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A building is an aggregation of the commonest geometrical forms: parallelograms, prisms, pyramids and cones the cylinder appearing in the column, and the hemisphere in the dome. The plans likewise of the world's famous buildings reduced to their simplest expression are discovered to resolve themselves into a few simple geometrical figures. This is the "bed rock" of all excellent design.

Under his right and left hands were the double-series potentiometers actuating the variable-speed drives of the flight-angle directors in the hour and declination ranges; before his eyes was the finely marked micrometer screen upon which the guiding goniometer threw its needle-point of light; powerful optical systems of prisms and lenses revealed to his sight the director-angles, down to fractional seconds of arc.

A huge chandelier with prisms hung over the flowers at the centre of the table, which sparkled with glass and silver, while dishes of vermilion and yellow fruits relieved the whiteness of the cloth. Honora found herself beside Mr. Holt, who looked more shrivelled than ever in his evening clothes.

'Why, every Christian must be with me, who has not lost his way in a mist of his own raising, said Lilias. 'Do you mean to say, said Maurice, 'that these colours are not produced by refraction? Look at them on those prisms; and he pointed to an old-fashioned lustre on the chimney-piece. 'I hope this is not a part of the Christian faith.

Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence.

On the bed Pollyanna lay blinking at the dancing band of colors on the ceiling, which came from one of the prisms in the window. "I'm glad it isn't smallpox that ails me, too," she murmured contentedly. "That would be worse than freckles.

Scientists have discovered just how to arrange prisms, lenses, and reflectors so the light will travel to the farthest possible distance. At Navasink, on the highlands south of New York harbor, stands the most powerful coast light in the United States. It equals about sixty million candle-power, and its beam can be seen seventy nautical miles away.

The whole region appeared to consist of nothing but the same strange, uniform mineral conglomerate, crystallized into regular hexagonal prisms. But whatever was its geological character, it was only too evident that it had entirely replaced the former soil, so that not a vestige of the old continent of Europe could be discerned.

In the manufacture of saltpetre, the earths, whether naturally or artificially impregnated, are mixed with the ashes from burnt wood, or salts of potash, so that this base may take the place of all others, and produce long prisms of potash saltpetre. In this country there are numerous caves of great extent in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, from which saltpetre has been manufactured.

Directly I moved, its agitation perceptibly increased, it was, so to speak, all one whirr of tremblement; it scintillated, as if its coloured scales had been so many prisms; it began to unsheath its wings, as if it had finally decided that it would make use of them. Picking up the tin, disembarrassing it of its lid, I sprang towards my intended victim.