"Gnomon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hall they had established a gnomon.... This observatory, not worthy of much consideration for its ancient instruments, much less for its situation, its form, or its construction, is now enriched by several bronze instruments which ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... which it is useless to repeat. His addition to science, if he made any, was in treating the magnitudes and distances of the planets. He constructed geographical charts, and attempted to delineate the celestial sphere, and to measure time with a gnomon, or time-pillar, by the motion of its ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... large as a warming-pan, and a key like an anchor; then a little higher to the figured waistcoat of early British manufacture, and the sack-shapened coat, up to the narrow brim sugar-loaf hat on his head,—where can be found his equal? Nor does he want a nose as big as the gnomon of a dial-plate; and two flanks of impenetrable, deep, black brushwood, extending under either ear, and almost concealing the countenance, to complete the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... F.L.S. says, "We arrested several of these little aeronauts in their flight, and placed them on the brass gnomon of the sundial, and had the gratification to see them prepare for, and recommence, their aerial voyage. Having crawled about for a short time, to reconnoitre, they turned their abdomens from the current of air, and elevated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... gnomon, occupies the central portion of the stone, which is about 7 feet in length, and the inscription is closely packed in the ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... of compliment (which is the dial of the thought, and guided by the sun of your beauties,) are required these three specials; the gnomon, the puntilios, and the superficies: the superficies is that we call place; the puntilios, circumstance; and the gnomon, ceremony; in either of which, for a stranger to err, 'tis easy and ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... neither a history nor a past of his own, calculated to prompt even one exalted aspiration. He was a mongrel of the most inveterate character, and was therefore, and inevitably, treacherous, cowardly; and cunning. Not so the brave sons of the land he so ardently coveted. Ere the mighty gnomon of "The Great Pyramid" had thrown its gigantic shadow o'er the red dial of the desert, they had filled the long gallery of a glorious past with an array of portraits, the most superb presented by antiquity. Before the Vocal Memnon poured forth his hidden melody at sunrise, ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... middle of the city place a marble amussium, laying it true by the level, or else let the spot be made so true by means of rule and level that no amussium is necessary. In the very centre of that spot set up a bronze gnomon or "shadow tracker" (in Greek [Greek: skiatheras]). At about the fifth hour in the morning, take the end of the shadow cast by this gnomon, and mark it with a point. Then, opening your compasses ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... water to a lower level. A few broken walls rose on the highest peak of the eminence; the slope was occupied by the little mossy hillocks and sorely lichened tombstones that mark the ancient grave-yard; and among the tombs immediately beside the ruin there stood a rustic dial, with its iron gnomon worn to an oxydized film, and green with weather-stains and moss. And around this little lonely yard sprang the young wood, thick as a hedge, but just open enough towards the west to admit, in slant lines along the tombstones and the ruins, the red ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... ever-renewed wonders of the world; and Winter, that gathers us around the evening hearth:—all these, as they pass, touch by turns the springs of the spiritual life in us, and are conducting that life to good or evil. The idle watch-hand often points to something within us; and the shadow of the gnomon on the dial often ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike |
