"Retina" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on a disagreeable sensation in some distant part, and not on the irritation of the muscles themselves. Thus when a particle of dust stimulates the ball of the eye, the eye-lids are instantly closed, and when too much light pains the retina, the muscles of the iris contract its aperture, and this not by any connection or consent of the nerves of those parts, but as an effort to prevent or to remove a disagreeable sensation, which evinces that vegetables are endued with sensation, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... men endowed with the normal colour-sense the same material objects appear to have the same colour, we may speak of any such perception as practically true, marking it off from those plainly illusory perceptions which are due to some subjective cause, as, for example, fatigue of the retina. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... motion of the eye as it moved up and down the 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 ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... 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 Utopia ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 1500—Capt. Bennett, 13 Nov. 1780, and enclosures constituting the inquiry.] Yet such was the ultimate fate of many an impress officer. A stronger light focussed him ashore, and habits, proclivities and weaknesses that escaped censure at sea, were here projected odiously upon the sensitive retina ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... and "light" means the effect of the one on the other;—and perhaps, also—(Plato saw farther into that mystery than any one has since, that I know of),—on something a little way within the eyes; but we may stand quite safe, close behind the retina, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... was it he saw? for, sure as eyes were eyes, there was an island outlined upon the retina, so plainly perceptible, that his senses ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... magic, the sudden blotting out of the slim human figure, the substitution of the draped form as she moved from the light into the shadow. But on Kingozi's retina remained the vision of her as she was. He shifted, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... in each of these blinding intervals his figure. Each flash outlined it sharply on her retina—always the same—patient, resourceful, silent and unwearied. The man who had been directed to ride her own horse she never caught sight of. When they reached open country and better going her guide did not break the silence. He spoke only when at last he stopped the horse and ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... idly backward to the old home, reviewing the years of war that had transformed me from boy to man as though by some magic. The varied incidents of march, camp, and battle were like dreams, so swiftly did they pass across the retina of the brain, each stirring event leading to another as I climbed from the ranks to command. Yet at the end of all came again the vision of Claire Mortimer, and I was seeing in her blue eyes the hope of the future. The candle sputtering ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... 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, you see ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Locust is not sufficiently conspicuous to attract attention by itself. Then let us try red, the brightest colour to our retina and probably also to the Spiders'. None of the game hunted by the Epeirae being clad in scarlet, I make a small bundle out of red wool, a bait of the size of a Locust. I glue it ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... 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 to distinguish the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... creating a world, composed of material and spiritual phenomena, ordained from the beginning that these several phenomena should proceed in parallel lines side by side in a constantly corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the retina. The motion of the arm or the leg appears to result from an act of will; but in either case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between substances so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion; and we only suppose that the object seen produces the idea, and that the desire produces ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... what Baron Hubner would euphemistically describe as the "beau type d'un gentleman anglais," but when worn with a funny-shaped hat, a short coat, tight trousers, and a Penang lawyer, the picture produced on the retina of a Chinese mind is unmistakably ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... instance, almost 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 real success. Soft pencil rather than hard; sepia rather than India ink. It is ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... 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 of the eye ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... was not only to be a lord, it was more than that. It was to be famous, a national character, whose picture was printed on the retina of the million. Never had Jones felt more inclined to stick to his position than now, with the hounds on his traces, a tramp for his companion, and darkness ahead. He felt that if he could once get to London, once lay his hands on that eight ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... 