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Spectrum   Listen
noun
Spectrum  n.  (pl. spectra)  
1.
An apparition; a specter. (Obs.)
2.
(Opt.)
(a)
The several colored and other rays of which light is composed, separated by the refraction of a prism or other means, and observed or studied either as spread out on a screen, by direct vision, by photography, or otherwise.
(b)
A luminous appearance, or an image seen after the eye has been exposed to an intense light or a strongly illuminated object. When the object is colored, the image appears of the complementary color, as a green image seen after viewing a red wafer lying on white paper. Called also ocular spectrum.
Absorption spectrum, the spectrum of light which has passed through a medium capable of absorbing a portion of the rays. It is characterized by dark spaces, bands, or lines.
Chemical spectrum, a spectrum of rays considered solely with reference to their chemical effects, as in photography. These, in the usual photogrophic methods, have their maximum influence at and beyond the violet rays, but are not limited to this region.
Chromatic spectrum, the visible colored rays of the solar spectrum, exhibiting the seven principal colors in their order, and covering the central and larger portion of the space of the whole spectrum.
Continous spectrum, a spectrum not broken by bands or lines, but having the colors shaded into each other continously, as that from an incandescent solid or liquid, or a gas under high pressure.
Diffraction spectrum, a spectrum produced by diffraction, as by a grating.
Gaseous spectrum, the spectrum of an incandesoent gas or vapor, under moderate, or especially under very low, pressure. It is characterized by bright bands or lines.
Normal spectrum, a representation of a spectrum arranged upon conventional plan adopted as standard, especially a spectrum in which the colors are spaced proportionally to their wave lengths, as when formed by a diffraction grating.
Ocular spectrum. See Spectrum, 2 (b), above.
Prismatic spectrum, a spectrum produced by means of a prism.
Solar spectrum, the spectrum of solar light, especially as thrown upon a screen in a darkened room. It is characterized by numerous dark lines called Fraunhofer lines.
Spectrum analysis, chemical analysis effected by comparison of the different relative positions and qualities of the fixed lines of spectra produced by flames in which different substances are burned or evaporated, each substance having its own characteristic system of lines.
Thermal spectrum, a spectrum of rays considered solely with reference to their heating effect, especially of those rays which produce no luminous phenomena.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spectrum" Quotes from Famous Books



... called it helium, after the Greek word for sun. So much for him. Twenty-seven years later an element was found on earth in natural-gas in Kansas, which gave the same bright, yellow light viewed through the spectrum. The people, finding it would not burn, disgustedly let millions of barrels of this valuable element escape into the air, before a scientist told them that it was of untold value for balloon and ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... time in my life to secure specimens of two beautiful parasitic ferns (Polypodium tamariscinum and P. Hymenophylloides?). I saw for the first time, too, a lygodium and the large climbing potato-fern (Polypodium spectrum), very like a yam in the distance, and the Vittaria elongata, whose long grassy fronds adorn almost every tree. The beautiful Microlepia tenuifolia abounded, and there were a few plants of the loveliest fern I ever saw (Trichomanes ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... illumine it with a white light, it causes them to fall side by side; in fact they all fall apart, and the prism has actually analysed that light. We get now a coloured band, similar to that of the rainbow, and this band is called the spectrum (see Fig. 16). If we could now run all these coloured rays together again, we should simply reproduce white light. We can do this by catching the coloured band in another prism, when the light now emerging will be found to be white. ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... provided with organs of hearing, but whose language is too fine for our coarse perceptions. The vibrations—chirps, hums, and clicks—can be recorded on delicate instruments, but, just as there are shades and colours at both ends of the spectrum which our eyes cannot perceive, so there are tones running we know not how far beyond the scale limits which affect our ears. Some creatures utter noises so shrill, so sharp, that it pains our ears to listen to them, and these ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... different key. The stamp of public control is to be seen, if at all, in an inconvenient and monotonous chessboard plan for streets. Congestion of traffic at the busy points; wide stretches of empty pavement on streets little used; houses of every style and no style, imbued with all the colors of the spectrum; weed-grown vacant lots, unkempt yards, some fenced, some unfenced; poster-bedecked billboards-verily, the average American town is not a thing of beauty. Matthew Arnold's judgment is corroborated by every traveler. "Evidently," he wrote, "this is that civilization's weak side. There is ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... will have something to do with flowers and with bright butterflies, and we shall know why our "favorite color" is more than a whim, and why the Greeks may not have been able to distinguish the full gamut of our spectrum, and why rainbows are so narrow to our eyes in comparison to ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... Observatory, Greenwich. He proposed to investigate the effect of different elevations on the temperature of the dew-point; on the composition and electrical condition of the atmosphere, and on the rate and direction of the wind currents in it; on the earth's magnetism, and the solar spectrum; on sound, and on solar radiation. From 1862 to 1866 he made twenty-eight ascents, with Henry Coxwell as his balloonist. The most famous of these was from Wolverhampton on the 5th of September 1862, when Glaisher claimed to have reached ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... that neither of these two resplendent aspects of the divine nature reaches its highest beauty and supremest power, except it be associated with the other. In the spectrum analysis of that great light there are the two lines; the one purest white of righteousness, and the other tinged with a ruddier glow, the line of love. The one adorns and sets off the other. Love without righteousness is flaccid, a mere gush of good-natured ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... I asked. Joyce shook his head. "Nothing, Captain. I've checked the whole spectrum, and this is all I get. It's coming in on about a ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer

... color elements, as shown by the phenomena of the rainbow or by experimenting with the prism. (See 7.) When a ray of sunshine passes through a glass prism it is decomposed or separated, and if the prismatic colors are received upon a white screen you will find on the spectrum among the colors generated a pure blue, a pure red and a pure yellow. These are the primary colors, and it is necessary when thinking color to bear these prismatic colors ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford

... acquaint him with its truly volatile character. All sums greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him—equally prodigious. Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank was an institution of such abiding grace that, having once established a connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need. I was sure indeed that ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... of the black man in a three-cornered hat, seated in the stern of a jolly boat who used to be seen about Hell Gate in stormy weather; and who went by the name of the Pirate's Spuke, or Pirate's Ghost, because I never could meet with any person of stanch credibility who professed to have seen this spectrum; unless it were the widow of Manus Conklin, the blacksmith of Frog's Neck, but then, poor woman, she was a little purblind, and might have been mistaken; though they said she saw farther than other folks in ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... point. Let's go a bit further. The eye picks up certain vibrations. Light is nothing but energy vibrating at a tremendous speed. It has to be just so high for the eye to pick it up. A great deal we do not get. For instance, we can only catch one-twelfth of the solar spectrum. Until recently we have believed only what we could see. Science has pulled us out of the rut. It may pull ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... can tell the nature of a substance that is burning by splitting up the light which comes from it in the prism of a spectroscope. Well, these bright lines of different colours are the spectrum of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... gone with an astronomer to watch him photograph the spectrum of a star. As you enter the dark vault of the observatory you saw him being by lighting a candle. To see the star with? No; but to adjust the instrument to see the star with. It was the star that was going to take the photograph; it ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond

... obviously most inconvenient in practice. Place the front carrying the spectroscope in situ in the camera, and rack the latter out to its full extent; point the camera toward a bright sky, or the sun itself, if you can, while you endeavor to get a good focus. The spectrum will be seen on the ground glass, probably equal in dimensions to that of a quarter plate. Proceed to focus by sliding the outer tube to and fro until the colors are quite clear and distinct, and at same time screw ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... much is to be learnt in solar physics from the marvelous photographs of the sun's spectrum exhibited last summer by Professor Rowland; photographs that show as many as one hundred and fifty lines between H and K, and which he is still laboring to improve! The extension, too, of the visible solar spectrum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... in the gallery are not like these. No two of them are strikingly alike in mien and manner. Their personalities are as different, for most part, as their names. Their characters also ran the range of the spectrum, or nearly, if we are talking of moral habit, rather than of conscientious performance of military duty. Some drank their whiskey neat and frequently; others loathed it and took a harsh line with any subordinate ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... new home a collection of rare birds in such numbers that the room over the kitchen was devoted to the cages of cockatoos, parakeets, parrots and nonpareils. Here these feathered friends in spectrum-hued plumage lived among the potted plants and charmed the little bride with their beauty and sweet tricks. Other appendages included a chimpanzee, and a small Chinese slave boy, bought by her father ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... the behaviour of a reliable mercurial barometer. Electrical conditions were to be examined; the presence of ozone tested; the vibration of a magnet was again to be resorted to to determine how far the magnetism of the earth might be affected by height. The solar spectrum was to be observed; air was to be collected at different heights for analysis; clouds, also upper currents, were to be reported on. Further observations were to be made on sound, on solar radiation, on the actinic action of the sun, and ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... in stages midway between that of the Earth and that of the Sun. The fact that the centre of Jupiter's disc is twice or thrice as bright as his periphery, joined with the facts that he seems to radiate more light than is accounted for by reflection of the Sun's rays, and that his spectrum shows the "red-star line", are taken as evidences of luminosity; while the immense and rapid perturbations in his atmosphere, far greater than could be caused by heat received from the Sun, as well as the formation ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... through the whole body of air. The reader doubtless remembers the beautiful reddish or purple glow at sunrise and sunset for fully six months after August, 1883—that glow was caused by volcanic dust in the atmosphere interfering with the passage of the sun's rays of the upper part of the solar spectrum, more manifest at sun rising and setting than at other times during the day, because at these periods the sun's rays have to travel obliquely through the atmosphere, and consequently penetrating a very deep layer, were deprived of all ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and sights abound in everything; bird and breeze and bee alike are winged with melody; the music of the sea satisfies her heart, and there "the artist-ear,—which makes a spectrum for all sounds that are not separate, distinguishes the self-same harmonies that govern the gradations of the orchestra, from deep to deep descending, until sounds are lost in sound as lights in light";—the trains have their thunderous music in her hearing; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... from the carriage road, pouring out of the sky overhead, it gives a sense of power, and at the proper hour before sunset, when the vast mass of leaping, foaming water is shot through with the colors of the spectrum, it is one of the most exquisite sights the world can offer; the elemental forces are overwhelming, but the loveliness is engaging. One turns from this to the noble mass of El Capitan with a shock of surprise, however often it may have been seen. This ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... said, "'twas the spectrum of Miser Brimpson as you saw walking; and I'll take oath by the New Year that 'twas his way to show where his stuff be buried. For God's sake," he says, "if you don't want to get into trouble with unknown creatures, go out and pull up ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... the sun through the eye of the observer. On one occasion four coloured luminous circles were observed. The exterior one might be twenty degrees in diameter. It exhibited all the colours of the spectrum. The next, a little within it, was of a whitish-grey colour; the third was only four or five degrees in diameter, and though it exhibited the colours of the spectrum, these colours were not very brilliant. The fourth was extremely ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... cites as credible: A flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither; you can never discover nor re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of the burned dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower, just as it seemed in life. It may be the same with the human being. The soul has as much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may make a spectrum of it. And this phantom, though in the popular superstition it ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where it hibernates on the wing, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... which strikingly illustrate the connection in extent and quality between the universe and all its agencies and powers—such as Robert von Mayer's discovery of the conservation of force and of the mechanical equivalent of heat, or the spectrum analysis and the information which it gives us by ever-increasing evidences of the identity of the cosmic and telluric substances—we may venture to say that the scientific and intellectual ground was well prepared for ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... Dumpling, in the true spirit of lanx satura, allows Carey to attack by indirection a complete spectrum of traditional eighteenth-century targets. Like the musician and the satirist that he is, he builds up to a magnificent crescendo (pp. 19-24 of his "Dumpleid") which results in one of the finest displays of sustained virtuosity ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous

... noble-looking Harold had those dark lines in his spectrum. Wild ungovernable strength had whirled him in mere boyhood at the beck of his passions, and when most men are entering freshly upon life, he was already saddened and sobered by sin and suffering. The ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the term artigo is used for those particles having the functions of the inflectional endings of Latin; e.g., ga, ye, and ni (cf. 1-2, 78, and 137-140); and the general term particula is used to cover the broad spectrum of particles that include adverbs, conjunctions, and exclamations, as well as those otherwise unaccounted for elements which end phrases, clauses, and sentences; e.g., no, nite, and yo ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado

... never disconcerted. "Will you tell me," she said, "where you have found any account of the bands and lines in the spectrum of dream-nitrogen? I should be so pleased to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... difficulties to which neutrality of view is subject. These begin with the outbreak of the war. Each belligerent government believes itself to be in the right, and publishes a collection of documents which seem to it fitted to prove this right. This literature appearing in all the colours of the spectrum is really aimed at neutrals. For the belligerent nations themselves have weightier matters in hand than to sit in judgment upon their own governments. But the neutrals find themselves to decide which side is right. Yet this whole idea of a "just war" (coming to us from the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... supersubtle effluence, and contrive To follow beam and beam upon their way Hand-breadth by hand-breadth, till sense faint—confessed Frustrate, eluded by unknown unguessed Infinitude of action? Idle quest! Rather ask aid from optics. Sense, descry The spectrum—mind, infer immensity! Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed— Which, in the large, who sees to bless? Not I More than yourself: so, good my friend, keep still Trustful with—me? with thee, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... the mounted or standard specimen and the suspected liquid at the same time, placing them side by side, so that a mistake is impossible. All the red colours in the world, in fact, have been tried, and, with the exceptions named above, none of them gives a spectrum like the colouring matter of blood in any ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... individuality is not your own, but the delegated adaptability of God."—There is a certain position in the Scheme of Things Entire,—a point, with a relation of its own to the rest of the Scheme, to the Universe;— as the red line has a relation of its own to the rest of the spectrum and the ray of light as a whole..... From that point, from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things; and there are things ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... recollecting her affrighted spirits, and recovering the exercise of her reason, faith, and hope, having cast up a short and silent prayer to God, she turns about, and bespeaks her: 'In the name of God, mother, why do you trouble me?' 'Peace,' says the spectrum; 'I will do thee no hurt.' 'What will you have of me?' says the daughter," &c.[86] Dunton, the narrator and probably the contriver of the story, proceeds to inform us at length of a commission which the wife of Mr. Leckie receives from the ghost to deliver to Atherton, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... human soul is born into the world. A new flame is lit, a star which perhaps may come to shine with unusual beauty, which in any case has its own unseen spectrum. A new being, fated, perhaps, to bestow genius, perhaps beauty around it, kisses the earth; the unseen becomes flesh and blood. No human being is a repetition of another, nor is any ever reproduced; each new being is like a comet which only once in all eternity touches the path of the earth, and ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... to "Spectrum," page 358, of last volume, I will be brief. In his third paragraph he claims that he has merely suggested that friction and percussion may often be one and the same thing; and immediately claims that in the case of the polished button rubbing a planed pine board, the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... of these three strata are perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete. Such are the Abbey of Jumieges, the Cathedral of Rheims, the Church of the Holy Cross at Orleans. But the three zones are blended and mingled at the edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... increase the rapidity of wave vibration and decrease the wave length we pass from, sound waves to heat waves or what are known as the infra-red waves, those which lie below the red in the spectrum of light. Next we come to light, which is composed of the seven colors as you know from seeing them resolved in a prism. After that are what are known as the ultra-violet rays, which lie beyond the violet of white light. We also have electric waves, the waves of the alternating current, and ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... trust him, and only those that pay are behind. His brains are turned giddy, like one that walks on the top of a house, and that's the reason it is so troublesome to him to look downwards. He is a kind of spectrum, and his clothes are the shape he takes to appear and walk in, and when he puts them off he vanishes. He runs as busily out of one room into another as a great practiser does in Westminster Hall from one court to another. When he accosts a lady he puts both ends of his microcosm in ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... meanwhile, limned in the wonder of an undecipherable or at least untranslatable geometry, silently roaring, enthroned in the undiscoverable colors beyond the spectrum, swept ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... opinion will hinder the blessings that flow from the truths which we misconceive or reject. Languor of desire will diminish the sum and enfeeble the energy of the powers that work in us. Wavering confidence, crossed and broken, like the solar spectrum, by many a dark line of doubt, will make our conscious possession of Christ's gift fitful. We have a deep well to draw from. Let us take care that the vessel with which we draw is in size proportionate to its depth and our need, that the chain to which it hangs is strong, and that no leaks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... all stages of development. We find irregular nebulae, for example; we find spiral and spheroidal nebulae; we find stars which have got beyond the nebulous stage, but are still at a whiter heat than our sun; and we also find many stars which yield the same sort of spectrum as our sun. The inference seems forced upon us that the same process of concentration which has gone on in the case of our solar nebula has been going on in the case of other nebulae. The history of the sun is but a type of the history ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... dwell on what was before them at the moment. I should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he could not escape contradiction in terms: who can? When facts conflict, contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech. They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that a physical obstacle is the basis of physical sensation. No opposition, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... to produce Rainbow Colors. The Spectrum. If a beam of sunlight is admitted into a dark room through a narrow opening in the shade, and is allowed to fall upon a prism, as shown in Figure 86, a beautiful band of colors will appear on the opposite wall of the room. The ray of light which entered the room as ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... pulsations of atoms are detected, and countless millions of infinitely small waves, bearing light, heat, and sound, are discovered and their lengths determined. Refined spectroscopic analysis of light is now made so that when any material burns, no matter what its distance, its spectrum tells what substance is burning. When any luminous body appears, it can be told whether it is approaching or receding, or whether it shines by its own or reflected light; whence it is seen that rays falling ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various

... opposite to the pole of a short bar magnet cemented to the glass plate with the N pole facing it. If the current passes in one direction the field will be as represented by Fig. 14b; if it is reversed by the commutator, Fig. 14c is an image of the spectrum. Applying Faraday's second principle, it appears that attraction results in the first case, and repulsion in the second. The usual method of stating the fact is, that if you face the loop and the current circulates from left over to right, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... the most chemically active rays are those situated at the blue end of the solar spectrum; and although all the rays absorbed by a sensitive colored body affect its change, it is doubtless the blue rays which are the chief cause of the fading of colors. Experiments are on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... is seen is like a sort of photograph impressed upon the atmosphere of a particular locality, and visible only to certain persons, who are able to sense etheric wave-lengths which are outside the range of the single octave forming the solar spectrum. It throws no light on this question, because, in the case of my being seen by Mr. S. in Edinburgh and that of Miss B. and her mother being seen by me at Norwood, none of us were conscious of having been at those places; while in the case of my psychic visit to Lanercost Abbey, and ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... in the spectrum four secondary colors: orange, green, indigo, and violet. The secondary colors are alternate with the primary in the spectrum, and are formed by a mixture of the two primary nearest them—as orange, formed by a union of red and yellow; green, by a mixture of yellow and blue; indigo and violet, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... layer of melting ice, which was brilliant red in color to me, but it was the intensest blue to my friend, who was standing at my side. The moral vision is quite as largely dependent upon the angle at which it receives its rays of reflected light. North and South represent the extremes of the moral spectrum. The equalizing of labor and capital, which is a beautiful violet to us, is a very angry red to them; and the soft-toned hues of their system of servitude are crimson with blood-guiltiness to ourselves. If we stood where the perfect and undivided sunbeams could fall upon ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... light which caused so much damage to our men," reported a physicist, "was analyzed, and found to have some extraordinary lines. It was largely mercury-vapor spectrum, but the spectrum of mercury-atoms in an impossibly strained condition. I would suggest that great care be used hereafter, and all men be equipped with protective masks when observations are needed. This sun is very rich in ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell

... the past presented to us, the convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... then goes to work systematically to make it. He begins by drawing a diagram of the molecule, double-linking nitrogen or carbon and oxygen atoms to give the required intensity, putting in acid or basic radicals to fasten it to the fiber, shifting the color back and forth along the spectrum at will by introducing methyl groups, until he gets it just to ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... States Institute of Peace, focused on the Strategic Environment, Military and Security Issues, Political Development, and the Economy and Reconstruction. Every effort was made to ensure the participation of experts across a wide span of the political spectrum. Additionally, a panel of ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace

... an apothecary. In 1300 we find him elected one of the priors of the city. In order to a perfect misunderstanding of everything connected with the Florentine politics of this period, one has only to study the various histories. The result is a spectrum on the mind's eye, which looks definite and brilliant, but really hinders all accurate vision, as if from too steady inspection of a Catharine-wheel in full whirl. A few words, however, are necessary, if only to make the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... and ideas drawn from the most violent and conflicting philosophies and faiths. All are needed, if he is ever to suggest the character of that One whom the Upanishad called "the Sun-coloured Being who is beyond this Darkness": as all the colours of the spectrum are needed if we would demonstrate the simple richness of white light. In thus adapting traditional materials to his own use he follows a method common amongst the mystics; who seldom exhibit any special love for originality of form. ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... morning Dr. Wollaston came to pay us a visit in Hanover Square, saying, "I have discovered seven dark lines crossing the solar spectrum, which I wish to show you;" then, closing the window-shutters so as to leave only a narrow line of light, he put a small glass prism into my hand, telling me how to hold it. I saw them distinctly. I was among the first, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... occupation. Returning home fully equipped for a modern literary career, and finding after some bitter experience that his accomplishments were not taken or paid for at their real value by the caterers for intellectual New York, he had dropped into congenial society on the staff of the Daily Spectrum, a mighty engine of public opinion, which scattered about the city and adjacent territory a million of copies, as prodigally as if they had been auctioneers' announcements. Fastidious people who did not read it gave it a bad name, not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... ail ultimately intercepted by a plane (the retina of the eye, a focussing screen of a camera, &c.), they cause a confusion, named chromatic aberration; for instance, instead of a white margin on a dark background, there is perceived a coloured margin, or narrow spectrum. The absence of this error is termed achromatism, and an optical system so corrected is termed achromatic. A system is said to be "chromatically under-corrected'' when it shows the same kind of chromatic error as a thin positive ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... distributor of an obnoxious leaflet attacking the Negro race. He answers that, as applied, the Act denies a liberty secured to him by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. What is the liberty which that clause underwrites? The spectrum of views expressed by my seniors shows that disagreement as to the scope and effect of this Amendment underlies this, as it has many another, division of the Court. All agree that the Fourteenth amendment does confine the power of the State to make printed ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... see, I have submitted meteoric stones to spectrum analysis, with the result that I have found carbon, that, is to say, a clear trace of organic life. What do ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg

... and, as such, undeniably beautiful; for the sunlight, refracted and diffused in the water, gave his translucent, pearl-blue body all the shifting colors of the spectrum. Vigorous and graceful of movement, in shape he resembled a comma of three dimensions, twisted, when at rest, to a slight spiral curve; but in traveling he straightened out with quick successive jerks, ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... This absence of hieroglyphics points to its having been an unfinished work—something having prevented its constructor from recording on it the purpose of its erection, as was usually the case. But as the vacant shadow of the dial and the blank empty lines of the spectrum are more suggestive than any sunlit spaces, so the blank unwritten sides of this obelisk give rise to more speculations than if they had been carved from head to foot with hieroglyphics. On account ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... of light at the violet end of the spectrum; also the invisible rays beyond such end, or the ether waves of short periods which ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... low-lying sun as it swept the horizon towards the North in its uninterrupted circuit of the heavens. The southern end of the Alaskan range seemed like an opalescent serrated bow, changing to violet through all the darker hues of the spectrum by some strange freak of the atmosphere, only to leap into glorious amber as the fringe of a cloud passed ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... for its own life-purposes. Engelmann showed, for instance, that these red-purple bacteria collect in the ultra-red, and to a less extent in the orange and green, in bands which agree with the absorption spectrum of the extracted colouring matter. Not only so, but the evident parallelism between this absorption of light and that by the chlorophyll of green plants, is completed by the demonstration that oxygen is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... displays in that one guise a miracle of colour. But it is nothing compared with the displays of which he is capable. At one time he will appear green—pale green, deep green, phosphorescent green; at another time blue—deep blue, electric blue, all the spectrum of blue. Catch him on a hook, and he turns to gold, yellow gold, all gold. Haul him on deck, and he excels the spectrum, passing through inconceivable shades of blues, greens, and yellows, and then, suddenly, turning a ghostly white, in the midst ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... because I am a man and she is a woman. When I am with her I always feel as though she belongs to some third sex, and I to a fourth, and we float away together into the domain of the subtlest shades, and there we blend into the spectrum. Leconte de Lisle defines such relations better than any one. He has a superb passage, a ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... the traveller in the desert beholds the mirage of some city which is hundreds of miles distant, suddenly arising upon the sandy waste, so, in the spirit world, the spectrum form is projected, and events which are to take place are made visible before their actual occurrence. But, as in the natural world spectrum forms occur only under certain atmospheric conditions, so in the spirit world it is the conjunction of circumstances and the blending ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... To Anne Knish Lolita Spectrum of Mrs. Q Epitaph A Sixpence Three Spectra Two Commentaries A Womanly Woman Lolita Now is Old The Shining Bird The King Sends Three Cats to Guinevere Ode in the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

... stuff that clouds are made of, but a live thing, a great live thing pulsing with joy in the morning sunshine. She told him how some of it was blue and some of it was green, while some of it was blue wedded to green, and some of it too elusive to have anything to do with the spectrum. "And, dearie—it is flirting with the sunlight—flirting shamefully; I'm almost ashamed for the lake, only it's so happy in its flirtation that perhaps it is not bothered with moral consciousness. But it seems to want the sunlight ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell

... wave-length are both inversely proportional to T. It follows that with increasing temperature the mean wave-length diminishes—the colour changing into violet—and simultaneously the dispersion of the wave-length and also even the total length of the spectrum are reduced (decrease). ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier

... their light, examined through a prism, revealed certain rays which were characteristic of them. Thus the kind of metals which formed the sparking points could be determined by analysing the light of the spark. This suggestion has been of great service in spectrum analysis, and as applied by Bunsen, Kirchoff, and others, has led to the discovery of several new elements, such as rubidium and thallium, as well as increasing our knowledge of the heavenly bodies. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... the 40-inch telescope of the Nice observatory a body which seemed a tiny planet or aerolite of abnormal size. It was sighted at a point two degrees W. of a Librae at an angle of 431/2 deg. with the horizon, and had been photographed, its elements calculated, its spectrum taken. The ascertained diameter was 3 deg. 17", or about 73 miles, and its substance seemed to consist ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... other writers distinguished in various branches of science a few only can be here named. Walter Bagehot writes on Political Society; Alexander Bain on Mind and Body; Henry Maudsley on Brain and Mind; Norman Lockyer on Spectrum Analysis; and Sir John ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Gerfaut, whose nervous system had been singularly irritated by his disappointment of the night before, felt ready to burst with rage. He was seated at the table between two ladies, who seemed to have exhausted, in their toilettes, every color in the solar spectrum, and whose coquettish instincts were aroused by the proximity of a celebrated writer. But their simperings were all lost; the one for whom they were intended bore himself in a sulky way, which fortunately ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... force of his giving her up for the sake of his love. It is difficult in any case for one to understand fully the love to which he cannot respond, for involuntarily the heart averts itself from it like an ear or an eye, and misses it like the highest notes of music and colors of the spectrum. ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... nor conscious happiness, and was without effort as a lily of the field. It may be that the wisdom of babyhood and the wisdom of age will look very alike to us when we have the wisdom of eternity. And as all the colors of the spectrum make sunlight, so all his splendid powers that patient years had made perfect shone through the Bishop's character in the white light of simplicity. No one knew what they talked about, the child and the man, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays. In the psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both of physiological ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it. The one which follows [A] is strictly a Reverie; and neither that, nor the next after it in succession, 'Power of Music', would have been placed here except for the reason ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... relief and pleasure, after having for some time inspected other certain colours; as green after red, or red after green; orange after blue, or blue after orange; yellow after violet, or violet after yellow; this, he shows, arises from the ocular spectrum of the colour last viewed coinciding with the irritation of the colour now ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... the separation of sunlight into its component parts, and the invention of the spectrum, have marked an advance in man's achievement such as the world had not seen since the time of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... for a time. The accepted doctrine became this: that the only reason why all the nebula are not resolved into distinct stars is that our telescopes are not sufficiently powerful. But in time came the discovery of the spectroscope and spectrum analysis, and thence Fraunhofer's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited gaseous body is non-continuous, with interrupting lines; and Draper's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited solid is continuous, with no interrupting lines. And now the spectroscope was turned upon the nebula, and many ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... point to which I desire to refer. Light is the paint which colours bodies. You know that ordinary white light is made up of a series of beautiful colours (the spectrum), which I show you here. If I take all these spectrum or rainbow colours which are painted on this glass I can, as you see, recompose them into white light by rotating the disc with sufficient rapidity that they may get mixed together on the little screen ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy

... An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived 'nerd' in its variant form 'knurd' from the word 'drunk' backwards, but this bears all the earmarks of a ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... nature which does not regard the spirit of man as a part of nature. But is this all? Do man and nature exhaust the possibilities of being? We cannot answer this question here. But we find suggestions from the spectrum and the spectroscope which may be worth our heeding. The materials with which we have to do in their most brilliant scientific theories seem at first to overwhelm us with their vastness and complexity. The hulks are so enormous, the forces are so mighty, the laws are so wide-sweeping, and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... it. "Such a one is a worthless idol; not excellent, only sham-excellent:" here, on this negative side especially, you often had to admire how right he was;—often, but not quite always. And he would maintain, with endless ingenuity, confidence and persistence, his fallacious spectrum to be a real image. However, it was sure to come all right in the end. Whatever real excellence he might misknow, you had but to let it stand before him, soliciting new examination from him: none surer than he to recognize it at last, and to pay it all his dues, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... at truth, be reconciled to what is contrary; the white light only results from the union of the coloured rays of the spectrum." ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes

... the angle of reflexion and incidence follows the same law in both; the law of radiation and interference; and if experiments were instituted, there can be but little doubt that sound has also got its spectrum. ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett

... just the right degree, produce catalepsy. For instance, besides the fixing of the eye on a bright object, catalepsy may be produced by a sudden sound, as of a Chinese gong, a tom-tom or a whistle, the vibration of a tuning-fork, or thunder. If a solar spectrum is suddenly brought into a dark room it may produce catalepsy, which is also produced by looking at the sun, or a lime light, or ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... higher the altitude, the brighter the hues of any given species. Thus the Gentiana sedifolia is a small, light blue flower in the lowlands, but on the Assuay it has bright blue petals three times as large and sensitive. This accords with Herschel's statement: "The chemical rays of the spectrum are powerfully absorbed in passing through the atmosphere, and the effect of their greater abundance aloft is shown in the superior brilliancy of color in ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... the various constituents of white light and displayed them in the form of a series of overlapping images of the aperture, each of a different colour; this series of images we call a spectrum, and the operation we now call spectrum analysis. The reason of the defect of lenses was now plain: it was not so much a defect of the lens as a defect of light. A lens acts by refraction and brings rays ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... transmission of particular rays? The supposition appears by no means improbable, especially if we call to mind the hydrogen volcanoes which have been discovered on the photosphere of the sun. Indeed, there are a few small stars which afford a spectrum of bright lines instead of dark ones, and this we know denotes a gaseous or vaporized state of things, from which it maybe inferred that such orbs are in a different condition from most of ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... later in the season, well into December. The days are equally bright, but a little more rugged. The mornings are ushered in by an immense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A broad bar of red and orange lies along the low horizon, surmounted by an expanse of color in which green struggles with yellow and blue with green half the way to the zenith. By and by the red and orange spread upward and grow dim, the ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... a little ammonium sulphide to this solution, we get the spectrum of reduced haemoglobin, which is a single broad absorption band situated in the interval between the preceding oxyhaemoglobin bands. By shaking the solution, oxyhaemoglobin is again reproduced, and gives its ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... in that heart their Heaven and their all. 'He came to His own,' in the wider sense of the word, and 'His own received Him not'; but also, 'having loved His own He loved them unto the end.' There are textures and lives which can only absorb some of the rays of light in the spectrum; some that are only capable of taking, so to speak, the violet rays of judgment and of wrath, and some who open their hearts for the ruddy brightness at the other end of the line. Do you see to it, brethren, that you are of that inner circle ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... its writhing serpents of flame, was followed in a second or two by a thousand points of light as the town took fire, followed, almost instantaneously, by a burst of light of every color in the spectrum, as a thousand substances leaped into combustion, and then, in ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... media would have been required, and yet vision might have been just as perfect? The fact that the eyes of insects and molluscs are transparent to us shows that the very same limited portion of the rays of the spectrum is utilised for vision by them ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... moonshining, and divert your attention into the channels of realism. These premises are so spacious as to admit of your engaging to a considerable extent in agriculture; you can now lay aside the telescope and the spectrum for the spade and the hoe; the field of speculation can be abandoned for this noble acre which I hope soon to see ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... an infinitely small part of our total self—a mere fragment; that portion best adapted to meet the needs of everyday life. To borrow an analogy from physics, "consciousness is only the visible portion of the spectrum; the invisible, ultra portions are our subconscious selves." I shall not venture upon a criticism of this theory beyond saying that the majority of modern psychologists do not hold to it; and hence, whether it be ultimately ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... the wind, the edge of firs against the sky, occupied and bound his faculties. He was pure unity, a spirit wholly abstracted. A single mood filled him, to which all the objects of sense contributed, as the colours of the spectrum merge and ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson



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