"Retina" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in one of two ways—first, as a vivid picture affecting the focus and retina of the eye, perfect in its outline and colouring, and giving the impression of being either distant or near or at moderate range, Secondly, it may be conveyed as a vivid impression accompanied by a hazy and undefined formation in the crystal field. In this form it becomes an apperception ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... well said, 'in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.' To Newton and to Newton's Dog Diamond, what a different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely, the same! Let the Reader here, in this sick-room of Louis, endeavour to look with the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... 17), the apparent sizes of things vary as we move, and this means that the quantity of sensation, when I observe the apple from a nearer point, is greater. The man of science tells me that the image which the object looked at projects upon the retina of the eye grows larger as we approach objects. The thing, then, may remain unchanged; our sensations will vary according to the impression which is made upon ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... promise of renewed and successful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark of those two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retina of the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door of Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffin had gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. After them came Mr. Gladstone, with other members of the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a number of animals of the same species, in which the eye is not developed. They may have all the other senses, with the organs of nutrition, circulation, respiration, and locomotion. They all have a brain and nerves, and some of these nerves may be sensitive to light; but have no combination of retina, membranes, humors, etc., by which the distinct image of an object may be formed and conveyed by the optic nerve to the cognizance of the internal perception, or the mind. The animal in this case would be merely sensible ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... theory of color, white, red, and yellow are the so-called "dissimilating" colors in the three pairs, white-black, red-green, and yellow-blue, corresponding to three hypothetical visual substances in the retina. These substances, that is, in undergoing a kind of chemical disintegration under the action of light-rays, are supposed to give the sensations white, red, or yellow respectively, and in renewing themselves again to give the sensations of black, green, and blue. The dissimilating process seems ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... would have called, the sound died a murmur in his throat. His eyes were on the advancing figure; it seemed as if that object were to be forever branded on the retina. Still as he gazed, he was aware of another form, one sitting on the quay, unseen in shadow like himself, and seeing what he saw, and motionless as he. Would Mrs. Laudersdale dip her hands in murder? It all passed in a second of time; at the next breath he summoned every generous power in his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... addition to the imperfect eye of carefully fitted lenses or spectacles which will neutralize this mechanical defect. To put it very roughly, if the eye is too flat to bring the light-rays to a focus upon the retina, which is far the commonest condition (the well-known "long sight," or hyperopia), we put a plus or bulging glass before the eye and thus correct its shape. But if the eye is too round and bulging, producing the familiar "short sight," or myopia, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... which exists between the durations of the periods of these two categories of waves. The length of wave corresponding to the first spark-gap of Hertz was about 6 metres, and the longest waves perceptible by the retina ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... that, in the nature of things, many minds must change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their voices. You know, I suppose,—he said,—what is meant by complementary colors? You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina. If you close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... furnishes an example. Its eyes also have become small and are deeply hidden in the muscles, although they are by no means as much degenerated as in the Proteus anguineus, and are still possessed of a lens and a retina. Their nerve of vision, however, has become very imperfect, and its connection with the brain is interrupted, so that the animal for this reason can have no perception of light. Notwithstanding the above, however, it is doubtful whether the degeneration and gradual ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... as you've got it down to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so's time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length of vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there's a kind of shock to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time, if the eyes are ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... tissue hidden away at the base of the brain in a tiny cave behind and above its larger colleague, the pituitary. Microscopic scrutiny reveals that it is made up in part of nerve cells containing a pigment similar to that present in the cells of the retina, thus clinching the argument for its ancient function as an eye. But the outstanding and specifically glandular cells are large secreting affairs, which too reach back to the tidewater days of our vertebrate ancestors, when Eurypterus ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... likewise have lenses that can be moved forward and back until they form a sharp focus on the screen. Even the lens in your eye has muscles that make it flatter and rounder, so that it can make a clear image on the sensitive retina in the back of your eye. The lens in the eyes of elderly people often becomes too hard to be regulated in this way, and so they have to wear one kind of glasses to see things near them clearly and another kind to see ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... spectrum, but refusing to pass out of the blue into the other colours. It was plain that the spot belonged both to the eye and to the blue part of the spectrum. The result to which I have come is, that the appearance is due to the yellow spot on the retina, commonly called the Foramen Centrale of Soemmering. The most convenient method of observing the spot is by presenting to the eye in not too rapid succession, blue and yellow glasses, or, still better, allowing blue and yellow papers to revolve slowly before the eye. In ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... silver plate that once belonged to John Company, Bahadur, and that now repose on the groaning board of the Great Ornamental, amid a glory of Himalayan flowers, or blossoms from Eden's fields of asphodel, be reflected upon the eye's retina without producing positive thrills and vibrations of joy (that cannot be measured in terms of ohm or farad) shooting up and down the spinal cord and into the most hidden seats of pleasure! I certainly can never see the luxurious bloom of the silver sticks arranged in careless ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... world must needs be flattened to get it on one retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... sense of external life was brought into activity, and she projected on the paper before her groups of people, or groups of mountains, with a vividness that showed she had only to transfer them from the retina: they had no need of any additional processes. She made no remarks on society, or inferences from what she saw in the present to what had been in the past or might be in the future. It was simply a power of representation, unequalled in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... is presented to the retina of the eye, the looking- glass of the brain, upside down, and it is by study that begins at birth, and is finished ere remembrance commences, that the child of God and man is able to detect the true relation of material things ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... physiological optics is the study of perception by means of the sense of sight. We see things in the external world through the medium of light which they direct upon our eyes. The light strikes the retina, and causes a sensation. The sensation brought to the brain by means of the optic nerve becomes the condition of the representation in consciousness of certain objects distributed in space.... We make use of the sensation which the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... To these two painters is due the method of Pointillism, i.e. the division of tones, not only by touches, as in Monet's pictures, but by very small touches of equal size, causing the spheric shape to act equally upon the retina. The accumulation of these luminous points is carried out over the entire surface of the canvas without thick daubs of paint, and with regularity, whilst with Manet the paint is more or less dense. The ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... his efforts, forcing Pat's head back by sitting upon it. Pat twisted and writhed to throw him off. But the man stayed with him, and finally had him prone to earth again. Whereupon Pat experienced the chagrin of his first defeat. Yet he could see. Upon the retina of each eye danced a picture. It was that of his mistress, surrounded by open-mouthed spectators, outside the fence, gazing down upon him with seeming approval. This once, but only this once, he felt dislike ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... just a plain ordinary room in the barracks at Fort Bliss; but there wasn't a map or copy of 'rules and regulations' hanging on the yellowish white walls that I can't see now, whenever I shut my eyes. I guess they were all photographed on my 'mental retina,' as the writing folks say. The three officers were in full uniform, to do honour to the case, and of course there wasn't a man present dressed in 'cits.' All were army chaps, even to the headquarters clerk who took ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... can, he argued, know the outer world, because our sense impressions are literally 'impressions' or stamps made by external objects upon our organs. To see, for instance, is to be struck by an infinitely tenuous stream of images, flowing from the object and directly impinging upon the retina. Such streams are flowing from all objects in every direction—an idea which seemed incredible until the modern discoveries about light, sound, and radiation. Thus there is direct contact with reality, and consequently knowledge. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the dog turned his head. No human tympanum in the room vibrated to my cry. No human retina was recipient of my anguish. What fine, unclassified senses had the highly-organized animal by which he should become aware of me? The dog turned his noble head—he was a St. Bernard, with the moral qualities of the breed well ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... nausea and qualms at the pit of the stomach, while maleficent goblins kept puncturing their aguish, trembling legs with needles. Another of the physical effects of their fear was that in the congested condition of the blood vessels of the retina they beheld thousands upon thousands of small black specks flitting past them, as if it had been possible ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... choice, which of the two), that gleams-in from the circumambient Eternity, and colours with its own hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five-hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... flash of a gigantic lantern behind the dense masses of cloud lying piled along the western horizon, the light being so brilliant as to be quite dazzling after the Cimmerian darkness to which our eyes had become accustomed. But, despite the dazzling brilliancy of the sudden illumination, the retina of my eyes caught and retained the vision of three large proas broad on our starboard quarter, about two miles distant, situated precisely as Roberts had described them; and that this vision was no illusion ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... never that the wheel of a carriage really is round to your eye. It is round to your thought. But unless your eye is exactly opposite the hub of the wheel in the line of the axle, the wheel does not make a circle on the retina of your eye, and ought not to be represented by a circle in your drawing. To draw well, the first resolution and the first duty is to see well. Second, do not suppose that mere technical method has much to do with ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... cool. For he who has not something of the artist about him, who cannot paint beautiful landscapes in his head, will never see any outside. Beautiful nature, this most subjective of all works of art, which is painted on the retina of the eye instead of on wood or canvas, will differ every time according to the mental viewpoint of the onlooker; and as it is with individuals so it is with whole generations. The comprehension of the artistically beautiful is not half so dependent upon great cultural presuppositions as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... train of other thoughts, which end in a volition and an act—the loosing of the greyhound from the leash. These several thoughts are the concomitants of a process which goes on in the nervous system of the man. Unless the nerve-elements of the retina, of the optic nerve, of the brain, of the spinal cord, and of the nerves of the arms, went through certain physical changes in due order and correlation, the various states of consciousness which have been enumerated would not make their appearance. So that in this, as in ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the stronger light of the day; like owls, and bats, and many quadrupeds, and flying insects. When the eye is inflamed, great light becomes eminently painful, owing to the increased irritative motions of the retina, and the consequent increased sensation. Thus when the eye is dazzled with sudden light, the pain is not owing to the motion of the iris; for it is the contraction of the iris, which relieves the pain from sudden light; but to the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of the tent, he twists his eyes away so far, that, from the front, little else than their whites can be seen. But enough of the retina is uncovered to receive an impression from behind; this showing the mestizo tilting his cup, and spilling its contents ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its retina,—why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such questions very simply by ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the joint bent;—or they could trace backward any of the operations of the senses,—the sight, for example, from the object seen, through the coats of the eye, to the inverted picture of it formed upon the retina, which communicated the sensation to the optic nerve, by which it was conveyed to the brain. In all which they invariably succeeded, and shewed that the whole was clearly ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... 1.40 grain euphthalmine inserted, and examination of eye grounds showed no optic atrophy. The right eye ground (retina) was slightly higher in color than ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... and did the work. [Footnote: A strange incident connected with Mr. Walsh's misfortune was reported abroad, but I do not vouch for its truth. When under surgical treatment for his impaired vision, it was said that the operators in consultation decided on an experiment to test the powers of the retina to receive light, and in so doing blinded the other eye. Mr. Walsh went to England, having had a sum granted to him by the Victoria government. Whether he has recovered his sight I ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... woman never have I seen or heard of since, and but for her presence I could have explained the incident: called it, say, subjection of the mental powers to the domination of physical reflex action, and the man's presence could have been termed a false impression on the retina. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... the Sun, and light from the remote Stars, setting out upon its journey earth-ward from some, at the time the Chaldeans commenced to build the Tower of Babel? Or how the image of an external object comes to and fixes itself upon the retina of the eye; and when there, how that mere empty, unsubstantial image becomes transmuted into the wondrous thing that we call SIGHT? Or how the waves of the atmosphere striking upon the tympanum of the ear—those thin, invisible waves—produce the equally ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there, enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of partition between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and Angres, whence the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... eye has its limit of vision in the stars of the sixth magnitude. The light of fainter stars than these does not affect the retina enough for them to be seen. A very small telescope penetrates to smaller, and, in general, without doubt, to more distant stars. A more powerful one penetrates deeper into space, and as its power is increased, ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... vivid flash of sheet lightning that for an infinitesimal fraction of a second seemed to set the entire visible firmament ablaze, and caused every detail of the brig's hull and equipment to imprint a clear and perfectly distinct picture of itself upon the retina. They all listened for thunder, but none came. Suddenly, however, a few heavy drops of rain pattered upon the deck, and an instant later down came a perfect deluge with the sound of millions of small shot roaring and ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... that if the eyes are closed, no visual disturbances can be sensed, nevertheless, as a matter of fact the eye-lids are not wholly opaque. Sight may be obtained through them, as you may prove by closing your eyes and moving your fingers before them. The lids transmit light to the retina and it is quite likely that you are frequently awakened by a beam of light falling upon your closed eye-lids. For this reason, one who is inclined to be wakeful should shut out from the bed-room all avenues whereby light may enter ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... course, by the attraction of opaque bodies. From the first we derive the principles on which mirrors are constructed; to the second we are indebted for the power of the lenses, and the blessings of sight,—for the light acts upon the retina of the eye in the same manner as on the lens of a camera. The latter has no important ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... a tumour composed of neuroglia. It is met with exclusively in the central nervous system, retina, and optic nerve. It is a slowly growing, soft, ill-defined tumour, which displaces the adjacent nerve centres and nerve tracts, and is liable to become the seat of haemorrhage and thus to give rise to pressure symptoms resembling apoplexy. The glioma of the retina tends to grow ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... ploughed by succeeding avalanches that have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indication of the strange phenomena of the upper world. True, the same picture is painted upon the retina of all classes of observers; and so Porson and a schoolboy and a peasant might receive the same physical impression from a set of black and white marks on the page of a Greek play; but to one they would be an incoherent conglomeration ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... other bodily powers which go to form technical skill,—more notably yet does the hand come in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how all-important! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... to slight movement impressions on the side parts of our eye, and that this sensitiveness is often abnormally heightened. Just when the child is looking steadily into our face or to the ceiling, the outside parts of her sensitive retina may bring to her the visible unintentional signs from her sister or mother. The untrained observer is also usually unaware how easily he helps by suggestive movements or utterances to the other observers. When Beulah gave a six instead of a nine, one of our friends whispered that she may ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... well; and she planned a hundred vengeances. That is to say, her mind did not occupy itself with plots possible to make real; but rather it dabbled among those fragmentary visions that love to overlap and displace one another upon the changeful retina of the ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... beneath the countless waves of sound. For the voice of the jungle is the voice of love, of hatred, of hope, of despair—and in the night-time, when the dominance of sense-activity shifts from eye to ear, from retina to nostril, it cries aloud its confidences to all the world. But the human mind is not equal to a true understanding of these; for in a tropical jungle the birds and the frogs, the beasts and the insects are sending out their messages so swiftly one upon the other, that the senses fail ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... corpse for some time, impressing a picture of it in every detail on his mental retina. Struck by an idea, he bent over and touched the patch of blood in the dead man's breast, then looked at his finger. There was no stain. The blood was quite congealed. Then he tried to unclench the judge's right hand, but ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... small pale patch been occupying a corner of my retina for the last half hour; it turns out to be ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come. All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The first ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the diver; "pierce into you like a gimblet, goin' slap agin the retina, turnin' short down the jugular, right into the heart, where they create an agreeable sort o' fermentation. Oh! Don't I know?—my ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... eye-glass, which became the clear part of the eye, called the cornea. At the same time, the little sensitive spot at the bottom of the eye-pit spread out into the shape of the bottom of a cup, called the retina; and then the hollow of that cup between the retina and the cornea filled up with a clear, soft, animal jelly called the vitreous humor, and we have the eye as it is ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... itself, even then, but slowly and imperfectly. But the beauty of form and color, the grace of motion, the harmony of tone, are seen and felt and appreciated at once. The image of substantial and material loveliness once seen leaves an impression as distinct and perfect upon the retina of memory as upon that of the eyes. It does not rise before us in detached and disconnected proportions, like that of spiritual loveliness, but in crowds, and in solitude, and in all the throngful varieties of thought and feeling and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "You ought to know that no respectable TK would lay a lift on a retina. I just squeezed off a couple of small arteries. He's back in ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sunburn, I knew it was caused by the ultraviolet rays, the same as from the sun; and I knew that nothing but my light could produce those rays at night time. And as a physician I knew what I did not know as an inventor—the swift amblyopia that follows the impact of this light on the retina. As a physician, too, I can inform you that your country has not permanently blinded a single American seaman or officer. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... and innervated from the pallial nerve-cords. They are termed according to their size, micraesthetes and megalaesthetes. In the common species of Chiton and many others of the family Chitonidae the megalaesthetes are developed into definite eyes, the most complicated of which have retina, pigment within the eye, cornea and crystalline lens (intra-pigmental eyes) (fig. 2). The eyes are arranged in rows running diagonally from the median anterior beak of each valve to its lateral borders There may be only one such row on either side, or many rows. In some species the total number ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... it by a tall yew hedge, was a bowling-green, containing just about as much ground as Corporal Trim wished for. So that as Trim uttered the words, "a rood and a half of ground, to do what they would with," this identical bowling-green instantly presented itself upon the retina of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... for years on the retina of Knight's eye: the dead and brown stubble, the weeds among it, the distant belt of beeches shutting out the view of the house, the leaves of which were now red and ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... was—immunity from his debts. They had grown on him latterly, as much as the work had. Careless Roland saw no way out of that difficulty, any more than he did out of the other, except by an emigration to that desired haven which had stereotyped itself on the retina of his imagination in colours of the brightest phantasy—Port Natal. For its own sake, Roland was hurrying to get to it, as well as that it might ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... wonder. He told me the other day that he is going to cure what is called split retina, which has never ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... fingers, it is utterly impossible to conceive that we have not two round objects under them; and, though light is undoubtedly a mere sensation arising in the brain, it is utterly impossible to conceive that it is not outside the retina. In the same way, he who touches anything with a rod, not only is irresistibly led to believe that the sensation of contact is at the end of the rod, but is utterly incapable of conceiving that this sensation is really in ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the little creature from further suffering. Then it happened. One of the lads, apparently startled, let off his gun. The charge struck a tree a few yards off, and the shot glanced. It did not strike him full. The face is only slightly peppered and the brain quite uninjured. But shots pierced the retina of each eye, and the ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Michel Ardan offered a large field for physiological analysis. This astonishing man lived in a perpetual disposition to hyperbole, and had not yet passed the age of superlatives; objects depicted themselves on the retina of his eye with exaggerated dimensions; from thence an association of gigantic ideas; he saw everything on a large scale except ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... aberration, which is due to the fact that the circumferential and central rays have not the same focus. The human eye labours under a similar defect, and from this, and other causes, it arises that when the naked light from fifty cells is looked at the blur of light upon the retina is sufficient to destroy the definition of the retinal image of the carbons. A long list of indictments might indeed be brought against the eye—its opacity, its want of symmetry, its lack of achromatism, its partial blindness. All these taken together caused Helmholt to say that, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... parts at the points of pressure results from prolonged sitting or lying in one position, and as a result pain compels a muscular action that shifts the damaging pressure—this is the pain of anemia; when the rays of the blazing sun shine directly upon the retina, pain immediately causes a protective muscular action—the lid is closed, the head turns away—this is light pain; when standing too close to a blazing fire the excessive heat causes a pain which results in the protective muscular action of moving away—this is heat pain; when the urinary ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... be altogether a mistake. If matter were infinitely divisible in this sense, its particles must be imponderable, and a million of such molecules could not weigh more than an infinitely small one. But the particles of that imponderable matter, which, striking upon the retina, give us the sensation of light, are not in ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... directly and intimately related is the nervous system. The sense organs themselves are merely modifications of the nerve ends together with certain mechanisms for enabling stimuli to act on the nerve ends. The eye is merely the optic nerve spread out to form the retina and modified in certain ways to make it sensitive to ether vibrations. In addition to this, there is, of course, the focusing mechanism of the eye. So for all the sense organs; they are, each of them, some sort of modification of nerve-endings ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... impressions on the retina proves that the effect of external influences on nerve-vesicles is not necessarily transitory. In this there is a correspondence to the duration, the emergence, the extinction, of impressions on photographic ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... ducks towering. They mounted, and wheeled, and circled back or darted away. The sky became fairly obscured with them in the sense that it seemed inconceivable that hither space could contain another bird. Before the retina of the eye they swarmed exactly as a nearer cloud ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... away on a Commoner girl—he meant it. Flashed the picture on her mental retina of the little solemn oath to Louise. What he asked was impossible—for him and ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the substances found upon our planet, and shown how everything living and dead is put together from them. It is accomplishing wonders before us every day, such as Arabian story-tellers used to string together in their fables. It spreads the sensitive film on the artificial retina which looks upon us through the optician's lens for a few seconds, and fixes an image that will outlive its original. It questions the light of the sun, and detects the vaporized metals floating around ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... object to object scarcely a suggestion of this blurred appearance can be detected. The phenomenon is striking, since, if the eye moves in the same direction as the train, it is certain that the images on the retina succeed one another even more rapidly than when the eye is at rest. A supposition which occurs to one at once as a possible explanation is that perchance during eye-movement the retinal stimulations ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... of the proprieties of which impressions, we may collect these short definitions of Colours: That Blue is an impression on the Retina of an oblique and confus'd pulse of light, whose weakest part precedes, and whose strongest follows. And, that Red is an impression on the Retina of an oblique and confus'd pulse of light, whose strongest part ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... the electric spark, others again with electro-photometry and the chemistry of the electric arc. With Professor J. G. M'Kendrick, of Glasgow, he investigated the physiological action of light, and examined the changes which take place in the electrical condition of the retina under its influence. With Professor G. D. Liveing, one of his colleagues at Cambridge, he began in 1878 a long series of spectroscopic observations, the later of which were devoted to the spectroscopic examination of various gaseous constituents separated from atmospheric air by the aid ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... shortsightedness, a condition in which the axis of the eye gradually grows longer. This lengthening is accompanied by stretching of the eyeball, and such children always run the risk of the inner and most important part of the wall of the eye, the retina or nerve layer, being torn away, and blindness resulting. When nearsightedness is discovered early, and glasses are given that make distant vision normal, and all needless near work forbidden, the myopia may be ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... bleak, distant unchartered world two ships lay wrecked and a lone man stared at a star hyacinth. Its brilliance burned into his retina ... and he knew that men could easily kill and kill ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... in town,' said Colonel Delville, whereupon Mrs. Mostyn, while counters were being distributed, explained to the company on scientific principles why the room was comfortable, expatiating upon the effect of yellow and brown upon the retina, and some curious facts relating to the optic machinery of water-fleas, as lately discovered by a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... look steadfastly at the sun for a second or two, and then immediately close our eyes, the image, or spectrum, of the sun remains for a long time present to the mind, as if the light were still acting on the retina. It then gradually fades and disappears; but if we continue to keep the eyes shut, the same impression will, after a certain time, recur, and again vanish: and this phenomenon will be repeated at intervals, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the demands must be met by modifying the artificial illuminants which are available. Vision is accomplished entirely by the distinction of brightness and color. An image of any scene or any object is focused upon the retina as a miniature map in light, shade, and color. Although the distinction of brightness is a more important function in vision than the ability to distinguish colors, color-vision is far more important in daily life than is ordinarily appreciated. One may go through life color-blind without ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... and the highest emotions, by the certainty of expiation and the fullness of atoning equity, where virtue is victorious, vice is vanquished, and the ways of Allah are justified to man. They are a panorama which remains ken-speckle upon the mental retina. They form a phantasmagoria in which archangels and angels, devils and goblins, men of air, of fire, of water, naturally mingle with men of earth; where flying horses and talking fishes are utterly realistic; where King and Prince meet fisherman and pauper, lamia and cannibal; where citizen jostles ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... sweetness made the air a passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss, into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it. She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one who, under an aesthetic influence, seems to himself careering through mid-air, conscious only of motion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... breeze, after lunch, which took us gently up past Wargrave and Shiplake. Mellowed in the drowsy sunlight of a summer's afternoon, Wargrave, nestling where the river bends, makes a sweet old picture as you pass it, and one that lingers long upon the retina ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... distance above the dense cloud which hung, a lurid canopy, above the crater. Taking a last look, we "fell in" in Indian file, and got back to the house, with no further accident than a few bruises, about ten o'clock. The walk had required caution, and it was long after I had closed my eyes ere the retina yielded the impressions that had been so nervously drawn on them. The next morning at nine, we started on our return to the ship, sauntering leisurely along, picking strawberries by the way, and enjoying all the satisfaction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... explore the shelf, when something went whizzing past his head, and, embedding itself in a stunted oak behind him, shook and quivered with the shock,—a Tonto arrow. Only an instant did he see it, photographed as by electricity upon the retina, when with a sharp stinging pang and whirring "whist" and thud a second arrow, better aimed, tore through the flesh and muscles just at the outer corner of his left eye, and glanced away down the hill. ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... country in which it lives. Certainly, the point of view is good, and the advice is well thought-out. The conclusion that the public will have an accurate view is not warranted, for the state of its eyes must be examined, to ascertain whether it is near or far-sighted, or if the retina naturally, or through habit, is sensitive to certain colors. In the same way the French of the eighteenth century must be considered, the structure of their inward vision, that is to say, the fixed form of their intelligence which they are bringing with ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... instinctive sense of proportion that some men have—a sense as real as an "ear for music"; or perhaps they lack a willingness or a capability to think about a situation with sufficient intentness to force a clear picture of the situation with all its various features upon the mental retina. ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... I record my literary calamity as a warning to my sedentary brothers. When my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed, there appear on a bluish film a number of mathematical squares, which are the reflection of the fine network of the retina, succeeded by blotches which subside into printed characters, apparently forming distinct words, arranged in straight lines as in a printed book; the monosyllables are often legible. This is the process of a few seconds. It is remarkable that the usual power ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... shadows upward over the eyes? If this be not so, another thing is certain: namely, that the eyes of the actors suffer from the light, so that the effective play of their glances is precluded. Coming from below, the light strikes the retina in places generally protected (except in sailors, who have to see the sun reflected in the water), and for this reason one observes hardly anything but a vulgar rolling of the eyes, either sideways ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... hand before my face, but could not distinguish by sight that it was there. A few pale, phosphorescent gleams, that seemed to be wandering in the air, I was convinced were only the remembrances of the optic nerve,—eidolons of the retina; but they seemed to some extent plastic to my thoughts, and ready to become the subjective creations of the brain, outlined in the dark. I could conceive then how the brain, excited by fear, or stimulated by emotion, might multiply these phantasms, moulding them into the likeness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... incomparably faster than that of radiating or conducting away from the surface of the collision. In the eye of the observer a single impact of the atoms would cause an instantaneous flash, but if the impacts were repeated with sufficient rapidity they would produce a continuous impression upon his retina. To him then the surface of the metal would appear continuously incandescent and of constant luminous intensity, while in reality the light would be either intermittent or at least changing periodically in intensity. The metal piece would rise in temperature until equilibrium was attained—that ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... external shell. Its external face is related to the muscles and fatty cushion. It receives posteriorly, a little lower than its middle portion, the insertion of the optic nerve, which passes through the shell and spreads out to form a very thin membrane, the retina or ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... and fumbled desperately at the slide. A beam, pale but wavering, shot out into the darkness as he succeeded in his effort, and by its light, as men in moments of emotion may see some one thing or action painted on their retina by a lightning flash, he saw Archelaus bringing his stick, muffled in a coat, down on Ishmael's head. The next second the blow fell—there had not been time for Archelaus to check the impetus of the blow when the discovering light flared onto him. There came the heavy sound of a body falling ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... loose the usual assortment of sounds, it seemed as though the roadway below boiled over. Horses reared, plunged and stampeded, while high above the head of a long-tailed chestnut a countryman floated forth into space, a vision, in its brief perfectness, delightfully photographed on the retina. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Dr. L. T. Troland of Harvard tells us, "are built up on the same principle as the ordinary 'half-tone' engravings; that is, they are made up of minute dottings or stripplings far too small to be detected by the eye. . . . The sensitiveness of the retina is so great that a visual sensation can be produced by relatively few Quanta of the right kind of light." Through a master's divine knowledge of light phenomena, he can instantly project into perceptible manifestation the ubiquitous ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... acts on a plant and its degree of curvature; it was indeed hardly possible to perceive any difference in the curvature of some seedlings of Phalaris exposed to a light, which, though dim, was very much brighter than that to which others had been exposed. The retina, after being stimulated by a bright light, feels the effect for some time; and Phalaris continued to bend for nearly half an hour towards the side which had been illuminated. The retina cannot perceive a dim light after it has been exposed to a bright one; ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... its transverse axis) as well as downwards. These are relics of old surgery, and very rarely practised by any oculists of eminence, as, though easy to perform, and with very flattering immediate results, the risks of chronic inflammation of the whole globe and injury to the retina ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... termed corpuscles. In the work just referred to regarding this matter, he asks the question, "Are not rays of light very small bodies emitted from shining substances?" These small particles or corpuscles were supposed by him to actually strike the retina of the eye, and so produce the sensation of Sight, in the same way that odorous particles entering the nostril, come into contact with the olfactory nerves and produce the sensation of Smell. In order, however, to account for certain phenomena of light, he was compelled to postulate ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... with other colors, is different from the same color seen by itself. It has a distinct and peculiar power upon the retina dependent on its association. Consequently, the color of any object is not more dependent upon the nature of the object itself, and the eye beholding it, than on the color of the objects near it; in this respect also, therefore, it is ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Physiological Society of London, in November 1900. It may be mentioned here, by the way, that, in course of his investigations on the Response of the Living and Non-Living substances, Dr. Bose constructed an "artificial retina" to study the characteristics of the excitatory change produced by a stimulus on the retina and these characteristics gave him a clue to the unexpected discovery of the "binocular alteration of ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose |
