mist, which for ages past has been condensing under the influence of gravitation and the radiation ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of the evolutionists' inevitable attack upon us enters naturally at this point; because, while the average mind is willing enough to grant some sort of vague omnipresent "will to evolve" to the primordial "nebula" and even prepared to allow it such obscure consciousness as is implied in the phrase "life-force" or "elan vital," it is startled and shocked to a supreme degree when we assert that such "nebula," if it existed, was the outward ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... see, if the nebula had been exactly what the development men assert—simple, homogeneous matter—how they could ever have made such a composite world as this out of it, or indeed how they could make anything but itself out of it. No chemical ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... consisted of great numbers of stars which could not be recognised by unassisted vision. He counted no fewer than forty in the cluster called the Pleiades, or Seven Stars; and he has given us drawings of this constellation, as well as of the belt and sword of Orion, and of the nebula of Praesepe. In the great nebula of the Milky Way, he descried crowds of minute stars; and he concluded that this singular portion of the heavens derived its whiteness from still smaller stars, which his telescope ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... just two seconds of it; after a few more seconds, when man has been frozen off the earth, geological time will stretch for as long again, before the earth bumps into something, and be comes nebula once more. God's hands haven't been particularly full, sir, have they— two seconds out of twenty-four hours—if ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... already distinguished by common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (to apeiron), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... universe; just as they have discerned and taught that all force is one and eternal, so coordinated throughout the whole universe that whatever affects any atom measurably affects the whole boundless realm of matter and force, to the most distant star or nebula on the dim confines of space; so the ancient sages had discerned and taught that all consciousness is one, immortal, indivisible, infinite; so finely correlated and continuous that whatever is perceived by any consciousness is, whether ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... our instruments than to any difference between them and such as have been already resolved. Sir John Herschell, a high authority in such a case, tells us that "we have every reason to believe, at least in the generality of cases, that a nebula is nothing more than a cluster of stars."[33] Sir David Brewster is equally explicit: "It was certainly a rash generalization to maintain that nebulae differed essentially from clusters of stars, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... ship's search-light, and from it, at irregular intervals, came the warning toll of a heavy bell. It was the bell-buoy at the entrance to Key West harbor, and far away on the southeastern horizon appeared a faintly luminous nebula which marked the position of Key West city. Under the war regulations then in force, no vessels other than those belonging to the United States navy were permitted to enter or leave the port of Key West between late evening twilight ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... Vsevolod Ivanov, another Siberian, is perhaps the most interesting for the subjects he chooses (the Civil War in the backwoods of Siberia), but his style is, though vigorous, diffuse and hazy, and his narrative is lost in a nebula of ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... nebula has been formed in the sky and commences to revolve, a little matter in the center where motion is slowest commences to crystallize. When it has reached a certain density it is caught in the swirl, and whirled nearer and nearer to the outward extremity of what has, by that time, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... order; anywhere or anywhen, in nature. Sometimes law and order are patent and visible to our limited vision; sometimes they are hidden. But every particle of the matter of the most fantastic-looking nebula in the heavens is a realm of law and order in itself; and, that it is so, is the essential condition of the possibility of solar and planetary evolution from the apparent ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fashioning of New Knowledge as this simple but profound idea of Evolution, that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future. And with the picture of a continuity of evolution from nebula to social systems comes a promise of an increasing control—a promise that Man will become not only a more accurate student, but a more complete master ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... at once, a new-born world cohered out of the nebula, and the sight of its measured, orderly whirling dazed him. He had been seized with a wish—almost an intention, so stunning in its audacity that he all but reeled under the shock. It seemed to him that the thing must have been germinated in his mind without his knowledge; it had lain there, gathering ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... beginning of this solar system to which we belong. We are all familiar with the ordinary astronomical theory of its origin—that which is commonly called the nebular hypothesis—according to which it first came into existence as a gigantic glowing nebula, of a diameter far exceeding that of the orbit of even the outermost of the planets, and then, as in the course of countless ages that enormous sphere gradually cooled and contracted, the system as we know ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... considered from two standpoints; the physical and the spiritual. The danger is in making the physical alone interpret the spiritual and in declaring that "man is simply a ripple on the sea of human events and human life, merely on episode marking a particular stage in the cooling of a nebula." This method of interpretation leads to the ruling out of any personal responsibility on the part of man for his thoughts or actions, the obliteration of the distinction between right and wrong and the denial of a personal God and ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... Little Bear to between the Guardians and the Pointers. In the northwest, fairly high up, we find Cassiopeia, the Seated Lady, and on her right, lower down, the inconspicuous constellation Cephius. Andromeda, the Chained Lady, is on Cassiopeia's left. The Great Nebula will be noticed in the map—it is faintly visible to the naked eye. Above Andromeda is Perseus, the Rescuing Knight, and above him the Charioteer (Auriga), nearly overhead. On the left of Andromeda is Aries, the Ram, ...
— Half-Hours with the Stars - A Plain and Easy Guide to the Knowledge of the Constellations • Richard A. Proctor
... from his Journal No. 1, now at the rooms of the Royal Society, may be seen a copy of his first observation of the Nebula of Orion, on March 4, 1774. This was made with his ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... [Footnote: Page 219] Anyone who is in possession of a telescope of but moderate power may satisfy himself of its futility on any starlight night. He has only to turn his telescope to one or two of the more conspicuous nebulae; the Great Nebula in Orion, for instance, or the Ring Nebula in Lyra, and his eye will receive light which has not come from any Sun, for it is a well- ascertained fact that these nebulae are nothing but vast masses of incandescent gas. And this ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... his musical imagination. Sometimes it took shape in an isolated phrase complete in itself: more often it would appear as a nebula enveloping a whole work: the structure of the work, its general lines, could be perceived through a veil, torn asunder here and there by dazzling phrases which stood out from the darkness with the clarity of sculpture. It was only a flash: sometimes others ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... selfish considerations. While Austria tried the hazards of war, her northern rival husbanded her resources, strengthened her position as the protectress of Northern Germany, and dextrously sought to attract the nebula of middle German States into her own sphere of influence. From his task of tilting a balance which was already decided, Sieyes was recalled to Paris in May, 1799, by the news of his election to the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... The nebula which was to form a cluster about the "North American Review" did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes |
