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






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spectrum" Quotes from Famous Books



... that it was possible that the device might be capable of radiation effects outside of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that the power device was capable of integration into standard equipment—in fact, might be well worth adoption. He carefully declined, however, to give any definite opinion without an actual model to run tests on. And he added the comment ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole

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

... refractive property of a light-beam when passing through a medium denser than atmospheric air. It will be quite sufficient to say that all the rays are not equal in refractive power in all substances, so that the middle of the spectrum is generally selected as ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin

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

... Philadelphia, made some experiments to determine whether or not rays of sunlight passing through colored glass had any therapeutic effect on animals and plants. His selection of blue glass as a medium was probably based upon the theory that the blue ray of the solar spectrum possesses superior actinic or ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... the difference one of degree merely. The rainbow, as we see it, consists of seven colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But though the red and violet are the limits of the visible spectrum, they are not the limits of the spectrum itself, there are rays, though invisible to us, beyond the red at the one end, and beyond the violet at the other: the existence of the ultra red can be demonstrated by the thermometer; while ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... to red at the crimped edge. It gave a false warmth to the spaces of the room above the level of the mantelpiece, and Ed's figure, as he turned the regulator, looked from the waist upwards as if he stood within that portion of a spectrum screen that deepens to the band of red. The bright concentric circles that spread in rings of red on the ceiling were more dimly reduplicated in the old mirror over the mantelpiece; and the wintry eastern light beyond the chimney-hoods ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

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

... on the top of the ancient castle of Montlhery, I was conducting an experiment in optics by means of electrical communications with two assistants at Paris and Juvisy. I was trying to find out if the rays of different colours in the spectrum travel at the same rate. It was just on midnight before I brought the experiment to a successful conclusion. As I covered up my instruments, some one said, "You would not have brought that off, Camille, if it had not been for me. I gave you ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... the nineteenth century we have to record: railroads, steam navigation, the telegraph, the telephone, friction matches, gas lighting, electrical lighting, photography, the phonograph, electrical transmission of power, Roentgen rays, spectrum analysis, anaesthetics, antiseptic surgery, the airplane, gasoline-engine, transmission of news by radio, and transportation by automobile. Also we shall find in the nineteenth century thirteen important theoretical discoveries ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

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

... she was using as a guide was not new to her; it was only illuminating and corroborative. It was spectrum analysis where she had seen a star. It was the kingdom of heaven reduced from a noble phrase to such terms of simple, kindly living as she knew herself able to fulfil. It was the ideal become practical, and the present rendered one with the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

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

... indeed to describe the appearance of a loose atomic vortex to those who have never seen one; and, fortunately, most people never have. And practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it had an average effective surface temperature of about fifteen thousand degrees absolute—two and one-half times as hot as the sun of Tellus—and that ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith

... of reservoirs, at the other end of the spectrum are the comparatively small headwater dams that the Soil Conservation Service has been designing and supervising for three decades in authorized watersheds throughout the country. These structures can serve several ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... the red flush ran the spectrum gamut of the yellows and oranges and greens and blues and purples to the solitary star above the opaline peak, he had wanted to wait and see—what? He did not know. It had always seemed, if he watched, the primrose veil would lift and release some phantom with ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... other well-known elements, with the prospect of such a transformation of the elements being quite the normal thing throughout nature, the very earth seemed to be slipping away from under our feet. Some of the closely related discoveries, such as the fact that the X-rays show a spectrum susceptible of examination, were not so disconcerting in themselves; but the marvellous pictures of the structure of the atom elicited by these discoveries made many good people almost question whether our venerable experimenters ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... to the challenge of change will determine our ability to shape the future and defend ourselves against 21st century threats. The major issue, however it may be manifested, involves the degree of change that is required. Advocates, all along the spectrum from a military technical revolution to a revolution in military affairs to a revolution in security affairs, are making their cases. Military institutions are by their very nature somewhat conservative. History has shown that success has often sown the seeds of future failure. ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade

... fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail—such as he never imagined; while Abelard can respond with his true rejoinder, fatal in a different sense. For the chief analogy, the notes of music would serve, or the colours of the solar spectrum, or an energy, such as gravity—but the best is geometrical, because Euclid was as scholastic as William of Champeaux himself, and his axioms are even more familiar to the schoolboy of the twentieth, than to the schoolman of the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