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 ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... organ 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... observed to lighten the whole heavens. The observer's back was turned to it, but on looking round the streak of light was seen to remain on its path some seconds. This streak is usually explained to be only the continuance of the impression made by the shining body on the retina. This cannot be, as in this case the meteor was not actually seen and yet the streak was clearly perceived. The rays of planets and stars also require another explanation ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... she was gone. Shutting them again and opening, there she was, sunning herself, breathing deep and long, watching her own beauties as the light played with them. I tried this many times and it did not fail me. I could, with her assistance, bring her upon my retina or take her off it, as if I had worked a shutter across my eyes. But as I watched her so I got very excited. Her business was so mysterious, her pleasure in it so absorbing; she was visible and yet secret; I was visible, and yet she could be ignorant of it. I got the same throbbing ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... find a very delicate, dark-red membrane, very rich in blood-vessels—the choroid coat—and inside this the retina (o), the expansion of the optic nerve (i). The latter is the second cerebral nerve. It proceeds from the optic thalami (the second cerebral vesicle) to the eye; penetrates its outer envelopes, and then spreads out like ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... stone, and water, shine crimson in the light of a setting sun; but there is also the fact, which is not well known, that the eye may show its own hidden red—the crimson colour which is at the back of the retina and which is commonly supposed to be seen only with the ophthalmoscope. Nevertheless I find on inquiry among friends and acquaintances that there are instances of persons in which the iris when directly in front of the observer with the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... to realize that this ether is everywhere. This is shown by the undulatory theory of light. Light is not a substance but is the effect produced on the eye by the impinging of the ripples of the ether upon the retina. These waves are excessively minute, ranging in length from 1-39,000th of an inch at the red end of the spectrum to 1-57,000th at the violet end. Next remember that these waves are not composed of advancing particles of the medium but pass onwards by the push which each particle in the line of ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... mountains in the coals of his grate; another by gentleness only sunshine and grasses on Monadnock. You will not say that he chooses, but that he is chosen so to see. Light opens the eye without our intention, and we are at no trouble to paint on the retina what must there appear. Success is fidelity to that which must appear. Weak men discuss forever the laws of Art, and contrive how to paint, questioning whether this or that element should have emphasis or be shown. If there is any question, there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... 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
... case and had wired the authorities of the adjoining States to be on the look out for the guilty parties. There followed a description of the guilty parties photographed accurately from Mr. Bat Brydges's retina. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... are non-conductive to electric waves of ordinary length. Were the energy of a Marconi sending-instrument applied to an arc-lamp, it would generate a beam of a thousand candle-power. We have thus a means of comparing the sensitiveness of the retina to light with the responsiveness of the Marconi coherer to electric waves, after both radiations have undergone ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... front of the eye in a dark room, it appears not as an illuminated spark, but as a line of fire; a so-called shooting star, or a flash of lightning produces the same effect. This result is purely physiological, and is due to the fact that the retina of the eye may be considered as practically a sensitized plate of relatively slow speed, and an image impressed upon it remains, before being effaced, for a period of from one-tenth to one-seventh of a second, varying according ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Signac, who has painted some portraits and numerous landscapes. 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 theory of complementary colours is systematically applied. ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... from birth. Hence, the only possible way of correcting it is by the 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 ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... eye is kept constantly moving from 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 ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... been drawn in true perspective. Of course the building looked very Egyptian, with its sloping sides. The answer to his notion is easy enough. What is called the picture is not the picture from which the mind takes its perception; that picture is on the retina. The intermediate picture, as it may be called—the human artist's work—is itself seen perspectively. If the tower were so high that the sides, though parallel, appeared to meet in a point, the picture must also be so high that the picture-sides, though ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... sound, have tuned themselves at last into a perfect gamut in the developed ear of men and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient centres have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture flashed by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitive mirror of the retina, through the many-stranded cable of the optic nerve, straight up to the appropriate headquarters in the thinking brain. Stage by stage the continuous process has gone on unceasingly, from the jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite steps of progression, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... wonder. He told me the other day that he is going to cure what is called split retina, which ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... as if his retina had reacted like a photographic plate, a picture developed itself, which, in the end, by a series of recurrences, became quite singularly circumstantial. The dog-cart and its occupants, with the stretch of brown road, and the hedge-rows and meadows at either side, were ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... not produce any motion in us if it is not itself in motion. As soon as I see an object, my eyes must be struck by it; I can not conceive of light and of vision without a motion in the luminous, extended, and colored body which communicates itself to my eye, or which acts upon my retina. As soon as I smell a body, my olfactory nerve must be irritated or put into motion by the parts exhaled from an odorous body. As soon as I hear a sound, the tympanum of my ear must be struck by the air put in motion by a sonorous body, which could not act if it was not moved of itself. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... lines and, striking objects before us, is reflected in all directions. Some of these rays passing through a point situated behind the lenses of the eye, strike the retina. The multiplication of these rays on the retina produces a picture of whatever is before the eye, such as can be seen on the ground glass at the back of a photographer's camera, or on the table of a camera obscura, both of which instruments are constructed roughly on the same ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... the compound eye is at the base of the ommatidia, at their junction with the optic nerve; see retina. ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... is her work then—the giving of Form; then the separately Apolline work is the giving of Light; or, more strictly, Sight: giving that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light, but the existence of it; for light is to be defined only as the sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions; those same conditions ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... in the same state until the 7th of December. The uncertain clambering motion was now increasing, and likewise the defect of sight. He ran against almost every person and every thing. The cornea was transparent, the iris contracted, there was no opacity of the lens, or pink tint of the retina, but a peculiar glassy appearance, as unconscious of everything around it. An emetic was given, and, after that, an ounce of ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... and the section mounted in Farrant's solution or glycerine. The kidney may be treated in the same way. The cornea of the eye can be readily cut by embedding in paraffin, and the section may be mounted in Farrant's solution. The crystalline lens and retina may ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... remain, but monarchs have ceased to visit Portici since the days of Bomba, and the old royal demesne has been turned into an agricultural college. Adjoining and practically forming part of Portici is the town of Resina, which preserves almost intact the old classical name of Retina that it bore in the distant days when it served as the port of Herculaneum. Here then in the mean streets of Resina we find ourselves standing above, though certainly not upon, historic ground, for the temples and villas, the theatres and private houses of the famous buried ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Administration, human and divine. As an epitome or miniature, then, the Laws of Language must be an exact reproduction of the Laws of the Universe. Language itself, in other words, must be an epitome or miniature image, in all its perfection, of the Universe at large; as the image formed upon the retina of the eye, though infinitely small in the comparison, is an exact epitome or image, inversely, of the external world presented ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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
... mind, but to the eye,—not to the province of the metaphysician, but to that of the professor of optics. The lens of the camera obscura transmits the figures to the prepared paper, on quite the same principle on which in vision the crystalline lens conveys them to the retina. In the centre of the field in both cases there is much distinctness, while all around its circumference the images are indistinct and dim. We have but to fix the eye on some object directly in front of us, and then attempt, without ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... prevents too much light from entering. At night, or whenever the light is scarce, the eye often requires to grasp all it can. The pupil then expands; more and more light is admitted according as the pupil grows larger. The illumination of the image on the retina is thus effectively controlled in accordance with ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... second pair of cranial nerves. In mammalia, the eyes are limited to two in number, which in man are placed in circular cavities of the skull, beneath the anterior lobes of the cerebrum. Three membranes form the lining of this inner sphere of the eye, called respectively the Sclerotic, Choroid, and Retina. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... mid-morning throws over imperial Rome. Above, that canopy of translucent blue, iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all colour save one ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... there is some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven, the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages before a single being existed who saw it. The counterpart of this ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... matters in hand, and it is called logic; but it is not by logic, certainly not by logic alone, that the faculty I speak of is acquired. The infant does not learn to spell and read the hues upon his retina by any scientific rule; nor does the student learn accuracy of thought by any manual or treatise. The instruction given him, of whatever kind, if it be really instruction, is mainly, or at least pre-eminently, this,—a ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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
... light vessel to be got ready, and gave me the liberty, if I thought proper, to attend him. I rather chose to continue my studies, for, as it happened, he had given me an employment of that kind. As he was passing out of the house he received dispatches: the marines at Retina, terrified at the imminent peril (for the place lay beneath the mountain, and there was no retreat but by ships), entreated his aid in this extremity. He accordingly changed his first design, and what he began ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... 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
... other quite 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... or not the spirit of Titian had instructed the little creature to keep me there, I cannot say, but the result was that I sat for a quarter of an hour before the altar without a movement, so that every particular of the painting is photographed on my retina. Six months later the same cat led me to a courtyard opposite the Sacristy door ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... the inner side of which is laid a more delicate, friable membrane, consisting mainly of blood vessels and pigment cells (the choroid), which in its turn is lined by the extremely delicate and sensitive expansion of the nerve of sight (the retina). The anterior fifth of the globe of the eye bulges forward from what would have been the direct line of the sclerotic, and thus forms a segment of a much smaller sphere than is inclosed by the sclerotic. Its walls, too, have in health a perfect translucency, from which it has derived the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the hour. Once in a hundred years a six months' carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... is to be acquired by an operation of the mind directly opposite to what is necessary in delineating the sections of bodies; the mind must here be intent only upon the objects that are delineated upon the retina, exactly what we see; it must forget or suspend the knowledge which it has acquired from experience, and must see with the eye of childhood, no further than the surface. Every person, who is accustomed to drawing in perspective, sees external nature, when he pleases, merely as a picture: ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... steadily at the 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, ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... temperature of the sun and of 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... so kind as to give me the following remarks on certain inherited imperfections. First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex glass is required for clear vision of near objects, and frequently even of distant ones. This state occurs congenitally, or at a very early age, often in several ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... "The greatest of all the prejudices we have retained from our infancy is that of believing that the beasts think."[40] If the beasts can properly be said to see at all, "they see as we do when our mind is distracted and keenly applied elsewhere; the images of outward objects paint themselves on the retina, and possibly even the impressions made in the optic nerves determine our limbs to different movements, but we feel nothing of it all, and move as if we were automata."[41] The sentience of the animal to the lash of his tyrant is not other than the sensitivity of the plant to the influences ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... and shade effects on the toe of the boot. The afternoon sun, streaming in through the window, must have shone on the boot in such a manner as to give it a momentary and fictitious aspect of redness. If Mr. Downing recollects, he did not look long at the boot. The picture on the retina of the eye, consequently, had not time to fade. I remember thinking myself, at the moment, that the boot appeared to have a certain reddish ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... becomes extended, so to speak, over an external surface, and defined into limited figures. We are not disposed to lay any greater stress than Dr Brown himself upon the image said to be traced upon the retina; but we say that the eye, as well as the touch, immediately informs us of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... elaboration. Ralph Nickleby, Squeers, Smike, little Nell, Quilp, Barnaby Rudge, Steerforth, Paul Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Joe, each and all show how carefully they were elaborated; how distinctly they presented themselves to the retina of the mind of their distinguished creator. When this is borne in mind, it will be at once understood why the Mrs. Pipchin of Hablot Browne was not the Mrs. Pipchin with whose outward appearance and mental peculiarities the author himself ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Law for the Heliotropic Reactions of Animals and Plants. X. The Effect of Rapid Changes in Intensity of Light. XI. The Relative Heliotropic Efficiency of Light of Different Wave Lengths. XII. Change in the Sense of Heliotropism. XIII. Geotropism. XIV. Forced Movements Caused by Moving Retina Images: Rheotropism: Anemotropism. XV. Stereotropism. XVI. Chemotropism. XVII. Thermotropism. XVIII. Instincts. XIX. Memory Images ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... remarkable appearance, the elder Pliny, who was a great naturalist and a man of inquiring mind, resolved to go ashore and inspect more narrowly what was going on. But a rash resolve it proved. Steering towards Retina (now Resina), a port at the foot of the mountain, he was met, on his approach, by thick showers of hot cinders, which grew thicker and hotter as he advanced—falling on the ships along with lumps of pumice and pieces of rock, black but burning ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... blushes commenced by a small circumscribed spot on the cheeks, over the parotidean plexus of nerves, and then increased into a circle; between this blushing circle and the blush on the neck there was an evident line of demarcation, although both arose simultaneously. The retina, which is naturally red in the albino, invariably increased at the same time in redness. Every one must have noticed how easily after one blush fresh blushes chase each other over the face. Blushing is preceded by a peculiar sensation in the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... these quick glances that he experienced a blinding flash upon his retina. A second later it occurred again, and then a third time. Suspiciously the man drew his horse to a stand, and those behind him ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... you'll keep it to yourself, Mr. Crane, I'll tell you something: My native country's scientists have developed a rather simple device, though they haven't published anything about it in the scientific journals. Let me give you a brief explanation: Light strikes the retina of the eye; the rods and cones pass on impulses to the bipolar cells, which send them on to the optic nerve, which goes ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... impediment to vision. As volition was in abeyance, the balls could not roll in their sockets—but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as sound—sound sweet ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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 Susan ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... processes in the brain and are afterwards projected into P. There is not, however, an unextended image which forms itself in consciousness and then projects itself into the position P. Really, the point P, and the rays which it emits, together with the retina and nervous elements affected in the process of perception, all form a single whole. The point P is an indispensable factor in this whole and it is really in P and not anywhere else that the image of P is formed and perceived.[Footnote: Cf. Matter ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... number, sat on a chair under his desk. Before recommencing she gazed boldly at the house, and certain placards—'Smoking permitted,' 'Emergency exit,' 'Ices,' and 'Fancy Dress Balls'—were fixed for ever on the retina of her eye. At the end of the second movement there was more applause, and the conductor tapped appreciation with his stick against the pillar of his desk; the leader of the listless orchestra also tapped ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 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 of memory. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... optics, and 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 light stimulates ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... other. In this manner of expression, we follow exactly the principles on which we started, and suit our language to our ideas and habits of thinking. By the law of optics things are reflected upon the retina of the eye inversely, that is, upside down; but they are always seen in a proper relation to each other, and if there is any thing wrong in the case, it is overcome by early habit; and so our language accords with things as they are manifested ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... instant she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image—which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a toque, set upon a loosely-fastened mass of black hair; a ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... of the very best things the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music. There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly due to the sense of locomotion, the rhythm; so that sound, to become ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... 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 to himself. We have not yet learned ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... system of blood vessels on to a white screen merely by turning a strong light sideways into my eye. And the explanation of it was quite simple. The retinal vessels stand out slightly in relief, and thus a perfect shadow of the system is cast on the retina. It was this shadow I saw, and the white screen was merely a convenient background for it. I don't know ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... to stare long enough at it to get the image of some distinct object imprinted upon your retina, then you need but stare again at some space of indistinct colouring and you will see the impression of your distinct object reprinted a ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... point with the centre of our eye we are most sensitive 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 ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... I mean to say—how are they going to be held fast by the optic apparatus? The lens, you understand. I want to be able to shove them into a sketch-book, like you fellows. Well, how? That's what I want to know. How to turn my retina into a canvas." ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... chamber began to grow light, like very early morning. He could see nothing, but the retina of his eyes was affected. He fancied that he heard music, but while he was listening for it, it stopped. The light grew stronger, the air grew warmer; he heard the confused sound ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... saw it not. At least it made no sensible impression on him. His mental retina was capable of receiving only two pictures: the concentrated accumulation of past sin—the terrible anticipation of future retribution. Between these two, present danger and suffering ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 vision" in man—"each eye supplements its fellow by turns, instead of acting as a continuously ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... 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 ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... who remember something of the radiance of the young day even in the heart of midnight. These disprove the postulates of sameness and satiety, these are not smitten by the seen fact as are you of the microscopic retina, these "see life ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... and I have never been in one since, and yet so inexplicable a thing is memory, the picture stands before me now clear as if it were painted and tangible. So many millions of pictures have come and gone upon the retina, and yet I can single out this one in an instant, and take it down as you would a book from a shelf. The millions of coloured etchings that have fixed themselves there in the course of those years ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... circulatory process which, in its spasms of activity, gives rise to spots, produces in its regular course the singular "marbled" appearance, for the recording of which we are no longer at the mercy of the fugitive or delusive impressions of the human retina. And precisely this circulatory process it is which gives to our great luminary its permance as a sun, or warming ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... perceived, and the close attention consequently necessary causes both the eyes and the brain to tire. Most persons quickly find this out themselves, and the tendency is rather to hold the book too near, for the nearer the object to the eye, the larger its picture upon the retina, or back eye wall. But here we encounter another danger. The nearer the object the eyes are concentrated upon, the greater the muscular effort necessary; so that by holding the book too near, the labor of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... second, myopia, or progressive 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 held in check, and any considerable increase prevented. Teachers are usually the first ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... by supposing all the nerves of involuntary motion which supply that tract with vitality, suddenly to be gifted with the exquisite sensitiveness to their own processes which is produced by its correlative object in some organ of special sense—the whole organism assimilating itself to a retina or a finger-tip. Sleep now disappeared. This initiated an entire month during which the patient had not one moment of even ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of objects in motion, a picture truly drawn, truly coloured, and which is either very large to correct the divergence of light and convergence of visual axes, or if small, as viewed through a glass, would affect the retina exactly as the realities. But the desideratum still remained of being able to paint motion. Now this too has been recently accomplished, and in many cases with singular felicity, by making the picture transparent, and throwing lights and shadows upon it from behind. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... his pipe, and turned to meet her gaze. Then, he realized that never in his life had he looked into human eyes that in cruelty, keenness, and suspicion equaled these. That glare went through the retina, into the brain, and down, down to the hidden and undiscoverable recess of the soul, plumbing, searching, proving. He began to feel as though he were looking at a dazzling light... Suddenly, the light was turned off, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... the air ahead of us was filled with 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
... art[49] to manipulate a camel's hair pencil, than to manipulate a china tray and a glass vial. It is no more art to lay on color delicately, than to lay on acid delicately. It is no more art to use the cornea and retina for the reception of an image, than to use a lens and a piece of silvered paper. But the moment that inner part of the man, or rather that entire and only being of the man, of which cornea and retina, fingers and hands, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... to the old man that night, and even long after his eyes were closed, the silver things seemed arrayed in line upon his mental retina. And when, after a long while, he fell into a troubled slumber, it was only to dream. And in his dream old Judge Robinson's mother-in-law seemed to come and stand before him—black dress, side curls, and all—and when he looked at her for the first time in his life ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... 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 inherent to the successful accomplishment of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... in one comprehensive glance that he had seen this, and it seemed still to be passing panorama-like across the retina of his eyes, when the faint flame died out and he dropped upon his knees ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... five little grimy-faced boys on the bench before him, showing wide unblinking eyes turned up in coldly rational interrogative stares, with a figuratively bulging she-bear in the retina of each, and it ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... 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 notes of the proceedings, the orderly who kept ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... she will. She certainly ought to if she has the desire; and she has time enough yet if the right man only thinks so. It is rather on the system I am pondering than on the individual, though the vision of Josie at thirty unwedded, and a little hard and worn, haunts my retina and makes me feel philosophical. Away down in the bottom of my boots or my soul, or wherever a man can most safely harbor a secret reflection, has long lain a feeling of wonder that the world continues to put its daintiest, most cherished, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... miles from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there are. When you find furthermore that some stars are so far distant that the light you are now receiving on your retina started from them centuries ago, you say to yourself: "Well, what's the use? If we are such atoms and so unimportant in the ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... have been a sermon-copyist, busy only towards Sunday. He may have been a loafer pure and simple. I say I don't know; but he was a landmark of the place, idiosyncratic enough to be stamped indelibly on at any rate one retina. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... arrangement so far described depicts things on the retina the unaccustomed way up. By using a concave glass instead of a convex, and placing it so as to prevent any image being formed, except on the retina ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... me in my description if you will endeavour to draw the following landscape on the retina of ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... from 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 ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and black boxes plied on the floor by his table—the desk, hat-case, umbrella, coats, rugs, and mufflers, all ready for a journey—reached my brain and suggested thought. The mise en scene had remained in every detail fixed upon my retina; and how I wondered—'When is he going—how soon? Is he going to carry me away and place me ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... anxiety amongst my companions. I shall have to mention several other instances of the wonderful quickness and accuracy with which Brown as well as Charley were able to recognize localities which they had previously seen. The impressions on their retina seem to be naturally more intense than on that of the European; and their recollections are remarkably exact, even to the most minute details. Trees peculiarly formed or grouped, broken branches, slight clevations of the ground—in fact, a hundred things, which ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... indeed, by using platinum wires on the receiver connected with the negative pole, by the incandescence of these wires according to the different degrees of electricity we can obtain a picture, of a fugitive kind, it is true, but yet so vivid that the impression on the retina does not fade during the relatively very brief space of time the slide occupies in traveling over all the contacts. A Ruhmkorff coil may also be employed for obtaining sparks in proportion to the current emitted. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various |
