"It is an extraordinary thing to watch the sand come to life if one happens to be wading where there is a large colony of the [mole] crabs.  One moment it may seem uninhabited.  Then, in that fleeting instant when the water of a receding wave flows seaward like a thin stream of liquid glass, there are suddenly hundreds of little gnome-like faces peering through the sandy floor-beady-eyed, long-whiskered faces set in bodies so nearly the color of their background that they can barely be seen.  And when, almost instantly, the faces fade back into invisibility, as though a host of strange little troglodytes had momentarily looked out through the curtains of their hidden world and as abruptly retired within it, the illusion is strong that one has seen nothing except in imagination—that there was merely an apparition induced by the magical quality of this world of shifting sand and foaming water.” —from Rachel Carson in The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955, 1983, pp. 154-155

"Without the gradual uplift of the landscape[,] rivers cannot cut down into it.  [...]  Uplift or elevation of the land is necessary to carve canyons and without it there would be no Grand Canyon.” —from Wayne Ranney in Carving Grand Canyon:  Evidence, Theories, and Mystery,Grand Canyon Association, 2005, pp.42-43

"Birds have remarkable visual acuity and can distinguish color much better than humans can — trompe-l'œil fools them only partially."—from Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou in Microcosmos:  The Invisible World of Insects, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1996, p.123

"Color expands a photograph's palette and adds a new level of descriptive information and transparency to the image.  It is more transparent because one is stopped less by the surface -- colour is more like how we see.  It has added description because it shows the colour of light and the colours of a culture or an age."—from the Martha & Gary Hill Library, Paris, France:  Stephen Shore in The Nature of Photographs, Phaidon Press, 2007, p.16

[This quote continues from the previous post.]
“A modern translation of the third passage [translated by T__*, R__**, H__***, and O__**** — see preceding post] reads: 
     In those days [this happened]:  the temple of Anu and Raman 
     the great gods, my lords, 
     which formerly Samsiramanu, the Isakku of Assur, 
     Had built, and which in the course of 641 years had more and more decayed:

    Assurdân, the King of Assyria,     
    the son of Ninebpalekur, King of Assyria, 
    had torn down this temple, but not destroyed it; 

    throughout sixty years its foundation stone 
    had not again been laid.”

—from the Earle Havens Library, Baltimore, Maryland:  C. W. Ceram in The March of Archaeology (Trans., Richard and Clara Winston), Knopf, 1958, p.210.  *W.H.Fox Talbot, **Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, ***Edward Hincks, ****Julius Oppert

"In 1857, a sealed envelope was laid upon the desk of the Royal Asiatic Society:  the translation of an inscription of Tiglath-Pileser, King of Assyria, by W.H.F__T__*.  In the accompanying letter F.T__* made the unusual proposal that the [untranslated] text be submitted also to R__** and H__*** (later the Franco-German scholar J.O__**** was added) for translation, and that the separate translations should be delivered sealed to the society, to be opened in the presence of a commission.  R__* agreed to this at once.  Six weeks later the four contestants had delivered their versions, and the commission drew up its report. 

     The report was sensational.  Although two of the entries were of shorter length, H__*** and O__**** having had only a brief time at their disposal for the decipherment, the parallel passages showed an astonishing agreement.”—from the Earle Havens Library, Baltimore, Maryland:  C. W. Ceram in The March of Archaeology (Trans., Richard and Clara Winston), Knopf, 1958, p.209.  *W.H.Fox Talbot, **Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, ***Edward Hincks, ****Julius Oppert

"prism:  "(1) a solid figure whose bases or ends have the same size and shape and are parallel to one another, and each of whose sides is a parallelogram; (2) a transparent body of this form, often of glass and usually with triangular ends, used for separating white light passed through it into a spectrum or for reflecting beams of light; (3) a cut-glass object, such as a pendant of a chandelier; (4) a crystal form consisting of three or more similar faces parallel to a single axis; (5) a medium that misrepresents whatever is seen through it.  [...from Greek prīmsa, “thing sawed off,” ...from prīzein, “to saw”]." —from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Ed., 2000, p. 1396

"How is this photograph different from the actual scene that R.F__ saw...?"—from the Martha & Gary Hill Library, Paris, France:  Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, Phaidon Press, 2007, p.16

"The main proposal [...] here is that brain regions responsible for interpreting perceptual input are also those that represent an imagined perception.  For example, the primary visual areas are activated when an object is merely imagined." --from the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University:  Davis S. Miall, in "Neuroaesthetics of Literary Reading," in Neuroaesthetics:  Foundations and Frontiers in Aesthetics, Eds., Colin Martindale and Arnold Berleant, Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., 2009, p.241

"To understand the life of the shore, it is not enough to pick up an empty shell and say 'This is a murex,' or 'That is an angel wing.'  True understanding demands intuitive comprehension of the whole life of the creature that once inhabited this empty shell:  how it survived amid surf and storms, what were its enemies, how it found food and reproduced its kind, what were its relations to the particular sea world in which it lived." —from Rachel Carson, in The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955, pp. vii-viii