"Nebula" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... series of ideas, confused, for that matter, and 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 ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... doctrinal propositions. These must be understood in some measure and accepted, ere there can be faith in Him. Apart from them, the image of Christ must stand a pale, colourless phantom before the mind, and the faith which is directed towards such a nebula will be an unintelligent emotion, as nebulous and impotent as the vagueness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... first time a clear and distinct view of the evening sky. "Oh! is that pretty little yellow dot a star?" exclaims the delighted child. Poor innocent! a star had always been to him a dim, cloudy spot, a little nebula, which the magic glass has now resolved; and he can hardly believe that this brilliant point is not an optical illusion. But when his mother assures him that the stars always appear so to her, and he turns to look in her face, he says, "Why, mother! how beautiful you look! Please to give ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... one he picked out the constellations. Aldebaran swung on the pendant chain of Taurus like a giant ruby. Orion strode across the sky, a swirling nebula at his belt. Vega burned, cobalt blue, in the heart of ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... When a fiery 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, become the equator ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... rack, 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], effervescent, sparkling, mousseux[French: ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds—peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran
... System has just passed through an experience which is probably unique in all the history of the mighty nebula of which our sun is an infinitesimal part. The chances that one star, surrounded by a system of planets, should pass within a hundred billion miles of another star, similarly accompanied, was one in billions of billions. That both ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... 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 ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... inter-cluster ships which make runs of thousands of light-years and deign to stop only at very major planets. It was a medium ship of five thousand tons burden, designed for service in the Horsehead Nebula region. It was brand-new and on the way from its builders to its owners when Hoddan interfered. Naturally, though, it carried cargo on ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... more clearly than at any earlier period, that most of the planets possess special characteristics which distinguish them from one another, and that such an origin as Laplace suggested—the slow cooling and contraction of one vast sun-mist or nebula, besides presenting inherent difficulties—many think them impossibilities—in itself does not afford an adequate explanation of these peculiarities. Hence has arisen what is termed the Meteoritic theory, which has been ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... quae sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram, et Gangem pauci dignoscere possunt Vera bona, atque illis multum diversa, remota Erroris nebula." ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... of Orion (Hubble) 2. The Great Nebula in Orion (Pease) 3. Model by Ellerman of summit of Mount Wilson, showing the observatory buildings among the trees and bushes 4. The 100-inch Hooker telescope 5. Erecting the polar axis of the 100-inch telescope 6. Lowest section of tube ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. The general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... achievement, involving intermediate being who could not with certainty be placed either within or without the human family. The sun and the planets had already been shown by Laplace to be very probably derived from a primitive more or less undifferentiated nebula. Thus the old fixed landmarks became wavering and indistinct, and all sharp outlines were blurred. Things and species lost their boundaries, and none could say where they ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... to-day, 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 law of Nature ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold millenniums of slow geological ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a common antibilious ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 me: Now on this ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... natural science made scarcely less advance, and instead of a 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 ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... astronomers inform us that in the southern heavens near the Southern Cross there is a vast space which the uneducated call a hole in the sky, where the eye of man, with the aid of the telescope, has been unable to discover nebula, or asteroid, planet, comet, star or sun. In that dreary, cold, dark region of space, which is only known to be less than infinite by the evidences of creations elsewhere, the Great Author of celestial mechanism has left the chaos which was in the beginning. ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the confines of our solar 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 author addressed ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... 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 probably receding with ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... where a new heaven was seen; whence all our firmament seemed one nebula. Its glories burned like ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... incredibly 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 itself. If they were correct.... How could one know, ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... Description of 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 ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... terram teretibus Quae catervatim coelitus Neque coelorum culmina ...... ...... Grassabatur turbinibus Crebrantur nigris nubibus Carent nocturna nebula—' ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... 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 the three-hilled city does not ride down and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... 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 ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... 