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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



... 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 of one curious kind of cricket (48. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... with the invention of fire and the metals?' Hipparchus ranks with the Keplers and Newtons; and Copernicus was but the champion of Pythagoras. To say nothing of the characteristic assumption that somebody 'discovered' language and fire in the same sense as modern chemists discovered spectrum analysis, the argument is substantially that, because Hipparchus was as great a genius as Newton, the views of the ancients upon religious or historical questions deserve just as much respect as those of the moderns. In other words, the accumulated ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... tell the nature of a substance that is burning by splitting up the light which comes from it in the prism of a spectroscope. Well, these bright lines of different colours are the spectrum of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... gas emits luminous rays of the same refrangibility as those which it can absorb. This statement, as Sir E. Sabine remarked when awarding him the Rumford medal of the Royal Society in 1872, contains a fundamental principle of spectrum analysis, and though for a number of years it was overlooked it entitles him to rank as one of the founders of spectroscopy. From 1861 onwards he paid special attention to the solar spectrum. He announced the existence of hydrogen, among ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... 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 the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... 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 hearing; and the bells to which Cecilia ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... As in the solar spectrum, so in love: beyond and intermingled with the visible rays of passion are numerous actinic but invisible rays of affection, invisible to careless spectators, but known and felt by the recipients. These, too, must be introduced if the connubial domicile ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain

... may be later in the season, well into December. The days are equally bright, but a little more rugged. The mornings are ushered in by an immense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A broad bar of red and orange lies along the low horizon, surmounted by an expanse of color in which green struggles with yellow and blue with green half the way to ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... sure of it?" asked Frederick. "Don't you think it is strange that alongside the greatest achievements of science, alongside Galileo, Kepler, Laplace; alongside the spectrum analysis and the law of the conservation of energy; alongside Kirchoff and Bunsen; alongside steam, gas, electricity, the blindest and most antiquated superstitions still survive, powerful as ever? I am not so certain ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... the spectrum four secondary colors: orange, green, indigo, and violet. The secondary colors are alternate with the primary in the spectrum, and are formed by a mixture of the two primary nearest them—as orange, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... standard 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 any of ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... inconvenient in practice. Place the front carrying the spectroscope in situ in the camera, and rack the latter out to its full extent; point the camera toward a bright sky, or the sun itself, if you can, while you endeavor to get a good focus. The spectrum will be seen on the ground glass, probably equal in dimensions to that of a quarter plate. Proceed to focus by sliding the outer tube to and fro until the colors are quite clear and distinct, and at same time screw down the slit until the Fraunhofer lines ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... 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 took its rise, is probably that employment of physical knowledge, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... productions of Diaz, just as to-day some Diazs are palmed off as Monticellis. After four years of decadence he died, repeating for months before his taking off: "Je viens de la lune." He was one whose brain a lunar ray had penetrated; but this ray was transposed to a spectrum of gorgeous hues. Capable of depicting the rainbow, he died of the opalescence that clouded his glass of absinthe. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... likens to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays. In the psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... 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

... glorious and beneficent of discoveries," retorted Mr. Hoyt. "All life and vigor and power of achievement are dependent upon the red end of the spectrum. Incapacity, failure, disease, death-they are generated by the violet rays alone; eliminate them, and the problem of existence is solved. All hail to thee, O Magnus, and to thy incomparable genius! ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... marvelous growths upon the bottom. I peered into a garden of white and vari-colored flowers of stone, of fans and vases and grotesque shapes, huge sponges and waving bushes and stunted trees. Fish of a score of shapes and of all colors of the spectrum wove in and out the branches and caverns of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... "subliminal self." This theory says that the conscious mind is but an 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

... Green, found 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 nine colors ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... his hand was abundance of cold water to drink and bathe his wound in, and to this he resolved now to drag himself. To crawl across the space that separated him from the pool required all the strength he could summon. The sun was already well up and its rays shot like spectrum arrows through the spray of the dainty cataract, which spurted in a jewelled sheet over a rocky ledge twenty feet above and poured noisily down from the broad pool along ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... speciala. Specialise specialigi. 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 muta. Speed rapido. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... lamps, changing night into day; the invention of matches that made fire the companion of man; the process of making steel, invented by Bessemer, saving for the world hundreds of millions a year; the discovery of anesthetics, changing pain to happy dreams and making surgery a science; the spectrum analysis, that told us the secrets of the suns; the telephone, that transports speech, uniting lips and ears; the phonograph, that holds in dots and marks the echoes of our words; the marvelous machines that spin and weave, that manufacture the countless things ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... Each belligerent government believes itself to be in the right, and publishes a collection of documents which seem to it fitted to prove this right. This literature appearing in all the colours of the spectrum is really aimed at neutrals. For the belligerent nations themselves have weightier matters in hand than to sit in judgment upon their own governments. But the neutrals find themselves to decide which side is right. Yet ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... bell-ringing arrangements, their locks and their clocks. In the field of science to be sure, this fertility in invention will lead to a long list of important and beautiful discoveries: telescopes and the calculus, radiographs, and the spectrum. Discoveries great enough, almost, to make angels of them. But here again their simian-ness will cheat them of half of their dues, for they will neglect great discoveries of the truest importance, and honor extravagantly those of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.

... 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

... with the beginning color of the visible spectrum, red, and consider how a close study of shades of red can help in distinguishing the various red stones from each other. In the first place we will inquire what mineral species are likely to furnish us with red stones. Omitting a number of rare minerals, we ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... four pairs of trousers, light blue, dark blue, gray and black, with wide cuffs at the bottoms. There were six or eight shirts, their colors running the entire spectrum in the most violent shades. There were a couple of vests. There were two pairs of short boots with high heels and fancy leather-working, and a couple of hats with ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... moving in the wind, the edge of firs against the sky, occupied and bound his faculties. He was pure unity, a spirit wholly abstracted. A single mood filled him, to which all the objects of sense contributed, as the colours of the spectrum merge and disappear ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in this domain of science was Sir William Herschel. Causing a beam of solar light to pass through a prism, he resolved it into its coloured constituents; he formed what is technically called the solar spectrum. Exposing thermometers to the successive colours he determined their heating power, and found it to augment from the violet or most refracted end, to the red or least refracted end of the spectrum. But he did ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... put much faith in it. "Such a one is a worthless idol; not excellent, only sham-excellent:" here, on this negative side especially, you often had to admire how right he was;—often, but not quite always. And he would maintain, with endless ingenuity, confidence and persistence, his fallacious spectrum to be a real image. However, it was sure to come all right in the end. Whatever real excellence he might misknow, you had but to let it stand before him, soliciting new examination from him: none surer than he to recognize it at last, and to pay it all his dues, with the arrears and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... 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

... Chromatic Aberration.—Chromatic aberration gives rise to a coloured fringe around the edges of objects due to the fact that the different-coloured rays of the spectrum possess varying refrangibilities and that a simple lens acts toward ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... wise and old as he was, the spectrum of the philosopher's soul had all the colors of the ignorant and the young. I looked from the nymphs of the pool to his darkening eyes, and I had a revelation of the persistence of common humanity in the most learned and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... cites as credible: 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, though in the popular superstition it is held ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... I have submitted meteoric stones to spectrum analysis, with the result that I have found carbon, that, is to say, a clear trace of organic life. What ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg

... more especially Pfeffer, have shown that the yellow rays of the solar spectrum are the most potent ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... enthusiasm, 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 to what ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... 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

... convenient epochs and formations of the geologist, though having a certain distinctness, would fade into one another with limits as undefinable as those of the distinct and yet separable colours of the solar spectrum. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... of it was done at night. The color tones, you know"—and his manner changed, and a more thoughtful expression came into his face—the scientist was speaking now—"are most difficult to manage at night. The colors of the spectrum undergo some very curious changes under artificial light, especially from a gas consuming as much carbon as our common carburetted hydrogen. The greens, owing to the absorption of the yellow rays, become the brighter, and the orange and red tones, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... object, alike from the results of its powers of refraction, as also from the form into which its carbon has been crystallised. How Nature, in her wonderful laboratory, has precipitated the diamond, with its wonderful powers of spectrum analysis, we cannot say with certainty. Certain chemists have, at a great expense, produced crystals which, in every respect, stand the tests of true diamonds; but the process of their production at a great expense has in no way diminished the value ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... in Spectrum Analysis. By J. Norman Lockyer, F.R.S. With six photographic Illustrations of Spectra, and numerous engravings on Wood. Third ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... of the table. Next he placed the wad of paper on the plate. Then, standing at arm's length from the apparatus, he pressed a button. Instantly the paper disappeared behind a screen of the colors of the spectrum, from red to violet. The banded colors were there for a minute fraction of a second. Then there was nothing where the paper had been on the plate. Von Stein smiled as he stepped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant. Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... His own,' in the 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, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... 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

... red—Altair, Spica, Castor, Regulus, Rigel, all the stars of Ursa Major with the exception of one, and Vega—a glittering gem of pale sapphire, almost colourless. The light emitted by stars of this class gives a continuous spectrum, the predominating element being hydrogen, having a very elevated temperature and under relatively high pressure. The vapours of iron, sodium, magnesium, and other metals, are indicated as ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... of the lull to accomplish certain changes for the better, which in ordinary times the prevalent heat of friction makes impossible. The Joint Committee of Twenty-one is confidently believed to contain within itself every shade of color known to belong to the Anglican spectrum; if white light should be found to emerge, three years hence, as a result of the Committee's labors, it will be said, and truly, that never before in our history could such a blending of the rays ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... of the mind to which they were addressed—and not the reasonings only which could be stated, but those which went on darkly in the mind, and which "there was not at the moment strength to bring forth," real and weighty reasons which acted like the obscure rays of the spectrum, with their proper force, yet eluding distinct observation—had their necessary and inevitable and legitimate place in determining belief. All this was perfectly true; but it is obvious how easily it might be taken hold of, on very opposite sides, as a ground for saying that Tractarian ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... ministry; the prismatic law of mediation,—that there is no tint or shade of spiritual being, no angle at which any soul catches the Divine beam, that does not join and melt into the next above and the next below; that the farther apart in the spectrum of humanity the red of passion and the violet of peace, the more place and need for every subdivided ray, to help translate the whole story of the pure, ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... did I share this confidence, that I commenced a calculation as to the time at which we might expect to reach land. Assuming it to have been thirty miles distant at the time when we had seen its spectrum, by means of the refraction, arising from a peculiar state of the atmosphere; and estimating the rate of the current at three miles an hour, I came to the conclusion that we could not even come in sight ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... 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 gave place to that ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... 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, rose-stone structures, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... But it serves the point. Let's go a bit further. The eye picks up certain vibrations. 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

... limned in the wonder of an undecipherable or at least untranslatable geometry, silently roaring, enthroned in the undiscoverable colors beyond the spectrum, swept towards them ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... may The supersubtle effluence, and contrive To follow beam and beam upon their way Hand-breadth by hand-breadth, till sense faint—confessed Frustrate, eluded by unknown unguessed Infinitude of action? Idle quest! Rather ask aid from optics. Sense, descry The spectrum—mind, infer immensity! Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed— Which, in the large, who sees to bless? Not I More than yourself: so, good my friend, keep still Trustful with—me? with thee, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... no eyes or else they lie for the hell of it. They talk about the 'dirty brown' of the flowers, but A W, Ive seen the flowers myself and theyre a vivid glorious purple. Have you noticed the iridescent sparkle when the wind ripples the blades? All the colors of the spectrum against the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... resulting in the phenomena produced. However 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 ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... he to me. "It will take your mind off your impracticable star-gazing and moonshining, and divert your attention into the channels of realism. These premises are so spacious as to admit of your engaging to a considerable extent in agriculture; you can now lay aside the telescope and the spectrum for the spade and the hoe; the field of speculation can be abandoned for this noble acre which I hope soon to see ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... illustrate the connection in extent and quality between the universe and all its agencies and powers—such as Robert von Mayer's discovery of the conservation of force and of the mechanical equivalent of heat, or the spectrum analysis and the information which it gives us by ever-increasing evidences of the identity of the cosmic and telluric substances—we may venture to say that the scientific and intellectual ground was well prepared for a theory which takes the origin of organisms into this common relationship ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... through us, that we know not of, because a knowledge 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 gentler ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... on than dwell on what was before them at the moment. I should be the last to complain of him merely on the ground that he could not escape contradiction in terms: who can? When facts conflict, contradict one another, melt into one another as the colours of the spectrum so insensibly that none can say where one begins and the other ends, contradictions in terms become first fruits of thought and speech. They are the basis of intellectual consciousness, in the same way that a physical obstacle is the basis of physical ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... always accompanied by 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 on ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various

... about what the green fireballs were ran through the usual spectrum of answers, a new type of natural phenomenon, a secret U.S. development, and psychologically enlarged meteors. When the possibility of the green fireballs' being associated with interplanetary vehicles came up, the whole group got serious. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... 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. ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... 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

... other, poets are not very often found under fire, unless it be that of the critics. The temperament which makes men insensible to danger is rarely the gift of those who are so organized as to be sensitive to the more ethereal skyey influences. The violet end of the spectrum and the invisible rays beyond it belong to the poet, farthest from the red, which is the light that shines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... 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 ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... was the heading in the next morning's paper which gave Jim his first intimation of the accident. He had been to Columbia overnight to look up a new publication that contained an article on the hydrogen spectrum. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... 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 a ghostly white, in the midst of which are bright blue spots, and you suddenly ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... and yellow. This compound colour is called the contrasting colour, and is always used sparingly. But the harmonizing colour is said to be the compound made by any one colour itself, along with the next adjoining to it on either side of the spectrum. Thus red will be harmonized by purple, the colour produced by compounding it with blue on the one side of it, and it will also be harmonized by orange, which is the colour produced by compounding it with the yellow, next to it on the other side of the spectrum." In treating "of the effect" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... 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 functions and can furnish for small watershed areas and small ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... Durbeyfield did not 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 of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... produce catalepsy. For instance, besides the fixing of the eye on a bright object, catalepsy may be produced by a sudden sound, as of a Chinese gong, a tom-tom or a whistle, the vibration of a tuning-fork, or thunder. If a solar spectrum is suddenly brought into a dark room it may produce catalepsy, which is also produced by looking at the sun, or a lime light, ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... North. Seeing 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 ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... 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 I ever saw (Trichomanes ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... in various branches of science a few only can be here named. Walter Bagehot writes on Political Society; Alexander Bain on Mind and Body; Henry Maudsley on Brain and Mind; Norman Lockyer on Spectrum Analysis; and Sir John ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... sensational verification, there has been a tendency to overlook the third experimental test to which Einstein's theory was to be subjected. If his theory is correct as it stands, there ought, in a gravitational field, to be a displacement of the lines of the spectrum towards the red. No such effect has been discovered. Spectroscopists maintain that, so far as can be seen at present, there is no way of accounting for this failure if Einstein's theory in its present form is assumed. They admit that some compensating ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz

... 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 at them ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... it has never been an easy undertaking to find acceptable lectures. A course of lectures on astronomy illustrated by stereopticon slides will attract a large audience the first week, who hope to hear of the wonders of the heavens and the relation of our earth thereto, but instead are treated to spectrum analyses of star dust, or the latest theory concerning the milky way. The habit of research and the desire to say the latest word upon any subject often overcomes the sympathetic understanding of his audience which the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... to say—of various lengths. Each wave-length corresponds to a colour of the rainbow. The shortest waves give us a sensation of violet colour, and the largest waves cause a sensation of red. The rainbow, in fact, is a sort of natural spectrum. (The meaning of the rainbow is that the moisture-laden air has sorted out these waves, in the sun's light, according to their length.) Now the simplest form of spectroscope is a glass prism—a triangular-shaped piece of glass. If white light ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... magnet, the solar spectrum forms two series, separated by a neutral point, the blue series and the red one, united by ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... second-hand lyre and a plectrum, Or (since it's the fashion) a mandoline? Con amore I'd sing the new shade of the spectrum— No spook, though it haunts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various

... 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 want the sunlight to catch ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell

... nervous system had been singularly irritated by his disappointment of the night before, felt ready to burst with rage. He was seated at the table between two ladies, who seemed to have exhausted, in their toilettes, every color in the solar spectrum, and whose coquettish instincts were aroused by the proximity of a celebrated writer. But their simperings were all lost; the one for whom they were intended bore himself in a sulky way, which fortunately ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... interesting study of the color terms used by imaginative writers, which is a real contribution to scientific sthetics. The fact that the Greeks did not name green and blue does not, of course, indicate (as Mr. Gladstone and others have alleged) that they could not see the more refrangible rays of the spectrum, but it does show a lack of interest in these colors. Mr. Ellis' statistics are given in the annexed table, the number of times each of the colors is used by the author in selected passages ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various

... you must bear with me if I commence 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 ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... brilliant red in color to me, but it was the 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... 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 ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade

... for a time. 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 the nebula, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... 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 by every traveler. "Evidently," he wrote, "this is that civilization's weak side. There ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... of white light looks so pure and so simple, yet in reality it is composed of differently coloured lights blended together. These are, of course, indistinguishable in the compound beam, but they are separated or disentangled, so to speak, by the action of the prism. The rays at the blue end of the spectrum are more powerfully deflected by the action of the glass than are the rays at the red end. Thus, the rays variously coloured red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, are each conducted to a different part of the screen. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... has been known from the earliest ages. When the sun-bow was set on the background of cloud over the diluvial floods, the living beings of that age saw a spectrum—the glorious spectrum of rain and shine. Wherever the rays of light have been diffracted under given conditions by the agency of water drops, prism of glass or other such transparent medium, and the ray has fallen ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... dry, but at flood tide is more or less drenched through by sea-water, there rises at every step one takes, an exceedingly intense, beautiful, bluish-white flash of light, which in the spectroscope gives a one-coloured labrador-blue spectrum. This beautiful flash of light arises from the snow, before completely dark, when it is touched. The flash lasts only a few moments after the snow is left untouched, and is so intense, that it appears as if a sea ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... 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 action of the sun, and on atmospheric ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... came upon the scene, perfected by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, along lines pointed out by Fraunhofer almost half a century before. That marvellous instrument, by revealing the telltale lines sprinkled across a prismatic spectrum, discloses the chemical nature and physical condition of any substance whose light is submitted to it, telling its story equally well, provided the light be strong enough, whether the luminous substance be near or far—in the same room or at the confines ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... bother with their clothing, seem to wear costumes of rough woven cloth, dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen underclothing, and so achieve a decent comfort in its simplest form. Others outside the Rule of the samurai range the spectrum for colour, and have every variety of texture; the colours attained by the Utopian dyers seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range of stuffs on earth; and the subtle folding of the woollen materials witness that Utopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly sister. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... colors. At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as 'actinic' rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... 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 ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... great horror; but recollecting her 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 ghost to deliver to Atherton, Bishop of Waterford, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... great American 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 analysis is ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... he has lost receptibility to intermediate vibrations in the COLOR spectrum, which has clouded or stultified his visional faculties. The long waves of the Infra-red and the short waves of the Ultra-violet ends of the spectrum are invisible to your Earth people except in rare cases of developed mediumship, though your photograph plates are somewhat ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... mast-head. These occurred opposite to the sun, the 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 ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... the rationale of chemical affinity. From these lofty regions he stoops to his conclusion in the new science of "chromo-therapeutics." He undertakes to define and explain the alleged effects upon mind, soul and body of all the colors of the spectrum. Among these colors he assigns the place of honor to blue, that tint emanating from the frontal portion of the brain in rays visible to certain finely-organized individuals, and being associated with the highest intellectual faculties. Red belongs to the opposite pole ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... days when, with the placid confidence of beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held, every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. Here on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street there were Salvation Army bands and spectrum-shawled old ladies on door-steps and sugary, sticky candy in the grimy hands of shiny-haired children—and the late sun striking down on the sides of the tall tenements. All very rich and racy and savory, like a dish by a provident French ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... examined through a prism, revealed 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 mode of generating ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... 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 ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... 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 world it is the ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... colours of the spectrum they rose and fell; blazing orange, silken, wonderful, translucent blues, and shimmering reds. Below, a broad band of paler hue, like sheet lightning fixed to rigidity, wavered and rippled. All the auroras of the northland ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... Taken as a whole, the stars may be said to be flying about like the molecules in a mass of gas. The discovery of the radial component in the movements of the stars is due to the spectroscope. If a star is approaching, its spectral lines are shifted toward the violet end of the spectrum by an amount depending upon the velocity of approach; if it is receding, the lines are correspondingly shifted toward the red end. Spectroscopic observation, then, combined with micrometric measurements of the cross motion, enables us to detect the real movement of the star in ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... that we cannot have a science of nature which does not regard the spirit of man as a part of nature. But is this all? Do man and nature exhaust the possibilities of being? We cannot answer this question here. But we find suggestions from the spectrum and the spectroscope which may be worth our heeding. The materials with which we have to do in their most brilliant scientific theories seem at first to overwhelm us with their vastness and complexity. The hulks are so enormous, the forces are so mighty, the laws are so wide-sweeping, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... delegated adaptability of God."—There is a certain position in the Scheme of Things Entire,—a point, with a relation of its own to the rest of the Scheme, to the Universe;— as the red line has a relation of its own to the rest of the spectrum and the ray of light as a whole..... From that point, from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things; and there are things no eyes can see but these, no other ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... of colour 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 made a reflecting telescope; and he did it with the object ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... of ferns a splash of lovely tints illuminated the edge of the time-recording shadow—the solar spectrum produced by the prism which had beckoned from afar. Was there no escape from the wizardry of the crystal? No hope of evading comparison of its beauty and permanence with the muddy and fleeting passions of mankind? Yet how fruitless its functions—to glorify for aeons the intractable rock, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... to devote at all events a portion of the time allotted to me in answering the question why the sun appears red in a fog. I must first of all appeal to what every one who frequents this theater is so accustomed, viz., the spectrum. I am going not to put it in the large and splendid stripe of the most gorgeous colors before you, with which you are so well acquainted, but my spectrum will take a more modest form of purer colors, some ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various

... 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 ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... thickness of one meter, it is seen to possess a greenish yellow color, but paler, and containing more of yellow, than that of chlorine. In such a layer, fluorine does not present any absorption bands. Its spectrum exhibits thirteen bright, lines in the red, between wave lengths 744 and 623. Their positions and relative intensities are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various



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