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

... and the Source is one; the channels of communication alone are different. But truth in its finality, the Absolute, the noumenon that is the substance of phenomena, is in itself not a thing that can be directly apprehended by man; it lies within the "ultra-violet" rays of his intellectual spectrum. "The trammels of the body prevent man from knowing God in Himself" says Philo, "He is known only in the Divine forces in which He manifests Himself." And St. Thomas: "In the present state of life in which the soul is united to a passable body, it is impossible ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

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

... existence of such a word in a language argues an acute sense of style, of the manner of doing things. Like all words of real import its meaning is a gamut, a section of a spectrum rather than something fixed and irrevocable. The first implication seems to be "according to Hoyle," following tradition: a neatly turned phrase, an essentially Castilian cadence, is castizo; a piece of pastry ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... purpose, in which case no translucent media would have been required, and yet vision might have been just as perfect? The fact that the eyes of insects and molluscs are transparent to us shows that the very same limited portion of the rays of the spectrum is utilised for vision ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... remained, although their cause was unknown until Newton carried out his experiments on dispersion and the solar spectrum. To overcome the spherical aberration James Gregory,[2] of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, in 1663, in his Optica Promota, proposed a reflecting speculum of parabolic form. But it was Newton, about 1666, who first ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

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

... pressure) is examined by the spectroscope, it yields a few vertical lines or bars of light on a dark background; when a glowing liquid or solid is examined, it gives a continuous rainbow-like stretch of colour. Some of the nebulae give the former type of spectrum, and are thus known to be masses of luminous gas; many of the nebulae and the stars have the latter type of spectrum. But the stretch of light in the spectrum of a star is crossed, vertically, by a number of dark lines, and experiment in the laboratory has taught us how to interpret these. ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... modifications of sensibility are of no practical significance, being almost instantly corrected. Other modifications are more permanent. It was found by Himly that when the retina is overexcitable every stimulus is raised in the spectrum scale of colours. Thus, violet becomes red. An exactly opposite effect is observed when the retina is torpid.[35] Certain poisons are known to affect the quality of the colour-impression. Thus, santonin, when taken in any quantity, makes all colourless objects look yellow. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

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

... that!" exclaimed Larry. I followed his pointing finger. On the face of the shining wall, stretched between two colossal columns, hung an incredible veil; prismatic, gleaming with all the colours of the spectrum. It was like a web of rainbows woven by the fingers of the daughters of the Jinn. In front of it and a little at each side was a semi-circular pier, or, better, a plaza of what appeared to be glistening, pale-yellow ivory. At each end of its half-circle clustered a few low-walled, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... black as a middle vein of Massilon coal. Perhaps that is why they met in the desert and the spirit compassionately caught Philip away. The purest church and the purest ray of sunshine are alike—they absorb the seven colors of the spectrum. When the Creator flung the rainbow like a silken scarf over the shoulder of the summer cloud, he drew his color-line. Pentecostal blessings fell at Jerusalem, and have fallen ever since on the ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various

... one: they were not dramatizing the idea in hand. They were not creating a furor with pink and lavender haystacks. They were satisfied that there was still something to be found in the old arrangement of negative and positive tones as they were understood before the application of the spectrum turned the brains and sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet survived while the Barbizonians perished. There was an undeniable realization of fact still there, clamoring for consideration. There was the reality then even as now, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

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

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

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

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

... Specialist specialisto. Speciality specialo—eco. Specie monero. Species speco. Specimen modelo. Specious versxajna. Speck makuleto. Spectacle (a sight) vidajxo. Spectacles okulvitroj. Spectator rigardanto. Spectre fantomo. Spectrum spektro. Speculate spekulacii. Speculation spekulacio. Speculative spekulativa. Speculate (theorise) teoriigi. Speculative (theoretic) teoria. Speculum spegulo. Speech parolado. Speechless ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... thought the Story Girl was making fun of us. But I believe she really had a strange gift of thinking in colours. In later years, when we were grown up, she told me of it again. She said that everything had colour in her thought; the months of the year ran through all the tints of the spectrum, the days of the week were arrayed as Solomon in his glory, morning was golden, noon orange, evening crystal blue, and night violet. Every idea came to her mind robed in its own especial hue. Perhaps that was why her voice and words had such a charm, conveying to the listeners' ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... soul, that had known neither life nor sorrow nor conscious happiness, and was without effort as a lily of the field. It may be that the wisdom of babyhood and the wisdom of age will look very alike to us when we have the wisdom of eternity. And as all the colors of the spectrum make sunlight, so all his splendid powers that patient years had made perfect shone through the Bishop's character in the white light of simplicity. No one knew what they talked about, the child and the man, on the long ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

