"Planetary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this thing happening in space, a planetary moment, the faint smudge, the slender whirl of meteor, drawing nearer to this planet,—this planet like a ball, like a shaded rounded ball, floating in the void, with its little, nearly impalpable coat of cloud and air, with its dark pools of ocean, its gleaming ridges of land. And as ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... grave and methodical habits of the worthy ecclesiastic were altered when they interfered with the affairs of his precocious pupil. That order and regularity, apparently as fixed as the laws of a planetary system, were interrupted whenever Jacinto was ill or had to take a journey. Useless celibacy of the clergy! The Council of Trent prohibits them from having children of their own, but God—and not the Devil, as the proverb says—gives them nephews and nieces in order that they may know the ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... to take pride in. Brion stirred weakly on his bed and managed to turn so he could look out of the window. Winner of Anvhar. His name was already slated for the history books, one of the handful of planetary heroes. School children would be studying him now, just as he had read of the Winners of the past. Weaving daydreams and imaginary adventures around Brion's victories, hoping and fighting to equal them someday. To be a Winner was the greatest ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... symbol, such as the representation of a planet or zodiacal sign; or the picture of an animal or fabulous monster. Mystic words and occult phrases are oftentimes substituted, however, for such devices. It is essential that talismans should be prepared under suitable astrological conditions and planetary influences; otherwise they are of no value. Like amulets, they were formerly worn on the body, either as prophylactics or as healing agents. Tradition ascribes their invention to the Persian philosopher Zoroaster, but their use was probably ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... were three other figures, their yellow coolie faces strangely dumb and lifeless above the tasteful gray smocks which extended a little below their belted waists. Each bore embroidered on his chest the planetary insignia of Ku Sui in yellow, and each ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... Venus looked on him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more, as she had then reached her planetary hour. She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... study of climates is thus the first step towards the solution of the problem of the weather. Climates, in their changes and distribution, are very important elements in the determination of the movements of the weather, and are to the meteorologist what the elements of the planetary orbits are to the astronomer; but, unlike planetary perturbations, the weather makes the most reckless excursions from its averages, and obscures them by a most inconsequent and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Hippos must necessarily have been designed for the Sun. And however rude the whole may possibly have appeared, it is the most antient representation upon record, and consequently the most curious, of the planetary system. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... order, sitting in his orchard, and observing the descent of an apple, could have discovered a new quality in matter, and have ascertained the laws of attraction, by perceiving that the same causes might perpetuate the regular motions of the planetary system; who but a genius of this order, while viewing boys blowing soap-bladders, could have discovered the properties of light and colours, and then anatomised a ray? FRANKLIN, on board a ship, observing a partial stillness in the waves when they threw down water which ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... lifted—to heave ships out into space, and again used local power to draw them to ground again. Therefore ships carried fuel only for actual space-flight, which was economy. Yet landing grids had no moving parts, and while they did have to be monstrous structures they actually drew power from planetary ionospheres. So with no moving parts to break down and no possibility of the failure of a power source—landing grids couldn't fail! So there couldn't be an emergency to make a ship ride orbit around a planet which had a ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... sensations when he discovered the law of planetary motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober, middle-aged person, and acted as if he were a small boy who had just got the answer to his sum in vulgar fractions. Nobody had helped him; he had found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... might'st thou rend thy garments, well exclaim; Deep are the horrors of eternal flame! But God is good! 'Tis wondrous all! Ev'n he Thou gav'st to death, shame, torture, died for thee. Now the descending triumph stops its flight From earth full twice a planetary height. There all the clouds condens'd, two columns raise Distinct with orient veins, and golden blaze. One fix'd on earth, and one in sea, and round Its ample foot the swelling billows sound. These an immeasurable arch support, The grand tribunal of this awful court. Sheets of bright ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Climate: planetary air pressure systems and resultant wind patterns exhibit remarkable uniformity in the south and east; trade winds and westerly winds are well-developed patterns, modified by seasonal fluctuations; tropical cyclones (hurricanes) may form south of Mexico from June to October and affect Mexico ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... extended form the doctrines of the Ionian school. In his speculations with regard to the structure of the universe he propounded the theory (though the reasons by which he sustained it were fanciful) that the Sun is the centre of the planetary system, and that the Earth revolves round him. This theory—the accuracy of which has since been confirmed—received but little attention from his successors, and it sank into oblivion until the time of Copernicus, by whom it was revived. Pythagoras ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... superficies of the second order; 2nd, those of the ellipsoides of revolution around the small axis and the grand axis; 3rd, those—but no," said the madman, reflecting, "I will commence with him on the planetary system." Then, addressing the young lunatic, who was still kneeling before the Schoolmaster, "Take yourself off ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... hour, when of diurnal heat No reliques chafe the cold beams of the moon, O'erpower'd by earth, or planetary sway Of Saturn; and the geomancer sees His Greater Fortune up the east ascend, Where gray dawn checkers first the shadowy cone; When 'fore me in my dream a woman's shape There came, with lips that stammer'd, eyes aslant, Distorted feet, hands maim'd, and colour pale. I look'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... itself, but part of a still greater unit composed of a system of worlds revolving around the same sun; and this greater unit, part of one which is still greater—a star cluster, composed of many planetary systems, and subject to the same great cosmical laws. If the theory be correct, we find, in this example, the heterogeneous derived from the simple, and far more completely an organized unit, with all its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Old customs she left to be handed down to those who should sit in her sons' places,—the luctus of widows, who for a full year of widowhood might not wed again; the names of her deities she gave to the days of the planetary week. Her superstitions and folk-lore, deep-rooted, survived and lingered long among many nations: the old sorcery of the waxen image of an enemy transfixed by bodkins for the torment of that enemy; the belief in the ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... Philosopher's Stone, the happy possessor of which would not only be able to achieve the first two, but also, since it was supposed to contain the quintessence of all the metals, and therefore of all the planetary influences to which the metals corresponded, would have at his command all the forces which mould the destinies of men. In especial connection with the latter object of research may be noted the universal interest in astrology, whose practitioners were to be found at every Court, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... of this Administration's policy in space science have been to: (1) continue a vigorous program of planetary exploration to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system; (2) utilize the space telescope and free-flying satellites to usher in a new era of astronomy; (3) develop a better understanding of the sun and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... class man of genius in his field, in Paris, with a respected position in the whirl of its medical planetary system and a university appointment, to boom and advertise the doctrine of the internal secretions, so that people began to sit up and listen and take sides—on the wrong grounds. This Frenchman was Claude Bernard. At a series of lectures on experimental physiology ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... doctor replied: "If my friend here has really finished talking for a while I will say, Thorwald, that the theories already spoken of seem to be disproved by the discovery that these stones enter the earth's atmosphere with a planetary velocity. A body falling from an infinite distance—that is, impelled only by the attraction of gravitation—would strike the earth with a velocity of only six or seven miles a second, while the meteorites come at the rate ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he supposes a single centre of attraction set up; and, by strict deductions from admitted dynamical principles, shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. In vivid language he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... prophetic insight, had at length been irrefragably established on a scientific basis: God, Soul and Immortality were contemptuously relegated to the domain of nursery tales. What further use was there for a God when, in addition to the Kant-Laplacian theory of the origin of the planetary system, it had been discovered that living organisms had likewise evolved spontaneously? How could man who had sprung from the irrational brute possess a soul? And thus, finally, disappeared the third delusion, the hope of immortality. For with death the functions of the body simply ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... the white rainbow of the night, and sits in radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death. They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him forget them. We have ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... have inherited. The sacredness of the number seven itself—the belief in which has not been quite shaken off even to this day—was deduced by the Assyrian astronomer from his observation of the seven planetary bodies—namely, Sin (the moon), Samas (the sun), Umunpawddu (Jupiter), Dilbat (Venus), Kaimanu (Saturn), Gudud (Mercury), Mustabarru-mutanu (Mars).(11) Twelve lunar periods, making up approximately the solar year, gave peculiar importance ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... President O'Hanrahan of the planetary government of Eire listened unhappily to his official guest. He had to, because Sean O'Donohue was chairman of the Dail—of Eire on Earth—Committee on the Condition of the Planet Eire. He could cut off all support from the still-struggling colony if ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to describe the tides of Massachusetts Bay, would have to recognize the circumstance that they are a limited manifestation of a great oceanic movement. To consider them apart from this, would be to localize a planetary phenomenon, and to provincialize a law of the universe. The art of healing in Massachusetts has shared more or less fully and readily the movement which, with its periods of ebb and flow, has been raising its ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... characters of General Jackson and other public men. He told an anecdote, illustrating the old general's small acquaintance with astronomical science, and his force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better instructed people than himself to succumb to him in an argument about eclipses and the planetary system generally. Powers witnessed the scene himself. He thinks that General Jackson was a man of the keenest and surest intuitions, in respect to men and measures, but with no power of reasoning out his own conclusions, or of imparting them intellectually to other ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or the movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of life that flows through us? We are old fellows from the moment the fire begins to go out. Let us always behave like gentlemen when we are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... present creation in the ascending series, which it presents as a whole. One may consider it as henceforth proved that the embryo of the fish during its development, the class of fishes as it at present exists in its numerous families, and the type of fish in its planetary history, exhibit analogous phases through which one may follow the same creative thought like a guiding thread in the study of the connection between organized beings." Following this comparison closely, he shows how the early embryonic condition of the present fishes is ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... is better; and the house made of one jewel thirty miles in circuit is an extravagance that becomes reasonable on reflection, affording a just idea of what might be looked for among the endless planetary wonders of Nature, which confound all our relative ideas of size and splendour. The "lucid vermilion" of a structure so enormous, and under a sun so pure, presents a gorgeous spectacle to the imagination. Dante himself, if he could have forgiven ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Temporal rhythms, apart from those of planetary motion, the alternation of seasons, and the like (which are called rhythmic by a metaphorical extension of the term), manifest themselves to us as phenomena of sound; hence the two concepts time-rhythm and sound-rhythm are commonly thought of as ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Caereinion, in Powys, to stir the cauldron, and a blind man named Morda to kindle the fire beneath it, and she charged them that they should not suffer it to cease boiling for the space of a year and a day. And she herself, according to the books of the astronomers, and in planetary hours, gathered every day of all charm-bearing herbs. And one day, towards the end of the year, as Caridwen was culling plants and making incantations, it chanced that three drops of the charmed liquor flew out of the cauldron and fell upon the finger of Gwion Bach. And by reason of their great ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... have received a new form, such as adapted it to a ruder and less scientific method of observation, the limiting stars of the mansions being converted into zodiacal groups or constellations, and in some instances altered in position, so as to be brought nearer to the general planetary path of the ecliptic. In this changed form, having become a means of roughly determining and describing the places and movements of the planets, it was believed to have passed into the keeping of the Hindus, very probably along ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... least, and I believed indefinitely farther.(*2) Indeed, this medium I could not suppose confined to the path of the comet's ellipse, or to the immediate neighborhood of the sun. It was easy, on the contrary, to imagine it pervading the entire regions of our planetary system, condensed into what we call atmosphere at the planets themselves, and perhaps at some of them modified by considerations, so to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the ultimate end should all-attainable be or not. For freedom from this, and other literary ambiguity, yet never manifesting anxiety of freeing himself in prose from its insidious and arbitrary restraint, I attribute his tragical, subtle, gentle power of "connection," liaison; feeling for time; planetary time, be it lunar time, sometimes unmistakably, solar time; disallowing, by potency of sentimental touch, a sense of rupture, to linger. A noble stream by mute comparison, pursuing its course unwavering; interrupted ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... politician, but he was certainly not of the mythological brotherhood who inhabit the serene regions of space beyond the moon. He was not the son of god or goddess, destined, after removal from this sphere, to shine with planetary lustre, among other constellations, upon the scenes of mortal action. Those of us who are willing to rise-or to descend if the phrase seems wiser—to the idea of a self-governing people must content ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... planets do,—that is, he acts in harmony with his tendencies,—in harmony with the causes of his actions,—the causes of his actions cause them by causing him to will them, by inclining him to do them; and the causes of planetary action produce that action in the same way: but the freedom and the necessity are the same in the one case as in the other. All is free, and all is bound. The chain is infinite, eternal, and almighty. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... truly the monarch of the earth. Ever after this he was regarded by the ignorant multitude with a sort of religious awe, and was called Canute the Great, as we should say Sahib-i-kiran," (the Lord of the Conjunction, implying a man born under a peculiar conjunction of planetary influences which predestines him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... name of Johann Kepler (1571-1630), using the records of observations which Tycho Brahe had accumulated and applying them to the planet Mars, proved the truth of the Copernican theory and framed his famous three laws for planetary motion. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... might reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united with all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion about the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its adorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the dividing quality of the prism, which resolves ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... their helplessness, their ignorance, they are going back to Him. They cannot help feeling that they are to be transferred from the rude embrace of the boisterous elements to arms that will receive them tenderly. Poor planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at the hands of the brute forces of nature, from the control of which they are soon to be set free. There are some old pessimists, it is true, who believe that they and a few others are on a raft, and that the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was war in heaven, and that the fiends of darkness and the angels of light were arrayed against each other in some mighty struggle for the possession of the souls of men, should have tried to express itself in astrologic dreams, and, as was the fashion then, attributed to the "rulers of the planetary houses" some sympathy ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... brightness was already lifting into upper air, a mingled tissue of shadows lay along the valley. In the magical clarity of the evening light he suddenly felt (as one often does, by unaccountable planetary instinct) that there was a new moon. Turning, he saw it, a silver snipping daintily afloat; and not far away, an early star. He had found no creed in the prayer-book that accounted for the stars. ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... after I graduated from art school. I was on my grand tour. We had an unexpected stopover at the Coffin planetary system. I discovered ballpoint snakes are the chief export of Coffin Two. When we lifted ship, I had acquired ...
— Droozle • Frank Banta
... ascendents: under certain planetary influences. The next lines recall the alleged malpractices of witches, who tortured little images of wax, in the design of causing the same torments to the person represented — or, vice versa, treated these images for the cure of hurts ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... spreading my wings, like the bird which has been caged and delights in its new freedom. I saw before me endless space covered with new life. I did not know whether it was on another planet or farther still, beyond the planetary sphere,—enough that the space was different from ours, the light brighter and softer, the air cool and full of sweetness; the difference consisted mainly in the closer union of the individual spirit with ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses later in the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... only in the choice of the smut, as for her it was either the Virgin herself or St. Michael. A famous philosopher, who was the cousin of Capitan Tinong and who had memorized the "Amat," [42] sought for the true explanation in planetary influences. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Bond Street at half-past five in the afternoon, and spent half an hour in turning over the odd volumes displayed on the street board of a secondhand-book shop not far from Oxford Circus. His appearances were so planetary in their regularity that one might have reckoned time by them. Who he was, or what his objects in life may have been, I never learned. I never saw him walk but in the one direction; I never saw him buy one of the many books which he examined: perhaps he also was afflicted with the tedium ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... sun, which enlightens this part of the creation, with all the host of planetary worlds that move about him, utterly extinguished and annihilated, they would not be missed more than a grain of sand upon the sea-shore. The space they possess is so exceedingly little in comparison of the whole, it would scarce make a blank in ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... 12, 2430, was for me—and for all the Earth—the most stirring evening of history. Events of inter-planetary importance tumbled over each other as they came to us through the air from the Official Information Stations. And we—myself and a thousand like me in our office—retold them for our twenty million subscribers throughout ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... and die; the heavens go round With the song of wheeling planetary rings: You wriggle in the sun; each moment brings Its freight for you; in all things ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... sharp whistle of the launch aroused the town. Proceeding to the shore, I saw a boat put out from the Victoria, sculled by a native deck-hand. As the sun had not yet risen, all the sea was gray, and sea and sky blended into one vast planetary sphere. Two natives carrying the ample form of the constabulary captain staggered through the surf. Behind them came the captain's life-long partner and lieutenant, a slight man, with cold, steely eyes, dressed in gray crash uniform, with riding ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... are perhaps immortal, and perhaps after the ages lapse they are changed, others supplying their place. Each of these subordinate gods has created for himself a sun with its planetary system, over which he presides and from the inhabitants of which he expects adoration. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Woggle-Bug, "my father, although of ordinary size, was a famous Bug-Wizard in his day, and claimed descent from the original protoplasm which constituted the nucleus of the present planetary satellite upon ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... the earth is not the centre of the planetary revolutions because the planets are at different times at very different distances from the earth. For instance, Venus, when it is farthest off, is six times more remote from us than when it is nearest, and Mars rises almost eight ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... were the headless things with the jelly nuclei. I watched your battle with them, and waited to choose as my vehicle the planetary type that proved the stronger. You vanquished the Vegans, so it is in the body of an Earthling that I shall leave Xollar, and it is to the planet Earth that I shall be hurtled through ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... Prince of the Air, having, at least, the whole Atmosphere to range in, and how far that Atmosphere is extended, is not yet ascertain'd by the nicest observations; I say at least, because we do not yet know how far he may be allow'd to make excursions beyond the Atmosphere of this Globe into the planetary Worlds, and what power he may exercise in all the habitable parts of the solar system; nay, of all the other solar systems, which, for ought we know, may exist in the mighty extent of created space, and of which you may hear farther ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... the Spirits of God ascending and descending on it; and above it the Deity Himself. The Mithraic Mysteries were celebrated in caves, where gates were marked at the four equinoctial and solstitial points of the zodiac; and the seven planetary spheres were represented, which souls needs must traverse in descending from the heaven of the fixed stars to the elements that envelop the earth; and seven gates were marked, one for each planet, through which they pass, in descending or returning. We learn this from Celsus, in ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the hour being late, Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instant naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence on her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professor revealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spoke of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in the dance, and keep her to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... means that [D]his sun is not like this one, which is commonly believed to go round the earth with the daily movement in twenty-four hours, and with the planetary movement in twelve months, and by which he causes the four seasons of the year to be felt, according as he is found to be in the four cardinal points of the zodiac; but he is such an one, that, being the ethereal eternity ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original, eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune. Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... the last representatives of the human race in the Jovian planetary system. Our every trace upon the surface has been obliterated. We are hiding in our holes in the ground, coming out at night by stealth so that our burrows shall not be revealed to the hexans. We are fighting for time in which our scientists may learn the secrets of power—and fearing, each ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... the "guiding star" of a man's life, but never make the mistake of fancying that you are his whole planetary system. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... planetary nebulae may be looked on as very aged. Though we cannot see any individual nebula pass through all its stages of life, we can select particular ones in ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... on Mars is comparatively new. The idea of constructing a planetary Canal system had its incipiency at the time of Christ's visit to our planet. The Master warned the people that they must make provision for their future water supply. At that time (10,000 years ago) the water supply was becoming ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... sawing away across the strings, his mouth widened with a grin "like some drunken conception of Edgar Poe's, or some fantasy of Hoffmann, while the startled birds flew back to heaven, the moon split herself back to her ears, and the stars giggled behind their cloud-fans." The planetary system only revolved to frisky rhythms, and the earth herself, like a mad top, hummed comically about the horrified sun. En avant la musique! and the old edifice crumbled in dust around the musician. To Bergerat Offenbach was the great disillusioner of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... on—talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past—stories of Mr. Pitt and of George III., vituperations against Mr. Canning, mimicries of the Duchess of Devonshire—mingled phantasmagorically with doctrines of Fate and planetary influence, and speculations on the Arabian origin of the Scottish clans, and lamentations over the wickedness of servants; till the unaccountable figure, with its robes and its long pipe, loomed through ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the nature of symbolic language try to imagine such a literal creature as the one here described and picture in their minds what an awful thing it would be to see the third part of the stars falling to the earth. But real stars that are fixed or planetary never fall, and if they did, they would be as apt to fall in an opposite direction as toward the earth. Besides, if one should come tumbling down here, it would knock this world into oblivion. But with a knowledge of the proper use of symbols we can easily identify this dragon with the Roman empire ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... time such a revelation had been expected; but the result did not answer to expectation in one particular; for the new body seemed to be too insignificant to be called a world. It appeared rather to be a great planetary boulder, as if our Mount Shasta had been wrenched from the earth and flung into space. Investigation showed that the new body was more than a hundred miles in diameter; but this, according to planetary estimation, is only ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... are sentenced to be taken in to space beyond planetary limits, together with all material used by you in the furtherance of your criminal acts. There you shall be placed into a spacesuit containing sufficient oxygen for one hour of life, and no more. You and your contaminated possessions shall then be released into space, to drift there through all eternity ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... order to oppose the Avatara of good. He was a great, a marvellous yogi, and by Yoga he gained his power. Ravana was a typical yogi of the left-hand path, a great destroyer, and he practiced Yoga to obtain the power of destruction, in order to force from the hands of the Planetary Logos the boon that no man should be able to kill him. You may say: "What a strange thing that a man can force from God such a power." The laws of Nature are the expression of Divinity, and if a man follows a law of Nature, he reaps the result which ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... inconsistent with the doctrine of Uniformitarianism, with which geologists are familiar. That doctrine was held by Hutton, and in his earlier days by Lyell. Hutton was struck by the demonstration of astronomers that the perturbations of the planetary bodies, however great they may be, yet sooner or later right themselves; and that the solar system possesses a self-adjusting power by which these aberrations are all brought back to a mean condition. Hutton imagined that the like might be true of terrestrial changes; although ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... "However, suppose the planetary conditions are entirely different. I conceive it entirely possible for one of the other animals to forge ahead of the man-ape; quite possible, Smith," as the engineer started to object, "if only the conditions ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... occurrences of life, if it be properly attended to, subservient to the instruction of man; and that it enlarges the sphere of his instruction in this manner, in proportion as it is received and encouraged. Thus the man, who is attentive to these divine notices, sees the animal, the vegetable, and the planetary world, with spiritual eyes. He cannot stir abroad, but he is taught in his own feelings, without any motion of his will, some lesson for his spiritual advantage; or he perceives so vitally some of the attributes of the divine being, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... institution has not fallen into pieces completely, has not crept apart. And is it not the same astounding destiny which overtakes enormous social, universal organizations—cities, empires, nations, countries, and, who knows, perhaps whole planetary worlds? ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... that is possessed by a person. And when the end of the Yuga comes, everybody will be in want. And all the points of the horizon will be ablaze, and the stars and stellar groups will be destitute of brilliancy, and the planets and planetary conjunctions will be inauspicious. And the course of the winds will be confused and agitated, and innumerable meteors will flash through the sky, foreboding evil. And the Sun will appear with six others of the same kind. And all around ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... applying leeches; When sows and bitches may be spay'd, And in what sign best cyder's made: Whether the wane be, or increase, Best to set garlick, or sow pease: 250 Who first found out the Man i' th' Moon, That to the ancients was unknown; How many dukes, and earls, and peers, Are in the planetary spheres; Their airy empire and command, 255 Their sev'ral strengths by sea and land; What factions th' have, and what they drive at In public vogue, or what in private; With what designs and interests Each party manages contests. 260 He made an instrument ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... judge of the nature of his illness; for, like other damsels of that age, she was not entirely ignorant of the art of healing, and had been taught by Father Aldrovand, himself no mean physician, how to extract healing essences from plants and herbs gathered under planetary hours. She thought it possible that her talents in this art, slight as they were, might perhaps be of service to one already her friend and liberator, and soon about to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... thousand feet," he told Barstowe, "and it must be more than a half-mile in length. Probably," he added, "it is a planetary fragment of some odd composition that is less responsive to gravitation than the materials with which we are familiar. You will find, Barstowe, that there is nothing about it that science will not be able to explain. That will be all now," ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... matter, and call it light? Spirit is light, and the contradiction of Spirit is matter, darkness, and darkness obscures light. Mate- 504:30 rial sense is nothing but a supposition of the absence of Spirit. No solar rays nor planetary revolutions 505:1 form the day of Spirit. Immortal Mind makes its own record, but mortal mind, sleep, dreams, sin, disease, and 505:3 death have no record in the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... start for the Leger is in advance of another. When checked in our chronology by each other, it transpires that, in effect, we are but executing the nice manoeuvre of a start; and that the small matter of six thousand years, by which we may have advanced our own position beyond some of our planetary rivals, is but the outstretched neck of an uneasy horse at Doncaster. This is one of the data overlooked by Kant; and the less excusably overlooked, because it was his own peculiar doctrine,— that ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... publishes no separate second observation, but is confident that the declination is diminishing. Dr. Gmelin suggests for the name of this extra-zodiacal planet 'Io,' as appropriate to its wanderings from the accustomed ways of planetary life, and trusts that the very distinguished Herr Peters, the godfather of so many planets, will relinquish this name, already claimed for the asteroid (85) observed by him, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... reminded of Fechner's playful satire by the spectacle of those poets who ape angelic modes of progression. The poet who desires to achieve the music of the spheres may impart to his movement the planetary impulse if he can suggest to our ears the illusion of the swift rush of rustling wings, but he must never forget that in reality he still possesses legs, and that these legs have to be accounted for, and reckoned in the constitution of metre. Every poet must still ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... to worlds invisible. He groaned at the recollection of having tried to establish fixed precepts. Counting up his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through ether, he had explained their coherence by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction. You bowed before that man of science—well! I tell you that he died in despair. By supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; yet he admitted ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... order to explain the beginnings of life? Why is "God" assumed to be responsible for the order of nature? Why must we assume "God" to explain mind? The answer to these and to all similar questions is that we do not know, in the sense that we know the cause of planetary motions, how these things came to be. It is not what we know about them that leads to the assumption of god, but what we do not know. And the converse of that is that so soon as knowledge replaces ignorance "God" will be dispensed with. It is never ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... believe in the existence of a universe of suns and planets, among which there is one sun belonging to our planetary system, and that other suns, being more remote, are called stars; but that they are indeed suns to other planetary systems. I believe that the whole universe is NATURE, and that the word NATURE embraces the whole universe, and that God and ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... had its hazards, but Staniford's consciousness was confined to its discomforts. The day came, and then the dark came, and both in due course went, and came again. Where he lay in his berth, and whirled and swung, and rose and sank, as lonely as a planetary fragment tossing in space, he heard the noises of the life without. Amidst the straining of the ship, which was like the sharp sweep of a thunder-shower on the deck overhead, there plunged at irregular ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... called Earth. There are planets within reach of the scientific vision of its inhabitants that are many times larger. There are some which have more moons, more mountains and rivers, longer days, and longer years. Countless suns, the centres of other vast planetary systems, lie in ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... influence, in an important manner, the future prospects of the child now about to come into this busy and changeful world. I will not conceal from you that I am skilful in understanding and interpreting the movements of those planetary bodies which exert their influences on the destiny of mortals. It is a science which I do not practise, like others who call themselves astrologers, for hire or reward; for I have a competent estate, and only use the knowledge I possess ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... lightning flash: desire to look on her, and muffled sense of shame twin-born with it: wild love and leaden misery mixed: dead hopelessness and vivid hope. Up to the neck in Purgatory, but his soul saturated with visions of Bliss! The fair orb of Love was all that was wanted to complete his planetary state, and aloft it sprang, showing many faint, fair tracts to him, and piling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... scientific point of view, some of the gravest errors into which the author has fallen are the suppositions, that the perihelia and nodes of the planetary orbits move uniformly, and that they can ever become exactly circular. At the end of about twenty-four thousand years the eccentricity of the earth's orbit will be smaller than at any other time during the next two hundred thousand, at least; but it will ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have had a planetary patriotism, in which the green leaf should be like a cockade, and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been proud of what our star has wrought, and worn its heraldry haughtily in the blind tournament of the spheres. All this, indeed, we may surely do yet; for with all ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... we am shortly goin' t' promulgate eurseves inter conjunctionary juxtaposition wid de exterior circumference an' surface ob de planetary sphere commonly called Mars?" asked ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... was a young lady, named Oesterline, who suffered under a convulsive malady. Her attacks were periodical, and attended by a rush of blood to the head, followed by delirium and syncope. These symptoms he soon succeeded in reducing under his system of planetary influence, and imagined he could foretell the periods of accession and remission. Having thus accounted satisfactorily to himself for the origin of the disease, the idea struck him that he could operate a certain cure if he could ascertain beyond doubt, what he had long believed, that ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... now, at least in scientific researches, universally expressed in kilometres. A kilometre is, however, an inappropriate unit for celestial distances. When dealing with distances in our planetary system, the astronomers, since the time of NEWTON, have always used the mean distance of the earth from the sun as universal unit of distance. Regarding the distances in the stellar system the astronomers ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... beautiful comet of 1811 with equal accuracy. "Large telescopes showed him, in the midst of the gaseous head, a rather reddish body of planetary appearance, which bore strong magnifying powers, and showed no sign of phase (that is, of change of aspect, as in the case of the Moon). Hence Herschel concluded that it was self-luminous. Yet, if we reflect that the planetary body under consideration was not a second in diameter, ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... type of human nature whose interest is more than local, whose prevalence is admitted,—a type which is one of the products of the civilization of the century, perhaps of all centuries, and which has a positively planetary significance. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... "Any planetary commander of Armed Forces can, in a state of extreme emergency. I think you'll both agree that this emergency is about as extreme as they come. Kovac knew that Maith was unwilling to do it—he'd have to stand court-martial ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... field as to ruin some kinds of telescope work. Mr. Hale of the Kenwood Observatory tells me he cannot do any good prominence photography unless his objective has a clean surface; indeed every observer of faint objects or delicate planetary markings knows full well the value of a dark field free from diffused light. The object-glass maker uses his best efforts to produce the most perfect polish on his lenses, aside from the accuracy of the curves, both for high light value and freedom ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... speaking of the need for Avataras, and it is this: when the great central Deities have manifested, then there come forth from Them seven Deities of what we may call the second order. In Theosophy, they are spoken of as the planetary Logoi, to distinguish them from the great solar Logoi, the central Life. Each of These has to do with one of the seven sacred planets, and with the chain of worlds connected with that planet. Our world is one of the ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... recommendation of his scientific friends, he was appointed Nautical Examiner at the Trinity House; of a ploughman in Lincolnshire, who, without aid of men or books, discovered the rotation of the earth, the principles of spherical astronomy, and invented a planetary system akin to the Tychonic; of a country Shoemaker, who became distinguished as one of the ablest metaphysical writers in Britain, and who, at more than fifty years of age, was removed by the influence of his talents and their worth, from his native country to London, where he was employed to ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... there is much vegetation on Mars, or that many living creatures of the higher types of Martian life as it once existed still remain. All that is known about the planet tends to show that the time when it attained that stage of planetary existence through which our earth is now passing must be set millions of years, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, ago. He has not yet, indeed, reached that airless and waterless condition, that extremity of internal cold, or in fact that utter unfitness to support any kind of life, which ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... of molecules and chemically changed conditions of matter, we have the possibilities of all terrestrial life-manifestations, as we have, in the infinite number of cosmical changes, the possibilities of all planetary, cometary, and asteroidal manifestations. For whenever these vital changes occur, the life-manifestations dependent thereon, must as inevitably follow as that infinitely diffused matter should be aggregated by gravity, or by what Humboldt ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... laughing, — "there's a certain degree of license in our moral planetary system — I'm going away again as soon as I am rightly refreshed with the communication of ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... with the more accurate concept of elliptical form, Kepler did not think he had accounted for the movement of planets. He had to get a law, that is to say, a constant relation between the quantitative variations of two or several elements of the planetary movement. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... continued. Their notions in respect of the planetary bodies, and the figure of the earth. Their religious opinions, and belief in a future state. Their diseases and methods of treatment. Their funeral ceremonies, amusements, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... straight and narrow, indeed, and would therefore have lacked somewhat of the freedom that his intellect demanded; and yet the length to which his footsteps might have travelled forth and retraced themselves would partly have harmonized his physical movement with the grand curves and planetary returns of his thought, through cycles of majestic periods. Having it in his mind to compose the world's history, methinks he could have asked no better retirement than such a cloister as this, insulated from all the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... war will take place in spite of him, in spite of me, in spite of the interests of France and Russia.... It is an operatic scene, of which the English are the shifters." What madness! As if Russia's craving for colonial wares and solvency were a device of the diabolical islanders.[249] As if his planetary simile were anything more than a claim that he was the centre of the universe and his will its ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the contraction of the universe out of an ethereal state and ultimate return to the same condition one sees a resemblance to the modern scientific hypothesis of the origin of our planetary system out of the solar nebula, and its predestined end in the same. Especially is this the case with the form in which the theory was held by Cleanthes, who pictured the heavenly bodies as hastening to their own destruction by dashing themselves, like so ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... astronomy likewise—I cannot deny it. They deal each of them, with realms of Nature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands; chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic; meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the natural history of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you cannot now study deeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History—that is, plants and animals—without finding it necessary to learn something, and more and more as you go deeper, ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... position in space to another. Motion may be either abstract or concrete, more frequently the former; movement is always concrete, that is, considered in connection with the thing that moves or is moved; thus, we speak of the movements of the planets, but of the laws of planetary motion; of military movements, but of perpetual motion. Move is used chiefly of contests or competition, as in chess or politics; as, it is your move; a shrewd move of the opposition. Action is a more comprehensive ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... whitish specks, discoverable by telescopes in various parts of the heavens are owing to the same cause. Former astronomers could only reckon 103, but Herschel counts upwards of 1,250. He has also discovered a species of them, which he calls planetary nebulae, on account of their brightness, and shining with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... the moving circle at the sun itself, and correspondingly enlarging the circle in which Venus revolved. He might, too, have arranged that the several circles which the outer planets traversed should also have had their centres at the sun. The planetary system would then have consisted of an earth fixed at the centre, of a sun revolving uniformly around it, and of a system of planets each describing its own circle around a moving centre placed in the sun. Perhaps Ptolemy had not thought of this, or perhaps ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... medicine, simples had the power That none need then the planetary hour To helpe their workinge, they ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... Manifestation.—In all religions there remains some tradition of the great truth that the LOGOS manifests Himself through seven mighty channels, often regarded as minor Logoi or great planetary Spirits. In the Christian scheme they appear as the seven great archangels, sometimes called the seven spirits before the throne of God. The figure numbered 47 shows the result of the effort to meditate upon this method of divine manifestation. We have the golden glow in the centre, and ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... State reflected light upon the Minister, and the Minister reflected admiration upon the Under-Secretary of State. The Minister had desired his presence at this interview, not comprehending that this little Mercury of his planetary system, having resolved in his youth to free himself from the supernatural, which hampered the most spontaneous movements of his selfish nature, had come to hate the supernatural with much the same hatred which the sick conceive for the man who, they know, has gloomily ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... church and did well to forget the service. He soon began to wonder whether he could not make a pendulum which, swinging like the chandeliers, would do useful business for men. He soon began to discover, in what he had seen that day, new light on the laws of planetary motion. That was one of the turning points in human history—the boy was Galileo. The consequences of this new method are all around us now. The test of knowledge in modern life is capacity to cause change. If a man really knows electricity he can cause ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... derived only the surname of the Unfortunate. The wisdom of a sovereign is comprised in the institution of laws and the choice of magistrates, and while he seems without action, his civil government revolves round his centre with the silence and order of the planetary system. But the justice of Theophilus was fashioned on the model of the Oriental despots, who, in personal and irregular acts of authority, consult the reason or passion of the moment, without measuring the sentence by the law, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Most High This act of rebellion was nothing more than setting up his own selfish interests against the interests of the universe. And what would be the consequence, if this selfish principle were carried out in the material universe? Take, for example, our own planetary system. If every planet should set up an interest separate from the whole, would they move on with such beautiful harmony? No; every one would seek to be a sun. They would all rush towards the common centre, and universal confusion would follow. God is the sun ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... of dazzling bright Shakes Venus mid the twined boughs of the night; Rose-limb'd, soft-stepping From low bough to bough, Shaking the wide-hung starry fruitage—dimmed Its bloom of snow By that sole planetary glow. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... hearing, and affording the reader an opportunity to judge for himself. We await the logical sequences of time, knowing full well that the laws which regulate the progress of science are as stable and infallible as the laws which control the motions of the solar and planetary systems. One thing, however, we may be excused for saying: All the attempts we have seen to parry the force of this evidence, and to account for the acknowledged phenomena and facts within the schedule of the received chronology, strike us as singularly ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Curzon's statesmanlike reply in the House of Lords last night to the inflammatory question or string of questions put by Lord Ashmead with reference to our planetary visitors will go far to mitigate the unreasoning panic which has laid hold of a certain section of the community. As to the methods by which it has been proposed to confront and repel the invaders, the Duke's remark, 'that the use of dynamite violated ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... Mars won't give up—and Earth wants a plum, not responsibility. You'll have civil war and the whole planetary development ruined. Security's the only hope, Gordon—the only chance Mars had, has, or will have! Believe me, I know. Security has to be notified. There's a code message I had ready—a message to a friend—even you can send it. And they'll ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... her fruitless toil, Or hell's black regent claims his human spoil Oh, haste! before the fatal arrows fly That send you headlong to the nether sky When down the gulf the sons of folly go In sad procession to the seat of woe! Thus deeply musing on the rapid round Of planetary speed, in thought profound I stood, and long bewail'd my wasted hours, My vain afflictions, and my squander'd powers: When, in deliberate march, a train was seen In silent order moving o'er the green; A band that seem'd to hold in ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... gathering a crust of darkness, blotting itself out and vanishing: the sun that awakes a man from the sleep of death is the living Sun that casts from his thought out into being that other sun, with the space wherein it holds planetary court—the Father of lights, before whose shining in the inner world of truth eternal, even the deeds of vice become as spectral dreams, and, with the night of godlessness that ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... movements of massive worlds. In the one case, the majestic presence is revealed in its Atlantean task of establishing the firm foundations of the universe; in the other, in its Saturnian occupation of marking the lapse of time. In the planetary movements, material attraction bends onward impulse round into a circling curve; in the pendulum oscillations, material attraction alternately causes and destroys onward impulse. In the former it acts by a steady sweep; in the latter by recurring broken starts. The reason ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... specks, discoverable by telescopes in various parts of the heavens are owing to the same cause. Former astronomers could only reckon 103, but Herschel counts upwards of 1,250. He has also discovered a species of them, which he calls planetary nebul, on account of their brightness, and shining with a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... flames are, or have been, there is innocence. Our love of fire comes partly, doubtless, from our natural love of destruction for destruction's sake. Fire is savage, and so, even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our civilisation is but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old planetary flames. To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature. Nature is still 'red in tooth and claw,' though she has begun to make fine flourishes with tooth-brush and nail-scissors. Even the mild dog on my hearth-rug has been known to ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... a loud clap of thunder. When the confusion was over, the Court Astrologer was found to have turned into an eight-day clock, with a sun, moon, and stars arrangement, a planetary indicator, and a calendar calculated for two thousand years. The banquet ended rather gloomily, although the gifts of the other fairies, such as health, wealth, and beauty, managed to make everyone ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... rather sung, a planetary voice right at my shoulder. But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it was as though a mystical strain of music had passed ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... they were both born in September. Her father had told her of this on one of the few occasions when he seemed to have talked with her at any length, and like all his remarks it had made a great impression upon her. Anything more violently at odds with the theory of planetary influence it would be hard to find, for two people more fundamentally unlike each other than Roger and his ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... which he never understood; But little learning needs in noble blood. For, sooth to say, the Swallow brought him in, Her household chaplain, and her next of kin: 470 In superstition silly to excess, And casting schemes by planetary guess: In fine, short-wing'd, unfit himself to fly, His fears foretold foul weather ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... it withers up the sap of life, and makes the hair grey before its time. No, no; take the broad sunshine, and the brief but sweet flowers of earth; they are better for thee, my child, and for thy years than the fever and hope of the night-dream and the planetary influence." ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The names of the Oriental Hipparchi and Euclids who solved the first problems of astronomy and geometry were unknown; but a confused and grotesque literature made use of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to support systems of anthropology and of morality; the theorems of astronomy were used to establish an alleged method of divination; formulas of incantation, supposed to subject divine powers ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Newton, however, was able to demonstrate that any conic section can be described about the Sun consistent with the law of gravitation, and that the orbits of comets correspond with three of the four sections into which a cone can be divided. Consequently, they obey the laws of planetary motion. Comets which move in ellipses of known eccentricity and return with periodical regularity may be regarded as belonging to the solar system. Twenty of these are known, and eleven of them have more than once passed their perihelion. Those most familiarly known complete their periods ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... fact what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small one. Still stranger things may ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... called, enabled him to assign to it a velocity almost identical with that deduced by Roemer from a totally different method of observation. Subsequently Fizeau, and quite recently Cornu, employing not planetary or stellar distances, but simply the breadth of the city of Paris, determined the velocity of light: while Foucault—a man of the rarest mechanical genius—solved the problem without quitting his private room. Owing to an error in the determination of the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... the annex contains two curious machines for working stone—one a dresser, belonging to Brunton & Triers, which has a large wheel and a number of planetary cutters whose disk edges as they revolve cut the stone against which they impinge. The other machine, by Weston & Co., is for planing stone mouldings. The stone-drills are in the same annex; also the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... of course unknown to the old astrologers, we have only the other six planetary powers, together with the sun; and Aquarius is assigned to Saturn as his house. I could not find Capricorn at all; but this sign may have been broken away, as the whole capital is grievously defaced. The eighth side of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... hour I have spent in the small bookroom of the great "World" building. With Mr. Willson talk never flagged. We discussed the past and the future of our planetary chain, we built plans for the true and wholesome relation of sexes, we tried to find out—and needless to say never did—the exact limit where matter stopped being matter and became spirit; we also read the latest comic poems ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... from the nadir to the zenith. Such a leap would bring on a convulsion of nature and the crash of worlds. No: his ascent is gradual. Our eyes are accommodated, without pain, to his increasing light. The landscape is softly and beautifully unfolded, and the planetary system, in the meantime, maintains its harmonious and salutary action. The seasons revolve in their order; and the earth brings forth her flowers and her fruits, in peace. So let us be content to have it in the intellectual world. Let not vain man ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... ascends through the seven planetary heavens, the fixed stars, and the "primum mobile" to the empyre'an or seat ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... of miles in 225 days.—Like Mercury, it is visible to an observer on the earth only in the morning and evening, but for a greater space of time before sunrise and after sunset. It appears to us the most brilliant and beautiful of all the planetary and stellar bodies, occasionally giving so much light as to produce a sensible shadow. Observed through a telescope, it appears horned, on account of our seeing only a part of its luminous surface. The illuminating part of Venus occasionally presents slight spots. It has been ascertained ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... time to time, where a child-body is selected as the human tenement of a reincarnated adept; and that though belonging by rights to the fourth round, I was actually born into the fifth round of the human race in the planetary chain. "The adept," says an occult aphorism, "becomes; he is not made." That was exactly my case. I attribute it principally to an overweening confidence in myself, and to a blind faith in others. As Mr ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... mechanical, and in the most poetic of them stuff may be found for delicate fingers. Astounding, canorous, enchanting, alembicated and dramatic, the Chopin studies are exemplary essays in emotion and manner. In them is mirrored all of Chopin, the planetary as well as the secular Chopin. When most of his piano music has gone the way of all things fashioned by mortal hands, these studies will endure, will stand for the nineteenth century as Beethoven crystallized the eighteenth, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... even by his great four-foot reflector, the largest telescope that had then been constructed. And these nebulae exhibited a great variety of forms. Some of them were vast shapeless masses of faint light; others, which he designated "planetary" nebulae, exhibited a regular form—a circular disc more or less clearly defined, often brightest in the centre. Others seemed to be intermediate between these two classes. Hence he was led to the ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind—the Kepler— should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind—the Newton—should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law[2] of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... technically One World Drive. Second Avenue was labelled as Planetary Peace Drive, and First ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... better one in which lights will be turned to shadows and shadows into light, but all harmonized, so that we shall see why these ugly patches, these misplaced gleams and blots, were wrought into the temporary arrangements of our planetary life. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... to be the typical shape. Indeed, it is a question whether all nebul are not to some extent spiral. The extreme importance of this discovery is shown in the effect that it has had upon hitherto prevailing views of solar and planetary evolution. For more than three-quarters of a century Laplace's celebrated hypothesis of the manner of origin of the solar system from a rotating and contracting nebula surrounding the sun had guided speculation on that subject, and had been tentatively extended to ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... advise you to read it, at leisure hours. But that part of nature, which Mr. Harte tells me you have begun to study with the Rector magnificus, is of much greater importance, and deserves much more attention; I mean astronomy. The vast and immense planetary system, the astonishing order and regularity of those innumerable worlds, will open a scene to you, which not only deserves your attention as a matter of curiosity, or rather astonishment; but still more, as it will give you greater, and ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... ghouls— To bar up our path and to ban it From the secret that lies in these wolds— Had drawn up the spectre of a planet From the limbo of lunary souls— This sinfully scintillant planet From the Hell of the planetary souls?" ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... associates Fortune with the planetary influences of judicial astrology. It is doubtful whether Schiller ever read Dante; but in one of his most thoughtful poems he undertakes the same defence of Fortune, making the Fortunate a part of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... choose, regard as the divinely appointed law of the world. We can well believe that the great pioneers who, a century ago, acted in the spirit of this faith may have echoed the thought of Kepler when, on discovering his great planetary law, he exclaimed in rapture: "O God! I think ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... both the believer and the scientist build, is threatened by this false science and false religion. The calling, the very existence of both is assailed, and they must stand or fall together. The believer in one God cannot acknowledge a Sun-god, a Solar Logos, these planetary angels; the astronomer cannot admit the intrusion of planetary influences that obey no known laws, and the supposed effects of which are in no way proportional to the supposed causes. The Law of Causality does not run within ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... his plans and began a new set. He'd need a glass sphere with dots on it for the stars, and some kind of levers to move the planets and sun. It would be something like the orreries he'd seen used for demonstrations of planetary movement. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... the equilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities of planetary motions do not escape distortion: nor is it easy to be convinced that the distortion is in the eye which beholds, not in the object beheld. Let a planet be wheeling with heavenly science, upon arches of divine geometry: suddenly, to us, it shall ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey |
