"Spheroid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... atmospherical zones. In fact, if there is no air there is no noise, and as there was a noise—that famous trumpet, to wit—the phenomenon must occur in the air, the density of which invariably diminishes, and which does not extend for more than six miles round our spheroid. ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... the one which least interested him; but he ascertained the perfect circularity of its disc. With respect to Venus, he endeavoured to determine the time of its rotation from 1777. We owe to him the discovery of the true shape of the "red planet Mars,"—that, like the Earth, it is an oblate spheroid, or flattened at the poles. After Piazzi, Olbers, and Harding had discovered the small planets, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, he applied himself to the measurement of their angular diameters. His researches led him to the conclusion that these four new ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... Saturn, could be supposed to be projected from the sun by an explosion, the motion of the sun itself might be at the same time disturbed in such a manner as to prevent the planet from falling again into it. 2. As the sun revolves round its own axis its form must be that of an oblate spheroid like the earth, and therefore a body projected from its surface perpendicularly upwards from that surface would not rise perpendicularly from the sun's centre, unless it happened to be projected exactly from either of ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... have tired my wings and long to fill My breast with denser air, to stand, to walk With eyes not raised above my fellow-men. Sick of my unwalled, solitary realm, I ask to change the myriad lifeless worlds I visit as mine own for one poor patch Of this dull spheroid and a little breath To shape in word or deed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thousands of years of research, investigation, study and thought, can now be gathered together and presented in so simple a form that it can be learned by anyone of intelligence in a few months. It took humanity untold thousands of years to learn the scientific truth that the earth is an oblate spheroid. Many men gave their lives to establish the truth. As a result, to-day every schoolboy learns and understands the fact within a very few days after his first opening of a text book on geography. Thousands of scholars have ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... the plucky little quarter-back, it came, and Wallace was right under it. Into his arms, with a resounding "pung!" the spheroid landed, and, like a flash, the quarter passed it to Jack ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... the polar compression, the shape seemed as if the spheroid were irregularly squeezed; so that though not broken by projection or indentation, the limb did not present the regular quasi-circular curvature exhibited in the focus of our telescopes. Also, between the inner ring and the planet, with a power of 500, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... adjacent. Insert into the cavity formed by the imposition of the ligneous fibre upon the inferior transverse ferruginous bar, a sheet of laminated lignin, or paper, compressed by the action of the digits into an irregular spheroid. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... Verrier and Adams demonstrated a priori that a planet must exist exterior to Uranus, before any astronomer communicated information that it does exist. Or again: the French Commissioners proved by actual measurement that the earth is an oblate spheroid, of which Newton had ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... conduct according to the views of unerring prescience. But man is, while in this vale of tears, like an uninstructed bowler, so to speak, who thinks to attain the jack, by delivering his bowl straight forward upon it, being ignorant that there is a concealed bias within the spheroid, which will make it, in all probability, swerve away, and ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... each other, but does not compare them with surfaces and solids bounded by straight lines. Archimedes developed the proportions necessary for effecting this comparison, in his treatises on the sphere and cylinder, the spheroid and conoid, and in his work on the measure of the circle. He rose to still more abstruse considerations in his treatise on the spiral. Archimedes is also the only one of the ancients who has left us ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... general features of the distribution of continent and ocean can be regarded as the consequences of simple causes of a dynamical character," and finally, "As regards the contour of the great ocean basins, we seem to be justified in saying that the earth is approximately an oblate spheroid, but more nearly an ellipsoid with three unequal axes, having its surface furrowed according to the formula for a certain spherical harmonic of the third degree" (Ibid. page 436.), and he shows that this furrowed surface ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... newsmen, was an "ovate spheroid about thirty feet at the equator." (Fry has a habit of drifting off into the technical). Its outside surface was a highly polished silver with ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... Christian charity great Casey's visage shone; He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on; He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew, But Casey still ignored it; and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... might think that gravitation," Quoth Grey, "drew yon metallic spheroid down. The soul poetic views the situation Fraught with more meaning. When thy girlish crown Was mirrored there, there was disintegration Of me, and all my spirit moved to you, Taking the form of slow precipitation!" But here came "Taps," ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... convenience termed the earth a flattened spheroid, it is only such in a very general sense. It has an infinite number of minor irregularities which it is the province of the geographer to trace and that of the geologist to account for. In the first place, its surface is occupied by a great array ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... yo' really an' truly goin' t' depress this elongated spheroid an' its human consignment int' that conglomerous convoluted mass of gaseous vapor regardless of th' consequences?" asked Washington, as he gazed with wide opened eyes ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... miles. The length of the pendulum in the first measurement was such as to swing half seconds in England; and I had not thought it, in this case, worth attention, that by the laws of gravity and the oblate spheroid, the pendulum would not swing so quick in the latitude of 35 deg.. I must leave it to better mathematicians to determine from the data and the true length of a geographic mile in this latitude, whether the base ought to have been 8.22 ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... arranged, but always supported by seperate short and small peduncles, the insertion of which poduces a slight concavity in the bury while it's opposite side is slightly convex; the form of the berry is a spheroid; the shorter diameter being in a line with the peduncle.- this berry is a pericarp the outer coat of which is a thin firm tough pellicle, the inner part consists of a dry mealy powder of a yellowish white colour invelloping ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... have to be studied later under circumstances of forbidding technicality. It would be quite easy to teach the child in an incidental way to distinguish cube, cylinder, cone, sphere (or ball), prolate spheroid (which might be called "egg"), oblate spheroid (which might be called "squatty ball"), the pyramid, and various parallelepipeds, as, for example, the square slab, the oblong slab, the brick, and post. He could have these things added to his box of bricks by ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... continues in his clear, ringing voice. "You are not, I presume, disposed to regret the fortunate circumstance by which you were permitted to visit this surpassingly marvellous cavern—and it really is one of the finest, although the least known on this spheroid." ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... the limiting spheroid in which the bodies are enclosed being composed of the matter of the third, or gaseous, kind, drops away when the gaseous atom is raised to the next level, and the six bodies are set free. They at once re-arrange ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... they could see almost directly under them, easily recognizing her by her soft, sweetly scintillant light. But no planet or constellation possessed any attraction for the travellers, as long as their eyes could trace that shadowy, crescent-edged, diamond-girdled, meteor-furrowed spheroid, the theatre of their existence, the home of so many undying desires, the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... objects that surround us, and learn that we possess a power to move our own bodies, we experience, that those objects, which excite in us the idea of solidity and of figure, oppose this voluntary movement of our own organs; as whilst I endeavour to compress between my hands an ivory ball into a spheroid. And we are hence taught by experience, that our own body and those, which we touch, cannot exist in ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo. Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. [Footnote: When this sentence was written, it was generally believed that the original nucleus ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... assigned. The vague and in some respects false analogies, as they have been shown to be by Mr. Chauncey Wright, which have been advanced in favour of this view, such as the sudden crystallisation of inorganic substances, or the falling of a facetted spheroid from one facet to another, hardly deserve consideration. One class of facts, however, namely, the sudden appearance of new and distinct forms of life in our geological formations supports at first sight the belief in abrupt development. But the value of this evidence depends ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin |
