"Ocular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saved you the excitement of the scene I have imagined, but it puts me to the necessity of substituting a hurried description for the ocular satisfaction I had proposed to send you. Who would have supposed, thirty years since, that one Maga would not be enough for the world, and that New York would be the seat of its flourishing double! Yet it is now twelve ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... omens we are considering. The monsters guarding the approaches to temples and palaces[658] were but one form which this popular belief assumed, and when a colt was observed to have a lion's or a dog's claw, an ocular demonstration was afforded which at once strengthened and served to maintain a belief that at bottom is naught but a crude and primitive form of a theory of evolution. In a dim way man always felt the unity of the animal ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... vision, and who have not yet experienced the sufferings arising from any of the varied forms of ocular disease, appreciate the magnitude of the blessing vouchsafed to them? We venture ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... anterior region of the insect body, articulated at its base to the thorax, bearing the mouth structures and antennae. It is now believed to be made up of seven primitive segments, named in order: 1, the ocular or protocerebral; 2, the antenna or deutocerebral; 3, second antenna or tritocerebral; 4, mandibular; 5, superlingual; 6, maxillary; 7, ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... Pandora riding upon her anchor, and we thought we could distinguish the cabins and barracoons of King Dingo Bingo, peeping out from among the green trees. The barque looked no larger than a little boat, and although she appeared very near the river's mouth, that was also an ocular deception, for we knew that she was more ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... overlook any doubts that might exist as to the regularity of the court in the just sentence that would overtake acknowledged criminals. Thus, if Booth himself and a party of men clearly proved, by ocular evidence or confession, to have aided him, were here tried and condemned, and, as a consequence, executed, not much stress, we think, would be laid by many upon the irregularity of the mode by which they should reach that just death which all good citizens ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the laryngoscope was to throw the whole subject into almost hopeless confusion by the introduction of all sorts of errors of observation, each claiming to be founded on ocular proof, and believed in with ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... Davies's original adventure by daylight with the banks dry and the channels manifest. The reader has seen it on the chart, and can, up to a point, form his opinion; I can only add that I realized by ocular proof that no more fatal trap could have been devised for an innocent stranger; for approaching it from the north-west under the easiest conditions it was hard enough to verify our true course. In a period so full of new excitements it is not easy for ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... do it than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man was not to be daunted by a priori demonstrations of impossibility. One day there came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who have outsoared the eagle, and—alas!—carried death and destruction ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... good to be lost, especially as it bears upon the fate of a poor old friend of mine in past days who was fatally a victim to total abstinence. The story goes that a teetotal lecturer, in order to give his audience ocular proof of the poisonous character of alcohol, first magnifies the horrible denizens of stagnant water by his microscope, and then triumphantly kills them all by a drop or two of brandy! As if this did not prove the wholesomeness of eau de vie in such cases. If, for example, my poor friend above, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the elucidation of this point for its principal object. This expedition was also entrusted to my direction. I had scarcely a doubt of ultimate success, and set out with a confidence which nothing short of ocular demonstration could destroy. The result of our voyage down the Macquarie River, and the conjectures which naturally arose in my mind founded upon observations of its apparent termination, together with our subsequent journey ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... be done? If a continuous field of ice lay 150 miles off the southern coast of Spitzbergen, what would be the chance of getting to the land by going further north? Now that we had received ocular proof of the veracity of the Hammerfest skipper in this first particular, was it likely that we should have the luck to find the remainder of his story untrue? According to the track he had jotted down for me on the chart, the ice ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... you seen, as I did, the fire of truth in those gray eyes; had you felt the ring of sincerity in that quiet voice; had you realized the pathos of it all—you, too, would believe. You would not have needed the final ocular proof that I had—the weird rhamphorhynchus-like creature which he had brought back with ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... probably at an immense height above the surface, clouds which must be utterly unlike the clouds of Mars or the Earth in material as well as in form and mass. These markings enabled us to follow with clear ocular appreciation the rapid rotation of this planet. In the course of half-an-hour several distinct spots on different belts had moved in a direct line across a tenth of the face presented to us—a distance, upon ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... not satisfy me,' said Darsie; 'I must see my friend instantly; he is here, and he is here endangered on my account only—I have heard violent exclamations—the clash of swords. You will gain no point with me unless I have ocular demonstration of his safety.' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... They not only have appeared to me, but were as real to my ocular vision as any other external physical object which I saw with ...
— The Spectre In The Cart - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... nature that Natt should resist the temptation to show his cronies by ocular demonstration what a knowing young dog he could be if he liked. Natt never tried ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... afraid lest the ill example set by London should influence the rest of the kingdom. He expressed himself as willing to bear the expense of finding two or three honest persons in each ward, if required, to join the constable in an "ocular view." But in spite of every precaution fraudulent returns continued to flow in, and the collection of the tax to be slow ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... delight cum f'nent. Have ye ne'er a drap among the whole o' yees?" Receiving an answer in the negative, he turned about with a Kilkenny, "It don't signify," and toddled for the door, which he left open, to await Tommy's return. Redman knew Daley's propensity too well, and having ocular proof that he had wet t'other eye until it required more than ordinary effort to make either one stay open, he declined ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... money was sent to Ancon, on the pretence of placing it in safety from any attack by the Spanish forces, but possibly to secure it for the further purposes of the Protector. The squadron having thus ocular demonstration that its arrears could be paid, but were not, both officers and men refused longer to continue in a service which had brought them nothing ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... doctrine, so repugnant to the theories previously held, and to the immediate evidence of our senses, could only be established by a refined course of reasoning. The discovery of Jupiter's satellites was very opportune. Here we had an exquisite ocular demonstration of a system, though, of course, on a much smaller scale, precisely identical with that which Copernicus had proposed. The astronomer who had watched Jupiter's moons circling around their primary, who had noticed their eclipses and all the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... he became conscious of decaying power of vision. Being professionally a physician and naturally a philosopher, he conceived the idea that the eye might be improved by what he denominated a series of "ocular gymnastics." He therefore undertook to exercise his eyes upon the formation of minute letters—working upon them until the organs began to be weary, and then, like a prudent man, resting for hours. By progressing slowly and ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... camp, and arrived at dawn of day. I met with a very friendly reception, and had the good fortune to prevail upon the Indians to deliver me their furs upon the spot, which formed a very heavy load for both myself and men. We met our opponents in returning; but though they had ocular proof of my success, they nevertheless went on ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... everywhere, the panic was indescribable. One lady, my next neighbor, whom personally I knew, living at the moment, during the absence of her husband, with a few servants in a very solitary house, never rested until she had placed eighteen doors (so she told me, and, indeed, satisfied me by ocular proof), each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing-room, was like going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered fortress; at every sixth step one was stopped by a sort of ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... which all conceptions, especially those of the relations of quantities, are represented in intuition by signs; and thus the conclusions in that science are secured from errors by the fact that every proof is submitted to ocular evidence. Philosophical cognition does not possess this advantage, it being required to consider the general always in abstracto (by means of conceptions), while mathematics can always consider it in concreto (in an individual ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... own plan a thoroughly up-to-date place which would embrace on an extensive scale all the necessary requirements for their very large and expanding business, including residential quarters for their senior partner. That this has been successfully accomplished I have recently had ocular demonstration, and I have no hesitation in saving it is a marvel of perfection down to its very smallest detail. It is well worth any one's while to pay a visit to their premises, and I feel sure that my friend Jeffreys will ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... pulsation in the orbit and protrusion of the eyeball. There may be, in addition, congestion and oedema of the eyelids, and a distinct thrill and murmur, which can be controlled by compression of the common carotid in the neck. Varying degrees of ocular paralysis and of interference with ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... things as the sign of the cross, the use of sacramentals, the avoidance of notoriously injurious follies such as beginning work on Friday, the observance of such matters as wearing Principium Evangelii secundum Joannem on the person, and the paying of ocular deference to Saint Christopher on rising—these precautions and others like them are usually a sufficient safeguard. [I am afraid it is impossible to clear Sir John wholly of the charge of superstition. The "Beginning of the Gospel according to ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... be quite needless," Juno returned. "And of the gambling I have ocular proof, since I found him, cards, counters, and money, with my sick nephew. He had actually brought cards in ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... one of her majesty's subjects? He would probably find that functionary inditing a private letter to the English Secretary of State, giving the minister a graphic account of the rare doings of yesterday, and assuring the minister, from his own personal and ocular experience, that a member of one of the highest orders of the British peerage carried in the procession a lighted taper after two angels with amaranthine flowers and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... that of the Chinese, from the bottom to the top of the line, and that I have conveyed an erroneous idea of their natural form by arranging the characters horizontally instead of placing them in a perpendicular line. Not having now the opportunity of verifying by ocular proof what I understood to be the practical order of their writing, namely, from left to right (in the manner of the Hindus, who, there is reason to believe, were the original instructors of all these people), I shall only observe that I have among ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... barrier against its further progress? It is a state difficult to believe. Could I have listened with an ear of credulity to the tale of Thompson—could I have borne to listen to it with patience, had I not witnessed an act of turpitude that ocular demonstration could only render credible—had I not been prepared for that act by the tone, the manner, the expressions of the minister, when we passed an hour together, ignorant of each other's presence? It was a dreadful conviction that was forced upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... For example, a balloonist would have been greatly embarrassed in deciding, at the battle of Waterloo, whether it was Grouchy or Bluecher who was seen coming up by the Saint-Lambert road; but this uncertainty need not exist where the armies are not so much mixed. I had ocular proof of the advantage to be derived from such observations when I was stationed in the spire of Gautsch, at the battle of Leipsic; and Prince Schwarzenberg's aid-de-camp, whom I had conducted to the same point, could not deny that it was at my solicitation the prince was ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... preconceived ideas—and then I called to mind the poor fellow's speech about the beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... one knows so well as the Secretary, who opens and reads the letters, what a set is made at the man marked by a stroke of notoriety. Oh the varieties of dust for ocular use, offered in exchange for the gold dust of the Golden Dustman! Fifty-seven churches to be erected with half-crowns, forty-two parsonage houses to be repaired with shillings, seven-and-twenty ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Claus I do not regard the eyes of the Crustacea as limbs, and therefore admit no ocular segment; on the other hand I count in the median piece of the tail, to which the character of a segment is often denied. In opposition to its interpretation as a segment of the body, only the want of limbs can be cited; in its favour we have the relation of the intestine, which usually opens in this ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... Carey had ocular proof that the nude blacks were cautious enough to keep their skins clear of the fearful lash formed by the steel-wire-like tails. For the boomerang struck the distended jaws with a sharp crack, and the next moment the reptile was down, with ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... bear testimony to it in the world; and not because they only were admitted to see Christ after his resurrection: for the fact is otherwise. The gospel indeed, concerned to shew the evidence on which the faith of the world was to rest, is very particular in setting forth the ocular demonstration which the apostles had of the resurrection; and mentions others, who saw Christ after his resurrection, only accidentally, and as the thread of the history led to it. But yet it is certain, there were many others, who had this satisfaction, ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... facilities being ample, and the inducements abundant. Intelligently and successfully to consummate such a purpose is an education in itself. The tourist will find all previous study enhanced in value by ocular demonstration, which imparts life and warmth to the cold facts of the chroniclers, besides which a vast store-house of positive information is created which time cannot exhaust. Perhaps the majority of travelers see only that which comes clearly before them; but this they do most faithfully, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... drank we discussed the important question of what we should do next. Our recent experiences had been of such a character as to convince us that our prospects of reaching Rio before our stock of provisions should be consumed—if ever—were exceedingly slight. On the other hand, we had already had ocular demonstration of the fact that we were not far from the track of south-bound craft; we therefore eventually arrived unanimously at the conclusion that, taking all things into consideration, the best thing we could do was to cruise to the northward, in the hope that within ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... shrugging my shoulders, decided to push incredulity to its very last limits. But whatever might have been my wish, I was compelled to yield to the weight of ocular demonstration. ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... ears have been deafened against truth, by the clamours of sinister conspirators against the monarchy instead of the monarchs; if all these circumstances, I repeat, do not completely acquit the Queen, argument, or even ocular demonstration itself, would be thrown away. Posterity will judge impartially, and with impartial judges the integrity of Marie ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... consequent noise of breaking up the meeting, you'd thought the inhabitants of the infernal regions had broke loose. For my part, I went contentedly home and finished my tea, but was soon informed what was going forward. Not crediting it without ocular demonstration, I went and was satisfied. They mustered, I'm told, upon Fort Hill, to the number of about two hundred, and proceeded, two by two, to Griffin's wharf, where Hall, Bruce and Coffin lay.... The latter arrived at the wharf only the day before, and was freighted ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... every-day occurrence to most working botanists, having to elaborate collections from countries not so well explored as Europe—when the forms in question, or one of the two, are as yet unnamed? Does he introduce as a new species every form which he cannot connect by ocular proof with a near relative, from which it differs only in particulars which he sees are inconstant in better known species of the same group? We suppose not. But, if he does, little improvement for ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... It was an edifice built in times when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place, the insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... were but rarely seen in Europe prior to the seventeenth century, there were but few opportunities of correcting the popular fallacy by ocular demonstration. Hence ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... results already obtained in past years, in the dyeing department of the Yorkshire College, where it has been our custom to expose to light and other influences the patterns dyed by our students. Further, I wish to give you an ocular demonstration of the action of light or dyed colors, by means of these silk, wool, and cotton patterns, portions of which have been exposed for 34 days and nights on the sea coast near Bombay, during the month ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... think not likely to occur to a Scotsman of Buchanan's age. Did you look at the watermark of the MS.? If the Manuscript be of undeniable antiquity, I consider it as a great curiosity, and most worthy to be published. But I believe nothing else than ocular inspection will satisfy most cautious antiquaries....—Yours, my dear ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Lindsay, a man whose honorable character, and whose intellectual accomplishments speak for themselves, in the posthumus memorabilia of his travels published by Lord L., had seen an array of objects in the desert, which facts immediately succeeding demonstrated to have been a mere ocular lusus, or (according to Arab notions) phantoms. During the absence from home of an Arab sheikh, who had been hired as conductor of Lord Lindsay's party, a hostile tribe (bearing the name of Tellaheens) had assaulted and pillaged his tents. Report of this had reached the English travelling ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... his comrade; and twisting out one more look—a kind of ocular screw—under the influence of which the blind man feigned to undergo great anguish and torture, bade him, in a softened tone, approach, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... course, always to get the weather-gage of your patient. I mean, to place him so that the light falls on his face and not on yours. It is a kind of, ocular duel that is about to take place between you; you are going to look through his features into his pulmonary and hepatic and other internal machinery, and he is going to look into yours quite as sharply to see what you think about his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... result achieved by the use of the telescope in the hands of Galileo. The fact that the planets were intrinsically dark bodies revolving round the sun, and reflecting its light, as he and Copernicus had maintained, thus received a further ocular demonstration. The Florentine astronomer describes in a letter to a friend how the planet, after emerging from superior conjunction as a morning star, gradually loses her rotundity on the side remote from the luminary, changing first to a half sphere and then to a waning crescent; until, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the doctor occasionally, by separating the fibrine from the blood in a basin of water by his side, and exhibiting it, pretends that he has extracted something more than blood. He can thus explain the rationale of the cure by his own art, and the ocular ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... over to him without his discovering the least emotion at it; yet would not his sister cease urging him to resent it as became a man sensible of his dishonour, that is, to rid himself, by such ways as the law puts it in the power of a husband so injured, to get rid of her; and imagining that an ocular demonstration of her crime, would make a greater impression on him, than any report could do, she set about contriving some way to bring him where his own eyes might convince him of the truth of what he had been so often told:—but ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... this last piece of information, Mr. Caresfoot took his victim at his word, and, ceasing his ocular experiments, laid into the less honourable portion of his form with the gold-headed malacca cane in a way that astonished the prostrate Jim, though he was afterwards heard to declare that the squire's cane "warn't not nothing compared with the squire's ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... (p. 370). In the cervical vertebrae the transverse processes represent the ribs. The skull consists of four vertebrae, the occipital, the parietal, the frontal and the nasal, or, named after the sense with which each is associated, the auditory, the lingual, the ocular and the olfactory. The "bodies" of these vertebrae are the body of the occipital (basioccipital), the two bodies of the sphenoid (basi- and pre-sphenoid), and the vomer. The transverse processes of each are the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... military acts of the reign of Jovian are related by Ammianus, (xxv. 6,) Libanius, (Orat. Parent. c. 146, p. 364,) and Zosimus, (l. iii. p. 189, 190, 191.) Though we may distrust the fairness of Libanius, the ocular testimony of Eutropius (uno a Persis atque altero proelio victus, x. 17) must incline us to suspect that Ammianus had been too jealous of the honor of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to the twig, from the twig to the branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute to them any great power of vision. Besides, what good would those short-sighted lenses ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... you yet improve the standard which I celebrate, to greater and more speedy exaltation? Bud your laurel on the black-cherry stock to what height you please: This I had from an ocular testimony, who was more than somewhat doubtful of such alliances; though something like it in Palladius ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... such expectation could soothe the friend, and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded. Two intimate associates of the dead man swore ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sure thou prove my love a whore;— [Taking him by the throat.] Be sure of it. Give me the ocular proof; Or, by the worth of man's eternal soul, Thou hadst been better have been born a dog ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had reached that very important part where the "fly," as an ocular witness, gives his substantial and straightforward evidence. I had a little narrow block between my fingers, and was glancing carefully among the unused pieces for its mate, repeating abstractedly ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the surname of The Pounder, or Bruiser. I tell thee this, because I intend to tear up the next oak or holm tree we meet; with the trunk whereof I hope to perform such wondrous deeds that thou wilt esteem thyself particularly happy in having had the honor to behold them, and been the ocular witness of achievements which posterity will scarce be able to believe."—"Heaven grant you may," cried Sancho; "I believe it all, because your worship says it. But, an't please you, sit a little more upright in your saddle; you ride sideling methinks; but that, I suppose, proceeds from your ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... grant—not by those who only know a little; but by those who are well informed, you probably would be. The fact is from a too ready credulity, we have now turned to almost a total scepticism, unless we have ocular demonstration. In the times of Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and others,—say in the fifteenth century, when there were but few travellers and but little education, a traveller might assert almost anything, and gain credence; latterly a traveller hardly dare assert ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the interval there had manifestly occurred a brief but adequate spasm of what would appear to have been an almost Berserk fury. What had caused it and why it should have expended itself so abruptly, Sally was not psychologist enough to explain; but that it had existed there was ocular evidence of the most convincing kind. A heavy niblick, flung petulantly—or remorsefully—into a corner, showed by what medium the ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... list,—adding, 'it has done more,—it has given us the probable prospect of the discovery of another. We see it as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis, with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.'—These expressions are not reported in any of the papers which profess to give an account of the proceedings, but I appeal to all present ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Associated Words: optics, optician, ocular, oculary, oculate, oculifonn, ophthalmology, ophthalmologist, ophthalmic, optometry, ophthalmostat, optometrist, chatoyant, chatoyment, cynosure, orbit, strabismus, rheum, ophthalmoscope, ophthalmoscopy, astigmatism, optography, blear, blear-eyed, bleary, ophthalmometer, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... only the land is undermined, and its ruins carried off by currents, but the sand is blown from the beach directly up the steep bank, where it is one hundred and fifty feet high, and covers the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit on the edge, you will have ocular demonstration of this by soon getting your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves its height as fast as it is worn away. This sand is steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate, "more than a hundred yards," says one writer, within ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... the result of stimulations coming from remote parts of the organism, may be classed the ocular impressions which we receive in indirect vision. When the eye is not fixed on an object, the impression, involving the activity of some-peripheral region of the retina, is comparatively indistinct. This will be much more ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... this case it is the damp side of the tunnel that appears to be stationary, and the framework of the window through which the prospect is presented that seems to be receding; of course, the uniformity of the objects visible, and the faint light in which they are beheld, materially assist this ocular deception; but the hint thus thrown out may serve as a convenient peg on which passengers may hang a theory of their own, and thus beguile the tedium of their journey in default of more exciting ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... [minor] planet Astraea; it has done more—it has given us the probable prospect of another. We see it as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain. Its movements have been felt trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to ocular demonstration." ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it. The one which follows [A] is strictly a Reverie; and neither that, nor the next after it in succession, 'Power of Music', would have been placed here except for the reason given in the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... in it. A human caricature in broken boots addressed me as I lay on the beach (writing with a stylographic pen and blotting the sheets with the sand), and besought me to buy sprigs of lavender. He proved to me by ocular demonstration that he had no money in his pockets; whereupon I proved to him by parity of reasoning that I had none in mine either. However, I remembered me of a penny postage-stamp (unlicked), and tendered it diffidently, and he received it with disproportionate benedictions. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... between recollection of a small engraving in my pocket Pope's Homer, and reverent study of the Horse Guards. And though I believe that most boys collect their ideas from more varied sources and arrange them more carefully than I did; still, whatever sources they seek must always be ocular: if they are clever boys, they will go and look at the Greek vases and sculptures in the British Museum, and at the weapons in our armouries—they will see what real armour is like in lustre, and what Greek armour was like in form, and so put a fairly true image together, but still not, in ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Spanish testimonies," says Adair, "for time and ocular proof have convinced us of the labored falsehood of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... their revenge, by repeating in every direction fables they had gleaned from the gondoliers for a few pence—viz., that Lord Byron was a misanthrope and hated his countrymen. Mr. Hoppner, who was an ocular witness of the life which Lord Byron led at Venice, and whose testimony is so worthy of respect, told Moore how much annoyance Lord Byron endured from English travellers, bent on following him ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... asked why, if the supermen exist, those who are in incarnation do not come out into the world and give us ocular evidence of the fact. It is pointed out that they could speedily convince the world by a display of superphysical force. But they are probably not in the least interested in convincing anybody of their existence. They are interested in raising the general level of morality, ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... viewing the body as we thus happened to do, the atrocity of this heartless treason against society and the injured dead becomes yet more striking; it seeming wonderful that the piteousness of the sight—the mute pleading of that mouth full of cloated blood—the arousing ocular evidence of the unprovoked assassin's cruelty—the helplessness of the aged woman—her innocence—all should not have kindled humanity in their hearts, (if all principle was dead in their dark minds,) just enough to dare to call ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Mackenzie had expected to make it, but the difference was owing to the variation of the compass. From this it became evident that the river emptied itself into the Polar Sea. Not satisfied, however, with the apparent certainty of this, our pioneer resolved to have ocular demonstration—to push on to the mouth of the river, even although, by so doing, he should risk not being able to return to Fort Chipewyan for want ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... are made of," and what they report to have occurred, might either proceed, when there was no intention to fabricate, from intertwining the fantastic threads which sometimes stream upon the waking senses from the land of shadows, or be caused by those ocular hallucinations of which medical science has supplied full and satisfactory solution. There is no argument which so long maintained its ground in support of witchcraft as that which was founded on the confessions referred to. It was ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... pleased, will keep them all the season. It became sufficiently clear to Ruggiero during the first interview that his future employer did not know the difference between a barge and a felucca, and he has had ocular demonstration that the Count cannot swim, for he has seen him in the water by the bathing-houses—a thorough landsman at all points. But there are two kinds of landsmen, those who are afraid, and those who are not, as Ruggiero well knows. The first kind are amusing and the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... ordered the imperial throne to be removed, and excused himself from attendance at high mass upon the pretext that he was suffering from severe pain in the eyes, and dared not encounter the blaze of light. It was an obstinate case of ocular malady, for it had already prevented him from appearing in the palace-court, when decorum would have exacted of him ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... which ocular demonstration, and personal investigation occasion upon visiting this uncultivated country, are so different from those excited in any other district of the globe, and so powerful, that the mind is naturally led to meditation on the means of its improvement and on the mode by which it may be ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... can afford to wear one dress: her father's worth millions, and everybody knows it. Everybody knows she can have a dozen new dresses for every day of the year. But we poor folks have got to give ocular demonstration of our ability to have new dresses, or nobody will ever believe that we can. Everybody knows that I wear that white muslin because I can't afford any other, I do wish I could have a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... shower of sticks, stones, whiskey-bottles, and superannuated eggs. The Eye-witness closed the window with an undignified bang, and retired into the depths of his chamber, where he remained until after the election. Owing to a dimness of vision, resulting from the eggs-cruciating condition of his ocular organs, the occupation of the Eye-witness was from that moment gone. And to this fact must be attributed his inability to state, with any certainty, whether the Right Party has succeeded in putting the Right Man in the Right Place; but he rather ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... travellers. Had I, therefore, attempted the difficult task of substituting manners of my own invention, instead of the genuine costume of the East, almost every traveller I met who had extended his route beyond what was anciently called "The Grand Tour," had acquired a right, by ocular inspection, to chastise me for my presumption. Every member of the Travellers' Club who could pretend to have thrown his shoe over Edom was, by having done so, constituted my lawful critic and corrector. It occurred, therefore, that where the author of Anastasius, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... old memories, the other women chattering at a distance, when the jarring doors are thrown open and the men return. It is all over in half a page, but in that glimpse the story is lifted forward dramatically; ocular proof, as it were, is added to Thackeray's account of Becky's doubtful and delicate position. As a matter of curiosity I mention the one moment in the later episode, the evening of those strangely ineffective ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... simple the method, the more wonderful every result. Men are shut, as if by a wall of adamant, from all that is yet beyond their sympathy. My neighbor is immersed in planting, building, and the new road. Beside him, companion only in air and sunshine, walks one who has no ocular adjustment for these atoms; his thought overleaps them in starting, and is wholly beyond. The end of vision for a practical eye is beginning of clairvoyance. To the road-maker, man is a maker of roads; he cracks his nuts and his jokes unconscious, while ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... asked myself a hundred times; but, Charles Holland, the judgment, the feelings, and all the prejudices, natural and acquired, must succumb to actual ocular demonstration. Listen to me, and do not interrupt me. You shall know all, and you ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... ladies visited him, to ascertain by actual inspection, whether the rites of circumcision extended to Christians. Mr. Park was not a little surprised at this unexpected requisition, and to treat the business jocularly, he told them it was not customary in his country, to give ocular demonstration before so many beautiful women, but if all would retire, one young lady excepted, to whom he pointed, he would satisfy her curiosity. The ladies enjoyed the joke, and went away laughing, The preferred damsel, although she did ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Rescue" not to give myself up to idleness, regrets, or dreaming, but to begin "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" and to go on with it without hesitation and without a pause. A comparison of any page of "The Rescue" with any page of "The Nigger" will furnish an ocular demonstration of the nature and the inward meaning of this first crisis of my writing life. For it was a crisis undoubtedly. The laying aside of a work so far advanced was a very awful decision to take. It was wrung ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... accurately the spot, inquired into the cause of it, and getting an exact information of the trades, characters, families, and circumstances of the unhappy sufferers, he immediately assumed the person and name of one of them; and burning some part of his coat and hat, as an ocular demonstration of his narrow escape, he made the best of his way to places at some distance, and there passed for one who had been burnt out; and to gain credit, showed a paper signed with the names of several ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... obtaining that Rowley's poems were written in the fifteenth century) and he pointed to the "Wondrous chest".' '"There" said he 'with a bouncing confident credulity "There is the very chest itself"!' After which 'ocular demonstration', Boswell remarks, 'there was no more to be said.' It was to such men as these that Chatterton read his 'Rouleie's' poems. Another of his audience was Mr. Barrett, a surgeon, who collected materials ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... grip upon actuality. The only drawback is that we have conclusively proved by ocular demonstration that there are no water channels ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which transcends the ocular orb, on which the orb depends, which is situated to the front of the black iris and has the power of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and power, by the play of the voice and eye, and by the billowy flushes of the countenance. Mental energy culminates in its modulations, while the finest physical features combine to make them a consummate work of art. But all the musical, ocular, and facial beauties are absent from writing. The savage knows, or could quickly guess, the use of the brush or chisel, the shuttle or locomotive, but not of the pen. Writing is the only dead art, the only institute of either gods or men so artificial that the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... minds. Had Walt Whitman composed the address, and printed it in the above manner, it would now appear in every anthology of poetry published since its date. To convince of this those conventional people who must have an ocular demonstration of form in order to compare the address with accepted examples of poetry, I will dare to incur the condemnation of those who rightly look upon such a departure from Lincoln's own manner of writing the speech as ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... description can never convey so true an idea of anything, as an ocular inspection. I will therefore say that it will afford me much pleasure to show any member of the profession the apparatus I am about to describe, at ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... two modes, although they are distinct in the sensitive cognition, or ocular vision, at the same time are united together in the rational ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... arms, and diminished on the face. Strength poor in the arms even when there was evidently great effort made. (Several of these functional findings, however, have varied from time to time in the ensuing years.) Hearing normal. Ocular examination showed hypermetropia 1.5 D. R. and L. with marked astigmatism. Fields and color vision normal. Left pupil about twice the size of the right. (A competent oculist could find no evidence of organic affection of the nervous system correlated with this.) Shape of head ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... hat and her black furs, and walked down to see the bank president, Mr. Pawling. The subject of their conversation was investments; and it bored her. At five she returned to the house to receive a certain Mr. Skidder—known in her childhood as Blinky Skidder, in frank recognition of an ocular peculiarity—a dingy but jaunty young man with a sheep's nose, a shrewd upper lip, and snapping red-brown eyes, who came breezily in and said: "Hello, Palla! How's the girl?" And took off ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... thoroughly honest fellow. I will tell you nothing of the result of the observations I have made upon him; for, from what I have learnt at the minister's, there is something going forward which will soon give you ocular demonstration of his worth; till then keep the idea you have formed of him in your bosom, and tell me what is your opinion of ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... economists say that capital sets towards the most profitable trades, and that it rapidly leaves the less profitable and non-paying trades. But in ordinary countries this is a slow process, and some persons who want to have ocular demonstration of abstract truths have been inclined to doubt it because they could not see it. In England, however, the process would be visible enough if you could only see the books of the bill brokers and the bankers. ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... to be taken, and in consequence printed. Sir Robert was therefore again singled out for royal vengeance: his library was put under sequestration; and the owner forbidden to enter it. It was in vain that his complete innocence was vindicated. To deprive such a man as COTTON of the ocular and manual comforts of his library—to suppose that he could be happy in the most splendid drawing room in Europe, without his books—is to suppose what our experience of virtuous bibliomaniacs will not permit us to accede to. In consequence, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... casualties increases: his casualties are growing, his resistance becoming less effective: the wearing-out process tells. Mark the concluding phases of the Somme battle. The PRISONERS line is nearer to that of casualties. The Tank has been introduced, and here is ocular evidence of its effectiveness. More tanks is one of the ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... It was old Deans, who, motionless in his seat, and concealed, as we have said, by the corner of the bench, from seeing or being seen, did nevertheless keep his eyes firmly fixed on the ground, as if determined that, by no possibility whatever, would he be an ocular witness of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and solemn nature occur both in private and public life, which seem to add ocular testimony to an intercourse betwixt earth and the world beyond it. For example, the son who has been lately deprived of his father feels a sudden crisis approach, in which he is anxious to have recourse to his sagacious advice—or a bereaved husband earnestly ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... therefore occasionally desirable to supplement the data of the count by THE ESTIMATION OF THE SIZE OF THE RED BLOOD CORPUSCLES INDIVIDUALLY. This is effected by direct measurement with the ocular micrometer; and can be performed on wet (see below), as well as on dry preparations, though the latter in general are to be preferred on account of their ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... outline, which would have stood for Zuleika as well as for Annie Donaldson. Yet instead of one hour, Annie generously allowed Mr. Arlington nearly to triple the time. How he was occupied during all this time, I cannot tell, though that he did not spend all of it in drawing I had ocular demonstration. ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh |