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

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

... in the spirit of a Jean Paul, playing between rough fun and sadness in a fine spectrum of moods. The lighter motive dances harmlessly about the more serious, intimate second phrase. There is almost the sense of lullaby before the sudden plunge to wildest chaos, the only portent being a constant trembling of low strings. All Bedlam is let loose, where the rogue's shriek is heard through ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... Lateran church in [1209]Rome, the popes' deaths are foretold by Sylvester's tomb. Near Rupes Nova in Finland, in the kingdom of Sweden, there is a lake, in which, before the governor of the castle dies, a spectrum, in the habit of Arion with his harp, appears, and makes excellent music, like those blocks in Cheshire, which (they say) presage death to the master of the family; or that [1210]oak in Lanthadran park in Cornwall, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

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

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

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

... magnetic storms, which so much affect our telegraph instruments, although the latter may occur when there is no visible aurora. An artificial aurora was produced by electrical means by Professor Lindstroem, in 67 deg. north latitude, which was found to exhibit the spectrum of the true aurora. You will find all information respecting the "Zodiacal light" in "Guillemin ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various

... refraction from and through drops of water—colours vary with size of drops, the smaller the drop the lighter the colours and nearer to the violet end of the spectrum—hence white rainbow as seen on ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... is the impression conveyed to the eye by its general contour. It will have size or measure, which will be its actual or relative area. It will further have tone or color, its general relation in appearance to black and white or to the colors of the spectrum. Embodying these terms in an example: We may specify a mass square in shape, having an area of four square inches, and being gray in tone. These three characteristics, then, will ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage

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

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

... horizon. The old cathedral, a dominant structure, has been quite a little patched up in recent years, and shows the patches. The houses, big and little, are still painted in nearly all the shades of the spectrum. But there is a seeming change, doubtless psychological rather than physical. One sees, in imagination, Cervera's squadron "bottled up" in the beautiful harbor, while Sampson's ships lie outside waiting for it to come out. It is difficult to ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... of numerous dark lines, constant in their number and position in the various regions of the solar spectrum, was made out by Fraunhofer in the early part of the present century, but more than forty years elapsed before their causes were ascertained and their importance recognised. Spectroscopy, which then ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... the distant clouds—dawn-jewels laid upon the breast of Night. Violet and blue mellowed into opal and turquoise, then, as the spectrum may merge into white light, a shaft of sunrise broke from the mysterious East, sending a javelin of ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... zoologist, President D. Starr Jordan: "It is, of course, true that the life-history of the individual is an epitome of the life-history of the race"; while a distinguished German zoologist (Sarasin) has described it as being of the same use to the biologist as spectrum ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... he grunted, "that there's different sorts of the wave-type those guys want us to broadcast. Like there's a spectrum of visible light. If we were color-blind and yellow'd bust things, they'd transmit in red that we could see, and they'd tell us to broadcast something in yellow that'd wipe us out. And we wouldn't have sense enough not to broadcast the yellow, because we wouldn't know the ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... was that there was no single color I could recognize! The eyes of van Manderpootz, or perhaps his brain, interpreted color in a fashion utterly alien to the way in which my own functioned, and the resultant spectrum was so bizarre that there is simply no way of describing any single tint in words. To say, as I did to the professor, that his conception of red looked to me like a shade between purple and green conveys absolutely no meaning, and the only way a third person could appreciate the meaning would be ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

