"Ellipse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for both narrator and listener were hungry. The two now sat face to face, their legs forming a sort of an ellipse, with the roast mutton in the centre, and for several minutes a formidable gritting of teeth, as huge pieces of the mutton passed through them, were the only sounds that broke ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... Euergetes by Apollonius Pergaeus, forty years later than Archimedes. He excelled both in the mathematical and physical department. His chief work was a treatise on Conic Sections. It is said that he was the first to introduce the words ellipse and hyperbola. So late as the eleventh century his complete works were extant in Arabic. Modern geometers describe him as handling his subjects with less power than his great predecessor Archimedes, but nevertheless displaying extreme precision and beauty in his methods. His ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... except in the tents of a circus—the canvas-filtered sunshine and sawdust atmosphere of show day. Through the entrance the crowd poured steadily, coming from the absorptions of the wild-animal tent to feast upon greater wonders; passing around the sawdust ellipse that contained two soul-cloying rings, to find seats whence they might behold the splendors so soon to be unfolded. Every one who was not buying the eternal lemonade was eating something; and the faces of children shone with gourmand rapture; indeed, very often the eyes of ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... Gr. [Greek: dia], through, [Greek: metron], measure), in geometry, a line passing through the centre of a circle or conic section and terminated by the curve; the "principal diameters" of the ellipse and hyperbola coincide with the "axes" and are at ... (continued in volume 8, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through the snarl of traffic, bleating. A woman, wrapped in a greatcoat of "baby" pelts and an almost undistinguishable dog in the cove of her arm, walked out from the Hotel Metropolis across the sidewalk and into a taxicab. An army of derby hats, lowered ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... bodies did not attract one another at all, but only moved under the influence of the sun, they would move in orbits having the form of ellipses. They are found to move very nearly in such orbits, only the actual path deviates from an ellipse, now in one direction and then in another, and it slowly changes its position from year to year. These deviations are due to the pull of the other planets, and by measuring the deviations ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... appear under many forms and disguises. The Americans have lately introduced an indifferent kind of it under the form of an ellipse—an omission of some important matter. Thus, the editor of a Western newspaper announces that if any more libels are published about him, there will be several first class funerals in his neighbourhood. Again, "An old Maine woman undertook to eat ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Barbican to Ardan, "this change of curve involves no change in the doom of the Projectile. We are as infallibly lost by an ellipse as ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... stages to the height of 260 feet and there ends in an embattled platform, account for the singularly feudal and fortress-like character of the building. The outline of the buttresses being that of a semi-ellipse, they look like turrets carried up the entire face of the wall. The floor of the church is many feet above the ground, and the entrance was originally protected by a drawbridge and portcullis; but these military works were removed in the sixteenth century, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... seventeen officers in all riding in this race. The race course was a large three-mile ring of the form of an ellipse in front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier five feet high, just before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous slope, an Irish barricade (one of the most difficult ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere co-existence of these opposite qualifies in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can coexist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If man can incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise than ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... long ellipse now, surrounded by a vast array of smaller bodies, fragments and contents of the ship. Now the stricken globe moved completely free of its companion. It rotated, presenting a crescent toward us, then wheeled farther as it receded from its twin, showing its ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... thirty-three years had in the past encountered the earth's atmosphere, was due, and over-due. The cause of this, and of their finally eluding observation, need only be very briefly touched on here. The actual meteoric train is known to travel in an elongated ellipse, the far end of which lies near the confines of the solar system, while at a point near the hither end the earth's orbit runs slantingly athwart it, forming, as it were, a level crossing common to the two orbits, the earth taking some five or six hours in transit. Calculation shows that the ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... wonder, and presently, at the distance, perhaps, of a little less than a mile, descried an innumerable herd of horses streaming across these level pastures, and at the extremity, it seemed, of a wide ellipse, that had brought them near, and now was galloping ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... drawing in the cave (Number 3) was an ellipse, three feet in length and one foot ten inches in breadth: the outside line of this painting was of a deep blue colour, the body of the ellipse being of a bright yellow dotted over with red lines and spots, whilst across it ran two transverse lines of blue. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The summit or highest level of it is in the southwest; longest diameter is from northwest to southeast. From Crossen, whither Friedrich is now driving, to the Jablunka Pass, which issues upon Hungary, is above 250 miles; the AXIS, therefore, or longest diameter, of our Ellipse we may call 230 English miles;—its shortest or conjugate diameter, from Friedland in Bohemia (Wallenstein's old Friedland), by Breslau across the Oder to the Polish Frontier, is about 100. The total area of Schlesien ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... defined by certain formulas. From the point of view of the impression they make on our eye these geometrical figures may assume very varied shapes. By perspective the cube may be transformed into a pyramid or a square, the circle into an ellipse or a straight line. Moreover, the consideration of these fictitious shapes is far more important than that of the real shapes, for it is they and they alone that we see and that can be reproduced by photography or in pictures. In certain cases there is more truth in the unreal ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... machine, specially devised for the purpose, Professor Marey found that a bird's wing moves in an ellipse, with a pointed summit (Fig. 10). The insect beats the air in a distinctly horizontal plane, but the bird in a vertical plane. The wing of an insect is impervious to the air; while the bird's wing resists the air only on its under side. Hence, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... clasp hands, arch arms, and let the whole countermarching train sweep through; and a beautiful arch they make, for they are the aforesaid captain and Charlotte Oliver. "Hands round!"—hurrah for the whirling ellipse; and now it's "right and left" and two ellipses glide opposite ways, "to quile dat golden chain." In the midst of the whirl, when every hand is in some other and men and girls are tossing their heads to get their locks out of their eyes, at the windows come unnoticed ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy the doctrine which it professes to interpret—that does not convert it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar- loaf an ellipse, adding—"By which term I here mean a cone;"—and then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among the conic sections! And yet—notwithstanding the repugnancy of the doctrine, in its unqualified sense, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sections of a cone. It is an oval curve, which may be drawn by fixing two pins in a sheet of paper at S and H, fastening a string, SPH, to the two pins, and stretching it with a pencil point at P, and moving the pencil point, while the string is kept taut, to trace the oval ellipse, APB. S and H are the foci. Kepler found the sun to be in one focus, say S. AB is the major axis. DE is the minor axis. C is the centre. The direction of AB is the line of apses. The ratio of CS to CA is the excentricity. The position ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... the Somersetshire Bacons, noticed by NOCAB, when read as written, is supposed to be in the ablative case; when transposed, the evident ellipse may be supplied ad libitum. From Grimbaldus, downwards, it does not appear that these beechen men ever signalized themselves by deeds of arms, the favourite boast of heralds and genealogists. Nor indeed could we expect them to have "hearts ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... law of Kepler, namely, the proportionality of the areas to the times of their description, Newton inferred that the force which keeps a planet in its orbit is always directed to the sun. From the first law of Kepler, that every planet moves in an ellipse with the sun in one of its foci, he drew the still more general inference that the force by which the planet moves round that focus varies inversely as the square of its distance from the focus. From the third law of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Crab-like, she crawled obliquely to within a few hundred feet of the low-lying town, then the screw churned up a furious wake as the anxious Tagalog on the bridge swung her back into the Straits to circle in a new attempt. Carried by the tidal rush the old tub circled in a great ellipse. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... subject to terrific hurricanes and cyclones, as well as explosions, casting up jets to the height of 200,000 miles. In the early days of spectroscopy these protuberances could only be seen at a time of a total solar ellipse, and astronomers made long journeys to distant parts of the earth to be in line of totality. Now all is changed. Images of the sun are thrown into the observatory by an ingenious instrument run by clockwork, and called a heliostat. This is set on the sun at such ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... asteroid belt without any collisions, take us as close to the sun as possible without having it capture us, and land us in space about ten thousand miles from earth. From then on I'll throw the asteroid into a braking ellipse around the earth and I'll be able to ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... the step towards making an ellipse, or, as they call it when shaped for a reflecting telescope, a parabola. You know what ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... flag is dark blue with a narrow red border on all four sides; centered is a red-bordered, pointed, vertical ellipse containing a beach scene, outrigger canoe with sail, and a palm tree with the word GUAM superimposed in bold red letters; US flag is ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... second class, of those lines whose nature is to proceed for ever into space. Any portion of a circle, for instance, is, by the law of its being, compelled, if it continue its course, to return to the point from which it set out; so also any portion of the oval curve (called an ellipse), produced by cutting a cylinder obliquely across. And if a single point be marked on the rim of a carriage wheel, this point, as the wheel rolls along the road, will trace a curve in the air from ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Castle Willis afterwards set apart in his memory as 'a bright ellipse in the usual procession of joys and sorrows.' He certainly made the most of this unique opportunity of observing the manners and customs of the great. The routine of life at the castle was what each guest chose to make it. 'Between ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... palace"; for, like the people who serve the same wine under different labels, the Celto-maniacs, who had almost nothing to offer, decorated the same things with various names. When these stones form an ellipse, and have no head-covering, one must say: There is a "cromlech"; when one perceives a stone laid horizontally upon two upright stones, one is confronted by a "lichaven" or a "trilithe." Often two enormous rocks are put one on top of the other, and touch ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... fret is a series of highly conventionalized spirals: translate it from angular to curved and we have the wave-band; isolate it and we have the volute. Egg and dart are phallic emblems, female and male; or, if you prefer, as ellipse and straight line, they are symbols of finite existence ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... world should leave behind it a trail of light to mark its orbit, and our perceptions of form were sufficiently acute, we should see that these curves of light are not exact circles, but a little flattened into an ellipse, with the sun always in one of the foci. Hence each planet is nearer to the sun at one part of its orbit than another; that point is called the perihelion, and the farthest point aphelion. This eccentricity ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... occupy this remarkable site consist of a strong wall, guarded by numerous bastions and pierced by four gateways, which runs round the brow of the hill in a slightly irregular ellipse, of some interesting remains of buildings within this walled space, and of a few insignificant traces of inferior edifices on the slope between the plain and the summit. As it is not thought that any of these remains are of a date ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... circular walled-plain, 111 miles in diameter, situated close to the N.W. limb, and consequently always foreshortened into a more or less elongated ellipse. But for this it would be one of the grandest objects in the first quadrant. Under the designation of "Mercurius Falsus" it received great attention from Schroter, who gives several representations of it ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... there, he so corrected their flight that they were precisely stationary in relation to the comet. He then opened his switches, and the Forlorn Hope hurtled on. Apparently motionless, it was now a part of Cantrell's Comet, traveling in a stupendous, elongated ellipse about the Master of our Solar ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... indeed to listen, hear These measured words, my work of yestermorn. "We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move; The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun; The dark Earth follows wheel'd in her ellipse; And human things returning on themselves Move onward, leading up the golden year. "Ah, tho' the times, when some new thought can bud, Are but as poets' seasons when they flower, Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore, [3] Have ebb and flow conditioning their march, And slow ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... ellipse represents the formal diction of Cicero, the dotted line ellipse his conversational vocabulary. They overlap each other through a great part of their extent, but there are certain literary locutions which would rarely be used ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite tentacles, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... light which enters by my window," said the abbe, "and then observe the lines traced on the wall. Well, by means of these lines, which are in accordance with the double motion of the earth, and the ellipse it describes round the sun, I am enabled to ascertain the precise hour with more minuteness than if I possessed a watch; for that might be broken or deranged in its movements, while the sun and earth never ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 'to Him' and 'for good' are 'all things,' we cannot tell how all will come circling round. We are like men looking only at one small segment of an ellipse which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... referred to any one of the four large plates that precede each season. He will observe that a portion of an ellipse has been traced on each of them, and that this line has been designated the Ecliptic, which simply means the sun's apparent ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... side by side the decaying temples of the gods and the mansions of the holy Roman matrons who, under the preaching of St. Jerome, had made their sumptuous palaces the homes of monastic self-denial. In the long ellipse between the two hills the citizens of Rome were ranged, not too many now in the dwindled state of the City to find elbow-room for all. A shout of applause went up from senators and people as the Gothic king, surrounded by a brilliant throng of courtiers, moved majestically ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... was angry disdain in Layroh's resonant voice. "They who slumber here are a race born far from this planet. They are the Shining Ones of Rikor. Rikor is a tiny planet circling a wandering sun whose orbit is an ellipse so vast that only once in a hundred thousand years does it approach your solar system. Rikor's sun was nearly dead and the Shining Ones had to find a new home soon or else perish. Then their planet swung near the Earth, and their scouts returned with the news that Earth was ideally ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... corresponding hemispheres; but as no simile squares ('nihil simile est idem'), so here the simile fails, for there is nothing in our loves that corresponds to the cold north, or the declining west, which in two hemispheres must necessarily be supposed. But an ellipse of such length will scarcely rescue the line from the charge of nonsense or a ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... that singular and complicated curves are made use of in modern engineering, but with these the general reader can have no concern: the Ponte della Trinita at Florence is the most graceful instance I know of such structure; the arch made use of being very subtle, and approximating to the low ellipse; for which, in common work, a barbarous pointed arch, called four-centred, and composed of bits of circles, is substituted by the English builders. The high ellipse, I believe, exists in eastern architecture. I have never myself met with it on ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... all the qualities of substances, and likewise all the properties of figures. He is acute and He is obtuse, because He is at one and the same time all possible triangles; his radii are at once equal and unequal, because He is both the circle and the ellipse—and He is the hyperbola besides, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the shape of an ellipse, the sides of which were formed by great clifflike mountains, and the other two by hills lower, but still of considerable boldness and size. The longest radius was perhaps six or eight miles, and the shortest three or four. At ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... precisely equal, in express contrast to the series of ellipses, with very unequal diameters, which the floundering hoop has illustrated in its career. When once, however, the definition of the circle is attained, no watching of hoops is any longer requisite. The ellipse can be generated ideally out of the definition, and would have been generated, like asymptotes and hyperbolas, even if never illustrated in nature at all. Lemmas from a foreign tongue have only served to disclose a great fecundity ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... run through the boxes. We were terribly afraid of the water failing us, and worked harder than ever. Indeed, it was difficult to tell when to leave off. The nights were never dark now; the daylight was over twenty hours in duration. The sun described an ellipse, rising a little east of north and setting a little west of north. We shovelled in till we were too exhausted to lift another ounce. Then we lay down in our clothes and slept as soon as we ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... as the centre of our individuality, but we should do better to picture our individuality as an ellipse rather than a circle, a figure having two "conjugate foci," two equilibriated centres of revolution rather than a single one, one of which is the will-power or faculty of doing, and the other the consciousness or perception of being. If we realise only one of these two ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... compass, whence it is called by Darwin circumnutation. The movement belongs to all young growing parts of plants. The great sweeps of a twining stem, like that of the Morning-Glory, are only an increase in the size of the circle or ellipse described.[1] ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... diminished by the thickness of a brick, and finally they disappear about the middle of the total length. At the point shown in our Fig. 94 the arch has lost its supports and rests directly upon the pavement of the channel. Its ellipse is composed of eight voussoirs, four on each side, and a key with a small wedge-shaped stone voussoir on each side of it. Between the two points shown in our Figs. 93 and 94 the upper and lower sewers have become one, the vaulted roof of the first and the paved floor of the second ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... objects and relations not apparent to Sense, or not presentable to Sense. Could we realise all the links in this chain, by placing the objects in their actual order as a VISIBLE series, the reasoning would be a succession of perceptions. Thus the path of a planet is seen by reason to be an ellipse. It would be perceived as a fact, if we were in a proper position and endowed with the requisite means of following the planet in its course; but not having this power, we are reduced to infer the unapparent points in its course from the points which are apparent. We see them ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... of the box is made of 5/16 or 3/8 inch wood, cut to an oval or elliptical shape. To mark out an ellipse about 8 inches long and 5-1/2 inches wide—this will be a. convenient size—stick two pins into the board 5-1/8 inches apart, pass a loop of thread 14 inches in circumference round these, and run the point of a pencil round the ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... pendulums that can be combined in this manner. The movements are rectilinear, but two rectilinear vibrations of equal amplitude acting at right angles to each other generate a circle if they alternate precisely, an ellipse if the alternations are less regular or the amplitudes unequal. A cyclic vibration may also be obtained from a pendulum free to swing in a rotary path. In these ways a most wonderful series of drawings have been obtained, and the similarity of these to some of the thought-forms is remarkable; ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... medallion is sufficient to proclaim her whereabouts to those who still remember her. It is good to pause awhile and etheralize oneself in the neighbourhood of her dust. She lived a quiet life in an old brown house, since rebuilt, that overlooks the Coliseum, on whose comely ellipse and blood-stained history she loved to pasture eyes and imagination. Often I walked thence with her, in those sparkling mornings, up the Palatine hill, to stroll about the ilexes and roses in view of the Forum, to listen ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the neophyte can refer for deductions of Grace to suit any premises or conditions. This, of course, is contrary to the spirit of beautiful design; and the ingenious Hay,—who maintains that his "composite ellipse" is capable of universal application in the arts of ornamental composition, and that by its use any desirable lines in mouldings or vases can be mechanically produced, especially Greek lines, falls into the grave error of endeavoring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... at all crowned my efforts, though I 'divided my swift mind,' now hither, now thither, in a way that I felt sure would have made AEneas green with envy: but the dimly-seen oval remained as provokingly blank as ever—a mere Ellipse, as if in some mathematical diagram, without even the Foci that might be made to do duty as a nose and a mouth. Gradually, however, the conviction came upon me that I could, by a certain concentration of thought, think the veil away, and so ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... Sometimes, however, large spaces occur in which no trees are to be seen, where, indeed, none grow. There are extensive lakes, always under water, even at the lowest ebb of the inundation. They are of all sizes and every possible configuration, from the complete circle through all the degrees of the ellipse, and not unfrequently in the form of a belt, like the channel of a river running for scores of miles between what might readily be mistaken for banks covered with a continuous thicket of low bushes, which are nothing more than the "spray" of ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... of several rocks give out light during the process of crystallization. Thousands of miles of the earth's surface must once have presented the lurid glow of a vast furnace full of igneous rocks. Even now, the copper color of the moon during an ellipse shows us that the earth is a source of light.[262] The mountains on the surface of Venus and the moon, and the continents and oceans of Mars, attest the existence of upheaval and subsidence, and of volcanic fires, capable of producing such phenomena, and of course of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... great lengths of coastline shooting out of sight at the edge of the screen. Mr. Yardo has the cross-hairs centered on the dot which is Gilgamesh. The dot is changing shape; it is turning into a short ellipse, a longer one. The gyros are leaning her out over ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... such a night, Jondo sat out my vigil with me. Our eighty or more wagons were drawn up in a rude ellipse with the stock corraled inside, for we were nearing the danger zone. And yet to-night danger seemed impossible in such a peaceful land ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Sak. [T]iu['][|c]ipu jin[']ga, or low lodges covered with mats, were used by the Omaha in former days. Such lodges are still common among the Winnebago, the Osage, and other tribes. The ground plan of such a lodge forms an ellipse. The height is hardly over 7 feet from the ground. The tent poles are arranged thus: Each pole has one end planted in the ground, the other end being bent down and fastened to the pole immediately opposite; a number ...
— Omaha Dwellings, Furniture and Implements • James Owen Dorsey,
... kindled at the touch, and the moment after the rocket rose hissing into the air, and described a circle of vivid red against the grey background of the sky. A second rocket was sent up, which traced an ellipse of white light; and then a third, whose reflection was a ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... related to and different from each. Since the beings and events form a single uninterrupted series, there are no distinctions of kind in the world, but only distinctions in degree. Rest and motion are not opposites, for rest may be considered as infinitely minute motion; the ellipse and the parabola are not qualitatively different, for the laws which hold for the one may be applied to the other. Likeness is vanishing unlikeness, passivity arrested activity, evil a lesser good, confused ideas simply less distinct ones, animals ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... pressure on the wind wheel, which it will be seen is set off the centre line of the mill and tower, exceeds that found desirable—and this can be regulated by means of a spring on the fantail—the windmill automatically turns on the turn-table and presents an ellipse to the wind instead of a circular face, thus decreasing the area exposed to the wind gradually until the wheel reaches its final position, or is hauled out of gear, when the edges only are opposed to the full force of the wind. The whole weight of the mill is taken upon a ball-bearing turn-table ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... of note, that the nice balance between shall and will is much impaired by the constant use of the ellipse, "I'll, you'll," &c.; and that volition and intention are, to a great extent, co-existent and inseparable in the first person: the metaphysical reasons for this do not here ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... measured, ponderous); The Flock—P. Moran (The horizontal, typifying quietude, repose, calm, solemnity); The curved line: variety, movement; Man with Stone—V. Spitzer (Transitional Line, Cohesion); The Dance—Rubens (The ellipse: line of continuity and unity); Swallows—From the Strand (The diagonal: line of action; speed) Aesthetics of Line, Continued, Where Line is the motive and Decoration is the Impulse; Winter Landscape—After Photograph (Line ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... bluebird, or the faint trill of the song sparrow; and Phoebe's clear, vivacious assurance of her veritable bodily presence among us again is welcomed by all ears. At agreeable intervals in her lay she describes a circle or an ellipse in the air, ostensibly prospecting for insects, but really, I suspect, as an artistic flourish, thrown in to make up in some way for the deficiency of her musical performance. If plainness of dress indicates powers of song as it ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... last to that which we sought a huge ellipse and dome of stones and earth, rising and broadening under our very eyes. It was on a farm among the granite hills, many miles from Rosebery. 'It's only a glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... appearance. It is in vain, that mathematicians represent a plain surface as produced by the flowing of a right line. It will immediately be objected, that our idea of a surface is as independent of this method of forming a surface, as our idea of an ellipse is of that of a cone; that the idea of a right line is no more precise than that of a plain surface; that a right line may flow irregularly, and by that means form a figure quite different from a plane; and that therefore we must suppose it to flow along two ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... ultimate matter is reduced to that of an oblate spheroid described by the revolution of an ellipse ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about you and the well-groomed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Tombs are arranged in rows in the form of an ellipse in the centre of each of the six floors. There is room to accommodate nine hundred prisoners of both sexes. The men are confined in the new prison; the women, fewer in number, in what remains of the old building. Only the centre of each floor being ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... awful temples of the middle ages, is not without grace and dignity. Near the Cathedral rose the palace of the Bishop, whose see was one of the most valuable in Ireland. The city was in form nearly an ellipse; and the principal streets formed a cross, the arms of which met in a square called the Diamond. The original houses have been either rebuilt or so much repaired that their ancient character can no longer be traced; but many of them were standing within living memory. They were in general two stories ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... comes in with greater severity on account of the curvature at either end of the major axis of the ellipse being sharper than it is at the end of any diameter of the circle, the sectional areas, of course, being ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... The base, of the bell, is a circle, but it has been found that by striking any part of this circle on the inside, that part flies out, so that the diameter which passes through this part of the base will be longer than the other diameter. The base, by the stroke, is changed into an ellipse or oval, whose longer axis passes through the part against which the clapper is struck. The elasticity of the bell restores the figure of the base, and makes that part which was forced out of its place, return ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... I am in grave doubts, Carnes, although I can make a pretty shrewd guess. As to the reason for the unnatural lengthening of the day, the explanation is simplicity itself. As you doubtless know, the earth revolves daily on its axis. At the same time, it is moving in a great ellipse about the sun, an ellipse which it takes it a year to cover. If the axis of rotation of the earth were at right angles to the plane of its orbit; in other words, if the earth's equator lay in the plane of the earth's movement about ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... so courteous and restrained. In alternate curves and graceful sallies, they pursue and circumvent each other. First one hops a few feet, then the other, each one standing erect in true military style while his fellow passes him and describes the segment of an ellipse about him, both uttering the while a fine complacent warble in a high but suppressed key. Are they lovers or enemies? the beholder wonders, until they make a spring and are beak to beak in the twinkling of an eye, and perhaps mount a few feet into the air, but rarely ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... forever at their work, we might fancy ourselves, in one form or another, continual here on the round world. For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's orbit,—swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to ellipse, vibrating like a mighty pendulum, the "horologe of eternity" itself, with tremendous oscillations, through the depths of space,—he taught us that the earth endures; and so that the clay with which we are clothed still makes a part of the great revolution. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Indians were riding on in the ellipse, and another man fitted an arrow to his bowstring, and as he rode ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... so-called "altar stone," over fifteen feet long; in a line with this, through the opening of the ellipse, is the "Friar's Heel," a monolith standing outside the circles. The larger stones or "sarsens" are natural to the Marlborough Downs, but the unhewn or "blue" stones are mysterious. They are composed of a kind of igneous rock not found anywhere ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... as regards the process of concentrating the light. It is lighted, in fact, by a small incandescent lamp of 2 candle-power, placed within the apparatus and supplied by an accumulator. The reflector is represented by a portion of an ellipse so calculated that one of the foci corresponds to the lamp and the other to the extremity of the instrument. A commutator, B, permits of establishing or interrupting the current at will. A rheostat added to the accumulator makes it possible to graduate the light at one's leisure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... several previous letters he mentions a name. If he knew a little of journalism he would be aware that editors are a peculiar race, obtained by natural selection. They are never seen, even by their officials; only heard down a pipe. Secondly, "an ellipse or oval" is composed of four arcs of circles. Mr. Smith has got hold of the construction I was taught, when a boy, for a pretty four-arc oval. But my teachers knew better than to call it an ellipse: Mr. Smith does not; but he produces from it such confirmation of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of a style strange to me, but suggested Indian origin. It was long and low, with lofty towers at the corners, and one huge dome in the middle, rising from the roof to half the height of the towers. The main entrance was in the centre of the front—a low arch that seemed half an ellipse. No one was visible, the doors stood wide open, and I went unchallenged into a large hall, in the form of a longish ellipse. Toward one side stood a cage, in which couched, its head on its paws, a huge ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... ready prepared with the mathematics of the subject, tried the fall of the moon towards the earth, away from her tangent, and found that, as compared with the fall of a stone, the law of the inverse square did hold for the moon. He deduced the ellipse, he proceeded to deduce the effect of the disturbance of the sun upon the moon, upon the assumed theory of universal gravitation. He found result after result of his theory in conformity with observed fact: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... further completed by a double ditch across the intervening region. Like Qodshu, it was thus situated in the midst of an artificial island beyond the reach of the battering-ram or the sapper. The encompassing wall, which tended to describe an ellipse, hardly measured two miles in circumference; but the suburbs extending, in the midst of villas and gardens, along the river-banks furnished in time of peace an abode for the surplus population. The wall still rises some five and twenty to thirty feet above the plain. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Spanish line, and pouring in its fire as it went from a distance of forty-five hundred yards, the American squadron swept round in a long ellipse and sailed back, now bringing its starboard batteries into play. Six times it passed over this course, the last two at the distance of two thousand yards. From the great cannon, and from the batteries ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... of numbers and figures, and yet, that when he looks abroad into nature, he finds that things are obeying the same laws which he has ascertained for himself in his own mind. Man forms the idea of an ellipse, and ascertains the laws of ellipses. And the heavenly bodies move according to the laws which he has established. (It is not, of course, a question here of the astronomical views of the Pythagoreans. What may be said about these may equally be said of Copernican ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... them? Finally, how could the planets have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon anonymously, to assure him that the writer had no other motive than the interest ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... houses and gardens? He had everything quite settled except the land grant from the Doge when they started back; while the sun, with the swift passage of time in such fascinating diversion, had swung low in its ellipse. When they reached the main street the Doge was on the porch passing his opinion on ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... was to demonstrate the eccentricity of the sun's seeming orbit. We of to-day, thanks to Keppler and his followers, know that the earth and the other planetary bodies in their circuit about the sun describe an ellipse and not a circle. But in the day of Hipparchus, though the ellipse was recognized as a geometrical figure (it had been described and named along with the parabola and hyperbola by Apollonius of Perga, the pupil of Euclid), yet it would have been the rankest heresy to suggest an ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power of the Ancient Mariner could ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... creature lifting up its voice in protest against the sudden disturbance of its hitherto even and well-ordered life. At the end of the field, opposite the gate, a rocky and uneven road, in the shape of an ellipse, served as the race track. A grand-stand, formed by nature from a grassy knoll, covered with sweet-smelling pines, rose at one side, and made a convenient and delightful ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... elementa. Elephant elefanto. Elevate altigi. Elevation (height) altajxo. Elf koboldo, feino. Elicit eltiri. Elide elizii. Eligible elektebla. Eligibility elektebleco. Eliminate elmeti. Elision elizio. Elite eminentularo. Ell ulno. Ellipse elipso. Elm ulmo. Elocution parolscienco. Eloquence elokventeco. Eloquent elokventa. Elope forkuri. Else alie. Elsewhere aliloke. Elude lerte eviti. Emaciated malgrasega. Emanate deveni. Emancipate liberigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... to take much aye doth heed'; 'which is nonsense' says Prof. Skeat. But the sentence is an example of ellipse, a figure which Chatterton affected a good deal, and fully expressed would run 'She—not willing to take much, ever doth heed not to take much', which would of course be intolerably clumsy ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... obeyed in part only, for by the time that the word to recommence the bombardment had been flashed round the circuit of the entrenchments, more than half the batteries had been put out of action. The twelve air-ships stationed at equal intervals round the vast ellipse, and discharging their No. 3 shell from their four guns ahead and astern, from an elevation of four thousand feet, had simultaneously wrecked half the batteries of the besiegers before their occupants had any clear idea of ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... see that everything is all right. Then, when I give the signal, by dropping this small white ball, that means I'm ready for you to start to time me. Then I'll begin to try for the record. I'll go about the course in a big ellipse, ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... real ones. We know by experience that at times they are fulginous and ready to break into open flames." But there are two elements which have to be treated with the greatest care: Religion and Race. They are the two foci of the ellipse in which moves history; the two shores between which oscillates the tossing tide of humanity. Lord Morley calls them "the two incendiary forces of history, ever shooting jets of flame from undying embers." This explains why the soil ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... careful observation and study, Kepler arrived at the conclusion that the form of the planet's orbit is an ellipse, and that the Sun occupies one of the foci. He afterwards determined that the orbits of all the planets ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... heard another crack, and still another, which sent him into a hard gallop. As the horse quickened his pace, Kettle dropped the reins, and grasping Corporal around the neck, hung on desperately as the horse sped around the great ellipse. At a word from Sergeant Briggs, the horse stopped and walked sedately to the middle of the hall. Kettle slipped off ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... according to laws similar to that which governs the motion of a stone thrown from the hand. If two bodies alone were concerned, say the sun and a planet, the orbit of the lesser around the greater would be an ellipse, which would never change its form, size, or position. That the orbits of the planets and asteroids do change, and that they are not exact ellipses, is due to their attraction upon each other. The question is, do these mutual attractions completely explain ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... elasticity, is pinched nearly in two while forcing its way through, assuming an hour glass shape when about half out. The rapid rotation of the spore continues during the process of emerging, and after about a minute it has fully freed itself (Fig 1, a). It immediately assumes the form of an ellipse or oval, and darts off with great speed, revolving on its major axis as it does so. Its contents are nearly all massed in the posterior half, the comparatively clear portion invariably pointing in advance. When it meets an obstacle, it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... over a limited area. The woodland caribou is almost exterminated, but might be resuscitated. The barren-ground caribou is still plentiful in the north, where most of the herds appear to migrate in an immense ellipse, crossing from west to east, over the barrens, in the fall, to the Atlantic, and then turning south and west through the woods in winter, till they reach their original starting-point near Hudson bay in the spring. ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... the circus is perhaps the only form of ancient entertainment which has retained something of its pristine simplicity. To-day, as in the old Roman circuses, tiers of seats run round the course, which in the larger circuses is still in the form of an ellipse, with its vertical axis, where the horses and performers enter, cut away. But the modern world has nothing in this connection to compare with the Circus Maximus of Rome, which, according to Pliny, held a quarter of a million spectators. It is singular, however, ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... pedantic, perhaps, anywhere but in a treatise on aesthetics, to deny to this quality the name of expression; we might commonly say that the circle has one expression and the oval another. But what does the circle express except circularity, or the oval except the nature of the ellipse? Such expression expresses nothing; it is really impression. There may be analogy between it and other impressions; we may admit that odours, colours, and sounds correspond, and may mutually suggest one another; but this analogy is a superadded ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... make a cell: pieces of two kinds, some, the oval ones, forming the honey-pot; others, the round ones, serving as a lid. I count, on an average, eight to ten pieces of the first kind. Though all cut on the pattern of an ellipse, they are not equal in dimensions and come under two categories. The larger, outside ones are each of them almost a third of the circumference and overlap one another slightly. Their lower end bends into a concave ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... a half-mile one, and, as the length of the race was five miles it would be necessary to make ten laps or circuits. The course was in the shape of an ellipse, with rather sharp turns at either end, where the contestants, if they did not want a spill, or a bad skid, must slacken their pace. It was on the two straight stretches that speed could ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... middle of the steps, so ancient that the stone showed through in places; all the pattern, supposing it ever had any, was worn or faded away. Carpet and steps glowed red too. His own face, and the hands he held in front of him were red-hot-poker color. Yet outside the little ellipse of light the darkness looked like a thing to lean against, and the silence was so intense that he could hear the arteries singing ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... dim eclipse Wide wheeling round its long ellipse,— His name Urania writes with these And stamps it ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... looking like a tiny pendulum moving in an immense arc, and, oddly enough, the segment seemed to be perfectly formed every time. Had the bird wheeled entirely around, he would, I feel sure, have described a circle and not an ellipse. The movement was exceedingly swift, and might well have been called the embodiment of grace. Suddenly, as the diminutive acrobat reached the highest point of his arc, he dashed off to the right in a straight line, followed by his mate, and in a moment both had disappeared. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... takes in head, neck, lower and upper arm and hand. The third division takes in foot, leg, thigh, pelvis and lumbar vertebra. I make this division for the purpose of holding the explorer to the limits of all supplies. In the ellipse of the chest is found all vital supplies; then from that center of life we have two branches only, one of the arm, and one of the lower limb. In each division we have ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... theory. Kepler gave his fancy play in the choice of an oval, greater at one end than the other, endeavouring to satisfy some ideas about epicyclic motion, but could not find a satisfactory curve. He then had the fortunate idea of trying an ellipse with the same axis as his tentative oval. Mars now appeared too slow at the apses instead of too quick, so obviously some intermediate ellipse must be sought between the trial ellipse and the circle on the same axis. At this point the "long arm of coincidence" ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... himself on the open downs that stretch eastwards from Plevna. As will be seen by reference to the map on page 213, his position, roughly speaking, formed an ellipse pointing towards the village of Grivitza. Above that village his engineers threw up two great redoubts which dominated the neighbourhood. Other redoubts and trenches screened Plevna on the north-east and south. Finally, the crowns of three main slopes lying to ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... perception, a question of our activities and therefore of our habits; and the aesthetic sensitiveness of a time and country (say the Florentine fourteenth century) with a habit of round arch and horizontals like that of Pisan architecture, could never take with enthusiasm to the pointed ogeeval ellipse, the oblique directions and unstable equilibrium, the drama of touch and go strain and resistance, of French Gothic; whence a constant readmission of the round arched shapes into the imported style, and a speedy return to the familiar empathic ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... already mentioned, is closely associated with the earlier half of her reign. The idea was due to Prince Albert, who wished to have a large hall for musical and oratorical performances. It is in the form of a gigantic ellipse covered by a dome, and the external walls are decorated by a frieze. The effect is hardly commendable, and the whole has been compared to a huge bandbox. However, it answers the purpose for which it was designed, ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... is overcome by proper care in the formation of the lens: "It can be shown upon mathematical data that a lens similar to that given in the following diagram—one surface of which is a section of an ellipse, and the other of a circle struck from the furthest of the two foci of ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... consists of only half an ellipse, the southern half being replaced by the area H, which we have already described. It has a rectangular niche to the west containing a fine trilithon with a cover-slab nearly 10 ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... for describing an oval or ellipse may be constructed by any apprentice or school boy as follows: Procure a straight piece of wood about 1/4 inch wide by 1/8 inch thick and 13 inches long. Beginning 1/2 inch from the end, bore a row of small holes only large enough for a darning needle to pass through and half an inch apart. Mark ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... of blue-chalk ribbon tied in large true-lover's knots in the centre. Having thus completed a frame, he proceeded, after sundry contortions of the facial muscles, to the execution of the great design. Having described an ellipse of red chalk, he tastefully inserted within it a perfect representation of the interior of an infant's mouth in an early stage of dentition, whilst a graceful letter A seemed to keep the gums apart to allow of this artistical exhibition. Proudly did Mr. Smear cast his small ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... 'lance-shaped.' The 'oblong' is like the linear, the same size up and down, but it's much wider than the linear. The 'elliptical' is what the oblong would be if its ends were prettily tapered off. The apple tree has a leaf whose ellipse is so wide that it is called 'oval.' Can ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... distance, but every one of its lakes and meadows, forests and wild gardens, has a charm and a grandeur of its own. There are lakes of many kinds. One named for the painter, now dead, who many times sketched and dreamed on its shores, is a beautiful ellipse; and its entire edge carries a purple shadow matting of the crowding forest. Its placid surface reflects peak and snow, cloud and sky, and mingling with these are the green and gold of pond-lily glory. Another lake is stowed away in an utterly wild place. ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... principal isoseismal lines as drawn by the Italian commissioners. The meizoseismal area, which included all places at which the shock was disastrous, is bounded by an ellipse (marked 1 on the map) 40 miles long from east to west, 28 miles wide, and about 886 square miles in area. The next isoseismal (2) includes the places in which some buildings were ruined, but not as a rule completely, and in which ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... out from a ship lying at the forward end of the ellipse for a moment into the sky and then it swung slowly round until it rested on the path from the observatory to the valley, and Lennard for a moment felt himself blinded by its rays. Then it lifted and a ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... quoniam will refer to ethics, in that case there will be a strange change of subject in passing from quisquam to haec ipsa, both which expressions will be nominatives to poterit, further, there will be the almost impossible ellipse of ars, scientia, or something of the kind after haec ipsa. On every ground the reading of Madv. is insupportable. Quid, haec ipsa: I have added quid to fill up the lacuna left by Halm, who supposes ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... certain, and above all, of more present utility than others. How often the most important practical results have been the remote consequence of studies which no one would have expected to lead to them! Could the mathematicians, who, in the schools of Alexandria, investigated the properties of the ellipse, have foreseen that nearly two thousand years afterwards their speculations would explain the solar system, and a little later would enable ships safely to circumnavigate the earth? Even in M. Comte's opinion, it is well for mankind that, in ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... usually rectangular in plan, are built side by side in two parallel lines, which are connected at the ends by other kilns so as to make a complete circuit. The original form of the complete series was elliptical in plan, but the tendency in recent years has been to flatten the sides of the ellipse and bring them together, thus giving two parallel rows joined at the ends by a chamber or passage at right angles. Coal or gas is burnt in the chamber or section that is being fired-up, the air necessary for the combustion being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... For many years a satisfactory explanation was sought unsuccessfully by Bradley and his fellow-astronomers, but at last he was able to demonstrate that the stary Draconis, on which he was making his observations, described, or appeared to describe, a small ellipse. If this observation was correct, it afforded a means of computing the aberration of any star at all times. The explanation of the physical cause of this aberration, as Bradley thought, and afterwards demonstrated, was the result of the combination of the motion of light ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the small part which remains of the original edge furnishes proof in two respects that this was not a watch-glass. In the first place, on taking a careful tracing of this piece of the edge, I found that its curve was part of an ellipse; but watch-glasses, nowadays, are invariably circular. In the second place, watch-glasses are ground on the edge to a single bevel to snap into the bezel or frame; but the edge of this object was ground to a double bevel, ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... lecture delivered at the Lowell Institute last winter, showed that in his science, also, similarity of outline does not always indicate identity of character. Compare the different circles,—the perfect circle, in which every point of the periphery is at the same distance from the centre, with an ellipse in which the variation from the true circle is so slight as to be almost imperceptible to the eye; yet the latter, like all ellipses, has its two foci by which it differs from a circle, and to refer it to the family of circles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... that a weapon with a fission yield of 1 million tons TNT equivalent power (1 megaton) exploded at ground level in a 15 miles-per-hour wind would produce fallout in an ellipse extending hundreds of miles downwind from the burst point. At a distance of 20-25 miles downwind, a lethal radiation dose (600 rads) would be accumulated by a person who did not find shelter within 25 minutes after the time the fallout ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... and at the same moment was attracted to a fixed centre by a force which diminished as the square of the distance at which it operated increased, such a body, thus deflected from its rectilinear path, would describe an ellipse," etc. Not only does this deduction, being made in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... the huge construction, in the area of which we stand delighted. He directed our attention to a large arched tunnel, under and at right angles to the pulpita, and we did not want direction to the thirty-six niches placed at equal distances all round the ellipse, and just over the lowest range of the CUNEI. All niches were, no doubt, for statues; but these might also have been, it pleases some to suppose, for the reverberation of applause; and they quote something about "Resonantia Vasa" from Macrobius, adding, that such niches were once probably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... masses of glossy black hair, waving along the brows and falling over the shoulders in curling clusters. Within this ebon framework were features to mock the sculptor's chisel. The mouth, with its delicate rose-coloured ellipse; the nose, with smooth straight outline, and small recurvant nostril; the arching brows of jet; the long fringes upon the eyelids; all were vividly before me, and all unlike the features of Eugenie Besancon. The colour of the skin, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the times are as the cubes of the distance' means that all motion is the result of two forces acting upon prakriti, and that where the two forces are balanced, or equal, the result in motion is a circle or ellipse, the square of the Repulsion being equal to the cube of the Attraction to make them equal and produce a circle. In other cases they ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... of its stroke. From the upper end of the lever, E, the motion is carried direct to the valve by the rod, G. It will be evident thus that by one revolution of the crank the lower end of the lever, E, will have imparted to it two different movements, one along the longer axis of the ellipse, traveled by the point, A, and one through its minor axis up and down, these movements differing as to time, and corresponding with the part of the movement of the valve required for lap and lead, and that part constituting the port opening ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... group of asteroids, and perhaps a score of satellites, the variety of orbital and axial movement which is developed taxes the computing genius of the ablest astronomer. The path which our earth follows around the sun, though it may in general and for convenience be described as a variable ellipse, is, in fact, a line of such complication that if we should essay a diagram of it on the scale of this page it would not be possible to represent any considerable part of its deviations. These, in fact, would elude depiction, even if the draughtsman had a sheet for his drawing as large ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... bridge, the creek walls open in an ellipse, narrowing abruptly where the bridge spans them. This open space has been scoured by floods until the bedrock lies like a polished floor and it was now dry except where the piers of the bridge stood in stagnant pools. Once within this amphitheater whose vertical walls rise twenty to thirty feet, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... we had just crossed. The effects of erosion following those of volcanic activity were evident enough upon the entire landscape. On the west side we had a horseshoe-shaped vertical wall—seemingly containing an extinct crater—and yet another on the north side of the western end of the elongated ellipse which was ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... easily shelled out after incising the overlying skin; sometimes splitting the cyst makes its removal easier. Local anaesthesia is to be preferred. It is important that none of the cyst wall be left behind. In large and adherent wens an ellipse of skin is removed along with the cyst. When inflamed, it may be impossible to dissect out the cyst, and the wall should be destroyed with carbolic acid, the resulting wound being treated by ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... see how the pyramids quickly rose with their summits in their mucous membranous case and approached to mutual contact. In like manner the vocal ligaments approached each other so closely that scarcely any space between them was observable. The pocket ligaments formed the ellipse described by Garcia in the upper ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... They are often formed against our will. VII. (108:13) The mind can determine in many ways the ideas of things, which the understanding forms from other ideas: thus, for instance, in order to define the plane of an ellipse, it supposes a point adhering to a cord to be moved around two centers, or, again, it conceives an infinity of points, always in the same fixed relation to a given straight line, angle of the vertex of the cone, or in an infinity ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... information. The plan adopted by Milton is to go over the Fides Publica, extracting phrases and sentences from it, and commenting on each extract; but the general effect of the book is that of the ruthless chasing round and round of the poor ecclesiastic in a biographical ellipse, the two foci of which are Geneva ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... on the horizon. Critics rose and thundered. Balzac defied all rules, walked over the grammar, defiled the well of classic French. He invented phrases, paraphrased greatness, coined words. He worked the slide, glide, the ellipse—any way to express the thought. He forged a strange and wondrous style—a language made up of all the slang of the street, combined with the terminologies of the laboratory, law, medicine and science. He ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard |
