"Phosphorescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... o'clock in the evening before. I reckoned then we should have eight hours to swim before sunrise, an operation quite practicable if we relieved each other. The sea, very calm, was in our favour. Sometimes I tried to pierce the intense darkness that was only dispelled by the phosphorescence caused by our movements. I watched the luminous waves that broke over my hand, whose mirror-like surface was spotted with silvery rings. One might have said that we were in a ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... heavens was a canopy of cloud, glowing faintly and testifying to the moon riding behind it. There was much phosphorescence. Fitfully before the ship and at her sides arose those stranger little swirls of mist that swirl up from the Southern Ocean like breath of sea monsters, whirl ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem. Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the blood faint in her veins, her mind went dim and unconscious. And he rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence. He looked round at the boat. It was drifting off a little. He lifted the oar to bring it back. And the exquisite pleasure of slowly arresting the boat, in the heavy-soft water, was complete ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... astray if we accepted and held fast to the teachings of Sir Charles Lyell. The book of Genesis, he said was not to be taken as meaning a day when it said a day, but rather something other than a mere day; and the word "light" meant not exactly light but possibly some sort of phosphorescence, and that the use of the word "darkness" was to be understood not as meaning darkness, but to be taken as simply indicating obscurity. And when he had quite finished, the congregation declared the whole sermon ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... voice could scarcely be heard by his companions; but they could see his countenance calm as ever even amid the flashing of the lightnings; he was watching the phenomena of phosphorescence produced by the fires of St. Elmo, that were now skipping to and fro along the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... were two cubes; one I judged in that uncertain light to be six feet high, the other half its bulk. From them a shaft of pale-blue phosphorescence pierced the murk. They stood, the smaller pressed against the side of the larger, for all the world like a pair of immense nursery blocks, placed like steps by some ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the Christian Church—but do not let us hide ourselves in the generality of that word—a great deal of our work is artificial light, brewed out of retorts, and smelling sulphureous; and a great deal more of it is the phosphorescence that glimmers above decay. If the Christian Church has ceased in any measure, or in any of its members, to be able to attract by the exhibition of its light, let the Christian Church sit down and bethink itself of the sort of light it gives, and perhaps it will find a reason for its failure. It ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... a white amorphous powder, sparingly soluble in water, is formed by heating the sulphate with charcoal, or by heating lime in a current of sulphuretted hydrogen. It is particularly noteworthy from the phosphorescence which it exhibits when heated, or after exposure to the sun's rays; hence its synonym "Canton's phosphorus," after John Canton (1718-1772), an English natural philosopher. The sulphydrate or hydrosulphide, Ca(SH)2, is obtained as colourless, prismatic crystals of the composition Ca(SH)2.6H2O, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... woven into the shrouds and the cordage. While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... wind that blew From undiscovered lands, and took my soul And set it on an uttermost peak of Hell Amid the gloom and fearful silences. Slowly the darkness paled, and a weird dawn Broke on my wondering vision, and there grew Uncanny phosphorescence in the air Which seemed to throb with some great vital spell Of mystery and doom. With aching eyes I gazed, and lo! the dreadful scene evolved, Black and chaotic, like an awful birth To Desolation, of a lifeless world! My soul in agony cried out to God, When of a sudden all the place ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... night's outlook nor that morning's was without result. For as the steamer stopped last night to pack her engines, and slipped along under sail at some three knots an hour, we made out clearly that the larger diffused patches of phosphorescence were Medusae, slowly opening and shutting, and rolling over and over now and then, giving out their light, as they rolled, seemingly from the thin limb alone, and not from the crown of their bell. And as we watched, a fellow-passenger told how, between Ceylon and Singapore, he had ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... phenomenon of phosphorescence is not a special gift to the animal kingdom. Henry O. Forbes describes a forest in Sumatra: "The stem of every tree blinked with a pale greenish-white light which undulated also across the surface of the ground like moonlight coming and going behind the clouds, from a minute thread-like ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock |
