"Retina" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... throws over imperial Rome. Above, that canopy of translucent blue, iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all colour save one ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... by turning a strong light sideways into my eye. And the explanation of it was quite simple. The retinal vessels stand out slightly in relief, and thus a perfect shadow of the system is cast on the retina. It was this shadow I saw, and the white screen was merely a convenient background for it. I don't know if I ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... coming," and buttoning up his coat, he whisked himself from the room, and Barclay, looking out of the window, watched the two forms as they disappeared in the dusk. But appearances are so deceptive. The truth is that what he saw was not there at all, but only appeared on his retina; the two forms that he seemed to see were not shivering through the twilight, but were walking among dahlias and coxcombs and four-o'clocks and petunias and poppies and hollyhocks on a wide lawn whereon newly set elm trees were fluttering their faint green foliage in the summer breeze. Yet ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... minute particles he termed corpuscles. In the work just referred to regarding this matter, he asks the question, "Are not rays of light very small bodies emitted from shining substances?" These small particles or corpuscles were supposed by him to actually strike the retina of the eye, and so produce the sensation of Sight, in the same way that odorous particles entering the nostril, come into contact with the olfactory nerves and produce the sensation of Smell. In order, however, to account for certain phenomena of light, he was compelled to postulate ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... record my literary calamity as a warning to my sedentary brothers. When my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed, there appear on a bluish film a number of mathematical squares, which are the reflection of the fine network of the retina, succeeded by blotches which subside into printed characters, apparently forming distinct words, arranged in straight lines as in a printed book; the monosyllables are often legible. This is the process of a few seconds. It is remarkable ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... seemed to have of lofty and wild scenery, made her journey a living picture. All her keen sense of external life was brought into activity, and she projected on the paper before her groups of people, or groups of mountains, with a vividness that showed she had only to transfer them from the retina: they had no need of any additional processes. She made no remarks on society, or inferences from what she saw in the present to what had been in the past or might be in the future. It was simply a power of representation, unequalled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the eyes there; and "light" means the effect of the one on the other;—and perhaps, also—(Plato saw farther into that mystery than any one has since, that I know of),—on something a little way within the eyes; but we may stand quite safe, close behind the retina, and defy the philosophers. ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... organised substance displays itself here in the most surprising fashion. The gentle stimulus of the light proceeding from the grain that affects the retina of the chicken, {82} gives occasion for the reproduction of a many-linked chain of sensations, perceptions, and emotions, which were never yet brought together in the case of the individual before us. We are accustomed to regard these surprising performances of animals as manifestations ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... undertaken by the eye. Were such an alteration of our senses to take place, the world would still be sending us the same messages, but we should be interpreting them differently. Beauty would still be ours, though speaking in another tongue. The birds' song would then strike our retina as pageant of color; we should see all the magical tones of the wind, hear as a great fugue the repeated and harmonized greens of the forest, the cadences of stormy skies. Did we realize how slight an adjustment of our own organs is needed to initiate us into such a world, we should ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... compound eye of the insect, did not convey to it the impression of a vast number of separate pictures, such as the eye produces when a microphotograph is taken through it. The fly sees one picture just as we do; in the same way as our brain rights the upside-down image cast on our retina, the fly's brain reduces the compound image to one. And beyond these impressions were a wild hodge-podge of smell-sensations, and a strange desire to burst through the invisible glass barrier into the brighter light beyond. But I had no time to analyze these sensations, ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... they had not done so, and she sat down in a comfortable chair. Her arrival caused a flutter among the other occupants of the terrace, and even the Englishman glanced up. This group had at last made some impression it would seem upon the retina of his eye, for he looked deliberately at them and realized that the two women were quite worthy ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Italian race. The requisite for accurately describing people, however, is not genius, but knowledge of the subject. The poet commonly sees himself in others, and the modern writer upon Italy is apt to believe that he can see others in himself. The reflection of an Italian upon the mental retina of the foreigner is as deceptive as his own outward image is when seen upon the polished surface of a concave mirror; and indeed the character studies of many great men, when the subject is taken from a race not their own, remind one very forcibly of what may be seen ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... bloodless, offered no complete impediment to vision. As volition was in abeyance, the balls could not roll in their sockets—but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as sound—sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... was it he saw? for, sure as eyes were eyes, there was an island outlined upon the retina, so plainly perceptible, that his senses could ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... considerable discrepancy which exists between the durations of the periods of these two categories of waves. The length of wave corresponding to the first spark-gap of Hertz was about 6 metres, and the longest waves perceptible by the retina are 7/10 ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... infinitesimal fraction of a second seemed to set the entire visible firmament ablaze, and caused every detail of the brig's hull and equipment to imprint a clear and perfectly distinct picture of itself upon the retina. They all listened for thunder, but none came. Suddenly, however, a few heavy drops of rain pattered upon the deck, and an instant later down came a perfect deluge with the sound of millions of small shot roaring and rattling on the deck and hissing into the sea. The rain ceased as suddenly ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... velocity are thrown off from its surface in all directions. The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of these together, and gives them such a course that they impinge upon the surface of the retina, which is a singularly delicate apparatus connected with the terminations of the fibres of the optic nerve. The impulses of the attenuated matter, or ether, affect this apparatus and the fibres of the optic nerve in a certain ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... out of the blue into the other colours. It was plain that the spot belonged both to the eye and to the blue part of the spectrum. The result to which I have come is, that the appearance is due to the yellow spot on the retina, commonly called the Foramen Centrale of Soemmering. The most convenient method of observing the spot is by presenting to the eye in not too rapid succession, blue and yellow glasses, or, still better, allowing ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... high authority, that the natural acuteness of our sensuous faculties cannot be heightened by use, and hence, that the minutest details of the image formed on the retina are as perfect in the most untrained as in the most thoroughly disciplined organ. This may be questioned, and it is agreed on all hands that the power of multifarious perception and rapid discrimination may be immensely increased by well-directed practice. [Footnote: ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... token of a great bard, I recognized Monte Soracte. The dragoon took us by the arms, and away we scampered over the Campagna, with one of the loveliest sunsets before us, that ever painted itself on my retina. I cannot portray in words the glory that flooded the whole western heaven. It was like a sea of melted ruby, amethyst and topaz—deep, dazzling and of crystal transparency. The color changed in tone every few minutes, till in half an hour ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Binocular Alteration of Vision,' which was published by the Physiological Society of London, in November 1900. It may be mentioned here, by the way, that, in course of his investigations on the Response of the Living and Non-Living substances, Dr. Bose constructed an "artificial retina" to study the characteristics of the excitatory change produced by a stimulus on the retina and these characteristics gave him a clue to the unexpected discovery of the "binocular alteration of vision" ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... from the eyes. Next, a long narrow slit, of the thickness of a thin saw-cut, is made along the middle almost from end to end. Through this slit the wearer can see very fairly. As it is narrower than the diameter of the pupil of his eye, the light that reaches his retina is much diminished in quantity. Crape or gauze is a substitute ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... the wild light, leaped like spectres out of the black, and granite crags, searched by blazing shafts, printed themselves in ghostly flames on the retina; thunder, searching unnumbered gorges, echoed beneath the sharper crashes in one long, unending roll, and far out beyond the mountains the flooded desert tossed on a dancing screen into the glare, rippled like a madcap sea, and flashed ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... ground as Corporal Trim wished for. So that as Trim uttered the words, "a rood and a half of ground, to do what they would with," this identical bowling-green instantly presented itself upon the retina of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... a long while ago men imagined they had explained vision by saying that the luminous action of bodies produces on the retina pictures representative of external forms and colours. To this the physiologists [query, the physiologists] have objected, with reason, that if it was as images that the luminous impressions acted, there needed another eye within the eye to behold them. Does not a similar objection hold ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... emporium, To which these noted picture-stealers Send all they can and meet with dealers. In many an optical proceeding The brain, he said, showed great good breeding; For instance, when we ogle women (A trick which Barbara tutored him in), Although the dears are apt to get in a Strange position on the retina, Yet instantly the modest brain Doth set them on ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... in focussing, the distance between lens and image depends on the distance between object and lens. Now, the retina cannot be pushed nearer to or pulled further away from its lens, like the focussing screen of a camera. How, then, is the eye able to focus sharply objects at distances varying from a foot to ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... the visual apparatus of the one had been singularly perfected by practice. The sensibility of its retina must have been as instantaneous as that of those conjurors who recognize a card merely by a rapid movement in cutting the pack or by the arrangement only of marks invisible to others. The Frenchman indeed possessed in the highest degree what may be called ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... steadily at the corpse for some time, impressing a picture of it in every detail on his mental retina. Struck by an idea, he bent over and touched the patch of blood in the dead man's breast, then looked at his finger. There was no stain. The blood was quite congealed. Then he tried to unclench the judge's right hand, but it ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... mountains in the coals of his grate; another by gentleness only sunshine and grasses on Monadnock. You will not say that he chooses, but that he is chosen so to see. Light opens the eye without our intention, and we are at no trouble to paint on the retina what must there appear. Success is fidelity to that which must appear. Weak men discuss forever the laws of Art, and contrive how to paint, questioning whether this or that element should have emphasis or be shown. If there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear as he writes his Englishman in Italy, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word.[32] The fisherman ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation) produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... caught the words, "White scar on the cornea," "leucoma," and "operation." He also heard Herophilus declare that an injury of the cornea by the flame of the torch was the cause of the blindness. In the work which led him to the discovery of the retina in the eye he had devoted himself sedulously to the organs of sight. This case seemed as if it had been created ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... an example. Its eyes also have become small and are deeply hidden in the muscles, although they are by no means as much degenerated as in the Proteus anguineus, and are still possessed of a lens and a retina. Their nerve of vision, however, has become very imperfect, and its connection with the brain is interrupted, so that the animal for this reason can have no perception of light. Notwithstanding the above, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... a walk down a city street a man has hundreds of visual images flashed upon the retina of the eye. His eye sees every little line in the faces of the passers-by, every detail of their clothing, the decorations on the buildings, the street signs overhead, the articles in the shop-windows, the paving of the sidewalks, the ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... my readers may remember that in a former paper I suggested the possibility of the existence of an idiotic area in the human mind, corresponding to the blind spot in the human retina. I trust that I shall not be thought to have let my wits go wandering in that region of my own intellectual domain, when I relate a singular coincidence which very lately occurred in my experience, and add a few remarks made by one of our company on ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
