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More "Refraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ship should therefore have been 21 deg. 51' 14"; but a meridian altitude observed to the north by lieutenant Flinders, gave 21 deg. 49' 54"; and I believe that altitudes from the sea horizon can never be depended on nearer than to one minute, on account of the variability of the horizontal refraction. From this cause it was that, when possible, we commonly observed the latitude on board the ship both to the north and south, taking the sun's altitude one way and his supplement the other, and the mean of ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... far as the examination of the instrument goes, there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it. They are both made upon the same principles, both being adjusted to the laws by which the transmission and refraction of rays of light are regulated. I speak not of the origin of the laws themselves; but these laws being fixed, the construction in both cases is adapted to them. For instance: these laws require, in order to produce the same effect, that the rays of light, in passing through ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... west there arises a perfect solar halo, very similar to an ordinary rainbow, but smaller in its arc and fainter in its hues of yellow and rose—a very beautiful phenomenon, and one seldom to be seen in England. Halos of this nature are supposed to arise from the double refraction of the rays from the sun as the light passes through thin clouds, or from the transmission of light through particles of ice. It lingers a full quarter of an hour, and then dies away. Does this bode rough ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Number Seven and his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less. There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You wonder at the eccentricities of this or that ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... N. deviation; swerving &c v.; obliquation^, warp, refraction; flection^, flexion; sweep; deflection, deflexure^; declination. diversion, digression, depart from, aberration; divergence &c 291; zigzag; detour &c (circuit) 629; divagation. [Desultory motion] wandering &c v.; vagrancy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... explanation is simple enough. Of the mirage the dictionary says it is "an optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere, causing images of remote objects to be seen double, distorted or inverted as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... battalions of cloudland with artillery of molten gold. Little white gulls, with red legs and beaks, came dipping over the water, solemnly wondering at the intruders. The morning mists rolling along before the resistless monarch of day confused the visible world for a time, so that between refraction and reflection and buoyant spirits Victor Ravenshaw felt that at last he had found the realms of fairyland, and a feeling of certainty that he should soon rescue his brother ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... seemed for an instant as if the stranger had great eyes like burning flames, but a second look dispelled the illusion. The red sunlight was shining on the windows of St. Mary's Church behind our seat, and as the sun dipped there was just sufficient change in the refraction and reflection to make it appear as if the light moved. I called Lucy's attention to the peculiar effect, and she became herself with a start, but she looked sad all the same. It may have been that she was thinking of that terrible night up there. We never refer to it, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... out, to be sure. It will also keep the few adventurous discoverers in, where you can neither kill nor eject. Likewise you are deprived of your pipe; and the common homely comfort of spitting on your bait is totally denied you. The landscape takes on the prismatic colours of refraction, so that, while you can easily make out red, white, and blue Chinese dragons and mythological monsters, you are unable to discover the more welcome succulence, say, of a partridge on a limb. And the end of that head-net is to be picked to holes by the brush, and finally to be snatched from ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the foghorn much better: the presence of different layers of fog and air, and their varying densities, which cause both reflection and refraction of sound, prevent the air from being a reliable medium for carrying it. Now, submarine signalling has none of these defects, for the medium is water, subject to no such variable conditions as the air. Its density is practically ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... is (Maxwell) that the specific inductive capacity of a non-conductor or dielectric should be equal to the square of its index of refraction for waves of infinite length. This is true for some substances—sulphur, turpentine, petroleum and benzole. In others the specific inductive capacity is too high, e. g., vegetable and animal oils, glass, Iceland spar, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... not disappear entirely in the Earth's cone of shadow; the solar rays are refracted round our globe by our atmosphere, and curving inward, illumine the lunar globe with a rosy tint that reminds one of the sunset. Sometimes, indeed, this refraction does not occur, owing doubtless to lack of transparency in the atmosphere, and the Moon becomes invisible. This happened recently, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... we employ telescopes of two entirely different classes. The more familiar forms are those known as refractors, in which the operation of condensing the rays of light is conducted by refraction. The character of the refractor is shown in Fig. 1. The rays from the star fall upon the object-glass at the end of the telescope, and on passing through they become refracted into a converging beam, so that all intersect at the focus. Diverging from thence, the rays ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... charts were studied. The atmospheric conditions were such that it was very possible that due to refraction Venus would have been visible just on the horizon. The fact that the UFO faded so fast would bear this out because the conditions for such refraction are critical and a slight change in atmospheric conditions could easily have caused the ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... ix:13, God tells Noah that He will set His bow in the cloud; this action of God's is but another way of expressing the refraction and reflection which the rays of the sun are subjected to in ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... importance, because thereby the theory is excluded, or at least made extremely improbable, that the phenomenon of refraction is to be ascribed to, a ring of vapor surrounding the sun for a great distance. Indeed, such a refraction should cause a deviation in the observed direction, and, in order to produce the displacement ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... eyeball is essential to ocular refraction, and closely related to ocular nutrition. Fully to understand the mechanism for its regulation would carry us far toward an understanding of the causes of glaucoma. Normal tension is maintained with a continuous flow of fluid into the eye and ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... was sought on the basis of alcoholic homes driving the children out into the streets. This was found to be markedly the case, the children of alcoholic parents spending much more of their spare time in the streets. An examination, however, of the vision and refraction of children with regard to the time they spent in-and out-of-doors, showed no clear and definite result, the children who spent the whole or most of their spare time in the streets having the most ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... questions respecting the Will, if stripped of unsuitable phraseology, are not very difficult questions. They are about as easy to comprehend as the air-pump, the law of refraction of light, or the atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... all artistic genius lies in the power of conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common days, generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to [214] the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a variety of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or persons open to them is as ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Albategnius that noble Arabian, on his death-bed, saw a ship ascending and descending, which Fracastorius records of his friend Baptista Tirrianus. Weak sight and a vain persuasion withal, may effect as much, and second causes concurring, as an oar in water makes a refraction, and seems bigger, bended double, &c. The thickness of the air may cause such effects, or any object not well-discerned in the dark, fear and phantasy will suspect to be a ghost, a devil, &c. [2702]Quod ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the naked eye, is pellucid in a microscope; and a hair seen in this way, loses its former colour, and is, in a great measure, pellucid, with a mixture of some bright sparkling colours, such as appear from the refraction of diamonds, and other pellucid bodies. Blood, to the naked eye, appears all red; but by a good microscope, wherein its lesser parts appear, shows only some few globules of red, swimming in a pellucid liquor, and how these red globules would appear, if glasses could be found that could ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... mornings at the same distance from noon. Some may ascribe this to the greater height of the atmosphere in the evenings having been rarefied by the sun during the day; but as its density must at the same time be diminished, its power of refraction would continue the same. I should rather suppose that it may be owing to the phosphorescent quality (as it is called) of almost all bodies; that is, when they have been exposed to the sun they continue to emit light for a ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... quite inappreciable to the eye, when unaided by instruments.* [These are the apparent angles which I took from Mr. Hodgson's house (alt. 7300 feet) with an excellent theodolite, no deduction being made for refraction.] ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... at the side of a mirror where the laws of incidence and refraction would unfortunately not permit her to see her ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of depression. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you don't know the general law, you must charge ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... escape—banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... rapidly of data which he had derived from the study of the photograph as from plumb line, level, compass, and tape, astronomical triangle, vertices, zenith, pole, and sun, declination, azimuth, solar time, parallactic angles, refraction, and ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... himself in fixing the orientation of the island, or, in other words, the precise spot where the sun rose. The day before he had noted exactly the hour when the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, making allowance for the refraction. This morning he noted, no less exactly, the hour at which it reappeared. Between this setting and rising twelve hours, twenty-four minutes passed. Then, six hours, twelve minutes after its rising, the sun on this day would ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... in this very storm. Next day came another of the sea wonders. The cry of land started them all from the dinner table; but the land happened to be an immense field of ice, which, with the inequalities of its surface and the effect of refraction, presented some appearance of a wooded country. On that night the cry of "Light a-head," while they were still several hundred miles from land, excited new astonishment. "All the knowing ones" clearly distinguished a magnificent revolver. The paddles were accordingly stopped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... refracting telescope was due to the fact that the object glass, made as it then was of a single piece, had not been properly shaped. Mathematicians had abundantly demonstrated that a single lens, if properly figured, must conduct all rays of light to the same focus, provided all rays experienced equal refraction in passing through the glass. Until Newton's discovery of the composition of white light, it had been taken for granted that the several rays in a white beam were equally refrangible. No doubt if this had been the case, a perfect telescope could have been produced by properly shaping ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... lovers and no more as were their counterparts and coevals in tragedy: there is more in Benedick and Beatrice than this simple quality of love that clothes itself in the strife of wits; the injury done her cousin, which by the repercussion of its shock and refraction of its effect serves to transfigure with such adorable indignation and ardour of furious love and pity the whole bright light nature of Beatrice, serves likewise by a fresh reflection and counterchange of its consequence to exalt and enlarge the stature of her lover's ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... made to the article REFRACTION for the general discussion of the phenomenon known as the refraction of light. It is there shown that every substance, transparent to light, has a definite refractive index, which is the ratio of the velocity of light in vacuo to its velocity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... and earth seemed to give a full denial to sin and sorrow. The sun was just mounting over the horizon, looking up the clear cloud-mottled sky. From millions of water-drops hanging on the bending stalks of grass, sparkled his rays in varied refraction, transformed here to a gorgeous burning ruby, there to an emerald, green as the grass, and yonder to a flashing, sunny topaz. The chanting priest-lark had gone up from the low earth, as soon as the heavenly light had begun to enwrap and ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... be capable of being analysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown law of refraction." ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... produce of his hard and heavy hand, makes happily no attempt to emulate the really noble touches of poetry and pathos with which Heywood has thrown out into relief the more serious aspect of the supposed crime of witchcraft in its influence or refraction upon the honor and happiness of innocent persons. Og was naturally more in his place and more in his element as the second "fat jailor" of Lancashire witches than as the second English dramatic poet of Psyche: he has come closer than his precursors, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... other, in the direction of its length. The surfaces of this section, after having been carefully polished, are cemented together again by means of Canada balsam. A ray of light, on entering the prism, is separated by the double refraction of the calc-spar into an ordinary and an extraordinary ray; the former undergoes total reflection at the layer of balsam at an incidence which allows the extraordinary ray to be transmitted; the latter, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... were as simple as the alphabet to Uncle Robin. He would explain it as a sight reflected on the cloud and thrown on a sea of mist or a desert as on a screen, using difficult words, like "refraction," and words from Euclid, like "angles." But Uncle Alan would object, Uncle Alan mistrusting difficult words and words from Euclid. Alan would raise his head from splicing a fishing-rod or cleaning the lock of a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... REFRACTION. Perhaps the surest single method of distinguishing precious stones is to find out the refractive index of the material. To one not acquainted with the science of physics this calls for some explanation. The term refraction is used to describe the bending which light undergoes ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... though he directed a force in nature. Hence, to disturb existing government is, in the sight of God, a heinous offence, unless circumstances plainly justify a revolution; otherwise, one might as well think to interfere with impunity and change the equinoxes, or the laws of refraction. It is well to consider what forms of government, and what forms of oppression under them, existed, when that divine word was written: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... the air becomes rarer. It has less moisture, because a wet atmosphere, being heavier, lies nearer the surface of the earth. Being rarer the action of sunlight on the particles is less intense. Reflection and refraction of the rays acting on the light atmosphere do not produce such a powerful effect as on the ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... us in our prejudices. But open to a parent, who has doubts on the subject, its inestimable benefits to all concerned, and he will be more disposed to see the grounds for it, and the abundant proofs of its divine authority, which the atmosphere of pure reason had not sufficient power of refraction to make him apprehend. ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... a cut or polished stone, one or more of the 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) reflected; or produce ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... blue belt of timber along the Gizhiga River wavered and trembled in its outlines as if seen through currents of heated air, and the white ghost-like mountains thirty miles away to the southward were thrown up and distorted by refraction into a thousand airy, fantastic shapes which melted imperceptibly one into another, like a series of dissolving views. Every feature of the scenery was strange, weird, arctic. The red sun rolled slowly along the southern horizon, until it seemed to rest on a white snowy peak far away in ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... changed some parts, the copies which I had made of it at that time may serve for proof that I have yet added nothing to it save some conjectures touching the formation of Iceland Crystal, and a novel observation on the refraction of Rock Crystal. I have desired to relate these particulars to make known how long I have meditated the things which now I publish, and not for the purpose of detracting from the merit of those who, without ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... The seventh was as broad as he was long; the cockpitonians dubbed him "Toby Philpot." He was an oddity, and fond of coining new words. He knew the ship had three masts and a sheet anchor. He was a strict disciple of Hamilton Moore, fond of arguing about dip and refraction, particularly the former, as he put it in practice on himself, being sometimes found with his head and heels at an angle of 30 degrees in consequence of dipping his head to too many north-westers. He was, however, good-natured, knew by rule how to ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... attraction, in this eager turning of all faces toward our future. There is a centre from which no eye can be diverted, for it is the beam of sight. Look which way you will, that centre is everywhere. The universe is flooded with a ray from it, and the light of common day on every object is a refraction or reflection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... of "law." The most frequent and useful type is that of the "elementary law,"—that of the composition of forces, that of gravitation, of refraction, and the like. Such laws declare no concrete facts to exist, and make no prophecy as to any actual future. They limit themselves to saying that if a certain character be found in any fact, another character will co-exist ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... reading Horace Walpole till he went out to the wood-house to saw and split wood. Presently I saw, hastening up the avenue, Mr. George Bradford. He stayed to tea. His beautiful character makes him perennial in interest. As my husband says, we can see nature through him straight, without refraction. My water this morning was deadly cold instead of livingly cold, and I knew the Imp must have taken it from some already drawn, instead of right from the well. The maid brought for me from Mrs. Emerson's "The Mysteries of Paris," which I read all the evening. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... all the other truths of the science are synthetically deduced (as the laws of motion and of the composition of forces in dynamics, the equal mobility of fluids in hydrostatics, the laws of reflection and refraction in optics, are the first principles of those sciences); but are merely necessary assumptions, self-evident indeed, and the denial of which would annihilate all demonstration, but from which, as premises, nothing can be demonstrated. In the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of taking the latitude there are numerous possibilities of inexactness. It does not appear that any correction was made for refraction of light, or the precession of the equinoxes. But the most important source of inaccuracy was in the use of the astrolabe whose disk was so small that its divisions could not be carried beyond degrees, and consequently minutes were arrived at ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... is no single and exact focus where all meet, and that the image of a star, for instance, formed by an ordinary lens, even if the spherical aberration has been corrected, appears blurred and discolored. There is no such difficulty with a mirror, because there is in that case no refraction of the light, and consequently no splitting up of the ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... carried kayaks) and 28 dogs. They reached their northern-most camp on April 8, which Nansen has given in his book as being in latitude 86 deg. 13.6' N. But Nansen tells me that Professor Geelmuyden, who had his astronomical results and his diary, reckoned that owing to refraction the horizon was lifted, and if so the observation had to be reduced accordingly. Nansen therefore gave the reduced latitude in his book, but he considers that his horizon was very clear when he took that observation, and ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... with open wings, The beauteous image, in fruition sweet Gladdening the thronged spirits. Each did seem A little ruby, whereon so intense The sun-beam glow'd that to mine eyes it came In clear refraction. And that, which next Befalls me to portray, voice hath not utter'd, Nor hath ink written, nor in fantasy Was e'er conceiv'd. For I beheld and heard The beak discourse; and, what intention form'd Of many, singly ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the writhing sun glare played the same trick with his own vision. Something a dirty white quivered above the black lava table like the loose canvas top of a tented wagon. The Ranger side-stepped the trail for a different angle of refraction. The object blurred, then reappeared, a leaf from a note book not thirty yards away. Wayland went quickly forward. He was aware as he walked that the shrivelled earth heaved and sank so that he had the sensation of staggering. It was a dirty leaf from a note book ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... he cried, pacing with his quick little steps up and down the dingy room. "Look here, laddie! There's a great continent from the equator to the icebergs, and not a man in it who could correct an astigmatism. What do they know of modern eye-surgery and refraction? Why, dammy, they don't know much about it in the provinces of England yet, let alone Brazil. Man, if you could only see it, there's a fringe of squinting millionaires sitting ten deep round the whole continent with their money in their hands waiting for an oculist. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... of 5000 ft. forty or fifty miles inland. The accurate estimation of heights and distances in the Antarctic is always difficult, owing to the clear air, the confusing monotony of colouring, and the deceptive effect of mirage and refraction. The land appeared to increase in height to the southward, where we saw a line of land or barrier that must have been seventy miles, and ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... feelings, and gentler yet in her attendance on her patron's obsequies, in the discovery that all of which he died possessed he'd left to her, but it is the duller surfaces that are slowest to give refraction, the least used springs that are least pliant. She was come a long road from her first signs of hardening. She was past, now, the stage where, when grieving for the little old man, she would have felt contrition that her first thought ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... friend, E. W. Cooke, long a resident in Holland, and a keen and observing artist, remarked that the skies in the pictures of Backhuysen, though dark and inky, were precisely what we see now—the deep Zuyder Sea swallowing up any refraction of light which would otherwise have illuminated the clouds; while the skies of Cuyp, receiving the coruscations arising from the meeting of the two rivers, the Meuse and the Waal, the scenes of most of his pictures, ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... now dusk, but the two regiments engaged in the flanking movement pushed on to gain the bluff. Just as they reached the crest of the ridge the moon rose from behind, enlarged by the refraction of the atmosphere, and as the attacking column passed along the summit it crossed the moon's disk and disclosed to us below a most interesting panorama, every figure nearly being thrown out in full relief. The enemy, now outflanked on left and right, abandoned his ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Chtellerault, but he gave up the idea, and settled in Paris (June 1625), in the quarter where he had sought seclusion before. By this time he had ceased to devote himself to pure mathematics, and in company with his friends Mersenne and Mydorge was deeply interested in the theory of the refraction of light, and in the practical work of grinding glasses of the best shape suitable for optical instruments. But all the while he was engaged with reflections on the nature of man, of the soul and of God, and for a while he remained invisible even to his most familiar ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... gone! In its place was a tenuous refraction that told where it had been. That and a thin layer of perfectly reflective copper ... colorless now, but Manning knew it was copper, for it represented the continuation of the great ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... here are the prairie fires at night. The grass is burnt in spring and autumn so as to kill off the old tufts and allow of the new shoots growing for hay. The fires look like one long streak of quivering flame, the forked tips of which flash and quiver in the horizon, magnified by refraction, and on a dark night are lovely. In the day-time one only sees volumes of smoke which break the monotony of the landscape, though I don't know that it is picturesque. With a slight breeze the fires spread in a marvellous way, even at the ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... that I was the victim of some hallucination, or that the refraction from the intense light produced an optical delusion; and, as I did so, the flaming pillar slowly twisted and thundered off whithersoever it passes to in the bowels of the great earth, leaving Ayesha standing where ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... forty feet long, the interior being lower than the opening. A mixture of gases is exhaled, which, being heavier than the atmosphere, fills it up to the level of the entrance; and when the sun is shining into the cave, one can see the gaseous fumes swaying to and fro, owing to the difference of refraction. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... first made public through this academy. The evidence of Capts. Williams and Thomas Long were recited and highly praised. One of the officers of Admiral Rodgers' expedition climbed to near the top of Herald Island, at a time of great refraction, when probably a false horizon existed, and hence did not see Plover Island, although Wrangell Land was ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... or on evening cloud impress'd, Bent in vast curve, the watery meteor shines Delightfully, to th' levell'd sun opposed: Lovely refraction ! while the vivid brede In listed colours glows, th' unconscious swain, With vacant eye, gazes on the divine Phenomenon, gleaming o'er the illumined fields, Or runs to catch the treasures ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... shows all the colors of the rainbow? Isn't it fine?" "That is the very thing I want to tell you about. The sun, shining upon vapor and falling water, makes all these beautiful colors. That is the way I mix the rainbow. The science which teaches about the rays of light, their reflection and refraction, and the coloring they give to different objects, is called Optics: it is an interesting study, and I wish you to be a proficient in it." "Optics, is it? That seems to me very different from blowing soap-bubbles. I do hate to be cheated into ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... to seeing is that of refraction. Refraction means the bending, or turning, of light from a straight course. One of the most interesting effects of refraction is the formation of images of objects, such as may be accomplished by light from them passing in a certain manner through convex lenses. If, for ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... many thousand feet, where sentries have to stand rigidly stationary, so as to remain invisible, and have to be changed every ten minutes owing to the intense cold, where Battalions of Alpini charge down snow slopes on skis at the rate of thirty miles an hour, where refraction and the deceiving glare of the snow make accurate rifle fire impossible even for crack shots,—the Isonzo Front is not so astounding and impossible a Front as this, but it is yet a very different Front from any on which British troops are elsewhere ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... Resemblance of some thing visible: In which sense the Phantasticall Formes, Apparitions, or Seemings of Visible Bodies to the Sight, are onely Images; such as are the Shew of a man, or other thing in the Water, by Reflexion, or Refraction; or of the Sun, or Stars by Direct Vision in the Air; which are nothing reall in the things seen, nor in the place where thy seem to bee; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object; but changeable, by the variation ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... disappeared, and again on the starboard hand shone a vision of the land; this time not in the sharp peaks and spires we had first seen, but in a chain of pale blue egg-shaped islands, floating in the air a long way above the horizon. This peculiar appearance was the result of extreme refraction, for, later in the day, we had an opportunity of watching the oval cloud-like forms gradually harden into the same pink tapering spikes which originally caused the island to be called Spitzbergen: nay, so clear did it become, that even the shadows on the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Plains. Before sunrise this morning I sent Wall up a tree to see if any hills or rising grounds would be visible by refraction. To the west, with a powerful telescope he can just see the top of rising ground. As the grass is now quite dry, the horses feel the want of water very much; many of them are looking wretched, and I hardly think will be able to reach it. However reluctant, I must go back for the safety of the party. ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... without the slightest appearance of vegetable life. The inland prospect is shrouded over by a dense mirage, through which here and there are to be discovered the stems of a few distant palm-trees, so broken and disjoined by refraction that they present to the imagination anything but the idea of foliage or shade. The water in the bay is calm and smooth as the polished mirror; not the smallest ripple is to be heard on the beach, to break through the silence of nature; not a breath ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... lakes of water in the distance, and hastened on to them; and then they fancied they were close to rivers and islands, covered with luxuriant foliage, but still were doomed to disappointment; as all was the result of the highly-rarefied air, and the refraction of the sun's rays on the sultry plain. What would they have given for a bush even to afford them any shelter from the noonday sun, for the crowns of their heads appeared as if covered with live coal, and their minds began to wander. The poor horses moved at the lowest ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... accustomed. The sunset upon this contracted horizon was very remarkable. There was not a cloud nor a vapor to catch the tints of the declining beams; the surface of the ice did not, as a liquid sea would, reflect the last green ray of light; but the radiant orb, enlarged by the effect of refraction, its circumference sharply defined against the sky, sank abruptly, as though a trap had been opened in the ice for ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... spearing fish, but found it difficult in consequence of the allowance necessary for the refraction of the water and the movement of the fish. There is a great temptation to strike in an apparently direct line with the fish, which I need hardly say, even if the fish be stationary does not go near ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... facts it is evident that matter set in motion by the sun has the power of producing heat without light, and that its rays are less refrangible than the visible rays. The invisible rays that produce heat are capable of reflection as well as refraction in the same manner as ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... them, too," he whispered. "Could it have been just imagination? Was it some refraction ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... of having stepped into an old Flemish painting. The hall in which he stood was cool and rather dark, though a bright refraction of light tossed from some upper window upon a tall mirror filled the shadow with broken spangles. Through an open doorway at the rear was the green glimmer of a garden. In front of him was a mahogany sideboard. On its polished top lay two books, a box of cigars, and ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... methods ordinarily resorted to, on account of the varying declination of the moon, and the inconstancy of the horizontal refractions, which are perpetually changing according to the state the atmosphere is in at the time. For the moon continues but for a short time in the equinoctial, and the refraction at a mean rate elevates her apparent place near the horizon, half as much ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... from the brig we encountered a tropical storm. The sun rose red and angry, and owing to the great refraction appeared three times its natural size. It climbed lazily to the zenith, and at noon we were shadowless. The sky was as calm as a vault, and the surface of the water was like burnished steel. The heat became so stifling that even the Africans ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... this, the eye perceives neither colour, nor form, nor motion. It roams over the limitless level in search of one or other, but in vain; and in the absence of all three, it tires, and the heart grows cheerless and sick. Even the sky scarcely offers relief. It, too, by refraction from the black surface beneath, wears a dull livid aspect; or perhaps the eye, jaundiced by the reflection of the earth, beholds not the brightness ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... in respect of their number or relative intensity. From this entire absence of any special absorption lines, it must be concluded that there is no atmosphere in the moon, a conclusion previously arrived at from the circumstance that during an occultation no refraction is perceived on the moon's limb when a star disappears behind the disk." [437] Mr. Nasmyth follows in the same strain. Holding that the moon lacks air, moisture, and temperature, he says, "Taking all these adverse conditions ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... platoon became a company for an instant under favorable light refraction. The object of British khaki, French blue and German green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed that will not be visible under certain conditions. A motley such as the "tanks" were painted would be best, but the most utilitarian of generals has not yet dared to suggest motley as a uniform ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... tremulous motion, as if they were "dancing in the air." The very same effect is perceived when we look at objects through spirits and water that are not perfectly mixed, or when we view distant objects over a red hot poker or over a flame. In all these cases the light suffers refraction in passing from a medium of one density into a medium of a different density, and the refracted rays are constantly changing their direction as the different currents rise in succession. Analogous effects are produced ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... it, though 'self-praise is no accommodation,' as the proverb says. You see, sir, I couldn't be happy when you was gone. I missed my dear young master so much. People wondered what was amiss with me, when they found me, as they often did, in a state of refraction. 'Why, Juniper,' they'd say, 'what's amiss? Are you grieving after Mr Frank?' I could only nod dissent; my heart was too full. But I mustn't be too long, a- keeping you too, sir, under the vertebral rays of an Australian ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... pure blue forty-five degrees under it, toward the west; and in the very west the dark veil of night still lingering on the horizon. I think I have remarked this progression between the tropics, where there is scarcely any horizontal refraction to make the light prematurely encroach on the darkness, as ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... the next morning the sun was pouring in between her curtains of old brocade, and its refraction from the ripples of the Canal was drawing a network of golden scales across the vaulted ceiling. The maid had just placed a tray on a slim marquetry table near the bed, and over the edge of the tray Susy discovered the small serious ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... 'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the condition of the man who could accept ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but if it, in passing from one medium to another of different density, fall obliquely, it is bent from its direct course and recedes from it, either towards the right or left, and this bending is called refraction; (see Fig. 3, b.) If a ray of light passes from a rarer into a denser medium it is refracted towards a perpendicular in that medium; but if it passes from a denser into rarer it is bent further from a perpendicular in that medium. Owing to this ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... dealing, but on this caricature of Him which His own lips repeat without a sign of anger. It is the only calumny of antagonists reported by Himself. We owe our knowledge of its currency to this saying. Like other words of His enemies, this saying is a distorted refraction of His glory. The facts it embodies are facts; the conclusions it draws are false. If Jesus had not come eating and drinking, He could not have been called gluttonous and a wine-bibber. If He had not drawn publicans and sinners to Him in a conspicuous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... phenomenon was due to an actual astral disturbance, or to light-signalling to the earth or other planet, it would be difficult—in fact, impossible—to ascertain with the means I had at my command. Perhaps it was only an optical illusion caused by refraction and deflected rays of vision, owing to the effect upon the atmosphere of the heated rocky mass by our side and under us—such as is the case in effects of mirage. I am not prepared to express an opinion, and only state what ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... intended, or only an arrangement whereby light was for the first time introduced to the earth's surface. The idea of creating light not only involves the Divine Conception of the thing, and the marvellous method of its production,[1] but doubtless, also, all those wonderful laws of reflection, refraction, polarization, and a thousand others, which the science ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... find any unusually light appearance in the air at Brighton, it is a distant refraction (I have no doubt) of the gorgeous and shining surface of Tavistock House, now transcendently painted. The theatre partition is put up, and is a work of such terrific solidity, that I suppose it will be dug up, ages hence, from the ruins of London, by that Australian of Macaulay's who is ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... of the dinghy. The schooner lay still in a pool of colourful water, the coral and weeds on the bottom in plain view, some of the swaying plants magnified by refraction. There was no air stirring, and from the far end of the island a morning haze was rising like smoke from flats which appeared ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... of nature, the tendency of the channel of the Mississippi is always toward one or the other of its banks, being influenced by the direction of its bends. The principle is one of nicely regulated refraction. If the river were perfectly straight, the gravity and inertia of its waters would move in a right line, with a velocity beyond all control. But we find the river very sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be calculated. Earlier in the year, a double corona had been seen when the moon was shining through cirro-cumulus clouds. Haloes, on the other hand, are wide circles (or arcs of circles) in the sky surrounding the sun or moon, and arising from light-refraction in myriads of tiny ice-crystals suspended in the atmosphere. They were very commonly noted in Adelie Land where the conditions were so ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... as well as of refraction have been enlisted into the service of the astronomical observer. The formation of an image by means of a concave mirror is exhibited in fig. 3. As the observer's head would be placed between the object and the mirror, if the ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... the name was used in its present sense. The mineral had, however, long been known under the names calcareous spar and calc-spar, and the beautifully transparent variety called Iceland-spar had been much studied. The strong double refraction and perfect cleavages of Iceland-spar were described in detail by Erasmus Bartholinus in 1669 in his book Experimenta Crystalli Islandici disdiaclastici; the study of the same mineral led Christiaan Huygens to discover in 1690 the laws of double refraction, and E.L. Malus in 1808 the polarization ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... were short; since the 31st of January the sun had reappeared in refraction, and was every day rising higher and higher above the horizon. But it was hid by the snow, which, if it did not produce ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... found. Fall in the Darling. Surprised by a party of natives. Emu killed by the dogs. Dunlop's range. Meet the Puppy tribe. Ascend Dunlop's range. High land discovered to the westward. Grass pulled and piled in ricks by the natives. Hills beyond the Darling. Convenient refraction. Native huts. Interview with the Red tribe. The Puppy tribe. How to avoid the sandy hills and soft plains. Macculloch's range. Visit a hill beyond the Darling. View ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the polarisation of skylight, the greatest stumbling-block has hitherto been, that, in accordance with the law of Brewster, which makes the index of refraction the tangent of the polarising angle, the reflection which produces perfect polarisation would require to be made in air upon air; and indeed this led many of our most eminent men, Brewster himself among the number, to entertain ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... snow covered peaks were beautifully tinged by the fading sunlight. The illusion regarding distances was difficult to overcome, and could only be realized by observing how very slowly we neared the mountains we were approaching. The atmosphere was of remarkable purity, and its powers of refraction reminded me of past experience in the Rocky Mountains. We had sunset and moon-rise at once. 'Adam had no more in Eden save the head of ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... very analogous to those which fixed my attention during a long abode at Mexico and Quito. These meteors are perhaps modified by the nature of the soil and the air, like certain effects of the looming or mirage, and of the terrestrial refraction peculiar to the coasts ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... principle involved, were exceedingly sorry affairs, for, soon after their introduction, the illustrious Kepler, in his work on "Optics," recommended the employment of plain apertures, without lenses, because they were superior to the telescope on account of their freedom from refraction. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... rather curious about these pools. Our guide saw us measuring the depth of one of them, which was full of greenish-blue water, colored only by the refraction of the light. He took our long alpenstock, and poising it, sent it down into the water, as a man might throw a javelin. It disappeared, but in a few seconds leaped up at us out of the water, as if thrown back again ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Lever what you thought of him, dearest friend, and then he said, all in a glow and animation, that you were not only his own delight but the delight of his children, which is affection by refraction, isn't it? Quite gratified he seemed by the hold of your good opinion. Not only is he the notability par excellence of these Baths of Lucca, where he has lived a whole year, during the snows upon the mountains, but he presides over the weekly balls at ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... become accessible to our psychic perception, corresponding to the lenses of the telescope which design the image. If we continue this comparison, we may say that the censor between two systems corresponds to the refraction of rays during their ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Hipparchus 1,700 years before. He felt it his duty to catalogue all the principal stars, so that there should be no mistake in the future. During the construction of his catalogue of 1,000 stars he prepared and used accurate tables of refraction deduced from his own observations. Thus he eliminated (so far as naked eye observations required) the effect of atmospheric refraction which makes the altitude of a star seem greater than ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... about 5 years. She developed into an unusually attractive young woman, showing at times various mild nervous disturbances as well as character difficulties. Only occasionally has she worn the glasses which corrected her errors of refraction. During this time she has not been severely ill. She has a palpable thyroid which has hardly increased in size. When last seen she was notable for a very clear skin, good color, and bright eyes. Conjunctival and corneal reflexes much diminished. Palatopharyngeal ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the case of a blind, or useless, eye. It was very much shattered, but its character was obvious. The glass of the left eye was much thicker and fortunately less damaged, so that I was able accurately to test its refraction. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... directly opposite to the doctrine I have been hitherto inculcating, at least, admits of no solution from it. In short it is this. Before the double convex glass or concave speculum EBF, let the point A be placed at such a distance that the rays proceeding from A, after refraction or reflection, be brought to unite somewhere in the AxAB. And suppose the point of union (i.e. the image of the point A, as hath been already set forth) to be Z; between which and B, the vertex of the glass or speculum, conceive ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... in England often, in Scotland rarely, is the blue sky. (Laughter) Lord Rayleigh's brilliant piece of mathematical work on the dynamics of blue sky is a monument to the application of mathematics to a subject of supreme difficulty, and on the subject of refraction of light he has pointed out the way towards finding all that has to be known, though he has ended his work by admitting that the explanation of the fundamentals of the reflection and refraction of light is still wanting and is a subject for the efforts ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... several people of apparent truthfulness that it is possible, in circumstances such as these, for each watcher to see the other man's eyes reflected from the mirrors of the periscopes; and it is an undoubted fact that the laws which govern the refraction of light would allow of this phenomenon. Personally, I am glad to say I have never seen a German's eye through a periscope; but then personally I am inclined to doubt if any one has. It must be quite dreadful to see a thing like a poached egg regarding you balefully ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... obtained and the curves calculated from the index of refraction, as obtained by any of the ordinary methods applicable to plates (the microscope method, in general, is quite good enough), squares circumscribing the desired circles are cut out by the help of a diamond. [Footnote: Glazebrook and Shaw's ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... naturelles de tous les changements qui arrivent a la matiere; ce que je confirme par i'explication des effets les plus generaux de la Physique, tels que sont la durete des corps, leur fluidite, leur pesanteur, legerete, la lumiere et la refraction et reflexion de ses rayons."—Malebranche, "Recherche de la ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... marine animals as nearly as possible in their native haunts and habits, to do which, and not startle the fish, the visitors go through darkened passages, and are thus concealed from them, all the light coming in by refraction through the water. Their actions are thus natural, and they move about with perfect freedom, some of the tanks being of enormous size. Here swim schools of herring, mackerel, and porpoises as they do out at sea, the octopus gyrates his arms, and almost every fish that ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... snow-curtain softly about the wintry world; and weaving the many-colored bow whose warp is the rain-drops of earth, whose woof is the sunbeam of heaven, all checkered over with the mystic hand of refraction. ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... colony which can be further tested. It is self-evident that all culture material must be sterilized by heat before using, and in the manipulations care must be exercised to avoid contamination from the air. The refraction index of the bacterial cell is so slight that the microscopic study is facilitated or made possible by staining them with various aniline dyes. Owing to differences in the cell material the different species of bacteria show differences in the ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... "Ideas" of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and shadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere, under the strange laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought—philosophic, [164] poetic, theological—has been greatly influenced; by the intense subjectivities, the accidents, so to speak, of Plato's genius, of Plato himself; the ways ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... has arisen with reference to quotations and cited authorities, all of which have gone through a double process of refraction: first into Russian, then into English. The translator, also a Russian, and far from perfectly acquainted with English, cannot claim to possess the erudition necessary to verify and restore the many quotations to verbal accuracy; all that is hoped is that, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... instance, we may state that the earth, as seen from a highflying balloon, used to be almost always described as appearing concave, or like a huge basin, and ingenious attempts were made to prove mathematically that this must be so. The laws of refraction are brought in to prove the fact; or, again, the case is stated thus: Supposing the extreme horizon to be seen when the balloon is little more than a mile high, the range of view on all sides will then be, roughly, some eighty miles. If, then, a line were drawn from the aerial observer to this ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... the sun's disc, enlarged by refraction, was dipping blood-red below the horizon. The distant waves glittered in the west, and sparkled like sheets of liquid silver. Nothing was to be seen in that direction but sky and water, except one sharply-defined object, the hull ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... with attention to his dissertation on sight, spectacles, focusses, lens, reflection, refraction, &c.; but, as he was not defective in the particular organs alluded to, felt but little interested on the subject; selected what he really wanted, or rather what etiquette required, when, to their great gratification, in came Sparkle. After the first salutations ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the return of William of Orange from England after the fall of the French dominion, I saw for the first time one of those sunsets which awaken in us Italians a feeling of wonder no less than that awakened in people from the North by the sunsets at Naples and Rome. The sun, because of the refraction of light by the mists which always fill the air in Holland, is greatly magnified, and diffuses through the clouds and on the sea a veiled and tremulous splendor like the reflection of a great fire. It seemed as if another sun had unexpectedly appeared ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... known of Thomas Hariot; his only published works are the 'Briefe and true report' (PG4247) and the posthumous 'Praxis', a handbook of algebra. He anticipated the law of refraction, corresponded with Kepler, observed comets, and may have been the first to recognize that the straight line paths of comets might be segments of elongated ellipses. The lost 'ephemera' referred to in the text have since been found (since 1876) and a conference was held in 1970 at the University ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... so eagerly sought. The day had been hot and almost cloudless. The shimmer of heat along the lazy roll of the land to the south had often baffled their blinking eyes. But now the sun was well to the west, and the refraction seemed diminishing, and away over to the northeast a dull-colored cloud seemed slowly rising beyond the ridges. It was this that Sergeant Bruce was studying when he murmured to ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... horizon was occupied by haze, and produced a very remarkable effect upon the land, which was so raised above the horizon by refraction that many distant objects became visible that could not otherwise have been seen. This mirage had been frequently observed by us on various parts of the coast, but never produced so extraordinary an effect as on the present ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... now is not with the inconsistency of the objectors to John and Jesus, but simply with this caricature which He quotes from them of some of His characteristics. It is a distorted refraction of the beam of light that comes from His face, through the muddy, thick medium of their prejudice. And if we can, I was going to say, pull it straight again, we shall see something of His glories. I take the two clauses of my text separately because ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... refrangibility of light, that is, to some of the colors being more refracted than others. He likewise knows that more than a hundred years ago Mr. Dollond having found out, after many experiments, that some kinds of glass have the power of dispersing light, for each degree of its refraction, much more than other kinds, and that on the discovery of this fact he contrived to make telescopes in which he passed the light through two object-glasses successively, one of which he made of crown and one of flint glass, so ground and adapted to each other that the greater dispersion ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... sight, without the slightest alteration in the line of vision, he will find that it takes in the entire breadth of a large room, and that up to a very short distance before him; and imperfectly, by a refraction, I believe, in the eye itself, to a point very near indeed. Next to nothing that passed in the room, therefore, ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... could not understand how it was that when they made a vigorous thrust with their spear at a great big, quiet fish it seemed to strike some place a couple of feet or so away from the fish. So they found that the law of refraction had to be considered, and after a few experiments they did better. Each was successful in securing some fine fish. Some, indeed, were so large that, after the boys had plunged their spears into them, they required the help of the Indians to get ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... for aim, but seeing a vague shadow below the boat, he allowed for the refraction of the water, and threw the small barbed spear with all his might. His cast was as clean as though he were experienced, and as he grasped the rope he cried to the boatman with ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Do not be frightened at the complexity; but, on the other hand, do not hope to render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see, and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be, first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by refraction, so that if the general structure of the stone shows straight parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the water crosses and interferes with the part that is ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and the great—brilliancy—and refraction of light, on this angle, where the stone has got polished by rubbing against other stones, in the course of ages, I'm inclined to think ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... mind becomes atrophied in a defective body. Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which passed through it issued forth completely distorted. The reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily, divergent ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... neighbour's, and all more or less imperfect, it was impossible that the absolute objective truth of anything could be seen by any mortal, but only some partial approximation, and, as it were, sketch of it, according as the object was represented with more or less refraction on the mirror of his subjectivity. And therefore, as the true inquirer deals only with the possible, and lets the impossible go, it was the business of the wise man, shunning the search after absolute truth as an impious attempt of the ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... "Good thing I've got my body shield modulated for full refraction," he told himself. "He'd be a little startled if he ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... "Refraction of light," said Thorn hurriedly. "The light rays strike this film, hurtle around the object, it coats—at increased speed, probably, but there are no instruments accurate enough to check that—and emerge on the other side. Thus, you can look ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... unascertained primary cause, then, Professor Williams, of Harvard College, who subsequently made a thorough investigation of the matter, gave it as his opinion that this unprecedented quantity of vapor had gathered in the air in layers so as to cut off the rays of light, by repeated refraction, in a remarkable degree. He thought that the specific gravity of this vapor must have been the same as that of the air, which caused it to be held so long in suspension in the atmosphere. In this case the extent of the darkness would coincide with the area of the vapor, ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... badly, or the refraction of the water was not allowed for, I cannot say, but there was no result. I only saw a quivering of the surface and the fish was ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... individuality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... have been hitherto inculcating, at least, admits of no solution from it. In short it is this. Before the double convex glass or concave speculum EBF, let the point A be placed at such a distance that the rays proceeding from A, after refraction or reflection, be brought to unite somewhere in the AxAB. And suppose the point of union (i.e. the image of the point A, as hath been already set forth) to be Z; between which and B, the vertex of the glass or speculum, conceive the eye to be anywhere ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... of the rainbow? It is evident that what apparent things we see come to our eyes in right or in crooked lines, or by refraction: these are incorporeal and to sense obscure, but to reason they are obvious. Those which are seen in right lines are those which we see through the air or horn or transparent stones, for all the parts of these things are very fine and tenuous; but those which appear in crooked ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of depression. The web is made up of the most diverse ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... forward after me, and having also passed the angle of refraction saw no more of the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... each exhibiting its farthest extremity faintly illuminated by the solar rays, before any part of the dark hemisphere was visible. Soon afterward, the whole dark limb became illuminated. This prolongation of the cusps beyond the semicircle, I thought, must have arisen from the refraction of the sun's rays by the moon's atmosphere. I computed, also, the height of the atmosphere (which could refract light enough into its dark hemisphere to produce a twilight more luminous than the light ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... parting from the brig we encountered a tropical storm. The sun rose red and angry, and owing to the great refraction appeared three times its natural size. It climbed lazily to the zenith, and at noon we were shadowless. The sky was as calm as a vault, and the surface of the water was like burnished steel. The heat became so stifling that even the Africans were gasping ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... and indistinct, but in the calm splendor of its own thallassphere. The first thought is one of unspeakable admiration of the miraculous beauty of everything around him—a glory and a splendor of refraction, interference and reflection that puts to shame the Arabian story of the kingdom of the Blue Fish. Above him is that pure golden canopy with its rare glimmering lustrousness—something like the soft, dewy effulgence that comes with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... inky darkness (save when the moon has a northern declination) in the period of a typical year. During the period of a little over four days, the sun shines continuously on both the North and South Poles at the same time, owing to refraction parallax, semi-diameter, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?—But, referred to the sun, it is widest at its base, which is no greater than his own opacity. The divine light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of the refraction of light, or else by a certain self-luminousness, or, as some will have it, transparency, if we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side. At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... constructed a cylindrical lens in which the axis remains constant in direction and amount of refraction, while the refraction in the meridian at right ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... eyes, thinking that I was the victim of some hallucination, or that the refraction from the intense light produced an optical delusion; and, as I did so, the flaming pillar slowly twisted and thundered off whithersoever it passes to in the bowels of the great earth, leaving Ayesha standing where ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Indeed, Ratty, my love, you must study. I will give you the renowned Kirwan's book. Charlotte tore some of it for curl papers; but there's enough left to enlighten you with the sun's rays, and reflection and refraction—" ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... years. She developed into an unusually attractive young woman, showing at times various mild nervous disturbances as well as character difficulties. Only occasionally has she worn the glasses which corrected her errors of refraction. During this time she has not been severely ill. She has a palpable thyroid which has hardly increased in size. When last seen she was notable for a very clear skin, good color, and bright eyes. Conjunctival and corneal reflexes much ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... adventurous discoverers in, where you can neither kill nor eject. Likewise you are deprived of your pipe; and the common homely comfort of spitting on your bait is totally denied you. The landscape takes on the prismatic colours of refraction, so that, while you can easily make out red, white, and blue Chinese dragons and mythological monsters, you are unable to discover the more welcome succulence, say, of a partridge on a limb. And the end of that head-net is to be picked to holes by the brush, and finally to be snatched from you ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Another.—Epicurus, founder of the Epicurean philosophy. He lived B. C. about 300 years. [29] Water crooks a stick.—An allusion to the bent appearance which a stick has in water, consequent upon the refraction of light. [30] The wars.—This fable appears to have been composed about the beginning of the year 1677. The European powers then found themselves exhausted by wars, and desirous of peace. England, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... sun's refraction—that is, the variation of the rays of light from their direct course, occasioned by the difference of density ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... little unctuous. Stepping through the gateway with the morning sun behind me, I saw at each step a fresh circle of dewdrops gleam, some ruby, some emerald, some brightly white, at the same distance in front. The angle of refraction advanced as I moved; there was a point at which the dewdrop shot back a brilliant ray, and then became invisible, or appeared a mere drop ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... used to find Paul Tichlorne plunged as deeply into the study of light polarization, diffraction, and interference, single and double refraction, and all manner ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... in the distance, and hastened on to them; and then they fancied they were close to rivers and islands, covered with luxuriant foliage, but still were doomed to disappointment; as all was the result of the highly-rarefied air, and the refraction of the sun's rays on the sultry plain. What would they have given for a bush even to afford them any shelter from the noonday sun, for the crowns of their heads appeared as if covered with live coal, and their minds began to wander. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... young friend, E. W. Cooke, long a resident in Holland, and a keen and observing artist, remarked that the skies in the pictures of Backhuysen, though dark and inky, were precisely what we see now—the deep Zuyder Sea swallowing up any refraction of light which would otherwise have illuminated the clouds; while the skies of Cuyp, receiving the coruscations arising from the meeting of the two rivers, the Meuse and the Waal, the scenes of most of his pictures, exhibit that ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... revolving light, might be produced. The apparatus was arranged so as to cause a series of eight lenses one foot in diameter and three feet focal distance to revolve with any velocity up to sixty revolutions per minute round a central lamp. The light from this lamp being concentrated by refraction through the eight lenses into eight pencils, having a divergence of about eight degrees each, illuminated when at rest not quite fifty degrees of the horizon; but when this system of lenses was put into rapid motion, every degree of the three hundred and ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... but found it difficult in consequence of the allowance necessary for the refraction of the water and the movement of the fish. There is a great temptation to strike in an apparently direct line with the fish, which I need hardly say, even if the fish be stationary does not go near it. I only succeeded in piercing two. But I afterwards went ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... every commander has to deal with some refraction of this kind of problem. When it comes, moralizing and generalizing about the weakness of human nature does no good whatever. To call the man a fool is as invidious as to waste indignation upon the cause of his misfortune. Likewise, any frontal approach to ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... of a volume of Tycho's great work "Introduction to the New Astronomy". The first volume, devoted to the new star of 1572, was not ready, because the reduction of the observations involved so much research to correct the star places for refraction, precession, etc.; it was not completed in fact until Tycho's death, but the second volume, dealing with the comet of 1577, was printed at Uraniborg and some copies were issued in 1588. Besides the comet observations it included ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... the logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you don't know the general law, you must charge your memory ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... discovered new excellences in the wonderful metal. Its properties of translucence and refraction enabled skilful artists to perform marvels. By suitable management a chain of artemisium could be made to resemble a string of vari-colored gems, each separate link having a tint of its own, while, as the wearer moved, delicate complementary colors chased one another, in ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... and medicine, but finding no satisfaction in either of these professions, with the true instincts of the scholar he chose poverty with liberty to pursue the studies he loved. He astonished the scientific world by his first published works, 'Memoir on the Integral Calculus' (1739) and 'On the Refraction of Solid Bodies' (1741); and while not yet twenty-four years old, the brilliant young mathematician was made a member of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1754 he entered the Academie Francaise, and eighteen years later became ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... but the two regiments engaged in the flanking movement pushed on to gain the bluff. Just as they reached the crest of the ridge the moon rose from behind, enlarged by the refraction of the atmosphere, and as the attacking column passed along the summit it crossed the moon's disk and disclosed to us below a most interesting panorama, every figure nearly being thrown out in full relief. The enemy, now outflanked on left and right, abandoned his ground, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... carried obliquely from one obtuse corner of the prism to the other, in the direction of its length. The surfaces of this section, after having been carefully polished, are cemented together again by means of Canada balsam. A ray of light, on entering the prism, is separated by the double refraction of the calc-spar into an ordinary and an extraordinary ray; the former undergoes total reflection at the layer of balsam at an incidence which allows the extraordinary ray to be transmitted; the latter, therefore, passes through unchanged. This principle of obtaining a single ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... the whole fabric is warped and bent at a thousand angles,—it is not only the quality of the ancient glass, nor its colour, that gives this unattainable expression to these windows, but the accidental warping and wear of centuries have laid each bit of glass at a different angle, so that the refraction of the light is quite different from any possible reflection on the smooth surface of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... are entirely different. As we ascend the air becomes rarer. It has less moisture, because a wet atmosphere, being heavier, lies nearer the surface of the earth. Being rarer the action of sunlight on the particles is less intense. Reflection and refraction of the rays acting on the light atmosphere do not produce such a powerful effect as on the air ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... way for the reform of physical science and for its immense modern advance. In his optical investigations he established the law of refraction of light. His ingenious theory of the vortices—tracing gravity, magnetism, light, and heat, to the whirling or revolving movements of the molecules of matter with which the universe is filled—was accepted as science for about a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... grass is burnt in spring and autumn so as to kill off the old tufts and allow of the new shoots growing for hay. The fires look like one long streak of quivering flame, the forked tips of which flash and quiver in the horizon, magnified by refraction, and on a dark night are lovely. In the day-time one only sees volumes of smoke which break the monotony of the landscape, though I don't know that it is picturesque. With a slight breeze the fires spread in a marvellous way, ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... go to bed. She had no nerves: she saw life in its proper colours without refraction. The dreadful scene at Wancote had made its full impression on her, but she was not beset like Hyde by visions of what might have been. Still she was tired and subdued, and when Verney had dressed her arm she announced her intention of spending the afternoon in the garden out of the way of ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the same vertical line in the sign of Taurus. The date was thus satisfactorily established, and a calculation of the longitude of the house was deduced with an accuracy which in those circumstances was certainly commendable. Nevertheless, as the facts and the theory of refraction were not thoroughly understood, nor Tycho Brahe's tables of refraction generally known, pilot Barendz could not be expected to be ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... scientific subjects to give definitions which can be rendered intelligible only by an intimate acquaintance with the very matters defined. It would be tedious to enumerate the countless absurd explanations given in elementary text-books of the phenomena of interference, polarization, and double refraction,—explanations as enigmatical as the inscriptions at Memphis and Karnak,—explanations useless to the optician because needless, and to the student because obscure. It would seem that subjects so simple and beautiful as these could not be rendered difficult of comprehension, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... words, as they dived down through the waves of sleep in which Swann was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing that refraction which turns a ray of light, at the bottom of a bowl of water, into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of the door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the clangour of an alarum, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile the scenery of his ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from other bodies. Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... smaller percentage is delivered in the beam. Mangin in 1874 made a reflector of glass in which both outer and inner surfaces were spherical but of different radii of curvature, so that the reflector was thicker in the middle. This device was "silvered" on the outside and the refraction in the glass, as the light passed through it to the mirror and back again, corrected the spherical aberration of the mirrored surface. These have been extensively used. Many combinations of curved surfaces have been developed for special projection purposes, but the parabolic ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... 52 feet focus, and it would have been impossible to have bestowed the necessary attention upon it had we made a business of observing. That instrument is nearly finished, and I hope it will effect something for astronomy. The unequal refraction of the atmosphere will limit its powers, but how far remains to be ascertained.... Lady Rosse joins me in very kind remembrances and believe ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... the hitherto unexplored domains of nature what reason demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the mammalian skeleton, discovered the intermaxillary bone in man; and Sir William Hamilton, from the mathematical consequences of the undulation of light, led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. A similar story is told of Prof. Agassiz and Prof. Pierce, the one the great zooelogist, the other the great mathematician, of Cambridge. Agassiz, having studied the formation of radiate animals, and having found them all referable to three different plans of structure, asked Prof. Pierce, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... gentle feelings, and gentler yet in her attendance on her patron's obsequies, in the discovery that all of which he died possessed he'd left to her, but it is the duller surfaces that are slowest to give refraction, the least used springs that are least pliant. She was come a long road from her first signs of hardening. She was past, now, the stage where, when grieving for the little old man, she would have felt contrition that her first thought at his death had been, not ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... was sinking fast and flashing as it turned over, while two merry little young scamps were diving down after it, racing to see which would get first to the coin. This soon disappeared in the disturbed water, while the figures of the boys grew more and more shadowy and distorted by the varying refraction. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the side of least resistance. Within a refracting body the ether is rarefied, not only by the proximity of the atoms of the body (or its density), but also by the motions of those atoms; so that if two simple gases of different specific gravity be made equal in density by compression, their refraction will be approximately as their specific heats. In the case of solids and liquids, or even compound gases, there is a continual absorption of motion to produce the cohesion of composition and aggregation. And the specific heats ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... the custom with a great many if not the majority of opticians to fit a customer without knowing whether he has presbyopia, hypermetropia, or any of the other errors of refraction. Their method is first to try a convex, and if this does not improve, a concave, etc., until the proper one is found. This, of course, amounts to the same thing if the right glass is found. But in practice it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... the great—brilliancy—and refraction of light, on this angle, where the stone has got polished by rubbing against other stones, in the course of ages, I'm inclined to think ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... the Weather Man said, "the sun has gone below the horizon at least two minutes before you see it disappear. You're looking at a sun that isn't there at all. That's due to refraction. The reason of the pink glow is that when you see it, the earth and the air for several thousand feet above you are in the shadow of the edge of the earth. The sun, therefore, is not shining on the thicker dust of the lower part of the air, but the finer ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... in July than in September. R. Hooke, in 1674, pubilshed his observations of g Draconis, a star of the second magnitude which passes practically overhead in the latitude of London, and whose observations are therefore singularly free from the complex corrections due to astronomical refraction, and concluded that this star was 23" more northerly in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less. There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You wonder at the eccentricities of this or that connection of your own. Watch yourself, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Providence and their own exertions from the jaws of a horrible death. They awoke and looked at each other, the very gaze of despair was appalling; far as the eye could reach, no object could be discerned; the bright haze of the morning added to the strong refraction of light; one smooth, interminable plain, one endless ocean, one cloudless sky and one burning sun, were all they had to gaze upon. The boat lay like the ark, in a world alone! They had no oar, no mast and no sail, nothing but the bare planks and themselves, without provisions or water, food ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... a slave. And I had hardly worked and thought about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes suddenly—blindingly! I found a general principle of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... cried, and his cheeks flushed with annoyance. "Think of my wasting three cartridges in that fashion! If I had him at Bisley I'd shoot the turban off him, but this vibrating glare means refraction. What's ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... aground in this place. In the afternoon we sailed within the edge of the ice, as much as a light westerly wind would admit, in order to approach the western land. Some curious effects of atmospheric refraction were observed this evening, the low ice being at times considerably raised in the horizon, and constantly ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... plane high in the sky. What chance has one to detect a machine that is perfectly transparent when there is nothing but perfectly transparent air around it? It is a curious property of this vibrational system of invisibility that the index of refraction is made very low. It is not the same as that of air, but the difference is so slight that it is practically within the limits of observation error; so small is the difference that there is no 'rainbow' effect. The difference of temperature of the ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... little journey more pleasing than you can possibly conceive: the serene blue sky above, the dazling brightness of the sun, and the colors from the refraction of its rays on the transparent part of these ridges of ice, the winding course these oblige you to make, the sudden disappearing of a train of fifteen or twenty carrioles, as these ridges intervene, which again ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... said the captain quietly. "Sit down. You have heard of refraction. It is a peculiar state of the air. I daresay we look the same to them. Pull, my lads. I'm afraid the mist will be down upon us before we can reach ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... behold! round the sun in the west there arises a perfect solar halo, very similar to an ordinary rainbow, but smaller in its arc and fainter in its hues of yellow and rose—a very beautiful phenomenon, and one seldom to be seen in England. Halos of this nature are supposed to arise from the double refraction of the rays from the sun as the light passes through thin clouds, or from the transmission of light through particles of ice. It lingers a full quarter of an hour, and then dies away. Does this bode rough weather? Surely the cruel Boreas and the frost ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... alcoholism. Some explanation was sought on the basis of alcoholic homes driving the children out into the streets. This was found to be markedly the case, the children of alcoholic parents spending much more of their spare time in the streets. An examination, however, of the vision and refraction of children with regard to the time they spent in-and out-of-doors, showed no clear and definite result, the children who spent the whole or most of their spare time in the streets having the most myopia and also most normal sight. It ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... all cautions regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... of each other, and rendered their walls hideous with bad likenesses of all their friends. Their conversation ceased to be intelligible to the uninitiated, and they prattled prettily of "chiaro oscuro, French sauce, refraction of the angle of the eye, seventh spinus process, depth and juiciness of color, tender touch, and a good tone." Even in dress the artistic disorder was visible; some cast aside crinoline altogether, and stalked about with a severe simplicity of outline worthy of Flaxman. Others flushed themselves ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... her look as cold as the wet marble she stood on, her dark eyes seemed to gleam with a strange but enticing lustre. Even in the unsearching moonlight, which is after all rather deceptive than illuminative, I could not but notice one rare quality of her eyes. Each had some quality of refraction which made it look as though it contained a star. At every movement she made, the stars exhibited new beauties, of more rare and radiant force. She looked at me imploringly as the heavy curtain rolled back, and in eloquent gestures implored me to admit ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... had been brilliantly fine. The bergs had absolutely duplicated and inverted themselves by reflection, so that the sunlit pinnacles became submarine fires, and refraction stepped in to reverse, and as it were shatter, the floes on the horizon, while three mock suns glowed in the heavens at the same time—thus making the beautiful confusion still ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... is not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense vapor formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated by refraction. A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but it is not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Composition.—Reference should be made to the article REFRACTION for the general discussion of the phenomenon known as the refraction of light. It is there shown that every substance, transparent to light, has a definite refractive index, which is the ratio of the velocity of light in vacuo to its velocity in the medium ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... April that Harding had employed himself in fixing the orientation of the island, or, in other words, the precise spot where the sun rose. The day before he had noted exactly the hour when the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, making allowance for the refraction. This morning he noted, no less exactly, the hour at which it reappeared. Between this setting and rising twelve hours, twenty-four minutes passed. Then, six hours, twelve minutes after its rising, the sun on this ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... which God's agency is declared and His ownership asserted. 'I do set My bow.' Neither Noah nor the writer knew anything about refraction or the prismatic spectrum. But perhaps they knew more about the rainbow than people do who know all about how it comes, except that God sets it in the cloud, and that it is His. Let us have the facts which science labels as such, by all means, and the more ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... day the horizon was occupied by haze, and produced a very remarkable effect upon the land, which was so raised above the horizon by refraction that many distant objects became visible that could not otherwise have been seen. This mirage had been frequently observed by us on various parts of the coast, but never produced so extraordinary an ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... 'self-praise is no accommodation,' as the proverb says. You see, sir, I couldn't be happy when you was gone. I missed my dear young master so much. People wondered what was amiss with me, when they found me, as they often did, in a state of refraction. 'Why, Juniper,' they'd say, 'what's amiss? Are you grieving after Mr Frank?' I could only nod dissent; my heart was too full. But I mustn't be too long, a- keeping you too, sir, under the vertebral rays of an Australian sun. I just couldn't stand it no longer—so I gets together ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... And this double refraction of his mind by which a concentrated and individualised Britling did but present a larger impersonal Britling beneath, carried with it a duplication of his conscience and sense of responsibility. To his personal conscience he was answerable for his private honour and his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Ross continued his survey of the horizon, all of which was visible except a small portion obscured by the rise of the conning-tower. The air was remarkably clear. Taking into consideration the refraction of the atmosphere, the navigation lamps of a vessel shown at twenty feet above the sea would be visible from the low-lying deck of the submarine at a distance of six ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... 21st November, and it reappeared on the 19th January. On the 15th May the sun no longer set. The temperature was then under the freezing point of mercury. That the upper edge of the sun should be visible on the 19th January we must assume a horizontal refraction of nearly 1 deg.. The islands on the Yenisej are so low that there was probably a pretty ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... other hand, do not hope to render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see, and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be, first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by refraction, so that if the general structure of the stone shows straight parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the water crosses and interferes with the part that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... suddenly compared with the red rays than happened with the crown-glass prism. Look at Fig. 112. The red rays passing through the flint glass are but little deflected, while the violet rays turn suddenly outwards. This is just what is wanted, for it counteracts the unequal inward refraction by B, and both sets of rays come to a focus in the same plane. Such a lens is called achromatic, or colourless. If you hold a common reading-glass some distance away from large print you will see that the letters are edged with coloured bands, proving that the lens ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... not our design to enter into an elaborate description of this piece of mechanism, as every student of philosophy, who is well acquainted with the reflection and refraction of rays of light, will understand how an ingenious contrivance produced the results spoken of. The same principle enters into the arrangement of the camera obscura. There was an aperture very artfully cut through the wall, and so guarded on the ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks. Few greater men have lived. As we follow Bacon's process of reasoning regarding the refraction of light, we see ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sand, which has come inward from the sea, and prevents the mud's escape—banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top of the mud banks lounge the long black ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... of different varieties of tabasheer, Brewster proceeded to determine its refractive index, arriving at the remarkable result that tabasheer "has a lower index of refraction than any other known solid or liquid, and that it actually holds an intermediate place between water and gaseous bodies!" This excessively low refractive power Brewster believes to afford a complete explanation of the extraordinary behavior ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... pacing with his quick little steps up and down the dingy room. "Look here, laddie! There's a great continent from the equator to the icebergs, and not a man in it who could correct an astigmatism. What do they know of modern eye-surgery and refraction? Why, dammy, they don't know much about it in the provinces of England yet, let alone Brazil. Man, if you could only see it, there's a fringe of squinting millionaires sitting ten deep round the whole continent with ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... the Will, if stripped of unsuitable phraseology, are not very difficult questions. They are about as easy to comprehend as the air-pump, the law of refraction of light, or the atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by involving a simple ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process of synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In front and rear of China the English ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... on in a straight line through the body; but if it, in passing from one medium to another of different density, fall obliquely, it is bent from its direct course and recedes from it, either towards the right or left, and this bending is called refraction; (see Fig. 3, b.) If a ray of light passes from a rarer into a denser medium it is refracted towards a perpendicular in that medium; but if it passes from a denser into rarer it is bent further from a perpendicular in that medium. Owing to this ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... from which it rose; at the nightward edge, once in eighty-eight days, the sun peeps above the horizon and quickly sinks from sight again. The result is that, neglecting the effects of atmospheric refraction, which would tend to expand the borders of the domain of sunlight, about one quarter of the entire surface of Mercury is, with regard to day and night, in a condition resembling that of our polar regions, where there is but one day and one night in the course of a year—and on ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... symmetry of the liquid figures, known to be produced in the planes of freezing, when radiant heat is sent through ice, we may safely infer symmetry of aggregation, and hence conclude that the line perpendicular to the planes of freezing is a line of no double refraction; that it is, in fact, the optic axis of the crystal. The same remark applies to the line joining the opposite blunt angles of a crystal of Iceland spar. The arrangement of the molecules round this line being symmetrical, the condition of the ether depending upon these molecules shares their ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... opening. A mixture of gases is exhaled, which, being heavier than the atmosphere, fills it up to the level of the entrance; and when the sun is shining into the cave, one can see the gaseous fumes swaying to and fro, owing to the difference of refraction. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... heavens and earth seemed to give a full denial to sin and sorrow. The sun was just mounting over the horizon, looking up the clear cloud-mottled sky. From millions of water-drops hanging on the bending stalks of grass, sparkled his rays in varied refraction, transformed here to a gorgeous burning ruby, there to an emerald, green as the grass, and yonder to a flashing, sunny topaz. The chanting priest-lark had gone up from the low earth, as soon as the heavenly light had begun to enwrap and illumine the folds of its tabernacle; ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... exactly the same effect that a similar occurrence had upon Hipparchus 1,700 years before. He felt it his duty to catalogue all the principal stars, so that there should be no mistake in the future. During the construction of his catalogue of 1,000 stars he prepared and used accurate tables of refraction deduced from his own observations. Thus he eliminated (so far as naked eye observations required) the effect of atmospheric refraction which makes the altitude of a star seem greater than it ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... of mind which might be called the refraction of an idea by the presence of another idea. An example is the habit of saying, "Unprepared, as I have—'' before beginning a speech. The speaker means to say that he has not prepared himself, but, as he really ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... observatories we employ telescopes of two entirely different classes. The more familiar forms are those known as refractors, in which the operation of condensing the rays of light is conducted by refraction. The character of the refractor is shown in Fig. 1. The rays from the star fall upon the object-glass at the end of the telescope, and on passing through they become refracted into a converging beam, so that all intersect at the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the aesthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Leyden, introduced the true method of measuring the degrees of longitude and latitude, and Huygens, who had seen his manuscripts, asserted that Snellius had invented, before Descartes, the doctrine of refraction. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... cortical centres. It would appear that in some cases the spasmodic jerkings are originated by certain movements habitually made by the patient in the course of his work. In others, as a result of astigmatism and other errors of refraction, the patient has acquired the habit of repeatedly tilting his head to enable him to see clearly, and these movements ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... from unity rather than arrives at it; and the order which it appears to discover subsequently in an experience which at first is manifold and incoherent is only a refraction of the original unity through the prism of a spontaneous analysis. Mr Bergson admirably points out ("Creative Evolution", pages 240-244 and 252-257.) that there are two types of order, geometric and vital, the one a static hierarchy of relations, ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... to remark that as another result of the thinness of the Martian atmosphere twilight is much shorter than on the earth, the light being less diffused when the sun is below the horizon, and refraction also considerably ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... and exact focus where all meet, and that the image of a star, for instance, formed by an ordinary lens, even if the spherical aberration has been corrected, appears blurred and discolored. There is no such difficulty with a mirror, because there is in that case no refraction of the light, and consequently no splitting up of ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... present sense. The mineral had, however, long been known under the names calcareous spar and calc-spar, and the beautifully transparent variety called Iceland-spar had been much studied. The strong double refraction and perfect cleavages of Iceland-spar were described in detail by Erasmus Bartholinus in 1669 in his book Experimenta Crystalli Islandici disdiaclastici; the study of the same mineral led Christiaan Huygens to discover in 1690 the laws of double refraction, and E.L. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... kill them with arrows; but they swam too deep, and, somehow or another, he always missed them. The fact was that Ossaroo was not practised in shooting fish with the arrow; and not understanding any thing about optics or the laws of refraction, he missed his mark ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... his dissertation on sight, spectacles, focusses, lens, reflection, refraction, &c.; but, as he was not defective in the particular organs alluded to, felt but little interested on the subject; selected what he really wanted, or rather what etiquette required, when, to their great gratification, in ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Pennsylvania; Professor of Optics and Refraction; formerly Physician in Philadelphia Hospital; Member of Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania State and ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... guilt came from the pale image of it lifted above her horizon by the refraction of her sympathy. She did not know, perhaps never would understand the ghastly horror of conscious guilt, besides which there is no evil else. Agonies of injury a man may endure, and, so far from being overwhelmed, rise above them tenfold ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of being successfully wound up, as the pecuniary affairs of their former owners, there was always great choice in Mr Brogley's shop; and various looking-glasses, accidentally placed at compound interest of reflection and refraction, presented to the eye an eternal perspective ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... stranger had great eyes like burning flames, but a second look dispelled the illusion. The red sunlight was shining on the windows of St. Mary's Church behind our seat, and as the sun dipped there was just sufficient change in the refraction and reflection to make it appear as if the light moved. I called Lucy's attention to the peculiar effect, and she became herself with a start, but she looked sad all the same. It may have been that she was thinking of that terrible night up there. We never refer to it, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... the crystalline lens becomes opaque and loses its transparency, the power of refraction is lost—the animal can ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... entirely in the Earth's cone of shadow; the solar rays are refracted round our globe by our atmosphere, and curving inward, illumine the lunar globe with a rosy tint that reminds one of the sunset. Sometimes, indeed, this refraction does not occur, owing doubtless to lack of transparency in the atmosphere, and the Moon becomes invisible. This happened ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... these Vapours, and the Circumstance attending their Passage, they appear to us differently below. For if they be extremely subtile they mount very high, and there, according to the Sentiment of Sir Isaac Newton, form by Refraction the Azure, or blue Colour, that over-spreads the Sky in serene Weather. Clouds, while they remain visible, do not rise above the Height of a Mile; and we always observe, that the highest are of a very light Colour, and hardly ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... then about ten o'clock in the morning, and the rays of the sun struck the surface of the waves at rather an oblique angle; at the touch of the light, decomposed by [v]refraction as through a prism, flowers, rocks, plants, and shells were shaded at the edges by the seven solar colors. It was a marvelous feast for the eyes, this complication of colored tints, a perfect [v]kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... how it was that when they made a vigorous thrust with their spear at a great big, quiet fish it seemed to strike some place a couple of feet or so away from the fish. So they found that the law of refraction had to be considered, and after a few experiments they did better. Each was successful in securing some fine fish. Some, indeed, were so large that, after the boys had plunged their spears into them, they required the help of the Indians to get ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... a curious sensation of having stepped into an old Flemish painting. The hall in which he stood was cool and rather dark, though a bright refraction of light tossed from some upper window upon a tall mirror filled the shadow with broken spangles. Through an open doorway at the rear was the green glimmer of a garden. In front of him was a mahogany sideboard. On its ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... business now is not with the inconsistency of the objectors to John and Jesus, but simply with this caricature which He quotes from them of some of His characteristics. It is a distorted refraction of the beam of light that comes from His face, through the muddy, thick medium of their prejudice. And if we can, I was going to say, pull it straight again, we shall see something of His glories. I take the two clauses of my text ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
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