"Earth's surface" Quotes from Famous Books
... a small scale, in the very neighbourhood of man's busiest haunts, occur the cosmical cataclysms which are usually seen only in remote solitudes, and which during the unknown ages of geology have left their indelible records on large portions of the earth's surface. Here we are admitted into the very workshop of Nature, and are privileged to witness her processes of creation. In the neighbourhood of Rome the volcanoes are long extinct. Nature is dead, and there is nothing left but her cold gray ashes. But here we see her in all her vigour, changing ... — Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the mountains we are much nearer light than ... — The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... but the Pilot is prepared and has put his craft on an even keel in less time than it takes to tell you about it; for well he knows that he must expect such conditions when passing over a shore or, indeed, any well-defined change in the composition of the earth's surface. Especially is this so on a hot and sunny day, for then the warm surface of the earth creates columns of ascending air, the speed of the ascent depending upon the composition of the surface. Sandy soil, for instance, ... — The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... by no means the same density throughout. Like all gases, air is subject to the law that the density increases directly as the pressure, and thus the densest and heaviest layers are those nearest the sea-level, because the air near the earth's surface has to support the pressure of all the air above it. As airmen rise into the highest portions of the atmosphere the height of the column of air above them decreases, and it follows that, having a shorter column of air to support, those portions are less dense than those lower down. So rare does ... — The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... the memory holds are as clumsy as thumbs. The demand for this kind of traveller and the opportunity for him increase as we learn more and more minutely the dry facts and figures of the most inaccessible corners of the earth's surface. There is no hope of another Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, with his statistics of Dreamland, who makes no difficulty of impressing "fourscore thousand rhinocerots" to draw the wagons of the King of Tartary's army, or of killing eight hundred and fifty thousand men with a flourish of his quill,—for ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
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