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 ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... toward the sky, and hands, as if in ejaculation, were waved up and down, or thrust in significant indices toward that fatal blurred blot of splendor in the heavens. I followed their direction. The approaching nebula had grown sensibly since an hour ago. It glittered, the size of a shield, and a light coruscation seemed emanating from its edges. The faces of the multitude were justified. The mass above us was a train of celestial missiles, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... thoughts to the 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 ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... from 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... distance to the right appeared a faint point of flame, which grew larger. It was approaching, and he dispassionately viewed it; and when he looked again for the two, they were gone, and in their places were two clouds of nebula, which resolved into myriad points of sparkling light and color—whirling, encroaching, until they filled all space. And through them the larger light was coming—and growing larger—straight ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... universe, and the destruction of an old system worn out with age(62). We must also remember the power of attraction every where diffused through infinite space, by means of which, as Herschel assures us, in great length of time a nebula, or cluster of stars, may be formed, while the projectile force they received in the beginning may prevent them from all coming together, at least for millions of ages. Some of these nebulae, he adds, cannot well be supposed ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... it might almost seem that the Designer of the universe, in permitting its existence, had been willing to impart to His intelligent creatures the manner in which celestial bodies are evolved, and that this remarkable ring-system is a remnant of the nebula from which Saturn was himself developed, and which, from some unknown cause, has become solidified. If at any time it should disperse, it would either fall into fragments upon the surface of Saturn, or the fragments, mutually coalescing, would form additional satellites to circle round the ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... eagerly. "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 ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... 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 ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... at Birr 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 ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... nebula in Andromeda has a continuous spectrum crossed by a multitude of absorption lines. The spectrum is a very close approach to the spectrum of our Sun. It is clear that this spiral nebula is widely different from the bright-line or gaseous nebulae in physical condition. The spiral ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... it. We lose sight of 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Alcyone at the rate of four hundred thousand miles a day; and it will take him eighteen million years to complete one revolution. Our firmamental cluster contains, it has been calculated, in round numbers about twenty million stars. There are many thousands of such nebula visible, some of them capable of packing away in their awful bosoms hundreds of thousands of our galaxies. Measure off the abysmal space into seven hundred thousand stages each a hundred million miles wide, and you reach the nearest ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Andromeda has a continuous spectrum crossed by a multitude of absorption lines. The spectrum is a very close approach to the spectrum of our Sun. It is clear that this spiral nebula is widely different from the bright-line or gaseous nebulae in physical condition. The spiral may be a great cluster of stars which are approximate duplicates of our Sun, or there is a chance that it consists, as Slipher has suggested, of a great central sun, or group ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... cluster the bed of the Galaxy is strangely disturbed, and in places nearly denuded, as if its contents had been raked away to form the immense stack and the smaller accumulations of stars around it. The well-known "Trifid Nebula'' is also included in the field of the photograph, which covers a truly marvelous region, so intricate in its mingling of nebul, star-clusters, star-swarms, star-streams, and dark vacancies that no ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... to take its place among the other stars as a permanent member of the universe. Instead of this, such objects invariably fade away after a few months, and are changed into something very like an ordinary nebula. A question of transcendent interest is that of the cause of these outbursts. It cannot be said that science has, up to the present time, been able to offer any suggestion not open to question. The most definite one is the collision theory, ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... 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 between the orbits ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... the Pleiades, or, better than that, get into some observatory, and through the telescope see further than Amos with the naked eye could—namely, two hundred stars in the Pleiades, and that in what is called the sword of Orion there is a nebula computed to be two trillion two hundred thousand billions of times larger than the sun. Oh, be at peace with the God who made all that and controls all that—the wheel of the constellations turning in the wheel of galaxies for thousands of years ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... of the places which were once blank, mere misty nothings to us. They sparkle now with friends. Some of them are familiar friends known through the wear and tear of life; some we shall never see till we meet above the stars. And there the nebula speaks its word of mystery beyond mystery, but all illuminated by the light ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... 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
... 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 ultimately were ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... surrounding air in some way, the energy lost by the atom being instantly regained. Pilipo Re,*10* in 1903, advanced the theory that the various parts of the atom might at first have been free particles constituting an extremely tenuous nebula. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... strewn thick and close in the deep blue of the sky, the milky way glowing like a silver veil. Ursa Major wheeled gigantic in the north. The great nebula in Orion was a whorl of shimmering star dust. Venus flamed a lambent disk of pale saffron, low over the horizon. From edge to edge of the world marched the constellations, like the progress of emperors, and from the innumerable glory of their courses ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... is in motion,—system rising above system, cluster above cluster, nebula above nebula,—all majestically sweeping around under the providence of God, who alone knows the end from the beginning, and before whose glory and power all intelligent beings, whether in heaven or on earth, should bow with ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... as if some cream had been poured on the blue sky and hadn't mixed properly yet," the Forecaster continued, "is cirro-nebula. It's very hard to photograph, and even when you do get it on a plate, it doesn't look ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... so powerful a tool in the 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 of ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... 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, ...
— Half-Hours with the Stars - A Plain and Easy Guide to the Knowledge of the Constellations • Richard A. Proctor
... 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 gleam ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... I was 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, slow strata piled to rest it in, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it with care. All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... defined his first principle, instead of having chosen it from among the different elements 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 recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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
... {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
... 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 the distance of the stars, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Carhill said. "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
... and near a small star, is visible a faint, whitish, luminous trail: this is the oblong nebula of Andromeda, the first mentioned in the history of astronomy, and one of the most beautiful in the Heavens, perceptible to the unaided eye ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... 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
... 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 plough-ridges, the green grass was springing, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Ptolemy, Copernicus and Newton, Galileo and Herschel—to be surrounded by admiring crowds. But these men will have as warm a grasp and as kind a word for the humblest of their followers, who has merely discovered a comet or catalogued a nebula, as for the more ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... satisfaction with which, on the 22d of September, 1847, being then connected with the University at Cambridge, I received a letter from the venerable director of the Observatory there, beginning with these memorable words:—"You will rejoice with me that the great nebula in Orion has yielded to the powers of our incomparable telescope! * * * It should be borne in mind that this nebula, and that of Andromeda [which has been also resolved at Cambridge], are the last strongholds of ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... fell from the entire circumference of his broad-brimmed hat, like the ever-flowing drop from the edge of an antique fountain; his drab-coat had become a deep orange hue, while his huge figure loomed still larger, as he stood amid a nebula of damp, that would have made an ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... planet, I went back far enough, using Earth as the spatial referent, to move with Earth a little more than a third of the way around this spiral nebula that is our Galaxy. Then I shifted my frame of reference to that of the group of galaxies of which ours is such a ...
— Upstarts • L. J. Stecher
... 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 ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... opening 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 ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... The nebula is not an outside creation—it merely represents a phase; and to leave out all poetry which has not attained definiteness would not bring us to the truth of literature. If any phase of man's nature has found true expression, it is worth preserving—it may be cast aside only if not expressed truly. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... head drearily. Poor man! the world of existence to him seemed to have melted lazily down into a mere nebula, of which the forlorn nucleus was—himself. What a life for any young creature—even his own daughter, to be ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that even the sun itself is not the centre of the universe but one 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, and find that they ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... in a purely chance way. He had no expectation of finding such a remarkable object, and indeed, when he had found it, wholly mistook its character. There could be no doubt that it was a body wholly dissimilar to the fixed stars, and it was equally certain that it could not be a nebula. It had a perceptible disk, for when it had first come under the critical eye of its discoverer he had noticed immediately that its appearance differed widely from the multitude of objects which crossed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... NEBULA. An old term for a cluster of stars looking like a cloudy spot till separated by telescopic power; but the term is also now correctly applied to masses of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... could separate in thought a million per second, it would take more than 250,000,000 years: the being who commenced the task at the time that our solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula, would not yet have reached the end."[92] Biology, with its protoplasmic elements, its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means of infinitesimal subdivisions; the theory of evolution, which ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... 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 body or form of a living "soul-monad" possessed, even as human ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... say so, 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 than ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • 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 ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 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 closer, a shapeless monstrosity of darkness—tremendous. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... origin 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 and his festivals ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... through a whole spectrum of meanings in order to adapt itself to the successive spheres of evolution to which it must apply. "Integration," for instance. A definite coherence is an Integration; and examples given of integration are the contraction of the solar nebula, the formation of the earth's crust, the calcification of cartilage, the shortening of the body of crabs, the loss of his tail by man, the mutual dependence of plants and animals, the growth of powerful states, the tendency of human occupations to ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... if 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
... shouldn't wonder, if you will excuse my interrupting you," said Zaidie, "if the moons themselves have been made up of a lot of these things going together when they were only gas, or nebula, or something of that sort. In fact, when Saturn was a good deal younger than he is now, he may have had a lot more rings and no moons, and now these aerolites, or whatever they are, can't come together and make moons, because they've ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... adore it sacredly, and loathe To-day's whole content—except you! I loathe it So much that, if I had the dynamite, I'd blow it all—and you and me ourselves— Into a nebula of dust.... Ah, well, We hardly can decide these things to-night, Can we? I must be off, little as I like, To ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... 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 ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden |
