"Spherical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... photographic camera is perfect lenses. They should be achromatic, and the utmost transparency should be obtained; and under the closest inspection of the glass not the slightest wavy appearance, or dark spot should be detected; and a curvature which as much as possible prevents spherical aberration should be secured. The effect produced by this last defect is a convergence of perpendiculars, as for instance; two towers of any building, would be represented as leaning towards each other; and in a portrait the features ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... Although the familiar spherical balloon has proved perfectly adequate for reconnoitring in the British and French armies, the German authorities maintained that it was not satisfactory in anything but calm weather. Accordingly scientific ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... my early work Dr. Draper suggested a very excellent plan for testing a flat surface, which I briefly describe. It is a well known truth that, if an artificial star is placed in the exact center of curvature of a truly spherical mirror, and an eyepiece be used to examine the image close beside the source of light, the star will be sharply defined, and will bear very high magnification. If the eyepiece is now drawn toward the observer, the star disk ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... from the unknown spaces around me, and rushed back to the shelter of the home-walls. But as I grew older I became more adventurous; and one evening, although the shadows were beginning to lengthen, I went on and on until I made a discovery. I found a half-spherical hollow in the grassy surface. I rushed into its depth as if it had been a mine of marvels, threw myself on the ground, and gazed into the sky as if I had now for the first time discovered its true relation to the earth. The earth was a cup, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... layers, and the mode of their formation. Does the occurrence of blastulae and gastrulae and one-celled beginnings mean that the higher animals composed of numerous and much differentiated cells have evolved in company from two-layered saccular ancestors which were themselves the descendants of spherical colonies of like cells, and ultimately ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... spring from. Then his eyes fell upon a huge receptacle that stood on the table nearest to the furnace. It was covered with a white cloth. He took it off. The vessel was about four feet high, round, and shaped somewhat like a washing tub, but it was made of glass more than an inch thick. In it a spherical mass, a little larger than a football, of a peculiar, livid colour. The surface was smooth, but rather coarsely grained, and over it ran a dense system of blood-vessels. It reminded the two medical men of those huge tumours which are preserved in spirit in hospital museums. Susie ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... real object. In reflectors this is effected by giving a parabolic form to the concave surface of the mirror. In refractors there is a twofold difficulty to be overcome. In the first place, a lens with spherical surfaces does not bend all the rays that pass through it to a focus at precisely the same distance. The rays that pass near the outer edge of the lens have a shorter focus than that of the rays which pass near the center of the lens; this is called spherical aberration. A similar phenomenon ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to send him. The force was delighted at the pleasure of ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... passage, but ... the rhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences.... Return in 'polyphonic prose' is usually achieved by the recurrence of a dominant thought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but still giving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of as ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Butt, a spherical-bodied man-of-war's-man, with a rubicund nose, got on his legs somewhat unsteadily, and addressed himself to the company. They had met that evening, said the speaker, in accordance with a time-honored ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... particular column, and were ornamented only at the lower third of the shaft with the Brazilian coat of arms between floral festoons. Projecting above the roof of the building were three domes, two of which, on either loggia, were spherical in form, being 44 feet in diameter, while the apex of the central dome attained a height of 135 feet. The dome was octagonal in shape, having at each corner an exterior buttress, adorned with a large statue at its top. Encircling the same was a gallery from which could be viewed ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... each mitosis, is seen in figure 83 between the two parts of the spindle-remains, applied to the outside of the nuclear membrane. In figures 85, 86, and 87 the relation of the tail (or its axial fiber) to the centrosome is shown. In figures 87 and 88, instead of the small spherical centrosome of figures 83 to 86, we have a much elongated body, at first (fig. 87) applied for its whole length to the nuclear membrane, but later lying along one side of a middle piece (m), as shown in figure ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis (Part 1 of 2) • Nettie Maria Stevens
... other to manufacture"?) and thus constructs a flask-shaped 'test,' having a short neck and a large single orifice. Another picks up the FINEST grains, and puts them together, with the same cement, into perfectly spherical 'tests' of the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores disposed at pretty regular intervals. Another selects the MINUTEST sand grains and the terminal portions of sponge spicules, and works them up together—apparently with no cement at all, by the mere ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... analytic treatment of the elements of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry and their practical applications to Surveying, Geodesy, and Astronomy, with convenient and accurate "five place" tables for the use of the student, engineer, and surveyor. Designed for High ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... trenched vineyards, walled and treed, their defence might have been very obstinate. In the mean time the guns on the south face of the fortress opened on us, and our artillery forming line at about 800 yards range, opened their fire of spherical case and round shot in return; other guns in the fort then opened and a sharp fire was kept up on those in the gardens by jhinjals and pigadas, who when hard pressed took refuge in an outwork or round tower. The fire ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... likewise endowed with a soul, which is a portion of the eternal fires which you call stars and constellations; and which, being round, spherical bodies, animated by divine intelligences, perform their cycles and revolutions with amazing rapidity. It is your duty, therefore, my Publius, and that of all who have any veneration for the Gods, to preserve this wonderful union of soul and body; nor without ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... wall, in order to get across the river by the Pont d'Austerlitz. By this time I had ranged up abeam of the commodore, and I proposed that we should follow the river up as far as the wall again, in order to do our work honestly; but to this he objected that he had no wish to puzzle himself with spherical trigonometry; that plane sailing was his humour at the moment; and that he had, moreover, just discovered that one of his boots pinched his foot. Accordingly we proceeded straight from the bridge, not meeting the wall again until we were beyond the abattoir. These abattoirs are ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... birds and insects, our readers should be reminded of the great differences between an insect and a bird, remembering that the former, is, in brief, a chitinous sac, so to speak, or rather a series of three such spherical or elliptical sacs (the head, thorax and abdomen); the outer walls of the body forming a solid but light crust, to which are attached broad, membranous wings, the wing being a sort of membranous bag stretched over a framework of hollow tubes (the tracheae), ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... contained a number of spherical beads in green jade, highly polished, and some as large as pigeon's eggs. They were found in an alabaster box, of such elaborate and beautiful workmanship that the owner deemed it worthy to be presented as a sort of peace-offering to the wife ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... shown that the spherical figure of a cluster is owing to the action of central powers, it follows that those clusters which, caeteris paribus, are the most complete in this figure, must have been the longest exposed to the action of these ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... tubercle in books amount to about this, that the tubercle is an amount of fleshy substance which may be albumen, fibrin, or any other substance collected and deposited at one place in the human body, and covered with a film composed generally of fibrinous substances, and deposited in its spherical form, and separated from all similarly formed spheres by fascia. They may be very numerous, for many hundreds may occupy one cubic inch and yet one is distinct from all others. They seem to develop only where fascia is abundant; in the lungs, liver, bowels and skin. After ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... same thing, in the centre. This is its natural place; and its natural motion when away from the centre is in a straight line toward the centre. Water is the next heaviest element and its natural place is just above earth; hence the water in the world occupies a position spherical in shape round about the earth, i. e., it forms a hollow sphere concentric with the earth. Next comes the hollow sphere of air concentric with the other two. Its natural motion when away from its place in the direction of the earth is in a straight line toward the circumference of ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... end in his being brought up with a round turn and required to part company with his ears or nose, or to be turned adrift on the cold charity of the world, deprived of his hands by the crude and summary justice of Khorassan. His eyes are brown and large, and spherical almost as an owl's eyes, and they bulge out in a manner that exposes most of the white. He wears long hair, curled up after the manner of Persian la-de-da-dom, and in his crude, uncivilized sphere evidently fancies ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... compared are similar without being identical: the design for which a comparison is made enters as an essential element, and decisively determines its value. Between two given objects an analogy may exist, good for one purpose but worthless for another. Given two balls, spherical in form and equal in size, the one of wood and the other of iron; and let the question be, Do these two objects bear any analogy to each other, real in itself and capable of being usefully employed? The question cannot yet be answered: ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... gold Throwing an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points, Wherein you burn... You of unknown voltage Whirling on your axis... Scrawling vermillion signatures Over the night's velvet hoarding... Insolent, towering spherical To ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... well known that the ordinary rifle in use until late years was the seven-grooved, with a spherical ball, and the two-grooved, with a zone bullet; the latter an invention known as the Brunswick rifle; and imported from Berlin about 1836. It was upon this weapon Mr. Lancaster proceeded to make some very ingenious experiments, widening the grooves ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... very far beyond its original limits. Spherical vapor and atmospheric space give but a faint idea of its range. We find it a leading science in Physics, and having intimate relations with heat, light, electricity, magnetism, winds, water, vegetation, geological changes, optical effects, pneumatics, geography,—and with climate, controlling ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... formed, goes on to say:[198] "It needs no proof that in the case of spheres and crystals the forms and the structures are the effect, and not the cause, of the formative principles. Attraction, whether gravitative or capillary, produces the spherical form; the spherical form does not produce attraction. And crystalline polarities produce crystalline structure and form; crystalline structure and form do not produce crystalline polarities. The same is not quite ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... to remain at home passing long hours meditating with his elbows on the table, but at the same time attentive to the rustling of light steps that could be heard from time to time in the near-by hallway. He knew about everything,—spherical and rectangular trigonometry, cosmography, the laws of the winds and the tempest, the latest oceanographic discoveries—but who could teach him the approved form of addressing a maiden without frightening her?... Where the deuce could a body learn ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the fissures would be one-hundredth the area of the land. For let us consider the strain upon a single line drawn over the summit of the protuberance from a point on its rim to a point opposite. Regarding the protuberance as a spherical swelling, the length of the arc corresponding to a chord of 100 miles and a versed sine of 3 miles is 100.24 miles; consequently the surface to reach its new position must stretch 0.24 of a mile, or be broken. A fissure or a number of cracks with this total width would relieve the strain; that ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... body casting a shadow, and interposed between this shadow and the luminous body. By this it is made clear that the shadow is not produced by the angle of the derived shadow but only by the body casting the shadow; &c. If a spherical solid body is illuminated by a light of elongated form the shadow produced by the longest portion of this light will have less defined outlines than that which is produced by the breadth of the same light. And ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... combination of atoms. The smallest indivisible particle of matter is called an atom (a@nu). The atoms are all eternal and they all have touch, taste, smell, and colour. The formation of different substances is due to the different geometrical, spherical or cubical modes of the combination of the atoms, to the diverse modes of their inner arrangement and to the existence of different degrees of inter-atomic space (ghanapratarabhedena). Some combinations ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... are much more liable than smaller ones to what is termed 'chromatic' and 'spherical' aberration; and this also is detrimental to definition. No very large refractor is entirely free from ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... stimuli.—This reaction under stimulus is seen even in the lowest organisms; in some of the amoeboid rhizopods, for instance. These lumpy protoplasmic bodies, usually elongated while creeping, if mechanically jarred, contract into a spherical form. If, instead of mechanical disturbance, we apply salt solution, they again contract, in the same way as before. Similar effects are produced by sudden illumination, or by rise of temperature, or by electric shock. A ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... deep, hot, simple, strenuous, and yet ripe and spherical, nature, whose twin necessities were, first, that it must lay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly, that it must work these up into some form of melodious completeness. History and the world gave him Quakerism, America, and Rural Solitude; and through this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... descending from Heaven; and in another is Jove with an air of celestial dignity, kissing Ganymede; and in another, likewise, lower down, is the Car of Venus, and the Graces, with Mercury, drawing Psyche up to Heaven; with many other scenes from the poets in the other spandrels. And in the spherical triangles of the vaulting above the arches, between the spandrels, are many most beautiful little boys in foreshortening, hovering in the air and carrying all the instruments of the gods; Jove's lightnings and thunderbolts, the helmet, sword, and shield of Mars, Vulcan's hammers, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... hunting and cold, he crept into a hollow oak gall to sleep. The wind fanned the embers of the camp-fire and the dry grass burst into a blaze. It swept up to the sleeping coyote, where only his feet protruded from his hollow spherical den. Here they hung out for lack of room. So, of course, his claws were burned off before the pain wakened him. He leaped out of his nest, dashed through the blaze, and plunged into the creek, not in time, however, to keep his beautiful long hair from being singed. Even to ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... shell, and argues regarding their character from St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians and from the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm. As to "the waters which are above the firmament," he takes up the objection of those who hold that, this outside of the universe being spherical, the waters must slide off it, especially if the firmament revolves; and he points out that it is by no means certain that the OUTSIDE of the firmament IS spherical, and insists that, if it does revolve, the water is just what is needed to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... caused by inequality of the outer surface of the front of the eyeball, and rarely by a similar defect in the surfaces of the lens. The curvature of the eyeball in the astigmatic eye is greater in one meridian than in the opposite. In other words, the front of the eyeball is not regularly spherical, but bulges out along a certain line or meridian, while the curvature is flattened or normal in the other meridian. For instance, if two imaginary lines were drawn, one vertically, and the other horizontally across the front of the eyeball ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... of a pale green colour, embroidered with yellow, borne on foot-stalks without wings. The fruit whilst young is pear-shaped, yellow, longitudinally striated and sweet; but, as it ripens, it becomes spherical, of ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... blanket. It has withstood the exposure perfectly well for a year, without injury. The gauge, made from flat rubber, is altogether so cheap and so convenient that I am now experimenting with one of this description having a black cloth covering upon the outside. The balloon is of spherical shape, the black cloth covering is of cylindrical shape, and I hope that this device will serve every necessary purpose. A sectional view of the air-cushion is offered as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... "Nobody is to-day the same as yesterday. All things, even the smallest, have their share in the universal intelligence, or universal thinking power. For without a certain degree of sense or cognition, the drop of water could not assume the spherical shape which is essential to the preservation of its forces. All things participate in the universal intelligence, and hence come attraction and repulsion, love and hate. Nature shows forth each species ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... martins, for I had just before been utterly perplexed by noticing just such a proceeding as you describe: I counted seven, one day lately, visiting a single nest and sticking dirt on the adjoining wall. I may mention that I once saw some squirrels eagerly splitting those little semi-transparent spherical galls on the back of oak- leaves for the maggot within; so that they are insectivorous. A Cychrus rostratus once squirted into my eyes and gave me extreme pain; and I must tell you what happened to me on the banks of the Cam, in my early entomological days: under a piece of bark I found two ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... seven sectors perhaps a dozen vessels threw out enormous spherical screens of intense red light, and as they did so their tracer points upon all the interlocked lookout plates also became ringed about with red. Toward those crimson markers the pilots of the unmarked vessels directed their courses at their utmost power; and while the white lights upon the ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... applicable to working on metals; and in his own shops at Pimlico Bramah employed a machine with revolving cutters to plane metallic surfaces for his patent locks and other articles. He also introduced a method of turning spherical surfaces, either convex or concave, by a tool moveable on an axis perpendicular to that of the lathe; and of cutting out concentric shells by fixing in a similar manner a curved tool of nearly the same form as that employed by common turners ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece. He taught the spherical form of the earth and the true causes of lunar eclipses; discovered the electricity of amber. The Seven Sages, or Wise Men, are commonly made up of Thales, Solon, Bias, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... of Plutonic Rocks. Granite and its Varieties. Decomposing into Spherical Masses. Rude columnar Structure. Graphic Granite. Mutual Penetration of Crystals of Quartz and Feldspar. Glass Cavities in Quartz of Granite. Porphyritic, talcose, and syenitic Granite. Schorlrock and Eurite. Syenite. Connection of the Granites and Syenites with the Volcanic Rocks. Analogy ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... tolerably early period, the two become distinguishable by the different form of their adjuncts, the yelk-sac and the allantois. The former, in the Dog, becomes long and spindle-shaped, while in Man it remains spherical; the latter, in the Dog, attains an extremely large size, and the vascular processes which are developed from it and eventually give rise to the formation of the placenta (taking root, as it were, in the parental organism, so as to draw nourishment therefrom, as the root of a tree extracts ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... found them to contain a bright red sand. They were, in fact, volcanic bombs that had been formed by the ejection of molten lava to a great height from active volcanoes; these had become globular in falling, and, having cooled before they reached the earth, they retained their forms as hard spherical bodies, precisely resembling cannon shot. The exterior was brown, and appeared to be rich in iron. The smaller specimens were the more perfect spheres, as they cooled quickly; but many of the heavier masses had evidently reached the earth when ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... known as the "Thomson spherical," on account of the nearly spherical form of its armature, and differs radically from all others in all essential portions, viz., its field magnets, armature, and winding thereof, and in its commutator; both in principle and construction, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... treat Sprouts and Kales on one uniform rough plan will be surprised at the result of the routine we now recommend. The plants will button from the ground line to the top, and the buttons will set so closely that, once taken off, it will be impossible to replace them. Moderate-sized, spherical, close, grass-green Sprouts are everywhere esteemed, and there is nothing in the season more attractive ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... have seriously studied some science, which might at least have been effectual as an opiate in suppressing sensibility. She was, however, in Eastthorpe before the new education, as it is called, had been invented. There was no elaborate system of needle points, Roman and Greek history, plain and spherical trigonometry, political economy, ethics, literature, chemistry, conic sections, music, English history, and mental philosophy, to draw off the electricity within her, nor did she possess the invaluable privilege of being able, after studying a half-crown handbook, to unbosom herself ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... steps of spherical form, called "saucer" steps, have been installed with success (see Fig. 24). They seem to aid the lower guide-bearing in keeping the machine rotating about the mechanical center and reduce the wear on the guide-bearing. In some instances, too, cast-iron bushings have been substituted ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... eerie; the South Sea, savage and tempestuous, blowing a fitful blast. The lesser waters have a lighter quality. The hair of the sea-spirits suggests seaweed and coral. From the mouths of of the sea-chargers jets of water rise to meet the nimbus and rainbows of the semi-spherical downpour of ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... degree of heat obtained by the combustion of pulverized coal, which is injected into the interior of the kiln. This combustion effects a chemical decomposition of the chalk, and causes it to assume a plastic consistency and to collect together in the form of small spherical balls, which are known as "clinker." Kilns are usually arranged with a slight incline, at the upper end of which the chalk is fed in and gradually works its way down to the interior flame of burning fuel ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... presently. I heard Jack cry out when he saw one of the dishes of fruit. It was, I found, the durian, a fruit of which the natives are very fond, and which I got to like, though its peculiarly offensive odour at first gave me a dislike to it. It is nearly of the size of a man's head, and is of a spherical form. It consists of five cells, each containing from one to four large seeds enveloped in a rich white pulp, itself covered with a thin pellicle, which prevents the seed from adhering to it. This pulp is the edible portion of the fruit. However, ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... have record of, and in most of them segregation is the great mystery. A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force. Segregation of things that have fallen from the sky has been avoided as most deep-dyed of the damned. Mr. Jenyns conceives of a large pool, in which were many of these spherical masses: of the pool drying up and concentrating all in a small area; of a whirlwind ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Wells's New Plane and Spherical Trigonometry. For colleges and technical schools. $1.00. With six-place tables, $1.25. With Robbins's Surveying ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... his life of Numa, describes the reflectors used by the Romans for kindling the sacred fire, as concave instruments of brass, though not spherical like the Peruvian, but of a ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... clear heavens: both twins, as like each other As star to star, which by the vulgar sort, For their resplendent composition, Are named the bright eyes of Mount Cephalon: With four fair rooms those lodgings are contrived, Four goodly rooms in form most spherical, Closing each other like the heavenly orbs: The first whereof, of nature's substance wrought, As a strange moat the other to defend, Is trained movable by art divine, Stirring the whole compacture of the rest: The second chamber is most curiously ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... difficult for them to get about. The doctor's gig, now so generally in use, had not as yet been brought to that state of perfection that has made its use in these modern times a matter of ease and comfort. We had wheels, to be sure, but they were not spherical as they have since become, and were made out of stone blocks weighing ten or fifteen tons apiece, and hewn octagonally, so that a ride over the country roads in a vehicle of that period not only involved the services of some thirty ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... steam in Yugna," said Tommy coldly. "I'm designing steam guns. Gravity feed of spherical projectiles. A jet of steam instead of gunpowder. They'll be low-velocity, but we can use big-calibre balls for shock effect, and with long barrels they ought to serve for a hundred yards or better. Smooth bore, ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and blue, and traversed by blinding white clouds. I could not have been more than five or six, I think, from the kind of dress I wore, the very pearl buttons of which, encircled on their face with a ring of half-spherical hollows, have their undeniable relation in my memory to the heavens and the earth, to the march of the glorious clouds, and the tender scent of the rooted flowers; and, indeed, when I think of it, must, by the delight they gave me, have opened my mind the more ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... matter oscillating at such rates. From every star waves of these dimensions move, with the velocity of light, like spherical shells in all directions. And in ether, just as in water, the motion of every particle is the algebraic sum of all the separate motions imparted to it. One motion does not blot out the other; or, if extinction occur at one point, it is strictly atoned ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... the road at Dowdall's at the edge of the clearing. No sooner in place than a scattering fire by the men is opened upon friends and foes alike. Dilger's battery trains some of its guns down the road. The reserve artillery is already in position at the north of this line, and uses spherical case with rapidity. Howard and his staff are in the thickest of the fray, endeavoring to stem the tide. As well oppose ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... employed—urine, beer yeast water, meat water, etc. Our culture media were not sterile, but we found—most commonly—a microscopic organism showing no relationship to the septic vibrio, and presenting the form, common enough elsewhere, of chains of extremely minute spherical granules possessed of no virulence whatever. [Footnote: It is quite possible that Pasteur was here dealing with certain septicemic streptococci that are now know to lose their virulence with extreme ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... will find an account of what has been previously done to reduce by one-half the length of reflecting telescopes. The advantage of substituting, as you propose, a convex for a plane mirror arises from two causes that a spherical surface is more easily executed than a plane one; and that the spherical aberration of the larger speculum, if it be spherical, will be diminished by the opposite aberration of the convex one. This advantage, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... that part of our old world that was shot into space did not include much of this Arctic sea. We may find beyond here," pointing, as he spoke, ahead, "instead of the receded ocean, no ocean at all. We cannot believe that this island in the air is spherical like our own old earth. It is a ragged form which will show on what we may call the under side the very convolutions and scars made by its breaking away from the old earth. Do ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... necessity through ignorance compelled me to use! How I longed to discover the secret of some perfect lens, whose magnifying power should be limited only by the resolvability of the object, and which at the same time should be free from spherical and chromatic aberrations, in short from all the obstacles over which the poor microscopist finds himself continually stumbling! I felt convinced that the simple microscope, composed of a single lens of such vast yet perfect power was possible of construction. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... sun. As the oleaginous matter exudes, it falls in drops through the apertures into a wide-mouthed calabash placed underneath. After a sufficient quantity has thus been collected, the oil undergoes a purifying process, and is then poured into the small spherical shells of the nuts of the moo-tree, which are hollowed out to receive it. These nuts are then hermetically sealed with a resinous gum, and the vegetable fragrance of their green rind soon imparts to the oil ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... purpose of working out this theory he required a science of trigonometry, plane and spherical: and this he accordingly seems to have invented. To him also we owe the discovery of that vast gradual change in the position of the fixed stars, in fact, of the whole celestial system, now known by the name of the precession of the equinoxes; the first great catalogue of fixed ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... and Brazil another species, the Choestostomus pictus, is found, which is equally skilful. With aquatic plants it constructs a spherical nest and arranges it in the midst of the reeds, level with the water. At the lower part a hole is left, through which the female comes to lay. After fertilisation, the couple, as is rarely found among fish, remain in the neighbourhood of their offspring to assist them if necessary. This ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... 741, and was afterwards Bishop of Salzburg. He died in 785. He is remembered by his controversies with St. Boniface, one of which is concerned with the question of the Antipodes. Virgil is supposed to have been the first to teach that the earth is spherical. So celebrated was he that it has been thought that a part of the favor in which the author of the Aeneid was held by medieval churchmen was due to a confusion between his name and that of the geometer, sometimes spoken ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Balloons made spherical, or designed after the regular aeronaut's hot-air balloon, are the best kind to make. Those having an odd or unusual shape will not make ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Speculative (theoretic) teoria. Speculum spegulo. Speech parolado. Speechless muta. Speed rapido. Speed rapidigi. Speedy rapida. Spell silabi. Spell cxarmo. Spend elspezi. Spendthrift malsxparulo. Sphere sfero. Spherical sfera. Sphinx sfinkso. Spice spico. Spider araneo. Spider's web araneajxo. Spike najlego. Spile ligna najlo. Spill (liquid) disversxi. Spill (corn, etc.) dissxuti. Spin sxpini. Spinage spinaco. Spinal spina. Spindle akso. Spine spino. Spinning-wheel radsxpinilo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... members of the provincial meeting of the states of the Vivarais, then assembled at Annonay, to witness the first public aerial ascent. On the 5th June 1783, amidst a very large concourse of spectators, the spherical bag or balloon, consisting of different pieces of linen, merely buttoned together, was suspended from cross poles. Two men kindled a fire under it, and kept feeding the flame with small bundles of chopped straw. The loose bag gradually swelled, assuming a graceful form, and ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... ruggedness or difficulty; as a country may be eminently fruitful, though it has spots unfit for cultivation: His characters are praised as natural, though their sentiments are sometimes forced, and their actions improbable; as the earth upon the whole is spherical, though its surface is varied with ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... be seen with what facility, following our new Theory, we find not only the Ellipses, Hyperbolas, and other curves which Mr. Des Cartes has ingeniously invented for this purpose; but also those which the surface of a glass lens ought to possess when its other surface is given as spherical or plane, or of any other figure that ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... determined whether the forces resided in the centres of the planets or belonged to each individual particle of which they were composed. Newton removed this uncertainty by demonstrating that if a spherical body acts upon a distant body with a force varying as the distance of this body from the centre of the sphere, the same effect will be produced as if each of its particles acted upon the distant body according to the same law. And hence it follows that the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the good will of his jailer. From analogous observations I can credit the account in all its details, and I believe that the conduct of the captive four-hander can be traced to a mental process as utterly beyond the brain-scope of a horse, a dog, or an elephant as a problem in spherical trigonometry. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... reasons. First, momentum is a prime element in a missile. A long one contains double the metal of a spherical one. Second, it can be made so that it will expand when the explosion of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... ascertained by Mr. Reeks) in an uncompressed form: I believe that this salt has not heretofore been found in veins. Of the three beds, the central one is the most compact, and more like ordinary sandstone: it includes numerous flattened spherical concretions, often united like a necklace, composed of hard calcareous sandstone, containing a few shells: some of these concretions were four feet in diameter, and in a horizontal line nine feet apart, showing that the calcareous matter must ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... of the spherical-shaped objects reported, as already mentioned, is that they are meteorological or similar type balloons. This, however, does not explain reports that they travel at high speed or maneuver rapidly. But 'Saucer' men point out ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... six inches high, six feet five in circumference. Head spherical, and too large for any neck. Nature set it on the back-bone. Body capacious. Legs short and sturdy. A beer-barrel on skids. Face a vast, unfurrowed expanse. No lines of thought. Two small, gray eyes. Cheeks had taken toll of all that ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... delicate fibres, that are in constant oscillation. Some of these are attached by spiral tendrils; others are united by a slender stem to one common trunk, appearing like a bunch of hare-bells; others are of a globular form, and grouped together in a definite pattern, on a tabular or spherical membranous case, for a certain period of their existence, and ultimately become detached and locomotive, while many are permanently clustered together, and die if separated from the parent mass. They have no organs of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Christmannus and Raymarus). Mr. Harriot's method is now more used than Oughtred's, and himself in the esteem of Dr. Wallis not beneath Des Cartes. Dr. Hakewill, in his Apology, tells you Harriot was the first that squared the area of a spherical triangle; and I can tell you, by the perusal of some papers of Torporley's it appears that Harriot could make the sign of any arch at demand, and the converse, and apply a table of sines to solve all equations, and treated largely of figurate arithmetic. His papers fell into the ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... intrinsic qualities of things, or reproduce them exactly. The Ptolemaic system, for instance, was perfectly scientific; it was based on careful and prolonged observation and on just reasoning; but it was modelled on an image—the spherical blue dome of the heavens—proper only to an observer on the earth, and not transferable to a universe which is diffuse, centreless, fluid, and perhaps infinite. When the imagination, for any reason, comes to be peopled with images of the latter sort, the modern, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... hundred yards farther on there was a beach of pebbles, where the stream had changed its course. On this plot sat a gigantic spherical machine of a glasslike material. It was about 300 feet in diameter and it was tapered on two sides into tees which Larner rightly took to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... long petioles; leaflets lanceolate, acuminate, smooth, dark green. Calyx of 4 imbricated sepals. Corolla of 4 unguiculate petals, between white and straw color, 1' long. Stamens indefinite, violet-colored. Ovary unilocular, many-ovuled. Berry spherical with many seeds buried ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... the Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child, had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed, that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of spherical fossil terebratulae, which served the purposes of the game equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a profession; and, when supporting ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... other Isopoda the heart is removed towards the abdomen. In the wonderfully deformed parasitic Isopods of the Porcellanae (Entoniscus porcellanae), the spherical heart of the female is confined to a short space of the elongated first abdominal segment, and seems to possess only a single pair of fissures. In the male of Entoniscus Cancrorum (n. sp.), the heart (Figure 16) is situated in the third abdominal ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... Professor, planting himself squarely in front of us, "assuming a spherical form, and a spacial content, assuming the dynamic forces that are familiar to us and assuming—the thing ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... formation of pearls. Mr. Gray justly observes they are merely the internal nacred coat of the shell, which has been forced, by some extraneous cause, to assume a spherical form. Lister, on the other hand, states "a distemper in the creature produces them," and compares them with calculi in the kidneys of man. But, as observed by a more recent inquirer,[12] "though they are accidental formations, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... that what we call the white of the eye is part of a sphere and will therefore have the light and shade of a sphere. It will seldom be the same tone all over; if the light is coming from the right, it will be in shade towards the left and vice versa. Also the eyelids are bands of flesh placed on this spherical surface. They will therefore partake of the modelling of the sphere and not be the same tone all across. Note particularly the sudden change of plane usually marked by a fold, where the under eyelid meets the surface coming from ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... energy that develops upon its surface or in its atmosphere, engenders in ethereal space successive waves of varying nature and intensity, as has been said above, and let us admit that its mechanical waves are traversed obliquely (Fig. 1) by any spherical body—by a comet, for example; then, under the excitation of the waves that it is traversing, and through its velocity, the comet will itself enter into action, and produce mechanical waves in its turn. As the trace produced in the solar waves consists of an ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... consists of two parts, each one containing a single seed, or bean. These beans are flattened laterally, so as to fit together, except in the following instances: in the peaberry, where one of the ovules never develops, the single ovule, having no pressure upon it, is spherical; in the rare instances where three seeds are found, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a clear conception as to the spherical form of the earth, it was impossible for them to begin any intelligent inquiries concerning its structure or history. The Greeks knew the earth to be a sphere, but this knowledge was lost among the early Christian people, and it was not until ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... end-organ are found in the skin. There is the "spherical end-bulb", into which a sensory axon penetrates; it is believed to be the sense organ for cold. There is the rather similar "cylindrical end-bulb" believed to be the sense organ for warmth. There is the "touch corpuscle", found in the skin of the palms and soles, and consisting, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... TRIGONOMETRY. A solid angle is definable as the space contained by three or more planes intersecting in a common point; it is familiarly represented by a corner. The angle between two planes is termed dihedral, between three trihedral, between any number more than three polyhedral. A spherical angle is a particular dihedral angle; it is the angle between two intersecting arcs on a sphere, and is measured by the angle between the planes containing the arcs and the centre of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... secretly. The land is so low in the vicinity of Alexandria that boats or galleys are out of sight from it at a very short distance from the shore. In fact, travelers say that, in coming upon the coast, the illusion produced by the spherical form of the surface of the water and the low and level character of the coast is such that one seems actually to descend from the sea to the land. Caesar might therefore have easily kept his expedition a secret, had it not been that, in order to be provided with a supply of water ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... resembles one, who seeing a column for the first time, and standing at too great a distance to take in the whole of it, concludes it to be flat. Or, like one unacquainted with the first principles of philosophy, who, finding the sensible horizon appear a plain surface, can form no idea of the spherical form of the whole, which he does not see, and laughs at the account of antipodes, which ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... are very minute, not seeming readily to crystallize with each other; each in itself of uniform shape and size, spherical as the egg which contains the germ of life, and small as the egg from which the life of ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the hurds usually bears a layer of pith, consisting of thin-walled cells nearly spherical or angular, but not elongated. They are more or less crushed and torn. They are probably of little value for paper, but they constitute less than 1 per cent of the weight of the hurds. The principal weight and bulk consist of slender elongated woody cells. ...
— Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material - United States Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 404 • Lyster H. Dewey and Jason L. Merrill
... is an ocean to such a fish) for half an hour, more or less, the movement of the zoospore becomes slower, and is limited to a slow turning upon its axis, without change of place. It then becomes quite quiet, the cilia disappear, it assumes a spherical form, and surrounds itself with a distinct, though delicate, membranous coat. A protuberance then grows out from one side of the sphere, and rapidly increasing in length, assumes the character of a hypha. The latter penetrates into the substance of the potato plant, either by ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... The subterranean abode within the hillock is so remarkable that it involuntarily reminds the observer of the well-known "maze," which has puzzled the earliest years of youth throughout many generations. The central apartment, or "keep," if we so term it, is a nearly spherical chamber, the roof of which is almost on a level with the earth around the hill, and therefore situated at a considerable depth from the apex of the heap. Around this keep are driven two circular passages or galleries, one just level with the ceiling ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... modern Liberalism, many and great though they be, are practically summed in this denial or neglect of the quality and intrinsic value of things. Its rectangular beatitudes, and spherical benevolences,—theology of universal indulgence, and jurisprudence which will hang no rogues, mean, one and all of them, in the root, incapacity of discerning, or refusal to discern, worth and unworth in anything, and least of all in man; ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... planting himself squarely in front of us, "assuming a spherical form, and a spatial content, assuming the dynamic forces that are familiar to us and assuming—the thing is ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... earth of itself is ponderous and heavy, Cold and dry of his own nature proper; Some part lieth dry continually, And part thereof covered over with water, Some with the salt sea, some with fresh river, Which earth and the water together withal So joined make a round figure spherical; So the water which is cold and moist is found In and upon the earth filling the hollowness, In divers parts, lying with the earth round, Yet the hills and mountains of the earth excess Take nothing of it away the roundness, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... the pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns. Great and small, through all the upper levels these strange luminaries gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging unsupported in space. Out from their shining spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold, rigid, unshifting, with the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... varieties are nearly round in form, but are not so spherical as turnip seed. I note, however, that seed of the Savoys are nearly oval. In color they are light brown when first gathered, but gradually turn dark brown if not gathered too early. An ounce contains nearly ten thousand seed, but should not be relied ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... known as astigmatism, is due to the fact that the eye does not always have a perfectly spherical front (cornea). The curvature in one direction is different from that in others. For example, the vertical curvature may be more convex than the horizontal. Such a condition produces a serious defect of vision. It can be corrected by means of cylindrical lenses of the ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Ombrega, therefore I employed the interval of two days in cleaning all the rifles, and in preparing for a fresh expedition, as that of the Settite and Royan had been completed. The short Tatham No.10 rifle carried a heavy cylinder, instead of the original spherical ball. I had only fired two shots with this rifle, and the recoil had been so tremendous, owing to the heavy weight of the projectile, that I had mistrusted the weapon; therefore, when the moment arrived to fire off all the guns preparatory to cleaning, my good angel whispered ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... The commonest beads were spherical and barrel-shaped, of carnelian, haematite, and amethyst, and discs of shell, these last the commonest of all. In green felspar there were small flat discs, hawks, and hippopotamus heads. Sphinxes with human heads are generally of amethyst. Uninscribed scarabs, ...
— El Kab • J.E. Quibell
... body of water. This, by gravitation, is reduced to a spherical form, and by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation, is become oblate. The purpose of this fluid body is essential in the constitution of the world; for, besides affording the means of life and motion to a multifarious race of animals, it is the source of growth and circulation to the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... employed sails, held up to the wind by the drag of a guide-rope on the ground. The control to be obtained by means like these was pathetically small, and the real problem was soon seen to be the problem of a motor. The spherical balloon is obviously unsuited for power-navigation; in 1784, only a year after the invention of the balloon, General Meusnier, of the French army, made designs for an egg-shaped power-balloon to be driven ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... violet-coloured flowers; although there is another species, the "sapucaya," which has yellow ones. But it is neither the trunk, nor the branches, nor the leaves, nor yet the flowers of this tree, that render it such an object of curiosity. It is the great woody and spherical pericarps that contain the nuts or fruits that are wonderful. These are often as large as the head of a child, and as hard as the shell of the cocoa-nut! Inside is found a large number—twenty or more—of those triangular-shaped nuts which ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... excellent Lorenzo, that, as I have thus given you an account by letter of what has occurred to me, to send you two plans and descriptions of the world, made and arranged by my own hand skill. There will be a map on a plane surface, and the other a view of the world in spherical form, which I intend to send you by sea, in the care of one Francesco Lotti, a Florentine, who is here. I think you will be pleased with them, particularly with the globe, as I made one not long since for these sovereigns, and they esteem it highly. I could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... on this, Fuller was designing the mechanical details of the projector. It must be able to turn through a spherical angle of 180 degrees, and was necessarily controlled electrically from the inside. The details of the projector were worked out by six that evening, and the numerous castings and machined pieces that were to be used were to be made ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... maturity. My assistant extracted one from the oviducts, and succeeded in fixing it by an end on a glass slider. We may take this opportunity of remarking, that it is in the oviducts themselves the eggs are imbued with the viscous liquid, with which they are produced, and not in passing through the spherical sac as Swammerdam believed. During the remainder of this month, we found ten fertile workers in the same hives, and dissected them all. In most, the ovaries were easily distinguished, but in some we could not discern the faintest traces ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber |
