Word Finder - ray

definition

A beam of light or radiation.

example

I saw a ray of light through the clouds.

definition

A rib-like reinforcement of bone or cartilage in a fish's fin.

definition

One of the spheromeres of a radiate, especially one of the arms of a starfish or an ophiuran.

definition

A radiating part of a flower or plant; the marginal florets of a compound flower, such as an aster or a sunflower; one of the pedicels of an umbel or other circular flower cluster; radius.

definition

Sight; perception; vision; from an old theory of vision, that sight was something which proceeded from the eye to the object seen.

definition

A line extending indefinitely in one direction from a point.

definition

A tiny amount.

example

Unfortunately he didn't have a ray of hope.

definition

To emit something as if in rays.

definition

To radiate as if in rays.

At last he saw a ray of light far ahead of him.

The next morning she woke to the first ray of light through the window.

His words were like a ray of sunshine through the window on a cold winter morning.

The walls were of stained pine, shellacked to a glow that reflected every ray of light that entered the large windows.

The buds may all become detached after a time and give rise to separate and independent individuals, as in the common Hydra, in which only polyp-individuals are produced and sexual elements From Allman's Gymnoblastic Hydroids, by permission of are developed the Council of the Ray Society.

John Ray (1627-1705) did much to advance the science of botany, and was also a good zoologist.

As the sun rises, the rays enter the prisms more and more obliquely, and the angle of minimum deviation increases; but since the emergent ray makes the same angle with the refracting edge as the incident ray, it follows that the parhelia will remain on the parhelic circle, while receding from the inner halo.

Greek and Roman authors have much to say about Apis, the marks by which the black bull-calf was recognized, the manner of his conception by a ray from heaven, his house at Memphis with court for disporting himself, the mode of prognostication from his actions, the mourning at his death, his costly burial and the rejoicings throughout the country when a new Apis was found.

He promulgated a system which may be considered as the dawn of the "natural system" of the present day (Ray, Methodus Plantarum, 1682).

Being called upon to arrange the plants in the garden, he necessarily had to consider the best method of doing so, and, following the lines already suggested by his uncle, adopted a system founded in a certain degree on that of Ray, in which he embraced all the discoveries in organography, adopted the simplicity of the Linnean definitions, and displayed the natural affinities of plants.

Ray adopted Grew's views, and states various arguments to prove their correctness in the preface to his work on European plants, published in 1694.

The fact that in certain simple cases where a line when looked at equatorially splits into a triplet, the ratio of the charge to the mass is found by Lorentz's theory to be equal to that observed in the carrier of the kathode ray, shows that in these cases the electron moves as an independent body and is not linked in its motion to other electrons.

It gave no effects when the same magnetic poles or the contrary poles were on opposite sides (as respects the course of the polarized ray), nor when the same poles were on the same side either with the constant or intermitting current.

But when contrary magnetic poles were on the same side there was an effect produced on the polarized ray, and thus magnetic force and light were proved to have relations to each other.

On the 3rd of November a new horseshoe magnet came home, and Faraday immediately began to experiment on the action in the polarized ray through gases, but with no effect.

Ray's translation of that work (p. 334), stating that it is "a Sea-fowl, which fishermen observe to resort to their vessels in some numbers, swimming 1 swiftly to and fro, backward, forward and about them, and doth as it were radere aquam, shear the water, from whence perhaps it had its name."

The fish is characterized by its large scales (34 to 40 in the lateral line), its long dorsal fin, the first ray of which is stiff and serrated, and the presence of two small barbels on each side of the mouth.

The star of the knights grand cross is a seven-rayed star of silver with a small ray of gold between each, in the centre is a red St George's cross bearing a medallion of St Michael encountering Satan, surrounded by a blue fillet with the motto Auspicium melioris aevi.

For the growth of flowers generally, and for that of all fruits, every ray of light to be obtained in the dull winter season is required, and therefore every possible care should be taken to keep the glass clean.

Large Wimshurst multiple plate influence machines are often used instead of induction coils for exciting Rntgen ray tubes in medical work.

Thisleton Dyer (Edinburgh Review, 1902, p. 370) thinks that Ray's use of the word may be traced to the last-mentioned authors.

It is clear, however, that through Ray's work in the 17th century the common biological application of species became fixed much in its modern form, as denoting a group of animals or plants capable of interbreeding, and although not necessarily quite identical, with marked common characters.

Ray Lankester, have urged that the word is so firmly asssociated with historical implications of fixity which are now incongruous with its application, that it ought to be discarded from scientific nomenclature.

His collecting propensities made him useful to John Ray and Robert Boyle.

He returned to London with a considerable collection of plants and other curiosities, cf which the former were sent to Ray and utilized by him for his History of Plants.

Farther from the centre the ray structure is usually prominent.

Ray's quiet college life closed when he found himself unable to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity of 1661, and was obliged to give up his fellowship in 1662, the year after Isaac Newton had entered the college.

We are told by Dr Derham in his Life of Ray that the reason of his refusal "was not (as some have imagined) his having taken the ` Solemn League and Covenant,' for that he never did, and often declared that he ever thought it an unlawful oath; but he said he could not declare for those that had taken the oath that no obligation lay upon them, but feared there might."

From this time onwards he seems to have depended chiefly on the bounty of his pupil Willughby, who made Ray his constant companion while he lived, and at his death left him 60 a year, with the charge of educating his two sons.

In the spring of 1663 Ray started together with Willughby and two other pupils on a tour through Europe, from which he returned in March 1666, parting from Willughby at Montpellier, whence the latter continued his journey into Spain.

He had previously in three different journeys (1658, 1661, 1662) travelled through the greater part of Great Britain, and selections from his private notes of these journeys were edited by George Scott in 1760, under the title of Mr Ray's Itineraries.

Ray himself published an account of his foreign travel in 1673, entitled Observations topographical, moral, and physiological, made on a Journey through part of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France.

From this tour Ray and Willughby returned laden with collections, on which they meant to base complete systematic descriptions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Willughby undertook the former part, but, dying in 1672, left only an ornithology and ichthyology, in themselves vast, for Ray to edit; while the latter used the botanical collections for the groundwork of his Methodus plantarum nova (1682), and his great Historia generalis plantarum (3 vols., 1686, 1688, _1704).

In 1667 Ray was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1669 he published in conjunction with Willughby his first paper in the Philosophical Transactions on "Experiments concerning the Motion of Sap in Trees."

The Ray Society, for the publication of works on natural history, was founded in his honour in 1844.

Ray's first book, the Catalogue plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (1660, followed by appendices in 1663 and 1685), was written in conjunction with his "amicissimus et individuus comes," John Nid.

The book shows signs of his indebtedness to Joachim Jung of Hamburg, who had died in 1657, leaving his writings unpublished; but a MS. copy of some of them was sent to Ray by Samuel Hartlib in 1660.

Jung invented or gave precision to many technical terms which Ray and others at once made use of in their descriptions, and which are now classical; and his notions of what constitutes a specific distinction and what characters are valueless as such seem to have been adopted with little change by Ray.

The first two editions of the Catalogus plantarum Angliae (1670, 1677) were likewise arranged alphabetically; but in the Synopsis stirpium Britannicarum (1690, 1696, also re-edited by Dillenius, 1724, and by Hill, 1760) Ray applied the scheme of classification which he had by that time elaborated in the Methodus and the Historia plantarum.

But a serious blemish was his persistent separation of trees from herbs, a distinction whose falsity had been exposed by Jung and others, but to which Ray tried to give scientific foundation by denying the existence of buds in the latter.

In the first volume a chapter "De plantis in genere" contains an account of all the anatomical and physiological knowledge of the time regarding plants, with the recent speculations and discoveries of Caesalpinus, Grew, Malpighi and Jung; and Cuvier and Dupetit Thouars, declaring that it was this chapter which gave acceptance and authority to these authors' works, say that "the best monument that could be erected to the memory of Ray would be the republication of this part of his work separately."

Here also begins his long controversy with Rivinus (Augustus Quirinus Bachmann) which chiefly turned upon Ray's indefensible separation of ligneous from herbaceous plants, and also upon what he conceived to be the misleading reliance that Rivinus placed on the characters of the corolla.

Besides editing his friend Willughby's books, Ray wrote several zoological works of his own, including Synopsis methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis (1693), that is to say, both mammals and reptiles, and Synopsis methodica Avium et Pisciurn (1713); the latter was published posthumously, as was also the more important Historia Insectorum (1710), which embodied a great mass of Willughby's notes.

Most of Ray's minor works were the outcome of his faculty for carefully amassing facts; for instance, his Collection of English Proverbs (1670), his Collection of Out-of-the-way English Words (1674), his Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages (1693), and his Dictionariolum trilingue (1675, 5th edition as Nomenclator classicus, 1706).

But Ray's influence and reputation have depended largely upon his two books entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), and Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692).

In The Wisdom of God, &c., Ray recites innumerable examples of the perfection of organic mechanism, the multitude and variety of living creatures, the minuteness and usefulness of their parts, and many, if not most, of the familiar examples of purposive adaptation and design in nature were suggested by him, such as the structure of the eye, the hollowness of the bones, the camel's stomach and the hedgehog's armour.

Dupetit Thouars in the Biographie universelle; all these were collected under the title Memorials of Ray, and edited (with the addition of a complete catalogue of his works) by Dr Edwin Lankester, 8vo (Ray Society), 1846; Correspondence (with Willughby, Martin Lister, Dr Robinson, Petiver, Derham, Sir Hans Sloane and others), edited by Dr Derham, 1718; Selections, with additions, edited by Lankester (Ray Society), 1848.

Some represent natural groups and had in several cases been already recognized by Ray and others, but the majority are, in the light of modern knowledge, very mixed.

Ray Lankester (preface to the English edition of C. Gegenbaur's Comparative Anatomy), and employed by the same writer in the 9th edition of this encyclopaedia (article "Zoology") to denote the eighth phylum, or major division, of coelomate animals.

The doom of the nation is pronounced; its fate is imminent; there is no ray of hope for the existing constitution of religion and society.