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

... which God's agency is declared and His ownership asserted. 'I do set My bow.' Neither Noah nor the writer knew anything about refraction or the prismatic spectrum. But perhaps they knew more about the rainbow than people do who know all about how it comes, except that God sets it in the cloud, and that it is His. Let us have the facts which science labels as such, by all means, and the more the better; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... Newton discovered that the prismatic spectrum was composed of seven colours in the following proportions, violet 80, indigo 40, blue 60, green 60, yellow 48, orange 27, red 45. If all these colours be painted on a circular card in the proportions above mentioned, and the card be rapidly whirled on its center, they ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... divided. The sections, however, lay all in place; so the trunks of the trees were as they had fallen. About the ground were scattered fragments of rock of all sizes, like lava, but of all the colours of the giddiest parrots. The tiniest piece had at least all the tints of the spectrum; and the biggest seemed to go the littlest several better. They looked to me like beautiful jewels. Bill cast ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... in towns at each edge of the shadow-path to note the short duration of totality. The object was to determine the exact point to which the shadow extended. At this same eclipse Professor Harkness shared with Professor Young of Princeton the honor of discovering the brightest line in the spectrum of the sun's corona. The year following parties were sent to the Mediterranean to observe an eclipse which occurred in December, 1870. I went to Gibraltar, although the observation of the eclipse was to me only a minor object. Some incidents connected with this European trip will ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... of them is not necessary to our well-being. "Our eye takes in only an octave of the vibrations we call light," because no more is necessary for our action or our dealing with things. The invisible rays of the spectrum are potent, but they are beyond the ken of our senses. There are sounds or sound vibrations that we do not hear; our sense of touch cannot recognize a gossamer, or ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

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

... by making some simple and obvious reflections. Let us consider three statements, (i) 'Yesterday a man was run over on the Chelsea Embankment,' (ii) 'Cleopatra's Needle is on the Charing Cross Embankment,' and (iii) 'There are dark lines in the Solar Spectrum.' The first statement about the accident to the man is about what we may term an 'occurrence,' a 'happening,' or an 'event.' I will use the term 'event' because it is the shortest. In order to specify an observed event, the place, the time, and character of the event are necessary. In ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... in the ornamentation of the travertine, and in the darker shades at the bases of the flag poles. These first three colors, all in tones of green, are regarded as one unit in the spectrum of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

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

... tameni, taixite, and tomoni (cf. 73-73v and 140-148v); the term artigo is used for those particles having the functions of the inflectional endings of Latin; e.g., ga, ye, and ni (cf. 1-2, 78, and 137-140); and the general term particula is used to cover the broad spectrum of particles that include adverbs, conjunctions, and exclamations, as well as those otherwise unaccounted for elements which end phrases, clauses, and sentences; e.g., no, nite, and ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado

... divine, as she innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind the blue narcotic haze was potentially the "tragic mischief" of her drama—one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life. She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... Springs, in the neighborhood of Winchester, lie thirty or forty miles to the south; and beneath those are imbedded the White, Black, Yellow, and we know not how many other colors in the general spectrum of Sulphurs. It would perhaps be our duty to indicate more exactly the Bethesdas of this vast natural sanitarium, to which our present course gives us the key, but that task has already been performed, in a complete and very attractive manner, by Mr. Edward A. Pollard in his little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading itself with prodigality over the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... bodies, and revealed the fundamental fact that terrestrial matter is not peculiar to the solar system, but is common to all the stars which are visible to us. Professor Rowland had since shown us that if the whole earth were heated to the temperature of the sun, its spectrum would resemble very closely the solar spectrum. In the nebulae, the elder Herschel saw portions of the fiery mist or "shining fluid," out of which the heavens and the earth had been slowly fashioned. For a time this view of the nebulae ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... the solitary and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own: the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... upon those human organs which are only attuned to coarser stimuli. It is a fair subject for speculation, whether a fuller knowledge of those light rays which we know to exist on either side of the spectrum, or of those sounds which we can prove by the vibrations of a diaphragm to exist, although they are too high for mortal ear, may not bring us some further psychical knowledge. Setting that aside, however, let us follow the fortunes of the departing spirit. He is presently aware that there ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle

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

... gentleman in a pince nez who said the room was full of people I could not see, but who were perfectly distinct to him. He claimed, and I certainly could not refute him, that he saw further into the violet of the spectrum than the rest of us, and seemed to consider it nothing unusual when an elderly woman, whose description sounded much like my great-grand-mother, came ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... other end of the spectrum, the Special Programs Unit worked for the efficient use of black Class A school graduates by renewing the attack on improper assignments. The bureau had long held that the proper assignment of black specialists was of fundamental importance ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... and therefore there are arts, each addressed to some particular faculty or group of faculties, and each expressing some particular quality or group of qualities of the Self. The white light of Truth is thus broken up into a rainbow-tinted spectrum of Beauty, in which the various arts are colors, each distinct, yet merging one into another—poetry into music; painting into decoration; decoration becoming sculpture; ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon

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

... careful analysis of the daily appearance of the Sun, it has been satisfactorily settled that it is completely enveloped in gas. By the application of the literary spectrum, it is also shown that this gaseous vaporization is the result of brass in a high state of incandescence, while the indications of alkalies, and, in fact, all kinds of lies, are no ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various

... contact, &c., and on his observations was founded a noteworthy contribution to geological theory. But the most far-reaching of his achievements was the elaboration, about 1859, jointly with G.R. Kirchhoff, of spectrum analysis, which has put a new weapon of extraordinary power into the hands both of chemists and astronomers. It led Bunsen himself almost immediately to the isolation of two new elements of the alkali group, caesium and rubidium. Having noticed some unknown lines ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... shifting of Fraunhofer's lines of the spectrum point, in my opinion, to a widespread cosmic change of a subtle and singular character. Light from a planet is the reflected light of the sun. Light from a star is a self-produced light. But the spectra both from planets and stars have, in this instance, all undergone the same change. ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... England,' 1842, p. 124. The two sexes of OE. pellucidus of Europe differ, as I hear from Victor Carus, in nearly the same manner.) is described as being as white as ivory, whilst the female varies from almost white to greenish-yellow or dusky. Mr. Walsh informs me that the adult male of Spectrum femoratum (one of the Phasmidae) "is of a shining brownish-yellow colour; the adult female being of a dull, opaque, cinereous brown; the young of both sexes being green." Lastly, I may mention that the male ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo to fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though in the fresco of the vision of Zacharias there are seventeen different reds in large masses, and not a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no color of the spectrum, as there is no note of music, whose key and prevalence may not be made pure in expression, and elevating in influence, by a great and good painter, or degraded to unhallowed purpose ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... together in a disorderly but compact pile in the center of the reading room: we could say little concerning the contents and characteristics of that library; whether it is strong in certain fields of human endeavor, or weak in other fields. The spectrum of a star is as the same library when the books are arranged on the shelves in complete perfection and simplicity, so that he who looks may appraise its contents at any or all points. Let us consider the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... occasional way, as storms follow each other on the earth. What is it? Every attempt to detect it has been in vain. Professor Hale, at the Yerkes Observatory, has had in operation from time to time, for several years, his ingenious spectroheliograph, which photographs the sun by a single ray of the spectrum. This instrument shows that violent actions are going on in the sun, which ordinary observation would never lead us to suspect. But it has failed to show with certainty any peculiar emanation at the time of a magnetic storm or anything connected ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... Its Production. Light, Colour, Dispersion of White Light Methods of Producing the Spectrum, Glass Prism and Diffraction Grating Spectroscopes, The Spectrum, Wave Motion of Light, Recomposition of White Light, Hue, Luminosity, Purity of Colours, The Polariscope, Phosphorescence, Fluorescence, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech

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

... birdmen played such a part in the world war these scientists were correct in giving the flying machine a place among the wonders of the modern world. The fourth place was given to Radium, the fifth to Antiseptics and Antitoxines, the sixth to Spectrum Analysis, and the seventh to the marvelous X-Ray. Had eight subjects been called for the Panama Canal would have had a place, for it lacked but eleven votes of tie for seventh place. It can, therefore, be called the eighth wonder of the ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

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

... radiance struck and ricocheted from its screens, which were swiftly mounting through the spectrum as more and more power was thrown against ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... search and rescue, first aid, and general lifesaving actions. The current level of public preparation for this critical phase of response can be described as only minimal. Much of the current state of preparedness arises from past programs aimed at a wide spectrum of emergencies, particularly civil defense against nuclear attack. New or strengthened programs are needed to enhance ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various

