"Phosphorescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among the cavernous slopes of the hills were broken at intervals by strange rifts of light arising as it were from the palpitating water, which now and again showed gleams of pale emerald and gold phosphorescence,—the stars looked large and white like straying bits of the moon, and the mysterious 'swishing' of slow ripples heaving against the sides of the yacht suggested the whisperings of uncanny spirits. We stood in a silent group, entranced by the grandeur of the night ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "livid flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the description, in "The Ancient Mariner," of the sea snakes ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Moon!" Hope! hope! Its magic wand With phosphorescence ting'd that Stygian pool Of chill despair, in which his soul had sank Lower and lower still. Now, at the forge A blessed vision gleam'd. Its mystery woke The romance of his nature. Every day Moved lighter on, and when he laid it down, It breathed ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... three sides the moonlight turned the tiny waves into thousands of silver mirrors, and from farther up the curving coast-line the fires in the wickerwork huts of the fishermen burned red. At their feet the water was thick with the phosphorescence, shining more brilliantly than the moonlight. And, as schools of minnows fled, darting and doubling on their course before some larger fish that leaped and splashed in pursuit, the black depths of the ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... is the day of wonders! It was a line of brilliant phosphorescence, exceedingly brilliant, about two inches wide, perfectly sharp at the edges, which extended along the side of the ship, and ahead and astern out of sight. "Crack in the water" is the seaman's name for it. I have been a full year on the water, but never saw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... one night I went up to the promenade deck to smoke a cigar before turning in. It was a warm moonlight night. The broad low waves of ebony water that went seething past below, foamed luminous and were streaked and starred with phosphorescence. The recumbent moon, past its full and sinking westward, seemed bigger than I had ever seen it before, and the roundness of the watery globe was manifest about the edge of the sky. One had that sense so rare on land, so common in the night at sea, of the world as a conceivable sphere, and of interstellar ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... every part of the surface of the waves glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. I am inclined to consider that the phosphorescence is the result of organic particles, by which process (one is tempted almost to call it a kind of respiration) the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Watts-Dunton, he had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like the wave-rocked boat itself. He hymned in memory the surge and darkness, the thunder and foam and phosphorescence—'You remember, Theodore? You remember the PHOS—phorescence?'—all so beautifully and vividly that I almost felt stormbound and in peril of my life. To disentangle one from another of the several occasions on which I heard him talk is difficult because ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... into the shrouds and the cordage. While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... gestures. Finally I went on deck to cool. The sky was overcast I discovered all the men were in a knot forward, staring at the faint quivering luminosity that had spread over the heaps of quap, a phosphorescence such as one sees at times on rotting wood. And about the beach east and west there were patches and streaks of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... volcanic seafloor, there bloomed quite a collection of moving flora: sponges, sea cucumbers, jellyfish called sea gooseberries that were adorned with reddish tendrils and gave off a subtle phosphorescence, members of the genus Beroe that are commonly known by the name melon jellyfish and are bathed in the shimmer of the whole solar spectrum, free-swimming crinoids one meter wide that reddened the waters with their crimson hue, treelike basket stars of the greatest ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... air phosphorus slowly combines with oxygen, and in so doing emits a pale light, or phosphorescence, which can be seen only in a dark place. The heat of the room may easily raise the temperature to the kindling point of phosphorus, when it burns with a sputtering flame, giving off dense fumes of oxide ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... the faintly heaving ocean breast. You felt you were in a tropical clime, for, though no breath fanned your cheek, your senses easily detected the delicious odor of a distant garden of sweet roses. The sea sparkled with phosphorescence. Not a sound was heard except the panting of the hard-worked little donkey-engine and the whirr of the line as it came up taut and dripping from the ocean depths. The lamp, hanging from the mast, threw a bright glare ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... harsher surf, Nissr must have begun to break. But as the cupped hand of night, closing over the earth, had also shut away the wind, the air-liner was now resting more easily. Surf still foamed about her floats and lower gallery—surf all spangled with the phosphorescence that the Arabs call "jewels of the deep"—but unless some sudden squall should fling itself against the coast, every probability favored the liner taking ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and vicissitude the French monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people, gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor; till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards the abyss ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Winterborne seemed to keep her company and banish all sense of darkness from her mind. The rains had imparted a phosphorescence to the pieces of touchwood and rotting leaves that lay about her path, which, as scattered by her feet, spread abroad like spilt milk. She would not run the hazard of losing her way by plunging into ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... where the batteries lie hid, in the middle of a fan-shaped phosphorescence, we see the silhouettes of the gunners as they thrust in the shells. Every time they maneuver the breeches, their chests and arms are scorched by a tawny reflection. They are like the implacable workers of a blast furnace; the breeches ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... women, study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... too often is that light only the fugitive phosphorescence of putrefaction; wherefore as one contemplates him one soon begins to realise with bitterness and vexation and disappointment that he is but a sluggard, but a braggart, but one who is petty and weak and blinded with conceit ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... was some light—dim phosphorescence from the Martian night-rock lining the walls and tiling the floor. He walked swiftly, cursing the clack-clack his heels made on the ringing stone. When he reached the end of the corridor he tried ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... he had sunk into the water, swimming beneath it. I could see the phosphorescence of his moving body as he swam away into the shadows ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Chelkash drove the boat into a strip of water between two barks, and they darted rapidly over the smooth surface, that kindled into bluish phosphorescent light under the strokes of the oars. Behind the boat's stern lay a winding ribbon of this phosphorescence, ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... the foot of the companionway when the mate shouted again; "O Kennan! Come on deck quick!" and rushing hastily up I saw for the first time, in all its glorious splendour, the phosphorescence of the sea. With almost incredible swiftness, a mantle of bluish-white fire had covered nearly all the dark water north of us, and its clearly defined edge wavered and trembled for an instant, like the arch of an aurora, within half a mile of the ship. Another ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... positive pole of the battery—certain bands of light, varying in color with the color of the glass. But these are insignificant in comparison with the brilliant glow which shoots from the cathode, or negative wire. This glow excites brilliant phosphorescence in glass and many substances, and these "cathode rays," as they are called, were observed and studied by Hertz; and more deeply by his assistant, Professor Lenard, Lenard having, in 1894, reported that the cathode rays would penetrate thin films of aluminium, wood, and other substances ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... deep. Yet it was a cloud of tremendous potentiality, enwrapping a spirit of energy incarnate. From far aloft its burning eye pierced a channel of light through the murky darkness ahead. In its wake it drew a swell of sparkling phosphorescence, which it carelessly tossed off on either side as a Calif might throw handfuls of glittering coins to his fawning beggars. From somewhere in the structure above, the crackling, hissing wireless mechanism was ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... knightly mail, obtained from she had not the slightest idea where. But that fitted badly with hotels in Sydney and conventions he was going to teach her. In the evening they went to their favourite seat on the anchor and watched the phosphorescence shimmering away in ghostly paths to ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... in the clear sky, and the hosts of stars that studded the dark vault overhead did not shed any appreciable light on the waters of the Pacific, on which the Rover floated almost motionless. That beautiful and mysterious phosphorescence which sometimes illumines the sea was gleaming in vivid flashes in the vessel's wake, and a glowing trail of it appeared to follow the rudder like a serpent ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... Colour, Dispersion of White Light Methods of Producing the Spectrum, Glass Prism and Diffraction Grating Spectroscopes, The Spectrum, Wave Motion of Light, Recomposition of White Light, Hue, Luminosity, Purity of Colours, The Polariscope, Phosphorescence, Fluorescence, Interference.—II., Cause of Colour in Coloured Bodies. Transmitted Colours, Absorption Spectra of Colouring Matters.—III., Colour Phenomena and Theories. Mixing Colours, White Light from Coloured Lights, Effect of Coloured Light on Colours, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... been noticed in 1869 that a strange colouring was caused when an electric charge was sent through a vacuum tube—the walls of the glass tube began to glow with a greenish phosphorescence. A vacuum tube is one from which nearly all the air has been pumped, although we can never completely empty the tube. Crookes used such ingenious methods that he reduced the gas in his tubes until it was twenty million times thinner than the atmosphere. He then sent an ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the mind of the laird a fear: might not Cosmo unwittingly have had some share in the frightful event? When first he entered the room, there was Cosmo, dressed, and with a light in his hand: the seeming phosphorescence in the snow must have been one of his PLOYS, and might not that have been the source of the shock to the dazed brain of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... world! Desire of mine and of the unhuman Thing, did we grasp at Eve or Lilith? At the fire on the hearth or the cold phosphorescence of ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... just cast off her moorings, and was slowly steaming out of the crowded port of Genoa into the heart of a still rosy sunset. The water was perfectly smooth; no motion could be felt but the engine's throb. The trembling foam of the long wake showed glancing points of phosphorescence here and there, while low on the eastern sky a great silver planet ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... is not always in a state of calm phosphorescence, however. On the contrary, it sometimes manifests great flames, like those of a fiery furnace, which shoot forth in great tongues, and dart forth suddenly in certain directions toward the objects attracting them. Under great emotional excitement the auric flames move around in swift circling whirlpools, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... because all motion would be impossible there, and so on. Some inquisitive person sends down a dredge, and brings up lovely creatures, so delicate in structure that the daintiest touch must proceed with circumspection. There is no light in these depths: they make it with their own phosphorescence. Other inquirers visit subterranean caverns, and discover animals and plants whose organs have been transformed by adaptation ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... days' voyage through what seemed to us like a sea of phosphorescence, every splash and ripple producing liquid gems, brought us to Penang, the most northerly sea-port of the Malacca Straits, situated at the point where they open into the Indian Ocean, and just one hundred miles from the island of Sumatra across the mouth of the ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories with a glowworm phosphorescence. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... bright gold;" obliquely from the horizon the Southern Cross was rising, and the evening star shone in the warm night, before the moon had yet risen, with a silver gleam that threw clear light and shadow upon the deck below; while the vessel seemed to plough through a sea of phosphorescence, leaving in her wake a long trail of bluish ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... of Pele, He onohi no Pele (verse 11), is the phosphorescence which Pele's footfall stirs to activity in ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... halls of the echoes, and soon came to an arched passage, at the entrance of which Penn paused and placed the torch in a niche. A projection of the rock prevented the light from shining before them, yet their way was softly illumined from beyond, as by a dim phosphorescence. They advanced, and in a moment their eyes, grown accustomed to the obscurity, came upon a scene of ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... bow window in the castle a powerful apparatus was sending a broad stream of electric light into the darkness. It often changed and moved, being thrown now here, then there. In its course it illumined the tops of the trees with a faint, livid phosphorescence, interwove the shrubbery with fantastic gliding spots of light, and gave the turf, wherever it was visible, the appearance of a strip of a glittering glacier. In the distance, where the light was lost in the ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... the one whom Tom had named Sambo glared around him. His eyes gleamed with a phosphorescence like that which one sees on the water on a lowering night. What Reade did not know was that this black man possessed eyes that were a little keener in the dark than ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... first, utterly unlike real life, they said—nothing. The boy moved round and stood close to his side so that he found himself placed between them, all three leaning forward over the rails watching the phosphorescence of ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... its enfolding arms the wide vault of the cerulean sky. The richness of the majestic azure is deepened by that magnificent marriage. The pale blue is darkened to violet. Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights and cross-lights. As you look upon those endless pastures thought is quickened with the conception of their innumerable phases of vitality. The floating weed, whose meshes measure the spaces of continents and archipelagoes, is everywhere instinct with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Rick was aware of bubbles in the water, a trail of faint phosphorescence shooting downward past his mask. Then something glanced from his tank and he heard a sharp clang like a brazen bell in his ears. The impact rolled him partly over, and as he turned, another line of phosphorescence ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... service. Yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the "Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of silver, as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent. Which, being interpreted, means that his prose is of value ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... impressions have not undergone much change. The young men are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold is the gold of Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles a mild phosphorescence, a dim luminousness as of a bedside match-tray in the dark, in their eyes is when they hear of somebody's what they call conspicuous moderation. I suppose every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his sponge-bag or an archbishop's ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... pleasure prolonged. I want you to come out and have a walk on the deck now in the starlight. It is a lovely night, and, besides, you are now halfway across the ocean, and yet I don't think you have been out once to see the phosphorescence. That is one of the standard sights of an ocean ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... clear water I could see the giant sea-fans waving in a moony twilight, touched eerily in those glassy depths with sudden rays of the spectral light; soft bowers of phosphorescence spread a secret radiance about dimly branching coral groves. And, all the while, the path of the moon over the sea was growing stronger—laying, it would seem, an even firmer pathway of silver stretching to the very foot of ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... forth by the coal, that they could not be worked without the greatest danger; and for this reason some were altogether abandoned, The rudest possible methods were adopted of producing light sufficient to enable the pitmen to work by. The phosphorescence of decayed fish-skins was tried; but this, though safe, was very inefficient. The most common method employed was what was called a steel mill, the notched wheel of which, being made to revolve against a flint, struck a succession of sparks, which scarcely served to ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... theatre. On Sundays a military band performs here forenoons and evenings. Under the starlight you may look not only among the low growing foliage to see the fireflies, which float there like clouds of phosphorescence, but now and again one will glow, diamond-like, in the black hair of the fair senoritas, where they are ingeniously fastened to produce this effect. It is strictly a Spanish idea, which the author has often ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... English Channel only a short week ago! Bugs are now discarded, and winter clothing begins to feel almost oppressive. In the evenings, as we hang over the taffrail, we watch with interest the bluish-white sparks mingling with the light blue foam near the stern—the first indications of that phosphorescence which, I am told, we shall find so ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... face of leaden gray took on a tinge of green; he quaked with rage, and the glare he loosed on Lanyard made that young man wonder if he were mistaken in believing that the eyes of the prince shone in that dusky room with something nearly akin to the phosphorescence to be seen in the eyes of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... following effects are observed:—it may be transmitted through the stone, diaphaneity, as it is called; it may produce single or double refraction, or polarisation; if reflected, it may produce lustre or colour; or it may produce phosphorescence; so that light may be (1) transmitted; (2) ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... morning of October 12th, amid the sheen of the stars and phosphorescence of the sea, one of the crew, with eyes accustomed, like some nocturnal creature, to ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... arranged as the anode, both sealed through the walls of a glass tube or bulb from which almost the whole of the air has been extracted, rays proceed from the kathode, in a direction at right angles thereto, and, striking the glass in the neighbourhood of the anode, produce a green phosphorescence. Facts have been gradually accumulated which force us to think of these kathode rays as streams of very rapidly moving electrons, that is, as streams of extraordinarily minute electrically charged particles identical with the particles which form the [beta]-rays ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... spectroscopic observations. Formerly the spark- and absorption-spectra were the sole methods available; a third method was introduced by Crookes, who submitted the oxides, or preferably the basic sulphates, to the action of a negative electric discharge in vacuo, and investigated the phosphorescence induced spectroscopically. By such a study in the ultra-violet region of a fraction prepared from crude yttria he detected a new element victorium, and subsequently by elaborate fractionation obtained the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... distinctly visible, from the strong and vivid phosphorescence excited by his rapid motion through the sleeping waters of the dark creek, which lit up his jaws, and head, and whole body; his eyes were especially luminous, while a long wake of sparkles streamed away astern of him from the lashing ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... friend, it is very sad, now when Christianity is as good as extinct in all hearts, to meet this ghastly-Phantasm of Christianity parading through almost all. "I will clean your foul thoroughfares, and make your Devil's-cloaca of a world into a garden of Heaven," jabbers this Phantasm, itself a phosphorescence and unclean! The worst, it is written, comes from corruption of the best:—Semitic forms now lying putrescent, dead and still unburied, this phosphorescence rises. I say sometimes, such a blockhead ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Pater! He reminds me, in the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of one of those lucent match-boxes which you place, on going to bed, near the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light: he shines in the uneasy gloom—vaguely, and has a phosphorescence, not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day—but of the longer ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... against the rail, as though she had brought up abruptly against it, making impetuously for the void. He could see her slight pliant form, silhouetted against the jeweled horizon; upon her shoulders, her scarf floated like a vague phosphorescence, and her face was whitely turned toward the stars. He heard her take a long deep breath of the night, and then her arms went up and out in a ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... eyes of Dante, intent equally upon natural phenomena and the things of the soul. Von Humboldt suggests that the rhetorical figure employed by Dante in his description of the River of Light with its banks of wonderful flowers (Par. XXX, 61) is an application of our poet's knowledge of the phosphorescence of the ocean. If you have ever looked down the side of a steamship at night as it ploughed its way forward, and if you have ever observed in the sea the thousand darting lights just below the water line your ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... direction, Jack caught the gleam of a pair of eyes, peering from the gloom like the orbs of a jungle tiger gathering himself for a spring. Nothing could be seen but the glow of the eyes, that seemed to have something of the phosphorescence of the cat species, but he could not mistake the meaning of ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... precipitous crags and ravines. A lovely scene as we steamed up through a crowd of shipping—transports, I suppose—and anchored some way from shore. Blowing hard to-night. I have been on deck for a few minutes. The sea is like molten silver with phosphorescence under the ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... the condition of the party was, the appearances in the forest soon changed the professor's woe into eager delight, for the phosphorescence became more and more pronounced, until every tree-stem blinked with a palish green light, and it trickled like moonlight over the ground, bringing out thick dumpy mushrooms like domes of light. Glowing caterpillars ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... the heavens in one great lighthouse ray, concentrated through the loop above the pillar, and there this night also the ray ran far above us like a lance of fire. But now that we were nearer to its fount we found ourselves bathed in a soft, mysterious radiance like that of the phosphorescence on a summer sea, reflected downwards perhaps from the clouds and massy rock roof of the column loop and diffused ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... pierce the blackness, out of which the anchor lights of the ships stood like stars, but he could see nothing save a faint bluish-greeny gleam now and then far below, where the phosphorescence of the sea washed gently, like so much luminous oil, over the bases of the cliffs and played among the ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... station to get the news in Paris, promising to come back later in the evening, but Clerambault stayed in the isolated house, from which in the distance could be seen the far-off phosphorescence of the city. He had not stirred from the seat where he had fallen stupified. This time he could no longer doubt, the catastrophe was coming, was upon them already. Madame Clerambault begged him to go to bed, but he would not ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... sea were ablaze with phosphorescence, and appeared to tower above the poop as high as the main-topsail-yard, and the sight of them sweeping along after the ship was positively appalling. The wind now began to increase in violence, literally tearing off the summits of the huge waves and sending them in spindrift ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... friend, composedly; "I could have guessed as much; but that is a fire you may warm yourself at; no eternal phosphorescence it is the leaping up of all internal fire, that only shows ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... lights fairly subdued by the splendour of the waters. Under the awnings the ship's company lounged in lazy attitudes or promenaded slowly, talking low voiced, cigars glowing in the splendid dusk. Overside, in the furrow of the disturbed waters, the phosphorescence flashed perpetually beneath the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... stem 12—20 cm. long, and 8—12 mm. in thickness. It occurs in large clusters, several or many joined at their bases. From the rich saffron yellow color of all parts of the plant, and especially by its strong phosphorescence, so evident in the dark, it is an easy plant to recognize. Because of its phosphorescence it ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... in their multi-coloured glory: they burned with fiery splendour; the pine-trees glowed with a resinous phosphorescence. There was the fragrance of wormwood. Chicory, blue- bells, buttercups, milfoil, and cowslip blossomed and faded; ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... blue, but the sea became green oil. That night there were all around us fields of phosphorescence. About midnight these vanished; it was very black for all the stars, and we seemed to hear a sighing as from a giant leagues away. This passed, and the morning broke, silent and tranquil, azure sky and azure sea, and not so sharply ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... is feebly luminous, as are the larvae and even the eggs. It has been supposed by some authors that the light serves to frighten away enemies, and by others to guide the male to the female. At last, Mr. Belt (12. 'The Naturalist in Nicaragua,' 1874, pp. 316-320. On the phosphorescence of the eggs, see 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' Nov. 1871, p. 372.) appears to have solved the difficulty: he finds that all the Lampyridae which he has tried are highly distasteful to insectivorous mammals and birds. Hence it is in accordance ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... canopy of cloud, glowing faintly and testifying to the moon riding behind it. There was much phosphorescence. Fitfully before the ship and at her sides arose those stranger little swirls of mist that swirl up from the Southern Ocean like breath of sea monsters, whirl ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the facts of photo-electricity had not been attempted. Students of this subject will notice that the views expressed are similar to those subsequently put forward by Lenard and Saeland in explanation of phosphorescence. The whole matter is of more practical importance than appears at first sight, for the photoelectric nature of the effects involved in the radiative treatment of many cruel diseases seems ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... the street was like the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off. A murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him. The walls of the houses were wet, the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him. He might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen of an evening about there ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... words, and finally as words be digested by the reason. And another way to the soul only—rare, untransferable to words, and therefore not transmittable to others or to the reason. This way causes the creature a great amazement, and is like a flooding or moving of whiteness, or an inwardly-felt phosphorescence; it is a vitalising ministration greatly enjoyed by the soul. This is not any ecstasy, and is exceedingly swift; the soul must be at high attention to receive this, yet neither anticipates nor asks for it, but is in the act of giving great ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... days. In the moonlight it was an immense plane of vivid silver streaked with serpentine shadows. Its soft doughlike undulations, replete with microscopic life, illuminated the nights. The infusoria, a-tremble with love, glowed with a bluish phosphorescence. The sea was like luminous milk. The foam breaking against the prow sparkled like broken fragments ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the line of sight which he had indicated, perceived, at a distance of about two hundred yards a faint glow, so faint indeed that I think only Hans would have noticed it. Really it might have been nothing more than the phosphorescence rising from a heap of fungus, or even ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... raw-boned Munster-man, but a real good fellow. We forgot the aggressive inequalities of the Mediterranean while he talked to us of 'the pizzantry.' Late the second evening he propounded a confidence. It was a lovely night; Orion overhead, and the plashing phosphorescence on the water below conspired with the hour to make him specially confidential. 'Now, Miss Cayley,' he said, leaning forward on his deck chair, and gazing earnestly into my eyes, 'there's wan question I'd like ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... I would wear my large tortoise-shell spectacles (possibly blinders in addition), and I should attend strictly to business for a while, but when a full moon rose over a South Sea lagoon, and the palm trees rustled and the phosphorescence broke in silver on the bow of the pearl schooner, where she rode at anchor in our little bay, could I keep my contract and avoid sentiment? How ridiculous to suppose that stipulating that the lady should be forty ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... of summer stars spangled the heavens. Even in the reeking city itself a slight freshness grew in the air, although there was no wind to stir the parched leaves of the park trees, among which fire-flies floated—their intermittent phosphorescence breaking out ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... in the sea, while forward the spray dashed over the bows in cataracts, and drenched the men who were on the fore-yard. By this time the deck was alive with the whole strength of the ship's company, five hundred men, officers and all, mostly clinging to the weather bulwarks. The occasional phosphorescence of the yeasting sea cast a glare upon their uplifted faces, as a night fire in a populous city lights up ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... lightning, the lake at the foot of the rock, ordinarily so still and so dark, lighted up, not on the surface only, but down to half its depth; so that, as it tossed in the wind, like a tortured sea of writhing flames, or incandescent half-molten serpents of brass, they could not tell whether a strong phosphorescence did not issue from the transparent body of the waters, as if earth and sky lightened together, one consenting ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Popes. From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professional standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which it will cease to exist; to lay down precise ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... later they left the deck and went downstairs to dress for dinner. That same evening they stood again at the rail watching the mysterious phosphorescence as it sparkled in the moonlight. Her thoughts travelling faster than the ship, Shirley ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... the funeral procession of the girl winding its way by the light of paper lanterns—the wan dead glow that is like a shimmer of phosphorescence—to the Street of the Temples, followed by a long train of women, white-hooded, white-robed, white-girdled, passing all ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway, and indeed he thought he could make out another thread of light, as fine as a needle and as faint as phosphorescence, which might very well be reflected along the polished wood of a handrail. Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable desire for action of any sort had possessed itself of his spirit. He was in deadly peril, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... principal servants were Elde and Funfeng, emblems of the phosphorescence of the sea; they were noted for their quickness and they invariably waited upon the guests whom he invited to his banquets in the depths of the sea. AEgir sometimes left his realm to visit the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... life of these translucent waters is also extremely interesting. Here the floating jelly-fish, called, from its phosphorescence, the glow-worm of the sea, is observed in great variety, sheltering little colonies of young fishes within its tentacles, which rush forth for a moment to capture some passing mite, and as quickly return again to their shelter. One takes up a handful of the floating ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... great screw is whirling it towards the island of Martinique, as if itself anxious to reach that fairy land of fairy lands. Though the middle of November, the soft warmth of the tropics is in the air. Nor are the sea and sky now leaden. The first is turned into liquid gold by the phosphorescence, and the full moon silvers everything else. Neither is Peter pacing the deck with lines of pain and endurance on his face. He is up in the bow, where the vessel's forefoot throws up the white foam in silver drops in the moonlight. And he does not look miserable. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... fluorine is bubbled into it, but only potassium fluoride. Lime becomes most brilliantly incandescent, owing partly to the excess being raised to a very high temperature by the heat developed during the decomposition, and partly to the phosphorescence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... land that this phenomenon of phosphorescence is to be seen in living forms. Among marine animals, indeed, it is a phenomenon much more general, much more splendid, and, we may add, much more familiar to those who live on our coasts. There must be many in the British Isles who have never had the opportunity of seeing the light ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... wonderfully adapted to live in a compressed liquid, collapsed when lifted into a lighter medium, and which, despite the assumed perpetual darkness of their profound abode, were adorned with variegated colors and furnished with organs of phosphorescence whereby they could create for themselves all the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... it sat smoking cigar after cigar from the Indian D box, half-asleep, yet conscious. The moon came up into a pretty cloudless sky, and she was bright, but not bright enough to out-shine the enlightened flight of the ocean, which that night was one continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic current. I could hear it, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... and spinning at a rate inconceivable, so that it looked like a gigantic wheel of fire. Yet it was not fire that clothed it but rather some phosphorescence, since from it came no heat. Yes, a phosphorescence arranged in bands of ghastly blue and lurid red, with streaks of other colours running up between, and a kind of ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... threw a sheltering shadow; the moon was low in the west. In the blackness a phosphorescence was apparent. It rippled and rose in the dark with the pulsing beat of the jellylike mass. And through it were showing two discs. Gray at first, they ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... agents concerned in the production of the beautiful phenomena of phosphorescence. The minute species—mere gelatinous specks—swarm at times by countless myriads in the waters of the ocean, and make its surface glow with 'vitalised fire.' The waves, as they curl and break, sparkle and flash ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... fire maker, encountered by the Cakchiquels in Xahila's narrative (Sec. 21).[42-2] I have narrated the curious folk-lore about the woodsman in another publication, and need not repeat it here.[42-3] His second name, the White Fire Maker, perhaps refers to the "light wood" or phosphorescence about ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... you see, phosphorus must at intervals be placed where it can absorb the light in order to retain its brilliancy. Now as a man's watch stays most of the time in his pocket, a watch dial treated with phosphorus would have no opportunity to regain its phosphorescence. Hence the Ingersoll Company developed a sort of radium coating for their dials. It probably was not actually made from radium because there is not enough of it to be found in all the world even if a watch company could afford to buy it up. Just what this magic watch ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... minutes later I saw Morris step suddenly back from a corner, which he was examining. We all followed his movements with our eyes, for undoubtedly some nervousness was growing on us, and we saw a whole mass of phosphorescence, which twinkled like stars. We all instinctively drew back. The whole place ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... was clear and hard against the sky, and in one particular quarter it showed black against a silvery climbing phosphorescence that grew and grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more they began to see ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... the spots on the sun, and the larvae in a beech leaf, and the light under fire-fly's wing, and the terrible eye glance of a condor pitching from Chimborazo. It has studied the myriads of animalculae that make up the phosphorescence in a ship's wake, and the mighty maze of suns, and spheres, and constellations, and galaxies that blaze on in the march of God. Healthful curiosity has stood by the inventor until forces that were hidden for ages came to wheels, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... near me, in a splutter of phosphorescence. I tried to help him, and in an instant he had me wildly round the neck. In the end I shook him off, poor devil, to his death. And he was the last I tried to aid: have I not said ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... are fringed by a number of cays among which the sea breaks heavily, while the whole surface of the shoal is white water. And it is this same white water which gives rise to the phenomenon above referred to, locally known as "Bank Blink." It is simply the reflection of the phosphorescence of the water in the clouds above; and the darker and more overcast the night, the more distinctly is the reflection seen. The phenomenon is, of course, quite natural and easily to be accounted for, yet its occurrence can scarcely be regarded as less than providential; ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... searchlight, and the eyes of that creature stared straight at us with a dreadful, stony look; and then the effect of the phosphorescence, heightened by the absence of the greater light, became more terrible than before. We were unmanned, and I hardly had nerve enough to turn the submersible away and ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... and dark, illumined only by an extraordinary phosphorescence in the wake of the ship; everybody was asleep on board except the steersman, who, in order to keep himself awake, sang all night, but in a voice so soft and so subdued that one might have thought that he feared to awake the men of the watch, or that he himself was half asleep. We did not ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of phosphorescence is most conspicuous on stacks of fire-wood. At Dorjiling, during the damp, warm, summer months (May to October), at elevations of 5000 to 8000 feet, it may be witnessed every night by penetrating a few yards into the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the girl answered: "I can't see it now, either. Maybe I didn't see it. It was very faint—just a glow—it might have been phosphorescence." ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... haze dimmed the star-glow, only the diffused illumination of the open sea enabled the passengers of the Fair Play to identify that blacker darkness on the horizon ahead of them as land. The ship herself was no more than a formless blot stealing through the gloom, and save for the phosphorescence at bow and stern no light betrayed her presence, not even so much as the flare of a match or the coal from a cigar or cigarette. Orders of the strictest had been issued and the expedicionarios, gathered along the rails, were not inclined ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... words, still subdued, smell of wine: "Ah, la, la! Talk about a filthy war! Don't you think we should be a lot better at home!—Hullo! What's the matter with the ass?" A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief and sudden flash of phosphorescence. Others go off here and there along our line. Rifle-shots are ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... tentacula, and the brownish tuberosities of its body. If we place a very irritable medusa on a pewter plate, and strike against the plate with any sort of metal, the slight vibrations of the plate are sufficient to make this animal emit light. Sometimes, in galvanising the medusa, the phosphorescence appears at the moment that the chain closes, though the exciters are not in immediate contact with the organs of the animal. The fingers with which we touch it remain luminous for two or three minutes, as is observed in breaking ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about in ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... stem is six to eight inches high. It occurs in large clusters and the rich saffron color of the entire plant compels our admiration and we are reminded that "not all is gold that glitters." It will be interesting to gather a large cluster to show its phosphorescence and the heat which the plant will generate. You can show the phosphorescence by putting it in a dark room and by placing a thermometer in the cluster you can show the heat. It is frequently ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... older and far more prominent than psychic. But although a changed environment made the old types of defense obsolete, they still persist, "in a sthenic if somewhat now inco-ordinated way, and when they are called into action now they evoke a faint phosphorescence of the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... once a colony of real artists, but the big fish left and the minnows swim slimily about, giving off nothing but their own sickly phosphorescence." ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... almost dissipated. In place of the phosphorescence, electric lights had appeared, making the ground beneath perfectly visible. Dick could see a number of men grouped together at the entrance to a large building, part of which had been wrecked by a bomb, though there were no evidences of fire. Other structures ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... and there through the gloom shone a lamp. Across the north was a dim glow of phosphorescence, precursor of the aurora, from which occasionally trembled for an instant a single shaft of light. The group by the bronze field-cannon were humming softly the sweet and tender cadences ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... Thucydides thought in each case can only be guessed at. They have presented the facts without comment, and the facts tell their own tale, explain themselves, carry with them the feelings they should evoke, and shine by their own light, like the phosphorescence of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... near Valencia. The women went to the city to sell the fish, the men sailed about in their boats with triangular sails, or tugged at their nets on the beach; we summer vacationists spent the day sleeping and the night at the doors of our houses, contemplating the phosphorescence of the waves or slapping ourselves here and there whenever we heard the buzz of a mosquito,—that scourge of our ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... have eight hours to swim before sunrise, an operation quite practicable if we relieved each other. The sea, very calm, was in our favour. Sometimes I tried to pierce the intense darkness that was only dispelled by the phosphorescence caused by our movements. I watched the luminous waves that broke over my hand, whose mirror-like surface was spotted with silvery rings. One might have said that we were in a ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... fancy may be roused even more strongly in darkness than by daylight. How living seem the smoulderings and the flashings of the tide on nights of phosphorescence!—how reptilian the subtle shifting of the tints of its chilly flame! Dive into such a night-sea;—open your eyes in the black-blue gloom, and watch the weird gush of lights that follow your every motion: each luminous point, ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... about the sea on a clear night when the moon is full; or when there is no moon, and the phosphorescence in the water shows, as if mermaids' children were playing with blue-tipped matches. I like to see it when a gale is blowing, and the white caps race. Yes, and when it is a flat calm, with here and there a tiny cat's-paw crinkling the water into gray-green crepe. And also ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... when the tempest blows and the wind howls about his ears, a man gathers his cloak round him, and cleaves fast to his supporter. The midnight sea lies all black; but when it is cut into by the oar, or divided and churned by the paddle, it flashes up into phosphorescence, and so it is from the tumults and agitation of man's spirit that there is struck out the light of man's faith. There is the bit of flint and the steel that comes hammering against it; and it is the contact of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... these tropics, if only for the freedom from severe heat, the glory of the moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the fish swim to meet the 10 harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. A night for a lover, a lady, and ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... while the crest of a wave broke into a long snowy-white line which appeared to be filled with a thousand lights; this effect was caused by the infinite number of animalculae, which are struck together by the movement of the wave and give out phosphorescence. These animalculae are living creatures which cannot be seen without the help of the microscope. It is wonderful that such small things ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... form of radiant energy, is used as a general term for any luminous effect discernible by the eye, from the faintest phosphorescence to the blaze of the noonday sun. A flame is both hot and luminous; if it contains few solid particles it will yield little light, tho it may afford intense heat, as in the case of a hydrogen-flame. A blaze is an extensive, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... conceivable angle with such rapidity that the "shaling" of the water was like that of a strong rapid, while the interlacing—so to speak—of the ripples created a sort of network of miniature breakers, easily visible because of the phosphorescence set up. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... precursor of a storm. It begins with a heave of the whole atmosphere, like the sigh of a weary strong man on turning to re-commence unusual exertion, just as I stand here in the second fosse. That which now radiates from the sky upon the scene is not so much light as vaporous phosphorescence. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... of innumerable phosphorescent organisms breaking against the boat. I have seen the like of it only once before, and this was on the Pacific down at Asilomar one evening, when the waves were running fire with phosphorescence. It was a beautiful sight there ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... nature is the sea. That great and many-sided wonder, whether with its glare of phosphorescence or the stillness of its dead calm, fascinates the poems of Sharp and lends them its spell. But of the prose of Fiona it may be ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... hard by, he would anchor the punt and leave it. He begged Rob to take him for that night's fishing. He had discovered a sure sign of the presence of herring—unknown to any of the fishermen. What was the phosphorescence in the sea?—the nights were too clear for that. What was the mere breaking of the water?—a moving shoal that might escape. But this sign that the old man had discovered went to show the presence of large masses of the fish, stationary and deep: it was the appearance on the surface ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... visitors," said a sailor, pointing over the side. Long streaks of phosphorescence darted back and forth in the shadow of ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... steadily on, guiding myself by some much ruddier star on the horizon. The pale phosphorescence on the wave, the simple sounds as of fish stirring in the water—the beauty and wonder of Night's dwelling-place seemed ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... swiftly to a mysterious violet glimmer in the sky, on the ground, a cold phosphorescence that seemed to ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hands and threw it into the air, it appeared like sparkles of fire, so long did it retain its brilliancy. The slightest movement in the water caused a flash of light. Jerry and I agreed that we had never seen anything more beautiful. The doctor told us that this phosphorescence or luminosity of the ocean is caused by a minute animal, scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, though sufficient to tinge the water of a brown or reddish colour. Other marine substances are, however, luminous. While we were waiting ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston |
