"Retina" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this instant, the dog turned his head. No human tympanum in the room vibrated to my cry. No human retina was recipient of my anguish. What fine, unclassified senses had the highly-organized animal by which he should become aware of me? The dog turned his noble head—he was a St. Bernard, with the moral qualities of the breed well marked ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... table bare of the lore and lure of journalism as typified in the bulky, black-faced editions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused, unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he recalled a saying of Gardner's as that wearied ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... saw it not. At least it made no sensible impression on him. His mental retina was capable of receiving only two pictures: the concentrated accumulation of past sin—the terrible anticipation of future retribution. Between these two, present danger and suffering were ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... problem of optics, and physiological optics is the study of perception by means of the sense of sight. We see things in the external world through the medium of light which they direct upon our eyes. The light strikes the retina, and causes a sensation. The sensation brought to the brain by means of the optic nerve becomes the condition of the representation in consciousness of certain objects distributed in space.... We make use of the sensation which the light stimulates ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... sclerotic), on the inner side of which is laid a more delicate, friable membrane, consisting mainly of blood vessels and pigment cells (the choroid), which in its turn is lined by the extremely delicate and sensitive expansion of the nerve of sight (the retina). The anterior fifth of the globe of the eye bulges forward from what would have been the direct line of the sclerotic, and thus forms a segment of a much smaller sphere than is inclosed by the sclerotic. Its walls, too, have in health a perfect translucency, from which ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... eye has a blind spot in the retina. When things pass over this blind spot, they absolutely vanish; the other eye supplies the missing object. To the French ace it seemed that his eyes were all blind spots, so far as the Master was concerned. The ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the two), that gleams-in from the circumambient Eternity, and colours with its own hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five-hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Caspar set his wits to work; and for a long while he sat in silence, as if buried in some very profound speculation. Probably, there was no material substance in that valley that did not pass in review before the retina of his mental vision; and all were considered ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... vengeances. That is to say, her mind did not occupy itself with plots possible to make real; but rather it dabbled among those fragmentary visions that love to overlap and displace one another upon the changeful retina ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... have seven more towns (as per itinerary), and if their thirst for cathedrals isn't slaked when these are finished, we have the entire Continent to do. If I could only succeed in making an impression on the retina of Aunt Celia's eye! Though I have been under her feet for ten days, she never yet has observed me. This absent-mindedness of hers serves me ill now, but it may prove ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... long while ago men imagined they had explained vision by saying that the luminous action of bodies produces on the retina pictures representative of external forms and colours. To this the physiologists [query, the physiologists] have objected, with reason, that if it was as images that the luminous impressions acted, there needed another eye within the eye to behold them. Does not a similar objection ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... perhaps, if it is a face which you love and have lingered over, a dozen other expressions equally belonging to it are hanging in your memory, and blending themselves with the actual picture on your retina:—till every little angle is somewhat rounded, every little wrinkle somewhat softened, every little shade somewhat blended with the surrounding light, so that the sum total of what you see, and are intended by Heaven to see, is something far softer, lovelier—younger, perhaps, thank ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... profound and comparatively complete darkness, light never allows a complete destruction and extinction of its power. Light is so diffuse, so subtle, that it permeates everywhere, and whatever little may remain, the retina of the eye will succeed in finding it. In this place nothing—the absolute obscurity made ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... sensations as the discourses of an idiot. Fatalities of flesh and blood, unending strife,—I saw all pass before my eyes, until night caused me to lose my taste for day, and now I cannot distinguish flowers from thistles. Everything is confused in my wearied retina. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... define, and reason, correctly. There is a particular science which takes these matters in hand, and it is called logic; but it is not by logic, certainly not by logic alone, that the faculty I speak of is acquired. The infant does not learn to spell and read the hues upon his retina by any scientific rule; nor does the student learn accuracy of thought by any manual or treatise. The instruction given him, of whatever kind, if it be really instruction, is mainly, or at least pre-eminently, this,—a discipline in ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... is formed on the plate. Motion-picture machines and stereopticons likewise have lenses that can be moved forward and back until they form a sharp focus on the screen. Even the lens in your eye has muscles that make it flatter and rounder, so that it can make a clear image on the sensitive retina in the back of your eye. The lens in the eyes of elderly people often becomes too hard to be regulated in this way, and so they have to wear one kind of glasses to see things near them clearly and another kind to see ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... room in town,' said Colonel Delville, whereupon Mrs. Mostyn, while counters were being distributed, explained to the company on scientific principles why the room was comfortable, expatiating upon the effect of yellow and brown upon the retina, and some curious facts relating to the optic machinery of water-fleas, as lately discovered by a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... William faced five little grimy-faced boys on the bench before him, showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational interrogative stares, with a figuratively bulging she-bear in the retina of each, and it was ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... diver; "pierce into you like a gimblet, goin' slap agin the retina, turnin' short down the jugular, right into the heart, where they create an agreeable sort o' fermentation. Oh! Don't ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... the required action. Anemia of the soft parts at the points of pressure results from prolonged sitting or lying in one position, and as a result pain compels a muscular action that shifts the damaging pressure—this is the pain of anemia; when the rays of the blazing sun shine directly upon the retina, pain immediately causes a protective muscular action—the lid is closed, the head turns away—this is light pain; when standing too close to a blazing fire the excessive heat causes a pain which results in the protective muscular action of moving away—this is heat pain; when the urinary bladder ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... appearance to the nose and cast shadows upward over the eyes? If this be not so, another thing is certain: namely, that the eyes of the actors suffer from the light, so that the effective play of their glances is precluded. Coming from below, the light strikes the retina in places generally protected (except in sailors, who have to see the sun reflected in the water), and for this reason one observes hardly anything but a vulgar rolling of the eyes, either sideways or upwards, toward the galleries, so that nothing but the white of the eye shows. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... to stare long enough at it to get the image of some distinct object imprinted upon your retina, then you need but stare again at some space of indistinct colouring and you will see the impression of your distinct object reprinted a hundred ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... or perhaps they lack a willingness or a capability to think about a situation with sufficient intentness to force a clear picture of the situation with all its various features upon the mental retina. ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... than that which met the apostle's gaze as he entered the bay of Puteoli. "See Naples, and die," is the cuckoo cry of the modern tourist who visits this enchanted region; and such a vision is indeed worthy to be the last imprinted upon a human retina. It is called by the Italians themselves "Un pezzo di cielo caduto in terra," a piece of heaven fallen upon earth. Shores that curve in every line of beauty, holding out arm-like promontories, into whose ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... a dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there, enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of partition between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and Angres, whence the enemy ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... everything living and dead is put together from them. It is accomplishing wonders before us every day, such as Arabian story-tellers used to string together in their fables. It spreads the sensitive film on the artificial retina which looks upon us through the optician's lens for a few seconds, and fixes an image that will outlive its original. It questions the light of the sun, and detects the vaporized metals floating around the great luminary,—iron, sodium, lithium, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... many minds must change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their voices. You know, I suppose,—he said,—what is meant by complementary colors? You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina. If you close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, you see ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the proprieties of which impressions, we may collect these short definitions of Colours: That Blue is an impression on the Retina of an oblique and confus'd pulse of light, whose weakest part precedes, and whose strongest follows. And, that Red is an impression on the Retina of an oblique and confus'd pulse of light, whose strongest part ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... example. Its eyes also have become small and are deeply hidden in the muscles, although they are by no means as much degenerated as in the Proteus anguineus, and are still possessed of a lens and a retina. Their nerve of vision, however, has become very imperfect, and its connection with the brain is interrupted, so that the animal for this reason can have no perception of light. Notwithstanding ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... and the skin showed through. His mother had done that, reaching it down for his father to "take the book"[2] in the old house at home. John Arniston sat down on the easy-chair with the half-unwrapped parcel on his knee. His eye read the pages without a letter printing itself on his retina. It was a book within a book, and without also, which he read. He read the tale of the smooth places on the side. No one in the world but himself could know what he read. He saw this book, his father's great house Bible, lying above a certain grey head, in the white square ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... likely she will. She certainly ought to if she has the desire; and she has time enough yet if the right man only thinks so. It is rather on the system I am pondering than on the individual, though the vision of Josie at thirty unwedded, and a little hard and worn, haunts my retina and makes me feel philosophical. Away down in the bottom of my boots or my soul, or wherever a man can most safely harbor a secret reflection, has long lain a feeling of wonder that the world continues ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... distant unchartered world two ships lay wrecked and a lone man stared at a star hyacinth. Its brilliance burned into his retina ... and he knew that men could easily kill and kill for ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... Trim wished for;—so that as Trim uttered the words, 'A rood and a half of ground to do what they would with,'—this identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and became curiously painted all at once, upon the retina of my uncle Toby's fancy;—which was the physical cause of making him change colour, or at least of heightening his blush, to that immoderate degree I ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... piled along the western horizon, the light being so brilliant as to be quite dazzling after the Cimmerian darkness to which our eyes had become accustomed. But, despite the dazzling brilliancy of the sudden illumination, the retina of my eyes caught and retained the vision of three large proas broad on our starboard quarter, about two miles distant, situated precisely as Roberts had described them; and that this vision was no illusion ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... spectrum, but refusing to pass out of the blue into the other colours. It was plain that the spot belonged both to the eye and to the blue part of the spectrum. The result to which I have come is, that the appearance is due to the yellow spot on the retina, commonly called the Foramen Centrale of Soemmering. The most convenient method of observing the spot is by presenting to the eye in not too rapid succession, blue and yellow glasses, or, still better, allowing blue and yellow papers to revolve slowly before the eye. ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... dream was floating before his imagination, and its details were painted vivid as life upon the retina of the mind, a quiet voice, but one not without some ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... or complete albino is altogether devoid of pigment. One result of this among the Vertebrata is that the eyeball is pink in colour, since the cornea, iris and retina being transparent, the red blood contained in the capillaries is unmasked by the absence of pigmentary material. In man, and doubtless also in lower forms, the absence of this pigment produces the well ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... one of two ways—first, as a vivid picture affecting the focus and retina of the eye, perfect in its outline and colouring, and giving the impression of being either distant or near or at moderate range, Secondly, it may be conveyed as a vivid impression accompanied by a hazy and undefined formation in the ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses. It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina. Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually; the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in his patient, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... choking them. These symptoms were accompanied by nausea and qualms at the pit of the stomach, while maleficent goblins kept puncturing their aguish, trembling legs with needles. Another of the physical effects of their fear was that in the congested condition of the blood vessels of the retina they beheld thousands upon thousands of small black specks flitting past them, as if it had been possible to ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... platinum wires on the receiver connected with the negative pole, by the incandescence of these wires according to the different degrees of electricity we can obtain a picture, of a fugitive kind, it is true, but yet so vivid that the impression on the retina does not fade during the relatively very brief space of time the slide occupies in traveling over all the contacts. A Ruhmkorff coil may also be employed for obtaining sparks in proportion to the current ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.' To Newton and to Newton's Dog Diamond, what a different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely, the same! Let the Reader here, in this sick-room of Louis, endeavour to look ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of which all the rest of nature does not afford. These eyes are a sort of looking-glasses, wherein all the objects of the whole world are painted by turns and without confusion in the bottom of the retina that the thinking part of man may see them in those looking-glasses. But though we perceive all objects by a double organ, yet we never see the objects double, because the two nerves that are subservient to sight in our eyes are but two branches that unite in ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... interesting paper 'on Binocular Alteration of Vision,' which was published by the Physiological Society of London, in November 1900. It may be mentioned here, by the way, that, in course of his investigations on the Response of the Living and Non-Living substances, Dr. Bose constructed an "artificial retina" to study the characteristics of the excitatory change produced by a stimulus on the retina and these characteristics gave him a clue to the unexpected discovery of the "binocular alteration of vision" in man—"each eye supplements its fellow by turns, instead of acting as a continuously ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... breeze, after lunch, which took us gently up past Wargrave and Shiplake. Mellowed in the drowsy sunlight of a summer's afternoon, Wargrave, nestling where the river bends, makes a sweet old picture as you pass it, and one that lingers long upon the retina of memory. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... began to grow light, like very early morning. He could see nothing, but the retina of his eyes was affected. He fancied that he heard music, but while he was listening for it, it stopped. The light grew stronger, the air grew warmer; he heard the confused sound of ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... by night, relatively speaking, than by day is due to some lesion of the macular region, rendering it blind. At night the pupil dilates more than in the day-time, and hence vision with the extramacular or peripheral portions of the retina is correspondingly better. It is, therefore, a symptom of serious retinal disease. All night-prowling animals have widely dilatable pupils, and in addition to this they have in the retina a special organ called ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the X-ray, observed that if X-rays are allowed to enter the eye of an observer who is in complete darkness, the retina receives a stimulus, and light is perceived, due to the fluorescent action of the X-rays upon ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... this concession is officially termed a "privilege." The red tunic of the soldier, like the red rays of the spectrum which cannot be brought into focus with the other colours, fails to make a sharp impression upon the British retina, but projects an ill-defined image seen through a medium of doubt ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... ought to know that no respectable TK would lay a lift on a retina. I just squeezed off a couple of small arteries. He's back in business already, ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... already seen that, in focussing, the distance between lens and image depends on the distance between object and lens. Now, the retina cannot be pushed nearer to or pulled further away from its lens, like the focussing screen of a camera. How, then, is the eye able to focus sharply objects at distances varying from ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... blue or to yellow; yet in its general effects it is cool, calm, temperate, and refreshing. Having little power in reflecting light, it is a retiring colour, and readily subdued by distance: for the same reason, it excites the retina less than most colours, and is cool and grateful to the eye. As a colour individually, green is eminently beautiful and agreeable, but it is more particularly so when contrasted by its compensating colour, red, ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... suddenly registers a small pale patch been occupying a corner of my retina for the last half hour; it turns out to be a ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... not as a series of impressions on the retina of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at every moment; and the instrument by ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... of my retinal system of blood vessels on to a white screen merely by turning a strong light sideways into my eye. And the explanation of it was quite simple. The retinal vessels stand out slightly in relief, and thus a perfect shadow of the system is cast on the retina. It was this shadow I saw, and the white screen was merely a convenient background for it. I don't know if ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the impression of a vast number of separate pictures, such as the eye produces when a microphotograph is taken through it. The fly sees one picture just as we do; in the same way as our brain rights the upside-down image cast on our retina, the fly's brain reduces the compound image to one. And beyond these impressions were a wild hodge-podge of smell-sensations, and a strange desire to burst through the invisible glass barrier into the ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... qualities of beaten metal. I know an expert on Japanese pottery who, when a sixth sense tells him that two pots apparently identical come really from different kilns, puts them behind his back and refers the matter from his retina to his finger-tips. Thus alternately challenged and trusted, the eye should become extraordinarily expert. A Florentine collector once saw in a junk-shop a marble head of beautiful workmanship. Ninety-nine amateurs out of a hundred would have said. "What a beautiful copy!" for ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... vary as we move, and this means that the quantity of sensation, when I observe the apple from a nearer point, is greater. The man of science tells me that the image which the object looked at projects upon the retina of the eye grows larger as we approach objects. The thing, then, may remain unchanged; our sensations will vary according to the impression which is made upon ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... with the centre of our eye we are most sensitive to slight movement impressions on the side parts of our eye, and that this sensitiveness is often abnormally heightened. Just when the child is looking steadily into our face or to the ceiling, the outside parts of her sensitive retina may bring to her the visible unintentional signs from her sister or mother. The untrained observer is also usually unaware how easily he helps by suggestive movements or utterances to the other observers. When Beulah gave a six instead of a nine, one of our friends whispered ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... to perceive and speak. Such a poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque groupings and tempestuous tossings of the forest-trees, but with their roots and fibers naked to the chalk and stone. He does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human eyes, to see those pictures on them. He is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. That ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... 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
... volition and an act—the loosing of the greyhound from the leash. These several thoughts are the concomitants of a process which goes on in the nervous system of the man. Unless the nerve-elements of the retina, of the optic nerve, of the brain, of the spinal cord, and of the nerves of the arms, went through certain physical changes in due order and correlation, the various states of consciousness which have been enumerated would not make their appearance. So that in this, as ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... comprehensive glance that he had seen this, and it seemed still to be passing panorama-like across the retina of his eyes, when the faint flame died out and he dropped upon his knees beside ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... circulatory process which, in its spasms of activity, gives rise to spots, produces in its regular course the singular "marbled" appearance, for the recording of which we are no longer at the mercy of the fugitive or delusive impressions of the human retina. And precisely this circulatory process it is which gives to our great luminary its permance as a sun, or warming and ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... was like magic, the sudden blotting out of the slim human figure, the substitution of the draped form as she moved from the light into the shadow. But on Kingozi's retina remained the vision of her as she was. He shifted, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... wonder. He told me the other day that he is going to cure what is called split retina, which has ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... the point of view is good, and the advice is well thought-out. The conclusion that the public will have an accurate view is not warranted, for the state of its eyes must be examined, to ascertain whether it is near or far-sighted, or if the retina naturally, or through habit, is sensitive to certain colors. In the same way the French of the eighteenth century must be considered, the structure of their inward vision, that is to say, the fixed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... find a very delicate, dark-red membrane, very rich in blood-vessels—the choroid coat—and inside this the retina (o), the expansion of the optic nerve (i). The latter is the second cerebral nerve. It proceeds from the optic thalami (the second cerebral vesicle) to the eye; penetrates its outer envelopes, and then spreads out like a net between the choroid and the corpus ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... died away in half-caught sobs. The Kid read his thoughts openly, and wandered back with him through all the weary days of famine and disease; and with him was also the patient Madeline, sharing his pains and perils, never doubting, never complaining. His mind's retina vibrated to a score of pictures, stern, clear-cut, and the hand of the past drew back with heavy fingers on his heart. It was the psychological moment. Malemute Kid was half-tempted to play his reserve card and win the ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... grown on him latterly, as much as the work had. Careless Roland saw no way out of that difficulty, any more than he did out of the other, except by an emigration to that desired haven which had stereotyped itself on the retina of his imagination in colours of the brightest phantasy—Port Natal. For its own sake, Roland was hurrying to get to it, as well as that it might be convenient ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the tableau photographed on my retina as I sprang forward; but I drew the revolver which had occasioned Winston's mirth when Molly gave it to me at Brig, and in an instant the picture had dissolved. The man in brown dropped the ruecksack, and ran as I have never seen man run before—ran as if he wore seven-leagued boots. My revolver ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... needs be flattened to get it on one retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men and then groups of men will fall ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... literary calamity as a warning to my sedentary brothers. When my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed, there appear on a bluish film a number of mathematical squares, which are the reflection of the fine network of the retina, succeeded by blotches which subside into printed characters, apparently forming distinct words, arranged in straight lines as in a printed book; the monosyllables are often legible. This is the process of a few seconds. It is remarkable that the usual power ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... backward to the old home, reviewing the years of war that had transformed me from boy to man as though by some magic. The varied incidents of march, camp, and battle were like dreams, so swiftly did they pass across the retina of the brain, each stirring event leading to another as I climbed from the ranks to command. Yet at the end of all came again the vision of Claire Mortimer, and I was seeing in her blue eyes the hope of the future. The candle sputtering fitfully aroused me to ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... by having a picture, formed by the rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in one piece, instantaneously, on the retina, or last nervous part of the eye. Or, according to others, there is but one point of any object painted on the eye in such a manner as to be perceived at once, but by moving the eye, we gather up, with great celerity, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... far described depicts things on the retina the unaccustomed way up. By using a concave glass instead of a convex, and placing it so as to prevent any image being formed, except on the retina ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... particular spot, though at the distance of some ages? The query could not be answered, but the thought has frequently cheered me on. The stern-looking gateway opening on St. Martin's plain, was probably one of the very first objects traced on the retina of my infant eye, when it ranged beyond the inner walls of the nursery; and often, with tottering step, I passed beneath that arch into the splendid garden of our noble episcopal palace; and certainly, if my Protestantism may not be traced to that locality, my taste ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... White's volumes.[1] The two do not differ in any important particular. The amazing apparition of the huge white-winged ship with its crew of goblins, and what they said, and what they did, and how they looked, had remained clearly photographed upon the retina of Taniwha's mind's-eye for three-quarters of a century. From his youth up he had, of course, proudly repeated the story. A more delightful child's narrative it would be ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... be entire brain. This it is not; but a conception of this nature will bring you near a comprehension of what it is. A luminous body imparts vibration to the luminiferous ether. The vibrations generate similar ones within the retina; these again communicate similar ones to the optic nerve. The nerve conveys similar ones to the brain; the brain, also, similar ones to the unparticled matter which permeates it. The motion of this latter is thought, of which perception is the first undulation. This is the mode by which the mind ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to come the 95,000,000 miles from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there are. When you find furthermore that some stars are so far distant that the light you are now receiving on your retina started from them centuries ago, you say to yourself: "Well, what's the use? If we are such atoms and so unimportant in the general ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... Le Moyne was very quiet. She had been making a sort of subconscious impression on the retina of his mind during all the night. It would be difficult to tell when he actually ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... reported abroad, but I do not vouch for its truth. When under surgical treatment for his impaired vision, it was said that the operators in consultation decided on an experiment to test the powers of the retina to receive light, and in so doing blinded the other eye. Mr. Walsh went to England, having had a sum granted to him by the Victoria government. Whether he has recovered his ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... if his retina had reacted like a photographic plate, a picture developed itself, which, in the end, by a series of recurrences, became quite singularly circumstantial. The dog-cart and its occupants, with the stretch of brown road, and the ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... an infinitesimal fraction of a second seemed to set the entire visible firmament ablaze, and caused every detail of the brig's hull and equipment to imprint a clear and perfectly distinct picture of itself upon the retina. They all listened for thunder, but none came. Suddenly, however, a few heavy drops of rain pattered upon the deck, and an instant later down came a perfect deluge with the sound of millions of small shot roaring and rattling on the deck and hissing into the ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation) produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely from ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... 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 light. Its whole skin is a sort of retina, incapable of seeing, of course, but able, at any rate, to distinguish between light and darkness. Under the direct rays of a searching sun, the grub's distress could be easily explained. We ourselves; with our coarse skin, in comparison with that of the maggot, can distinguish ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... that tract with vitality, suddenly to be gifted with the exquisite sensitiveness to their own processes which is produced by its correlative object in some organ of special sense—the whole organism assimilating itself to a retina or a finger-tip. Sleep now disappeared. This initiated an entire month during which the patient had not one moment of even ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... appearance, the elder Pliny, who was a great naturalist and a man of inquiring mind, resolved to go ashore and inspect more narrowly what was going on. But a rash resolve it proved. Steering towards Retina (now Resina), a port at the foot of the mountain, he was met, on his approach, by thick showers of hot cinders, which grew thicker and hotter as he advanced—falling on the ships along with lumps of pumice and pieces ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... truly, you will begin to draw them truly. It is, for instance, almost never that the wheel of a carriage really is round to your eye. It is round to your thought. But unless your eye is exactly opposite the hub of the wheel in the line of the axle, the wheel does not make a circle on the retina of your eye, and ought not to be represented by a circle in your drawing. To draw well, the first resolution and the first duty is to see well. Second, do not suppose that mere technical method has much to do with real success. Soft pencil rather than hard; sepia rather than India ink. It is pure ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... to the eye,—not to the province of the metaphysician, but to that of the professor of optics. The lens of the camera obscura transmits the figures to the prepared paper, on quite the same principle on which in vision the crystalline lens conveys them to the retina. In the centre of the field in both cases there is much distinctness, while all around its circumference the images are indistinct and dim. We have but to fix the eye on some object directly in front of us, and then ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... disturbances can be sensed, nevertheless, as a matter of fact the eye-lids are not wholly opaque. Sight may be obtained through them, as you may prove by closing your eyes and moving your fingers before them. The lids transmit light to the retina and it is quite likely that you are frequently awakened by a beam of light falling upon your closed eye-lids. For this reason, one who is inclined to be wakeful should shut out from the bed-room all avenues whereby light may ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... strapped across the insides of their hands as a protection against splinters. These, like all other especial accoutrements, seemed to Bob somehow romantic, to be desired, infinitely picturesque. He passed on with the clear, yellow-white of the pine boards lingering back of his retina. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... student of social conditions, who might have been a guest of the philosopher Rousseau, the picture photographed on the mental retina would have been far different. Above he would have beheld the round of selfish, thoughtless gaiety, in which the images and intrigues of Madame Dubarry and Marie Antoinette, of Choiseul and Rohan, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... belonged to John Company, Bahadur, and that now repose on the groaning board of the Great Ornamental, amid a glory of Himalayan flowers, or blossoms from Eden's fields of asphodel, be reflected upon the eye's retina without producing positive thrills and vibrations of joy (that cannot be measured in terms of ohm or farad) shooting up and down the spinal cord and into the most hidden seats of pleasure! I certainly can never see ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... is presented to the retina of the eye, the looking- glass of the brain, upside down, and it is by study that begins at birth, and is finished ere remembrance commences, that the child of God and man is able to detect the true relation of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... tissue hidden away at the base of the brain in a tiny cave behind and above its larger colleague, the pituitary. Microscopic scrutiny reveals that it is made up in part of nerve cells containing a pigment similar to that present in the cells of the retina, thus clinching the argument for its ancient function as an eye. But the outstanding and specifically glandular cells are large secreting affairs, which too reach back to the tidewater days of our vertebrate ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... useless when the investigation is to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between certain definite limits—759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436 trillions from the minimum—these waves give rise in us to the sensation which the brain translates into colour. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... answered that physicist as follows: "You give the preponderance to your eye; I myself give it to my ear. This tuning-fork appears to you to vibrate. Wrong! This is how the thing occurs. This tuning-fork produces a sound which, by exciting our retina, gives us a sense of movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer world is a concert of sounds which rises ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... in each of these blinding intervals his figure. Each flash outlined it sharply on her retina—always the same—patient, resourceful, silent and unwearied. The man who had been directed to ride her own horse she never caught sight of. When they reached open country and better going her guide did not break the silence. He spoke only when at last he stopped the horse and stood in ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... conducted a series of experiments on each other, examining the eye by means of the ophthalmoscope while the system was under the influence of various drugs. They found that the nerves controlling the delicate blood-vessels of the retina were paralyzed by a dose of about ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its retina,—why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such questions very simply by saying it ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... it may be accounted for by their much larger personal experience of the vertical dimension of space than adults. They are lifted, tossed and swung, but adults pass their lives very much on a level, and only judge of heights by inference from the picture on their retina. Whenever a man first ventures up in a balloon, or is let, like a gatherer of sea-birds' eggs, over the face of a precipice, he is conscious of having acquired a much extended experience of the third dimension ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... electric spark, others again with electro-photometry and the chemistry of the electric arc. With Professor J. G. M'Kendrick, of Glasgow, he investigated the physiological action of light, and examined the changes which take place in the electrical condition of the retina under its influence. With Professor G. D. Liveing, one of his colleagues at Cambridge, he began in 1878 a long series of spectroscopic observations, the later of which were devoted to the spectroscopic examination of various gaseous constituents separated from atmospheric air by the aid of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... front of the eye in a dark room, it appears not as an illuminated spark, but as a line of fire; a so-called shooting star, or a flash of lightning produces the same effect. This result is purely physiological, and is due to the fact that the retina of the eye may be considered as practically a sensitized plate of relatively slow speed, and an image impressed upon it remains, before being effaced, for a period of from one-tenth to one-seventh of a second, varying according to the idiosyncrasies of the individual and the intensity ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... column of mist rose higher; and now it formed more than the half circle, the top a little above the level of the Fall,—and the blue, and gold, and green, and orange, and purple, painted so brightly on the retina of the eye that they seemed to be a part of the very air the observer was inhaling. How near he stood, impressible Tom, at that moment, to the eternal mystery!—how near to the workshop in which seem to be flashed out from eternal forges the beauties ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... bodily powers which go to form technical skill,—more notably yet does the hand come in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... should I know what I was then, when I was called Trenck; when that combination of particles which Nature commanded should compose this body shall be decomposed, scattered, or in other bodies united; when I have no muscles to act, no brain to think, no retina on which pictures can mechanically be painted, my eyes wasted, and no tongue remaining to pronounce the Creator's name, should I still behold a Creator—then, oh then, will my spirit mount, and indubitably ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... organs of sense,—the eye with its cornea and lens, vitreous humor, aqueous humor, and choroid, culminating in the retina, no thicker than a sheet of paper, and yet consisting of nine distinct layers, the innermost composed of rods and cones, supposed to be the immediate recipients of the undulations of light, and so numerous that in each eye the cones ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... of no fleeting impulse, but of steadfast desire; therefore they were persistent. The likeness of the great bass horn remained upon the retina of his mind's eye, losing nothing of its brazen enormity with the passing of hours, nor abating, in his mind's ear, one whit of its fascinating blatancy. Penrod might have forgotten almost anything else more readily; for such a horn has this double compulsion: people cannot possibly keep ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... and sweeping by like vague wailings of the wind—all this might be taken for an artful appropriation of Victor Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, though it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant page, read in early youth, still lingered on the retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were the case, it does not necessarily detract from the integrity of the conception or the playwright's presentment ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... only to be a lord, it was more than that. It was to be famous, a national character, whose picture was printed on the retina of the million. Never had Jones felt more inclined to stick to his position than now, with the hounds on his traces, a tramp for his companion, and darkness ahead. He felt that if he could once get to London, once lay his hands on that eight thousand pounds lying in the National Provincial ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... and another line, XX, at twenty feet, which is the proper distance for testing vision for distance, for the reason that a normal eye is at rest when looking at any object twenty feet from it or beyond, and the rays coming from it are parallel and come to a focus on the retina. You must also have a near vision test card with lines that should be seen by a normal eye from ten to seventy-two inches, and a card of radiating lines for astigmatism. With this preparation you are ready to proceed. To illustrate, the first customer ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... it is mere telepathy, or mind affecting mind at a distance without the use of the recognised organs of sense or of any of the ordinary conducting mediums, what an enormous extension it gives to the ordinary conception of the limits of the human mind! To be able instantaneously to paint upon the retina of a friend's eye the life-like image of ourselves, to make our voice sound in his ears at a distance of many miles, and to communicate to his mind information which he had never before heard of, all this is, it may be admitted, as tremendous a draft upon the credulity of mankind as the ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... not noticed the Milky Way, the pale belt that traverses the entire firmament and is so luminous on clear evenings in the Constellations of the Swan and the Lyre? It is indeed a swarm of stars. Each is individually too small to excite our retina, but as a whole, curiously enough, they are perfectly visible. With opera-glasses we divine the starry constitution: a small telescope shows us marvels. Eighteen millions of stars were counted there with the gauges of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Thus, there are people who, when they once see any word (we will say a proper name) written or printed, can always afterwards spell that word unerringly, no matter how uncommon it may be. The mental retina, so to speak, receives so clear and exact an impression of the form of that word from the eye, that it retains and reproduces ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... it was merely a congestion of the retina—for which no cause could be assigned; and that he would be cured in less than a month. That he was to have a seton let into the back of his neck, dry-cup himself on the chest and thighs night and morning, and take a preparation ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... dwelling upon lava thrown down to the sea by the eruption of 1631. On this black bed stands the royal palace, built by Charles III. in 1738. Resina, one mile further, is the favorite suburban seat of wealthy Neapolitans. Its 14,000 residents dwell partly upon the ruins of Herculaneum and of Retina, to which latter city Pliny the elder set out during the great eruption which destroyed these cities ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... following theory of these instinctive reactions. Animals of the type of those mentioned are automatically orientated by the light in such a way that symmetrical elements of their retina (or skin) are struck by the rays of light at the same angle. In this case the intensity of light is the same for both retinae or symmetrical parts of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... job after Orillo fled from a murder charge in South Africa. And Bryce had arranged the operations that gave Orillo a new face, new fingerprints and an unworried future. Only Bryce could now give the word to the police which could bring the examination that would show Orillo's retina tallied with that of ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on shore, and his wife's profile, serenely projected against the changing blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious face seem an ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... Heatherbloom looked toward the vessel and his pupils dilated. The light leaped into the air with the motion of the naphtha, and, in an instant was gone, but the impress of a single detail remained on his retina—of a side ladder, lowered, no doubt, for the woman, and not yet hoisted into place on the ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... a magic mirror, and transforms all that it encloses. There is a vastness of depth, too, in that concave hemisphere, through which the vision sinks like a falling star, that excites and fills the imagination. What it shows is only a shadow, but all things seen are mere shadows painted on the retina, and you have, at such times, a realistic sense of the beautiful and bold imagery which calls a favorite fountain of the East the Eye ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... brief expeditions across the road. He may merely have been a sermon-copyist, busy only towards Sunday. He may have been a loafer pure and simple. I say I don't know; but he was a landmark of the place, idiosyncratic enough to be stamped indelibly on at any rate one retina. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... that there are very few such. The two pictures which I have already referred to, those of Erasmus and of Dr. Johnson, come up more distinctly before my mind's eye than almost any faces of the living. My mental retina has, I fear, lost much of its sensitiveness. Long and repeated exposure of an object of any kind, in a strong light, is necessary to fix ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... watched an electric bulb fade away when the current is failing?" he asked. "The film pales down from glowing white to dull red, which gets fainter and fainter, little by little, till nothing but the memory of it lingers on your retina. His eyes went out exactly like that bulb. They faded and faded out of his face, which still kept up that queer, twisted smile. I've seen them ever since; wherever I turn. I shall be glad of that bout of influenza, and shall begin it with a stiff dose of veronal.... When ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... ways are drugs available in this kind of landscape culture; how sent through the crystalline structures of the eye with clearing effect; how to polish the retina and the surfaces to a sparkle? What drugs for such culture? And yet the materia medica needs a hoist to place it on the shelf. These external changes that become clearly apparent to even dull eyes are the changes that also go on in the ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... throws over imperial Rome. Above, that canopy of translucent blue, iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all colour save one all-pervading ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... related to the muscles and fatty cushion. It receives posteriorly, a little lower than its middle portion, the insertion of the optic nerve, which passes through the shell and spreads out to form a very thin membrane, the retina ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... cases of defective eyesight, so called, are in reality defective brain. The mechanism of the eye may be perfect, the retina and the optic nerve may faithfully perform their duties, but if the brain behind the eye be defective, the comprehension of the object or some of its properties is lost to the intelligence of the individual. Some people are "color blind." Their eyes are good enough, but they don't see colors; they ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image—which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... happened. One of the lads, apparently startled, let off his gun. The charge struck a tree a few yards off, and the shot glanced. It did not strike him full. The face is only slightly peppered and the brain quite uninjured. But shots pierced the retina of each eye, and ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... things more at leisure, Magnificent libraries and museums, grand churches and chapels, and extensive buildings and botanical gardens, were rushed through and passed by, as if the charm and beauty of Oxford's scenes consisted rather in making the images of them flit in quick succession across the retina of the eye, than in examining, studying ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... that will block the harmful effects of these faulty genes for good. Researchers are already using this new technique to target and destroy cells that cause breast cancer. Soon, we may be able to use it to prevent the onset of Alzheimer's Disease. Scientists are also working on an artificial retina to help many blind people to see and microchips that would directly stimulate damaged spinal cords and allow people who are now paralyzed to stand up ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... will have a different direction, and the organ of sense will conceive the origin of the waves to lie in a direction different from that before the body was interposed. Now consider the waves to be waves of light, and their origin the sun. The organ of sense is the retina of the eye. The moon is the opaque body interposed in the course of the waves, and they, being bent, make the impression on the eye that the light comes from beyond the edge of the sun. The moon covers the sun during the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... from object to object scarcely a suggestion of this blurred appearance can be detected. The phenomenon is striking, since, if the eye moves in the same direction as the train, it is certain that the images on the retina succeed one another even more rapidly than when the eye is at rest. A supposition which occurs to one at once as a possible explanation is that perchance during eye-movement the retinal stimulations ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... work? If you'll keep it to yourself, Mr. Crane, I'll tell you something: My native country's scientists have developed a rather simple device, though they haven't published anything about it in the scientific journals. Let me give you a brief explanation: Light strikes the retina of the eye; the rods and cones pass on impulses to the bipolar cells, which send them on to the optic nerve, which goes ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... hoped was the promise of renewed and successful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark of those two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retina of the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door of Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffin had gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. After them ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the character of Michel Ardan offered a large field for physiological analysis. This astonishing man lived in a perpetual disposition to hyperbole, and had not yet passed the age of superlatives; objects depicted themselves on the retina of his eye with exaggerated dimensions; from thence an association of gigantic ideas; he saw everything on a large scale ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... observer's back was turned to it, but on looking round the streak of light was seen to remain on its path some seconds. This streak is usually explained to be only the continuance of the impression made by the shining body on the retina. This cannot be, as in this case the meteor was not actually seen and yet the streak was clearly perceived. The rays of planets and stars also require another explanation than ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear as he writes his Englishman in Italy, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... is affected, by emanations escaping from the most solid bodies, of which all the particles appear to be at perfect rest? How could we, even by the assistance of a telescope, see the most distant stars, if there was not a progressive motion of light from these stars to the retina of ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indication of the strange phenomena of the upper world. True, the same picture is painted upon the retina of all classes of observers; and so Porson and a schoolboy and a peasant might receive the same physical impression from a set of black and white marks on the page of a Greek play; but to one they would be an incoherent conglomeration of unmeaning ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... streaming in through the window, must have shone on the boot in such a manner as to give it a momentary and fictitious aspect of redness. If Mr. Downing recollects, he did not look long at the boot. The picture on the retina of the eye, consequently, had not time to fade. I remember thinking myself, at the moment, that the boot appeared to have a certain ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... of all my thoughts. Even now, I can see nothing in those feelings of mine but simple admiration—idolatry, if you will—of physical beauty. Doubtless there was more—doubtless—I had seen pretty faces before, and knew that they were pretty, but they had passed from my retina, like the prints of beauties which I saw in the shop windows, without exciting a thought—even a conscious emotion of complacency. But this face did not pass away. Day and night I saw it, just as I had seen it in the gallery. The same playful smile—the same glance ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... plain ordinary room in the barracks at Fort Bliss; but there wasn't a map or copy of 'rules and regulations' hanging on the yellowish white walls that I can't see now, whenever I shut my eyes. I guess they were all photographed on my 'mental retina,' as the writing folks say. The three officers were in full uniform, to do honour to the case, and of course there wasn't a man present dressed in 'cits.' All were army chaps, even to the headquarters ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... placed in circular cavities of the skull, beneath the anterior lobes of the cerebrum. Three membranes form the lining of this inner sphere of the eye, called respectively the Sclerotic, Choroid, and Retina. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... But always he saw her seated in that room, alone, deserted, playing the piano, reading, with no prospect of company, of change. Mrs. Chepstow had acted her part well. She had stamped a lonely image upon the retina of Nigel's imagination. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... intuitions which are inseparable from the act of sense are really the result of complicated reasonings. The most cursory glance at objects enables the experienced eye to judge approximately of their relations and distance, although nothing is impressed upon the retina except colour, including gradations of light and shade. From these delicate and almost imperceptible differences we seem chiefly to derive our ideas of distance and position. By comparison of what is near with what is distant we learn that the tree, house, river, etc. which are a long ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... time the lad was so dazed and bewildered that he scarcely comprehended his good fortune. His eyes had been totally unaccustomed to light for so long a time that the retina was overpowered by the sudden flood of it and required time to accommodate itself to the new order of things. A few minutes were sufficient. And then, when he looked about and saw that he was indeed outside of the cave which had been such an appalling prison to ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... descriptive memory is that which photographs, as it were, upon the brain the visual impressions that objects have made upon the retina, in such a manner that the thought can reconstruct them ideally. This, in particular, is the form of memory required by designers of all kinds, and, like the other forms of visual memory, is susceptible of education. The child is ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... pretense of looking at the frescoed walls, to examine which had been their ostensible purpose in entering. Sylvia was indeed aware of great pictured spaces, crowded dimly with thronging figures, men, horses, women—they reached no more than the outer retina of her eye. She remembered fleetingly that they had something to do with the story of Ste. Genevieve. She wanted intensely to escape from this phantom whom she herself had called up from the void to stalk at her side. But she felt she ought not ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lines and, striking objects before us, is reflected in all directions. Some of these rays passing through a point situated behind the lenses of the eye, strike the retina. The multiplication of these rays on the retina produces a picture of whatever is before the eye, such as can be seen on the ground glass at the back of a photographer's camera, or on the table of a camera obscura, both of which instruments ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed |