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

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

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

... evidence, and cannot be accepted as final. I feel quite confident that sooner or later a means will be found of definitely proving the presence of water vapour upon Mars by the aid of the usual lines in the spectrum. There are too many evidences of its presence, such as clouds, hoarfrost, snow, and seasonal changes in vegetation, to warrant the rejection of the idea of its existence merely because it has not been detected by the particular means hitherto ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... suddenly extinguished, leaving his atmosphere in its present intensely heated condition, the light of the faint sun which would thus be left us would give (under spectroscopic scrutiny) those very rays which now seem wanting. There would be a spectrum of multitudinous bright lines, instead of a rainbow-tinted spectrum crossed by multitudinous dark lines. It is, indeed, only by contrast that the dark lines appear dark, just as it is only by contrast that the solar spots seem dark. Not only the penumbra but ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... already presuppose, from the Cartesian point of view, certain aggregations of the primitive particles of matter. Descartes regards matter as uniform in character throughout the universe; he anticipates, as it were, from his own transcendental ground, the revelations of spectrum analysis as applied to the sun and stars. We have then to think of a full universe of matter (and matter extension) divided and figured with endless variety, and set (and kept) in motion by God; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... vision, the human aura is seen to be composed of all the colors of the spectrum, the combinations of colors differing in various persons, and constantly shifting in the case of every person. These colors reflect the mental (particularly the emotional) states of the person in whose aura they are manifested. Each mental state has its own particular combination ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi

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

... stone and the moon, of Galvani on the convulsive movements of frogs' legs in contact with iron and copper, of Darwin on the adaptation of woodpeckers, of tree-frogs, and of seeds to their surroundings, of Kirchhoff on certain lines which occur in the spectrum of sunlight, of other investigators on the life-history of bacteria—these and kindred observations have not only revolutionized our conception of the universe, but they have revolutionized or are revolutionizing, our practical life, our means of transit, our ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

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

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

... God." This testimony is remarkable, coming from that source, for it corroborates and reiterates the Yogi teachings of the Indwelling Spirit Schofield has written: "Our conscious mind as compared with the unconscious mind, has been likened to the visible spectrum of the sun's rays, as compared to the invisible part which stretches indefinitely on either side. We know now that the chief part of heat comes from the ultra-red rays that show no light; and the main part of the chemical changes in the vegetable ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

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

... magnitude. The star exists in the same spot to this day, and it is of the same magnitude as it was prior to its spasmodic outburst in 1866. This was the first new star which was spectroscopically examined. We shall give in Chapter XXIII. a short account of the features of its spectrum. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

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

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

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

... beautiful and delicate instrument, consisting, essentially, of a prism of glass, which, decomposing the light of any heavenly body to which the instrument is directed, presents a spectrum, or long bar of color. Crossing this are narrow, dark and bright lines produced by the gases of metals in combustion, whereby the celestial orb's light is generated. From these dark and bright lines, therefore, we ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... Knowledge is a prose poem, a hymn of the finest utterance and fancy—the white light of science diffracted through the crystalline prism of his mind into the colored glories of the spectrum; truth dressed in the iridescent hues of the rainbow, and not the less but all the more true. His other papers in the British Quarterly, the North British Review, and his last gem on "Paper, Pens, and Ink," in his valued and generous friend Macmillan's first number of his Magazine, are ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... of trees on a bright day, has violet or lilac tones." This only means that these things have been scientifically determined, not that the naked eye ever perceives them, and it is for the natural, unscientific eye that art exists. None of us see the separate colours of the spectrum, as we look about in every-day fashion upon ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon

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

... much it may he urged that a deductive argument, besides being an incomplete syllogistic form, may often be in conflict with fact; that their major propositions may not always be correct, although the predicates of their conclusions seem correctly drawn—spectrum analysis will not be acknowledged as inferior to purely spiritual research. Nor, before developing his sixth sense, will the man of science concede the error of his theories as to the solar spectrum, unless he abjure, to some degree at least, his ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various



Words linked to "Spectrum" :   emission spectrum, radio spectrum, line spectrum, spectrum analysis, atomic spectrum, action spectrum, acoustic spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum, scope, sound spectrum, array, visible spectrum, range



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