"Optical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seemed surrounded by a beautiful sheet of water, and so certain was his Greek interpreter, who was acquainted with the country, of this fact, that he was quite indignant at an Arab, who attempted to explain to him, that it was a mere optical delusion. At length, they reached Rosetta in about two hours, without meeting any water; and, on looking back on the sand they had just crossed, it seemed to them, as if they had just waded through a ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... at the entirely reasonable conclusion that he was in love. He had every symptom of that malady. When Miss Marian Chapman was within range of his vision there was room for no one else there. He suffered from that peculiar optical condition which enabled him to see but one thing at a time when she was present, and she was that one thing, which was probably the reason why in his mind's eye she was the only woman in the world, for Marian was ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... "will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might be thus formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... have not reached the ultimate accessible structure of this organ. If we place a portion of the surface under one of the finest of our most powerful lenses, this will be the result.[6] Now, without discussing the real optical or anatomical value of this result as it stands, what I desire to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... heavenly bodies in the speculations of the old Greek thinkers. Galilei (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with the aid of the telescope; and the telescope was an outcome of the new study of optics which had been inspired in Roger Bacon and other medieval scholars by the optical works, directly founded on the Greek, of the Spanish Moors. Giordano Bruno still further enlarged the system; he pictured the universe boldly as an infinite ocean of liquid ether, in which the stars, with retinues of inhabited planets, floated majestically. Bruno was burned ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... value. It is that fine variety of carbonate of lime named Iceland-spar. Transparent and colourless, like glass, this mineral possesses the property of double refraction—any small object viewed through it in a particular direction appearing double. It is much used for optical purposes—especially for ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... general-purpose, switched voice network of the Defense Communications System (US Department of Defense). Eutelsat - European Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Paris). fiber-optic cable - a multichannel communications cable using a thread of optical glass fibers as a transmission medium in which the signal (voice, video, etc.) is in the form of a coded pulse of light. GSM - a global system for mobile (cellular) communications devised by the Groupe Special Mobile of the pan-European standardization organization, Conference ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sufficient for poetical purposes; nor should the old poet's philosophy have thought proper to gainsay it. Nevertheless, as the mysteries of the conscience are more awful things than any merely gratuitous terror (besides leaving optical phenomena quite as real as the latter may find them), even the supernatural part of the story becomes probable when we consider the agitations which the noble mind of Wallace may have undergone during such trying physical circumstances, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... The general colors of the buildings, roofs, and churches are light, gay, and sparkling, so that the whole, taken in one sweep of the eye, presents an exceedingly brilliant appearance, more like some well-contrived and highly-wrought optical illusions in a theatre—such, for example, as the fairy scenery of the "Prophete"—than any thing I can now remember. The vast extent of the city, compared with its population (the circuit of its outer wall being twenty miles, while the population is but little over 300,000), ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... remained but the blue sky above, and the deep blue water below. Hence it was termed by the geographers of old, Aprositus, or the Inaccessible; while modern navigators have called its very existence in question, pronouncing it a mere optical illusion, like the Fata Morgana of the Straits of Messina; or classing it with those unsubstantial regions known to mariners as Cape Flyaway, and ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... generally a compound one, and when all wave lengths which are competent to affect the retina are present, the compound effect we call white or whiteness. When some of the rays are absent, as, for instance, the longer ones, the optical effect is one we call green or greenness; and the special physiological mechanism for producing the sensation may be either three special sets of nerves, capable of sympathetic vibration to waves of about ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... optical illusion. There are three parties, but each is dominated by the fifty families, and election laws are such that for all practical purposes it's impossible to start another party. Theoretically it's possible, actually it isn't. The voters can vary back and forth between the ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... We are assured by optical metaphysicians, or metaphysical opticians, that, in the operations of vision, we never get beyond the eye itself, or the representations that are depicted therein. We see nothing, they tell us, but what is delineated within the eye. Now, the way in which a plain man should meet this statement, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend, in the one instant of its duration. For the moment, it required all my knowledge of the settled calmness of his countenance, to convince me that my eyes must have been only dazzled by an optical illusion produced by ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... small beads; and the fuppialume, who made large blown beads. Each man was a skilled artist, you see, and did some one special thing. The phiolari made vases, cups, and glass for windows; the cristallai optical glass; and the specchiai mirrors. No strangers were allowed to visit the glass works, and all apprentices must pass a rigid examination not only as to their skill, but as to their previous personal history. In 1495 the glass ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... volcanic ridge of the Isle of Wood runs in a latitudinal line, the Junonian Cordillera has a whorl, the ancient as well as the modern seat of eruption. Around the island appeared to be a rim, as if the sea-horizon formed a raised saucer—a common optical delusion at ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Gramophone.—The gramophone, by virtue of its table revolving at a controllable speed, comes in useful for a series of optical experiments made with coloured discs bearing designs of ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... the Brocken, they despaired of seeing the famous spectre, in search of which they toiled, it being visible only when the sun is a few degrees above the horizon. Haue says, he ascended thirty times without seeing it, till at length he was enabled to witness the effect of this optical delusion. For the best account of it, see the Natural Magic of Sir D. Brewster, [26] who explains the origin of these spectres, and shews how the mind is deluded among an ignorant and easily deceived people, and thus traces the birth of various ghost stories in the neighbourhood, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... affectionate heart. Her smoothly polished exterior prevented all possibility of obtaining any hold over her. She had the art at once to seem to be intimate with people, and to keep them at the greatest distance; as, in certain optical deceptions, an object which appears close to us, eludes our hand if we attempt to grasp it. Almeria felt the want of that species of unreserved confidence and friendship which she had formerly enjoyed with Ellen. In judging of what will make us happy, we are ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the pearl's owner; "and I like people that like the real thing. A pearl of the first water is real. There's no sham there; no deception—except the iridescence, which is, as you doubtless know, an optical illusion attributable to the intervention of rays of light reflected from microscopic corrugations of the nacreous surface. But for that our eye is to ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... stepped forward and applied his eye to the lens. I suspect it to have been shut most of the time, for I observe a good many elderly people adjust the organ of vision to any optical instrument in that way. I suppose it is from the instinct of protection to the eye, the same instinct as that which makes the raw militia-man close it when he pulls the trigger of his musket the first time. He expressed ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in palm oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to become convex. By some optical illusion, it seemed to fall away on either hand to the depth of ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... can hold apart more than one thousand stimulations per second, that there is, in fact, no such thing as fusion, is a supposition which is in such striking contrast to all previous explanations of optical phenomena, that it should be accepted only if no other theory can do justice to them. It is hoped that the following pages will show that the facts do not demand ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of thought, and the form, lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and minutely, as the optical instrument reproduces the sensible object; we must come to the teachers of wisdom to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the fulness ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... "my ideas of natural beauty and those of the aesthetic Wilde may be entirely false; or the whole scene may be an optical illusion; or—Rosenduft und Maienblumen, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... scientific inquiry was made, and in due time there was collected and tabulated a list of places from whence these effects were seen, together with the dates of such occurrences. Eventually it was concluded that such optical phenomena had a common cause, and that it must be the dust of ultra-microscopic fineness at an enormous altitude. All the facts indicated that such a cloud started from the Sunda straits, and that the prodigious ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... equalised by the use of suitable spectacles, and he soon lost the habit completely and permanently. He is now the father of two children, a boy and a girl, whose vision (tested repeatedly and fully) is emmetropic in both eyes, so that they have not inherited the congenital optical defect of their father. All the same, they have both of them inherited his early acquired habit, and need constant watchfulness to prevent their hiding the left eye when writing, by resting the head on the left forearm or hand. Imitation ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... one theory which had floated in his mind had been that from these cabbages, which had lain a trifle too long in sun and moisture; gases might have arisen which had disturbed his senses. It was true that his theory did not account for other instances of the same optical delusion to which the talk of the ploughman had seemed to point, but Skelton could not bring himself to attach much importance to his words. He meditated on ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... told that a gnat's wing, in its ordinary flight, beats many hundred times in a second? or that there exist animated and regularly organised beings, many thousands of whose bodies laid close together would not extend an inch? But what are these to the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries have disclosed, which teach us that every point of a medium through which a ray of light passes is affected with a succession of periodical movements, regularly recurring at equal intervals, no less than 500 millions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... sculptures of the palaces of that renowned city, and shown the advanced knowledge of Assyria—some thirty long centuries ago—in mechanics and engineering, in working and inlaying with metals, in the construction of the optical lens, in the manufactory of pottery and glass, and in most other matters of material civilisation. It has lately, by these and other discoveries in the East, confirmed in many interesting points, and confuted in ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... canals on Mars may be only an optical illusion was demonstrated in an article in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times, by means of material obtained from a report of the section for the Observation of Mars, a division ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... columns slope inward and so do the principal surfaces of the building, while the anta-capitals slope forward. These refinements, or some of them, have been observed in several other buildings. They are commonly regarded as designed to obviate certain optical illusions supposed to arise in their absence. But perhaps, as one writer has suggested, their principal office was to save the building from an appearance of mathematical rigidity, to give it something of the semblance ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... about something; our men are as good as they, and would have built as well, had they been born at the right time for it. But now they are thinking of other things. The Dilettanti Society sent Mr. Penrose to Athens to study in the ancient remains there the optical corrections which it was alleged the Greeks made in the horizontal lines of their buildings. Mr. Penrose made careful measurements, establishing the fact, and a folio volume of plates was published to illustrate the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... parabolic curve of the echinus moulding under the abacus of its cap. In this form, the Doric column was an absolutely fresh note in architecture. Archaic though they were, these columns at Corinth show that the Greeks were already on the track of those refinements of form, those optical corrections and compensations, which differentiate Greek architecture from that of any other race. The exaggeration in the entasis of the archaic column disappears, its tapering was diminished, its height increased, and the overhang of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... return to Cambridge in 1666 his attention was occupied with optical discoveries; but he had no sooner brought them to a close than his mind reverted to the great subject of the planetary motions. Upon the death of Oldenburg in August, 1678, Dr. Hooke was appointed secretary to the Royal Society; and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... When flying, the flamingo seems to keep his head moving steadily forward at an even pace, although the ropelike neck undulates with the slow beating of the wings. I could not be sure that it was not an optical delusion. Nevertheless, I thought the heavy body was propelled irregularly, while the head moved forward at uniform speed, the difference being caught up in the ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Woolridge. It is the mirage, from the Latin miror, to wonder, which appears to be what you are doing just now. The steamer you see sailing along the shore is an optical illusion, a reflection, and not a reality. Refraction, which is the bending of the rays of light, produces this effect. If you look at a straight stick set up in the water, it will appear to be bent, and this is caused by refraction. ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... nothing the matter with the brain. It was only my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision, one of those visions which lead simple folk to believe in miracles. It was a nervous seizure of the optical apparatus, nothing more; the eyes were rather ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... a small, leather-covered case, evidently containing some optical instrument. "It will give me a pretext for going," he had said to himself, as he put it into his pocket in his counting-room. He was not going to let the apothecary know he had taken ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... especially, but also in lesser degree in other temples, the seemingly straight lines of the building were all slightly curved, and the vertical faces inclined. This was done to correct the monotony and stiffness of absolutely straight lines and right angles, and certain optical illusions which their acute observation had detected. The long horizontal lines of the stylobate and cornice were made convex upward; asimilar convexity in the horizontal corona of the pediment counteracted ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... It is an optical deception, depending upon principles which I cannot well explain to you till you know more of that branch of science. But what a number of new ideas this afternoon's walk has afforded you! I do not wonder that you ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... corresponding to grandiosity of faculty and idea, Belleisle, we shall find, does practically set off towards Germany;—like a kind of French Belus, or God of the Sun; capable to dazzle weak German Courts, by optical machinery, and to set much rotten ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... our assistance the artifices of the charlatans, who do so many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes of the ignorant. Philosophers, by means of certain glasses, and what are called magic lanterns; by optical secrets, sympathetic powders: by their phosphorus, and, lately, by means of the electric machine, show us an infinite number of things which the simpletons take for magic, because they know not how they ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... off and the dessert was brought in—a dessert that would have frightened a strong man after such a dinner as had preceded it. Not so the Ruggleses—for a strong man is nothing to a small boy—and they kindled to the dessert as if the turkey had been a dream and the six vegetables an optical delusion. There were plum-pudding, mince-pie, and ice-cream; and there were nuts, and raisins, and oranges. Kitty chose ice-cream, explaining that she knew it "by sight, though she hadn't never tasted none;" but all the rest took the ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor; toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more than ever for her fellow guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself with an intention that Strether instantly met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... to the size of the refractor depending upon the material of the object-glass. Glass manufacturers seem to experience unusual difficulties in their attempts to form large discs of optical glass pure enough and uniform enough to be suitable for telescopes. These difficulties are enhanced with every increase in the size of the discs, so that the cost has a tendency to increase at a very much greater rate. It may be mentioned in illustration that the price paid ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Metaphysical f. Commensal f. Scatical f. Primolicentiated f. Predicamental and categoric f. Train-bearing f. Predicable and enunciatory f. Supererogating f. Decumane and superlative f. Collateral f. Dutiful and officious f. Haunch and side f. Optical and perspective f. Nestling, ninny, and youngling f. Algoristic f. Flitting, giddy, and unsteady f. Algebraical f. Brancher, novice, and cockney f. Cabalistical and Massoretical f. Haggard, cross, and froward f. Talmudical f. Gentle, mild, and tractable f. Algamalized ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Patty solemnly; "it's an optical illusion. Don't you know how the Indian jugglers make you see flowers growing, when there aren't any flowers there? Well, this is ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... executive skill and taste in mere ornamentation in the characteristic Etruscan work is comparable only to those Eastern products which I have before alluded to,—the Persian fabrics. The animals are drawn without any regard to anatomical or optical truth,—foreshortening taken by a royal road, and grace thrown overboard. The hog is generally shown as flatted out, the legs appearing two on each side of the body; and the members of all animals are stowed away with more direct reference to composition of masses than of animal organisms. I remember ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... and very definite limit to optical discovery among the stars—a limit whose nature need only be stated to be understood. If, indeed, the casting of large lenses were all that is required, man's ingenuity would ultimately prove equal to the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Hildreth repeated the words in an awestruck tone. Did she see him cower in his chair? It must have been an optical illusion. The storm outside was making the house shiver and ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... collectively known generally as impressionists, though the word "plein-airist" - luminist - has been chosen sometimes by them and by their admirers. The neo-impressionists in pictorial principle do not differ from the impressionist. Their technical procedure is different, and based on an optical law which proves that pure primary colours, put alongside of each other in alternating small quantities, will give, at a certain distance, a freshness and sparkle of atmosphere not attained by the earlier technical methods of the impressionistic school, which does not in the putting ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... enters it from the air, each stone has its own definite ability to do this, and each differs from every other in the amount of bending which it can bring about under given conditions. The accurate determination of the amount of bending in a given case requires very finely constructed optical instruments and also a knowledge of how to apply a certain amount of mathematics. However, all this part of the work has already been done by competent scientists, and tables have been prepared by them, in which the values for each material ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... trees, at times appeared suspended in the air, and magnified far beyond natural size. High up in the air could be seen the reflection of animals that were many miles distant from the place they appeared to be occupying. These optical illusions were the cause of much annoyance to the thirsty travellers,— especially to their animals, unable to understand them. Excited with the hope of quenching their thirst, they were with much difficulty prevented from rushing about in pursuit ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... young couple again with her optical instrument. "He is very handsome. One easily sees how it is. She thinks him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentleman. She has never seen anything like him; he is better, even, than the courier. It was the courier probably who introduced him; and if he succeeds in marrying ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... to believe me. I've been fidgeting for the last month or two, and that window that you say you saw to-day has got very much on my nerves. I've been imagining that it's a heliograph from an enemy encampment. Simply nerves, of course; but nerves ought not to account for extraordinary optical delusions or hallucinations." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... important news story that he had heard had come two nights before. The Nipe had robbed an optical products company in Miami. The camera had shown the shop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blow open the vault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken the whole front door of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twisted ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... objects floating motionless above the earth. The telegraph poles traversing the plain in a long, straight line until lost to view in the hazy distance, appear to be suspended in mid-air; camels, horses, and all moving objects more than a mile away, present the strange optical illusion of animals walking through the air many feet above the surface of the earth. Long rows of kanaat mounds traverse the plain in every direction, leading from the numerous villages to distant mountain chains. Descending one of the sloping cavernous ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... rely for support in his conflicts with his rivals upon the God of the Christians. The sign of the cross, which he said that he beheld in the sky, and which led him to make the cross his standard, may have been an optical illusion occasioned partly by his own mental state at the moment, when, after prayer, he was standing at noon-day in the door of his tent. He remained, like many others in that day, not without relics of the old beliefs, as is seen from inscriptions on his coins, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... developed, first by Kelvin, and subsequently by Clerk Maxwell. In 1865, two years before Faraday's death, Maxwell proposed the electro-magnetic theory of light, showing that light is an electro-magnetic disturbance. He pointed out that optical as well as electro-magnetic phenomena required a medium for their propagation, and that the properties of this medium appeared to be the same for both. Moreover, the rate at which light travels is known by actual measurement; the rate at which electro-magnetic ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... atom &c. (small quantity) 32; fragment &c. (small part) 51; powder &c. 330; point of a pin, mathematical point; minutiae &c. (unimportance) 643. micrometer; vernier; scale. microphotography, photomicrography, micrography[obs3]; photomicrograph, microphotograph; microscopy; microscope (optical instruments) 445.. V. be little &c. adj.; lie in a nutshell; become small &c. (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c. (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c. (unimportant) 643; exiguous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... which lay half buried in the sand. The waters of the Nile had fallen, and the whole river bed was crowded with frogs, and this spectacle was just according to the taste of the stork family. The young storks thought it was optical illusion, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... M. Auzout, that the length of the Ring is more than treble the Diameter of Saturn's body, which, according to Campani, is only as about 67 to 31. Which difference yet dos not appear to M. Auzout to be so great; but that M. Hugens perhaps will impute it to the Optical reason, which he (Auzout) hath alleged of the Advance of the light upon the obscure space; although he is of Opinion, he should not have concluded so great a Length, if he had not seen the Breadth spread out more, than he hath done: ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... students of Christian archaeology: but on this occasion he accomplished a real tour de force. When, on December 19, I entered the cubiculum no. 54, in which the paintings are, and he began to point out to me outlines of figures and objects, I thought he was laboring under an optical delusion; I could see nothing beyond a blackened and mouldy plaster surface. My eyes, however, soon became initiated to the new experience, and able to read the lines of this curious palimpsest. The dark spots soon grew into shape, and lovely groups, inspired ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the method of Descartes had superseded the older modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his life became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-three he facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by his theory of Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which he was led by his experiments with the prism, and which he partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as Mathematical Professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... woman's name was Arletta Fogg, and that she was murdered in her own rooms, at the Seraglio Apartments, Central Park West. I could hardly believe my eyes saw the thing aright. I felt sure that it must be an optical illusion wrought by my constant thought of Arletta. I looked again and again, yet read ever the same words, and, laboring under tremendous excitement, I hurriedly perused the account of the murder. It stated that ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... Accounts of wonderful optical experiments by Roger Bacon (who died in 1292), and in the sixteenth century by Digges, Baptista Porta, and Antonio de Dominis (Grant, Hist. Ph. Ast.), have led some to suppose that they invented the telescope. The writer considers that it is more likely that these notes ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... republications are well known: the Scriptores Logarithmici[468] is a set of valuable reprints, mixed {207} with much which might better have entered into another collection. It is not so well known that there is a volume of optical reprints, Scriptores Optici, London, 1823, 4to, edited for the veteran of ninety-two by Mr. Babbage[469] at twenty-nine. This excellent volume contains James Gregory, Des Cartes, Halley, Barrow, and the optical writings of Huyghens, the Principia of the undulatory ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... set off this morning, I hear—somebody yesterday called the telescope an 'optical delusion,' anticipating many more of the kind! So ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the skies, on all sides, while they rested doubtless on the bottom of the ocean. Every fantastic form was there; there seemed in the distance cities and palaces as white as chalk; pillars and reversed cones, pyramids and mounds of every shape, valleys and lakes; and under the influence of the optical delusions of the locality, green fields and meadows, and tossing seas. Here the whole party rested soundly, and pushed on hard the next day in search ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... experiment of the person crossing his first two fingers, and placing them on a small object, such as a pea or the top of a lead-pencil, shows us how "mixed" the sense of feeling becomes at times. The many familiar instances of optical delusions show us that even our sharp eyes may deceive us—every conjuror knows how easy it is to deceive the eye by suggestion and ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... the box. There could be no doubt about it; the noise was louder. And, if I could trust my eyes, the box was moving—giving a series of little jumps. This might have been an optical delusion, but it seemed to me that at each tick the box gave a little bound. During the screeches—which sounded more like the cries of an animal in an agony of pain even than before—if it did not tilt itself first on one end, and then ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... this negotiation, Galileo went to Venice, on a visit to a friend, in the month of April or May 1609. Here he learned, from common rumour, that a Dutchman had presented to prince Maurice of Nassau an optical instrument, which possessed the singular property of causing distant objects to appear nearer the observer. This Dutchman was Hans or John Lippershey, who, as has been clearly proved by the late Professor Moll of Utrecht,[8] was in the possession of a telescope made by himself so early as 2d ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... the scientific and the artistic efforts of the new and the old world, we may tell the history of the moving pictures by the following dates and achievements. In the year 1825 a Doctor Roget described in the "Philosophical Transactions" an interesting optical illusion of movement, resulting, for instance, when a wheel is moving along behind a fence of upright bars. The discussion was carried much further when it was taken up a few years later by a master of the craft, by Faraday. ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... meteorology have not, up to the present day, classified with sufficient regularity the divers optical phenomena of the air. Some of these phenomena have, however, been seen but rarely, and have not been sufficiently studied to admit of their classification. We have examined the common phenomenon of the rainbow and we have seen that it is due to the refraction ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... disinherited, and thrown upon the world when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the endorsement ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... that Sir Piers, in addition to the loss of his teeth, should consent to the extinction of one of his eyes, he himself having lost an eye in the fight of Otterburn. As Courtenay demurred to this equalisation of optical powers, Dalzell demanded the forfeit; which, after much altercation, the King appointed to be paid to him, saying, he surpassed the English both in wit and valour. This must appear to the reader a singular specimen of the humour of that time. I suspect the Jockey Club would have given ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Frederic Madden, Mr. Duffus Hardy, Mr. Hamilton, Dr. Ingleby, accomplished palaeographers, keen-eyed, remorseless investigators, learned doctors though you be, you cannot make men who have common sense believe this. Your tests, your sharp eyes, and your optical aids, even that dreadful "microscope bearing the imposing and scientific name of the Simonides Uranius," which carried such terror to the heart of Mr. Collier, will fail to convince the world that he spent hour after hour and day after day in labors the only purpose of which was directly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... great animals in the river below them was so prodigious they could not grasp it. It seemed it must be optical illusion. In a few moments, the dead had been eaten, swallowed whole, and fights were progressing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... immense place is this church, and what an immense host must inhabit this wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still more to the effect. Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived and deceives itself, at the same time, with these sublime lights and deepening shades, all calculated to increase the illusion. The man whom in the street ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... minutes after his failure with the cotton-mouth. He had pulled out into the middle of the river, when I noticed a beautiful snake, short and rather stout, lying coiled on the water. Whether it was an optical illusion I cannot say, but it seemed to me that the creature lay entirely above the surface,—as if it had been an inflated skin rather than a live snake. We passed close by it, but it made no offer to move, only darting out its tongue as the boat slipped ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the brain to the back of the eyeball and there spreads out, to form the retina, a web of nerve filaments, on which the images of external objects are projected by the optical portion of the eye. This nerve is limited to the apprehension of the phenomena of radiation, and, notwithstanding its marvellous sensibility to certain impressions of this class, it is singularly ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... around was almost palpable. Sometimes it seemed as if the vessel were rushing against a mighty rock, that towered high above the masts, but this was only optical illusion, or, perhaps, a denser storm-cloud than usual passing by, for the steamer continued to plough her onward way unchecked, save, now and then, by the bursting on her bows of a monster billow, which caused her to quiver from stem to stern, ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... rather regretted the loss of her bachelor roomers and, as she said to her neighbor across the street, she kept one memento of them—a thing that looked like a shell but wasn't a shell. She thought it must be one of them optical ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... reached the other bank, the rocky one, I always had a curious optical illusion: it seemed to me that the town from which we had come, and whose gray ramparts we still could see, suddenly drew very far away from us, for in my young head distances exaggerated themselves strangely. ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... phantasmagorists is further increased by the mystery that conceals, from the eyes of the public, their operations and optical instruments: but it is easy for the showman to snatch from them this superiority, and to strengthen the illusion for the children whom you choose to amuse with this sight. For that purpose, he has only to change the arrangement of the sheet, by requiring it to be suspended from the ceiling, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... darkness. Now he felt a sudden damp touch on his face, as if a wet finger had been laid there. The faintest of winds had blown for a moment or two, and when Dick looked up, he saw that the sky was covered with black clouds. The saddest of woods had moved far away, but by some sort of optical illusion he could yet ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... impressions of a chair or table, which are conveyed by ordinary vision in right lines to the retina, if these lines be distorted by any intervening want of uniformity in the matter, are proportionally distorted. Let striae of glass of different density intervene in an optical lens, and the objects are distorted; increase the number of striae, the object is more imperfect; and carry the molecular derangement further, opacity is the result. Transparency and opacity, then, viewed apart from all hypotheses, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... the end with looking which is analogous to touching. The manner in which the libidinous excitement is frequently awakened is by the optical impression, and selection takes account of this circumstance—if this teleological mode of thinking be permitted—by making the sexual object a thing of beauty. The covering of the body, which keeps abreast with ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... more dense and assumed a human shape. Oh! with what interest—what deep, enthusiastic interest, did Fernand contemplate the spectacle; for his well-stored mind at once suggested to him that he was now the witness of that wondrous optical delusion, called the mirage. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... which to place the chair a steward was carrying for her. There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination. None of them seemed to satisfy her. After a minute's effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side of us. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... seven darker shades of color, so the divine personality or Ego has been broken into countless susceptible substances. As seven darker shades melt together in one clear pencil of light, out of the union of all these substances a divine being would issue. The existing form of nature's fabric is the optical glass, and all the activities of spirits are only an endless play of colors of that simple divine ray. If it pleased Omnipotence some day to break up this prism, the barrier between it and the world would fall down, all spirits would be absorbed in one infinite spirit, all accords would flow together ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is a deception of the senses, a misinterpretation of sensory impressions; the normal person can be convinced of this deception. The mirage, for example, is an optical illusion which has a starting point in an ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... has perhaps even more friends, and it is supported by the remarkable discoveries of the lamented Moseley. But we must not take such theories too seriously. As Kayser has said, any true theory of the make-up of the atoms must assume an absolutely full and perfect knowledge of all electrical and optical processes, and is therefore beyond our dreams. Or as Professor Planck said in his Columbia lectures, we are not entitled to hope that we shall ever be able to represent truly through any physical formulae the internal structure of ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... way to find out is to try," Elizabeth suggested. "Sorry to have been forced to disregard that optical S.O.S. of yours, Dad, but I realized that we had to strike now ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... thing is true of the cultivation of science for its own sake. The stargazer with his telescope, the chemist with crucible and retort, the physiologist with his chemical and optical aids, the purely scientific thinker—all who prosecute science for the love of it—have wrought out results which are breaking as light of the clear morning sun upon the history of nations, thus enabling us to avail ourselves of the past in order to comprehend the status ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... country, the blank would be still more perfect than it is; and this fact—a direct result of the strongly marked hues of the denominational spectrum, operated upon by the representative principle—we can no more change than we can the optical law. Let there be but the colour of one religion in the national spectrum, and the Legislature will wear but one religious colour: let it consist of half-a-dozen colours, and the Legislature will be of none. 'O for an hour of Knox!' it has been ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... The optical illusions that present themselves on the sea-shore, by which distant objects are raised to view, the opposite capes and islands made to loom up, lifted above the line of the apparent circumference of the earth, and ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... optical matter, a question of color. The pastel shades deceive him; the louder hues send him to his artillery. God help, I say, the red-haired girl! She goes into action with warning pennants flying. The dullest, blindest ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... cry will be for 'the sun.' How did my friends act? What did the critics say? A black sun was too much for the world, though astronomers have proven my theory correct. The doctors swore I drank too much absinthe; the critics said a species of optical madness had set in; that I saw only the peripheral tints—I was yellow and blue crazy. Perhaps I was, perhaps I am. So is the fellow crazy who invented wireless telegraphy; so is the man off his base who invents a folding bird cage. We are all crazy, and ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... letters ... four letters.... Who can lend me a hand?... Who can give me just a tiny hint?... Who? Why, Lavernoux, of course! That good Lavernoux, seeing that he took the trouble to indulge in optical telegraphy at the risk of his life.... Lord, what a fool I am!... Why, of course, why, of course, that's it!... By Jove, this is too exciting!... Lupin, you must count ten and suppress that distracted beating of your heart. If not, ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... opposition in 1877 the distance was almost at the lowest point it is capable of attaining; but this was not the only point in which Professor Hall was favoured; he had the use of a telescope of magnificent proportions and of consummate optical perfection. His observatory was also placed in Washington, so that he had the advantage of a pure sky and of a much lower latitude than any observatory in Great Britain is placed at. But the most conspicuous advantage of all was the practised skill of the astronomer himself, ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... live in the darkness, under the shelter of a corpse, should avoid the light is only natural; the strange part is its very perception. The maggot is blind. Its pointed fore part, which we hesitate to call a head, bears absolutely no trace of any optical apparatus; and the same with every other part of the body. There is nothing but one bare, smooth, white skin. And this sightless creature, deprived of any special nervous points served by ocular power, is extremely sensitive to the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... later shown on microscopical examination to be a mixture. The name was afterwards applied by G. Tschermak to those plagioclase felspars which lie between labradorite and anorthite; and this has been generally adopted by petrologists. In chemical composition and in optical and other physical characters it is thus much nearer to the anorthite end of the series than to albite. Like labradorite and anorthite, it is a common constituent of basic igneous rocks, such as gabbro and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... sitting on the foot of the bed, looking at her! Of course she was overwrought nervously. Only the trouble is, this was three months ago, and she swears the woman comes every night. She knows it's hallucination, optical delusion, anything you like, and she tries to treat it as such, but she's beginning to break down under it, and I don't know what to do. They've travelled, they've had her in a sanitarium, they've tried auto-suggestion—no ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... "it is wonderful! I have succeeded! I have changed the principles of a lifetime, made the most brilliant optical experiment which any man of science has ever ventured to essay, with the result—well, you shall see. I have wired to the Admiralty, wired for more work-people. Captain Chalmers, is it not?" he went on. "You must tell your ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... - the foundation of an optical science based on the colour-seeing faculty of the eye. The modern physicist's view of the Newtonian interpretation of the spectrum. A short history of Goethe's search for a satisfactory conception of Light and Colour. His discovery of Newton's cardinal error. First results ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... dramatic talent has come to its fullest maturity. Mr. Sheridan would possibly never have exceeded what he had already done, and his celebrity had now reached that point of elevation, where, by a sort of optical deception in the atmosphere of fame, to remain stationary is to seem, in the eyes of the spectators, to fall. He had, indeed, enjoyed only the triumphs of talent, and without even descending to those ovations, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... not think the causes of the color of transparent water have been sufficiently ascertained. I do not mean that effect of color which is simply optical, as the color of the sea, which is regulated by the sky above or the state of the atmosphere, but I mean the settled color of transparent water, which has, when analyzed, been found pure. Now, copper will tinge water green, and that very strongly; but water thus impregnated will not be transparent, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... his hands. He refused to see more. Whether ghost or optical illusion, an emanation from another world, or an image born of his remorse and proceeding from himself, it should torture ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... communications; good domestic facilities domestic: digitalization to be completed in 1998 international: satellite earth stations-1 Orion; 1 optical fiber submarine cable linking the Faroe Islands ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Mrs MacNeill related what had happened. The chest was minutely examined, and as it was found to contain nothing but some mats that had been stored away in it the previous day, the finger was forthwith declared to have been an optical illusion, and Mrs MacNeill was, for the time being, ridiculed into believing it was so herself. For the next two or three days nothing occurred; nothing, in fact, until one night when Mrs MacNeill and her daughters heard the queerest of noises downstairs, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long time I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves into the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... has been used in buildings of mediocre size, the architect seems to have been driven by some optical necessity to make his angle columns more thickset than the other supports. Thus it was in Assyria, in the little temple at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42), where the outer columns are sensibly thicker than those between them; at Khorsabad (Fig. 41) the same result was obtained by rather different means. The ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... "Optical images," Dr. L. T. Troland of Harvard tells us, "are built up on the same principle as the ordinary 'half-tone' engravings; that is, they are made up of minute dottings or stripplings far too small to be detected by the eye. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... so impressed with this vision, which he considered merely an optical illusion, that he arose, put on his hat, and went out for a walk. Returning to the house, he determined to test the matter again—and the result was the same as before. He distinctly saw the two Lincolns—one living and ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... limp and cold, conscious only of the erratic bobbing of the little vessel and the ceaseless rhythm of the oars. At last, unbelievably, the sky turned from black to gray. I could not believe it anything but an optical illusion in the endless night and I strained to dissipate whatever biliousness was affecting my vision. But it was dawn, sure enough, and soon it revealed the pettish, wallowing Channel and the fragile outline of our boat, even ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... have seen such a form traversing, with huge strides, in a line parallel to their own course, the opposite ridge of a mountain, when divided from it by a narrow glen; and indeed the fact of the apparition is so generally admitted, that modern scepticism has only found refuge by ascribing it to optical deception. * ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... on, As a more rare and rich phenomenon. He wisely said that the sensorium Is for the eyes a great emporium, To which these noted picture-stealers Send all they can and meet with dealers. In many an optical proceeding The brain, he said, showed great good breeding; For instance, when we ogle women (A trick which Barbara tutored him in), Although the dears are apt to get in a Strange position on the retina, Yet instantly the modest brain Doth set them ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... it sails away on the air and goes out of sight; then you throw up a clod and it doesn't. It comes down, every time. I have tried it and tried it, and it is always so. I wonder why it is? Of course it DOESN'T come down, but why should it SEEM to? I suppose it is an optical illusion. I mean, one of them is. I don't know which one. It may be the feather, it may be the clod; I can't prove which it is, I can only demonstrate that one or the other is a fake, and let a ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... five feet. The night being very dark, these weeds could be seen standing between the fire and the guards. As the flames swayed past the weeds, the impression was very naturally produced upon the mind of a timid beholder that the weeds were moving in the opposite direction. This optical illusion caused some of the guards to believe that the Indians had set fire to the grass, and were moving in immense numbers between them and the fire with intent to surround them, stampede the cattle, and massacre the entire party. The watcher next to Mr. ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... optical point. Everything that exists in the world—in history, in life, in man—should be and can be reflected therein, but under the magic wand of art. Art turns the leaves of the ages, of nature, studies ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... made of artificial light which are impossible with natural light. Light-sources may be made of a vast variety of shapes, and those may be transported wherever desired. They may be equipped with reflectors and other optical devices to direct or to ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was requested to mentally see the arrow as it was turned round. In these circumstances it was found that when the arrow-head pointed to the right, it was read off as pointing to the left, and so on. This led some to imagine that there was a mirage in the inner as well as on the outer plane of optical sensation. But the real explanation of the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... when he peeps through a magnifying glass on pictures of foreign scenes, and the picturesque ruins of old cities, and the like. They are really very fine, but it is difficult to realize that such things are. It is all an optical deception. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... every family was widely disagreed among themselves on matters of religion," they believed that this "new experimental philosophy was subversive of the Christian faith!"[254] and many mortally hated the newly-invented optical glasses, the telescope and the microscope, as atheistical inventions, which perverted our sight, and made everything appear in a new and false light! Sprat wrote his celebrated "History of the Royal ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... in a type page by using identical measures of furniture or slugs above and below. When, in certain instances (as in a business card), tradition demands that a line be "centered" vertically, it will be found that the exact centering of the line will make it appear a bit low. An optical illusion demands that such a line be raised slightly if it is to appear in the vertical center (Fig. 10). This apparent center ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... realized I was approaching Biddy Maloney's cottage until I saw her coming out of it and I certainly hadn't thought of Biddy Maloney until my eye fell upon her. And it's a funny optical illusion that deceives one into seeing an old lady opening gates, crossing railways and limping ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... save when letters with distinct serifs come closely against it at the bottom. Theoretically the right side of D would require similar treatment, but actually this is seldom found necessary. The pointed ends of [9] the letters V and W should, for similar optical reasons, be extended slightly below the bottom guide lines, the amount of this extension being determined by the letters on each side of them. In the A, the Roman letterer at first got over the optical difficulty caused by its pointed top by running this letter also higher than its neighbors; ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... any account; a complete lack of interest, apparently, in many matters that now bulk very large in the minds of men; a small theater, equal to none but very modest demands; a few engravings and plaster-casts and paintings—many of them very poor—to serve as a basis for theories of art; a little optical apparatus, a few minerals and plants and bones, to aid in the advancement of science; everything material on a small scale,—this was Weimar a hundred years ago. Truly a restricted outlook upon this spacious world as ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... accompanied by the vicious habit of pounding on the floor with the butt of the cue ever and anon, produces at last optical illusions, phantasmagoria and visions of pink spiders with navy-blue abdomens. Baseball is not alone highly injurious to the umpire, but it also induces crooked fingers, bone spavin and hives among habitual ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... the mechanical skill displayed in the formation of the eye, and then the optical arrangements, or rather a few of them, for there are more than eight hundred distinct contrivances already observed by anatomists in the dead eye, while the great contrivance of all, the power of seeing, is utterly beyond their ken. I hold in my hand a box made of several pieces of wood glued ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... effect of the MIRAGE," said the doctor, "and nothing else—a simple optical phenomenon due to the unequal refraction of light by different layers of the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Roygbiv Vance taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A star I see. Venus? Can't tell yet. Two. When three it's night. Were those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No. Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to account for such phenomena by referring them to optical illusions or a disordered condition of the brain, making them subjective semblances instead of objective realities. But one is continually being puzzled and perplexed with evidence contradicting this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... a visionary, I am forced to the conclusion that what you thought you saw, was, really nothing but an optical illusion!" ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... for it can not change the angle of vision. The villages upon the table-land were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women, surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is, by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist placed himself where we now stood, he would have more than realized the picture which his fancy painted. He might have seen the marshaled hosts of Liliput marching to the beat of drum, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... therein, though the open country beyond is plainly visible, so, standing in that submarine shadow, all around is dark, though beyond the sable curtain of the shadow the view is clear. Apply this optical fact to the ghastly story of a diver's alleged experience in the cabin of a sunken ship. It is narrated that there was revealed to his appalled sight the spectacle of the drowned passengers in various attitudes of alarm or devotion when the dreadful suffocation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... being repeated in the launching of an optical-glass industry; this trade has also been in Teutonic hands. I could cite many other instances, but these will show the new spirit of ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... they were physically capable; in making of gauges, forging billets, making fuses, cartridges, bullets—"look what they can do," said a foreman, "ladies from homes where they sat about and were waited upon." They also made optical glass; drilled and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric wires and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered guards for lamps and radiator fronts; repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments, automatic searchlights. "We can ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... GLOBE, or ball of the eye, is an optical instrument of the most perfect construction. The sides of the globes are composed of Coats, or membranes. The interior of the globe is filled ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two feet at arm's length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the western horizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but by that time Beta, the planet's G-class primary, would be at its midafternoon hottest. He glanced at his watch. ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... do the King the justice to say that it was I, and not he, who closed the dialogue. At this juncture, I became the subject of a remarkable optical delusion; the legs of my stool appeared to me to double up; the car to spin round and round with great violence; and a mist to arise between myself and His Majesty. In addition to these sensations, I felt extremely ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... senseless body. So far, Geley's experiments throw a strong explanatory light upon those of Crookes. And here the Spiritualist must, as it seems to me, be prepared to meet an objection more formidable than the absurd ones of fraud or optical delusion. It is this. If the body of Katie King the spirit is derived from the body of Florrie Cook the psychic, then what assurance have we that the life therein is not really one of the personalities out of ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my eyes. I saw houses squashed flat as if they had all fallen down from the skies; a smoke fog seemed to drown them. Over my head ragged clouds were drifting past, and by an optical inversion they seemed stationary, while the steeple, the ball and I were all spinning along with fantastic speed. Far away on one side was the green country, on the other the sea sparkled, bathed in sunlight. The Sound stretched away to Elsinore, dotted with a few white sails, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... distinguished member of the French Academy of Science rose up amongst his colleagues and pronounced the Edison phonograph to be nothing more than an acoustical illusion. So we are told that soldiers' visions are optical illusions. That is no answer. Call them optical delusions if you like, then the query arises what causes these optical delusions, of which we have countless instances, which inform a man of the hour, and sometimes the manner, of ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... uniformly level, like the under sides seen from the earth, but they are of a conical or pyramidal shape. These imposing masses seem to precipitate themselves upon the earth, as if to engulf it, but this optical illusion was due to the apparent immobility of the balloon, which at the moment was rising at the rate of ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and, by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the twinkling stars. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... this trust of being a Parliament-man, because he says nothing is done, that he can see, out of any truth and sincerity, but mere envy and design. Then into the Great Garden up to the Banqueting House; and there by my Lord's glass we drew in the species very pretty. [This word is here used as an optical term, and signifies the image painted on the retina of the eye, and the rays of light reflected from the several points of the surface of objects.] Afterwards to nine- pins, Creed and I playing against my Lord ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... owned by Mr. Appleman. It takes about four or five years to grind and polish it. Most of the polishing, as you may or may not know, is done by the hand—smoothing it with the thumb and forefinger. The time, judgment, and skill of an optical expert is required. To-day, unfortunately, that is not cheap. The laborer is worthy of his hire, however, I suppose"—he waved a soft, full, white hand—"and forty thousand is little enough. It would be a great honor if the University could have the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... to peer down at one of the great whirling pools beneath the rock, which was being undermined in this place more than ever; and as Saxe clung by him and gazed down too, there was the perfectly round pool of water, with its central pipe, which, by the optical illusion caused by the gloom and mist, looked reversed—that is, as if the concavity were convex, and he were gazing at the eye of some subterranean monster, the effect being made more realistic by the rock overhanging ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... Oh, by jabers that's not what we're afther, We'd breed for ourselves if they'd give us a chance. BALFOUR, ye stand there wid an oi full o' laughter. Ye divil, we know that cool optical dance. Come the comether on us then, would ye, ye wag, Wid this "ginerous" gift ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... of mud around the sole and a shadow of dust upon the uppers. Where the instep is defective or totally absent, a pretence at one may be made by blacking that portion of the sole of the foot that is immediately adjacent to the heel. This causes a kind of optical illusion which is favorable ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... ideas from the host of spirits that had already solved the problem of life and death, but who were not as yet sufficiently developed to be able to return to the earth. One day they stopped to investigate what they had supposed to be an optical illusion. They observed that leaves and other light substances floated several inches above the surface of the water in the pools. On coming to the edge and making tests, they found a light liquid, as invisible as air, superimposed upon the water, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... for the latter the rouge is mixed with a minute portion of solution of gum tragacanth. M. Titard prepares a great variety of rouges. In some instances the coloring-matter of the cochineal is spread upon thick paper and dried very gradually; it then assumes a beautiful green tint. This curious optical effect is also observed in "pink saucers." What is known as Chinese book rouge is evidently made in the same way, and has been imported into ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... nearer and nearer, gathering and massing beneath my feet and filling the Tenaya Canyon. Then the sun shone free, lighting the pearly gray surface of the cloud-like sea and making it glow. Gazing, admiring, I was startled to see for the first time the rare optical phenomenon of the "Specter of the Brocken." My shadow, clearly outlined, about half a mile long, lay upon this glorious white surface with startling effect. I walked back and forth, waved my arms and struck all sorts of attitudes, to see ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... my best to induce the poor viscount to listen to reason. I made him touch the mirrors and the iron tree and the branches and explained to him, by optical laws, all the luminous imagery by which we were surrounded and of which we need not allow ourselves to be the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... by a curious optical effect, the spectators always see themselves in the personages who are good, tender, generous, heroic whom we place on the boards; and in the personages who are vicious or ridiculous they never see anyone but their neighbors. How can you expect then that the truth ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... to me now, no more than if it had been some passing dream of summer sun-light and flowers; no more than if some optical illusion had dazzled my eyes and gladdened my heart for a short moment, and left me as suddenly again, with my tame and ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the highest human intellects, and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of men? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... on these infernal plains? If it is not water and a lake those buffalo are standing in, what in the name of sense is it?" I told them that what they saw was nothing more than merely buffalo at a distance on the plain; that what they saw that resembled water was simply an optical illusion, called the "mirage." Webster describes the word as follows: "An optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere and causing remote objects to be seen ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... female Glow-worm has her tricks for summoning her swains, the male, on his side, is provided with an optical apparatus suited to catch from afar the least reflection of the calling signal. His corselet expands into a shield and overlaps his head considerably in the form of a peaked cap or a shade, the object of which appears to be to limit the field of vision ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre |
