"Spheric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from Shakespeare on the back of the menu, he doubted, might mean a couvert charge. But he was distinctly cheered when the kidneys and bacon arrived—a long strip of bacon gloriously balanced on four very spherical and well-lubricated kidneys. Smiling demurely, even blandly, Lawton rolled his sheave of bacon to and fro upon its kidneys. "This is the first time I ever saw bacon with ball bearings," he ejaculated. He gazed with the eye of a connoisseur upon ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... papaw-tree of the lake (papaya de la laguna) abounds also in the island of Cura and at Cabo Blanco; its trunk shoots higher than that of the common papaw (Carica papaya), but its fruit is only half as large, perfectly spherical, without projecting ribs, and four or five inches in diameter. When cut open it is found quite filled with seeds, and without those hollow places which occur constantly in the common papaw. The taste of this fruit, of which I have often eaten, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... indeed, Father Gumilla, describing the turtles of the Orinoco, states what might be doubted,— that "in each nest of eggs there is one, larger than the rest, from which the male is hatched. All the others are females." The eggs are spherical; their shell solid, but ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... left it built of marble: lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit. Lord Rosse may say, even if to-day he should die, 'I found God's universe represented for human convenience, even after all the sublime discoveries of Herschel, upon a globe or spherical chart having a radius of one hundred and fifty feet; and I left it sketched upon a similar chart, keeping exactly the same scale of proportions, but now elongating its radius into one thousand feet.' The reader of course understands that this expression, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe: I could find out ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... flats, and even gibber plains, the most noticeable plant is Salsola kali, popularly known as the Rolly-polly. It is, when mature, one of the characteristically prickly plants of the Lower Steppes, and forms great spherical masses perhaps a yard or more ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... meridian, exactly one degree apart. The distance between the two stations was then measured, and found to be two hundred thousand Hashemite cubits; this gave for the entire circumference of the earth about twenty-four thousand of our miles, a determination not far from the truth. But, since the spherical form could not be positively asserted from one such measurement, the khalif caused another to be made near Cufa in Mesopotamia. His astronomers divided themselves into two parties, and, starting from ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... was done 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 for the transports ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... systems or collections of these particles he holds to have a motion about certain equidistant points, or centres, and that the particles moving round these composed so many vortices. These angular particles, by their intestine motions, he supposes to become, as it were, ground into a spherical form; the parts rubbed off are called matter of the first element, while the spherical globules he calls matter of the second element; and since there would be a large quantity of this element, he supposes it to be driven towards ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... 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 ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... derived solid bodies. And from solid bodies sensible bodies, of which last there are four elements—fire, water, earth, and air. And that the world, which is indued with life and intellect, and which is of a spherical figure, having the earth, which is also spherical, and inhabited all over in its centre,(4) results from a combination of these elements, and derives its motion from them; and also that there are antipodes, and that what is below, as respects us, is ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Wright was at work with a Crookes tube, nearly spherical in shape, and about five inches in diameter—the one with which he has taken all his shadow pictures. His best results have been obtained with long exposures—an hour or an hour and a half—and he regards it as of the first importance ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... 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 of President ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... cannon were the darts and stone shot which had been in use with older weapons. These darts ("garros") had iron heads or were of iron wrapped with leather to fit the bore of small guns, and continued in use up to nearly the end of the 16th century. Spherical stone shot were chosen on account of cheapness; forged iron, bronze and lead balls were tried, but the expense prevented their general adoption. Further, as the heavy metal shot necessitated the use of a correspondingly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a procession of gunners each carrying on his shoulder an unpleasant-looking object which resembled a gigantic dumb-bell with only one blob on the end—a huge spherical cannon-ball on a steel stalk. They were coming from Leicester Square, and he met them just as they turned up the Haymarket. Waiting until they had all gone by, he followed on in the rear of the party, which ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... growth should be corrected by pruning. We have lately seen the beneficial effects of close pruning on such plants; they had been cut in severely last season by removing strong, straggling branches of old wood, to give some a spherical and others a pyramidal form. When pruned, the ball was reduced, the plant fresh potted in a smaller-sized pot, and the peat soil rammed as hard as it was possible to make it; then watered, and introduced to heat. The plants treated in that manner are now covered with bloom, and ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... Barlow, Jefferson referred to Bishop Gregoire's essay and expressed his doubt that this pamphlet was weighty evidence of the intellect of the Negro. He said that the whole did not amount in point of evidence to what they themselves knew of Banneker. He conceded that Banneker had spherical knowledge enough to make almanacs, but not without the suspicion of aid from Ellicott who was his neighbor and friend, and never missed an opportunity of puffing him. Referring to the letter he received ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... lived than beneficial to posterity. This design was to sail to India by taking a western direction. By the accounts of travellers who had visited that part of Asia, it seemed almost without limits on the east; and by attending to the spherical figure of the earth Columbus drew the natural conclusion, that the Atlantic ocean must be bounded on the west either by India itself, or by some continent not far distant ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... has left us a description of this first balloon. "The aerostatic machine," he says, "was constructed of cloth lined with paper, fastened together on a network of strings fixed to the cloth. It was spherical; its circumference was 110 feet, and a wooden frame sixteen feet square held it fixed at the bottom. Its contents were about 22,000 cubic feet, and it accordingly displaced a volume of air weighing 1,980 1bs. The weight of the gas was nearly half the weight of the air, for ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... of tint, obvious to every one with normal vision, point to the existence of hills and valleys on her surface; the latter maintaining that the irregularities of outline presented by the "terminator," or line of demarcation between the illumined and unillumined portion of her spherical superficies, are due to mountains and their shadows; but more than fifteen centuries elapsed before the truth of this sagacious conjecture was unquestionably demonstrated. Selenography, as a branch of observational astronomy, dates from the spring of 1609, when Galileo directed his "optic ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... whether marching by the front or by a flank, case-shot, that is, grape, canister, and spherical case (sometimes called shrapnel), are most suitable; as these all scatter, right and left, ...
— A Treatise on the Tactical Use of the Three Arms: Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry • Francis J. Lippitt
... 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. ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... Spain said that they preferred a spherical body, but that the maps and other proper instruments should not be debarred, in order that they might locate the lands better ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... Gagabu, who was to-day charged with the conduct of the feast by Ameni—who on such occasions only showed himself for a few minutes—was a short, stout man with a bald and almost spherical head. His features were those of a man of advancing years, but well-formed, and his smoothly-shaven, plump cheeks were well-rounded. His grey eyes looked out cheerfully and observantly, but had a vivid sparkle when he was excited and began to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Root nearly spherical, but tapering to pear-shaped at the base; nearly one-third produced above ground. Size large; well-grown specimens measuring seven or eight inches in diameter, and nine or ten inches in depth. Skin smooth, and of a rich purplish ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... 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 rapidity ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... beginning God, the Life in God, the Lord in God, the Holy Procedure, inhabited the dome, which, burning in magnificence primeval, and revolving in prismatic and undulatory spiral, appeared, and was the pavilion of the Spirit: In glory inexhaustible and inconceivable, in movement spherical, ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean,—the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 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, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... fruit appeared also on the same bushes. This must be a very different species from the C. MITCHELII; the bush seldom exceeding the height and size of a gooseberry bush, although the fruit was larger than that of the tree CAPPARIS, and of a more uniform size and spherical shape. It seemed to grow only within the tropic. Thermometer, at sunrise, 28 deg.; at noon, 73 deg.; at 4 P. M., 75 deg.; at 9, 44 deg.;—with wet bulb, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... 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 ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... solidified masses of tissue looked nothing like the normal pink appearance of healthy lungs. Studded with yellowish spherical abscesses they lay swollen and engorged within the ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... beautiful weapon, very light compared with my old rifle, for it weighed, all complete and including the shoulder strap, less than six pounds. It had a plain blue cylindrical barrel, gauged to take a half-inch spherical bullet with three drachms of powder, was fitted with a nipple for percussion caps, and provided with a fixed sight for a range of one hundred yards and two flap sights for two hundred and five hundred yards respectively, the latter being regarded in those days as an exceptionally long range. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... but we may mark upon the surface two opposite points that correspond to it. A rod passing through these three points, and extending from one side of the heavens to the other, shall be the axis of the earth, and of the sun's apparent daily motion. A spherical top, turning on its point, shall represent the heavens revolving on their axis; the two extremities of the top are the two poles. The child will be interested in knowing one of them, which I will show him near the tail ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of interstellar space, the Lord Nelson came out of overdrive and set itself in an orbit around Fomalhaut V. Lieutenant Jervis, the sole survivor of the ill-fated Mavis, located the small valley between the giant crags that covered the planet, and the huge spherical bulk of the spaceship settled gently to the floor of ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... Proportion.—Definite proportion of elements (Chemistry), symmetrical arrangement of parts (Crystallography), numerical and geometrical relation of the forms and movements of the heavenly bodies (Spherical Astronomy), all of which are ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... were even 20 feet in diameter, the iron would better sustain the pressure on the head that on the periphery. With regard to the requisite strength of the cylinder's head, if they are made in a semi-spherical convex form, they will require no more thickness of plate than the cylinder: but if they consist of plane disks, the thickness thereof should bear the same proportion to that of the periphery that the area in square inches does to three times the circumference. ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... small masses, assume the spherical form; their parts possess freedom of motion; they differ in density and tenacity, in colour, and in opacity. They are usually regarded as incompressible; at least, a very great mechanical force is required to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... called him a mocker of the Homeric deceit because he had scoffed at the deceit in Homer. Xenophanes also dogmatised, contrary to the assumptions 225 of other men, that all things are one, and that God is grown together with all things, that He is spherical, insensible, unchangeable, and reasonable, whence the difference of Xenophanes from us is easily proved. In short, from what has been said, it is evident that although Plato expresses doubt about some things, so long as he has expressed himself in certain ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... horse treats them with the contempt such light-minded senility deserves, and wades through their phantom attack indifferent. After the breeze has died the debauched old tumbleweeds are everywhere to be seen, piled up against brush, choking the ditches, filling the roads. Their beautiful spherical shapes have been frayed out so that they look sodden and weary and done up. But their seeds have been ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... bead-work. These robes or cloaks were of buffalo-calf skin about four feet in length, elaborately decorated with bead-work in stripes. The outer was covered with rows of blue and white bead-work, the second was green and yellow, and the third blue and red. All were further adorned by spherical brass bells attached all about the borders ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... was revealed upon the plate a small, spherical space-ship, very like the one that had attacked and destroyed the Arcturus. After Nadia had taken one glance at it, Stevens shut off the power and leaped out into the shop. He closed all the bulkhead doors and air-break ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... morsel at the same time. A spiteful peck from nuthatch leaves him master of the morsel and the field. But the chickadee does not care. He flies down and spies a stalk of golden-rod above the snow on which there is a round object looking like a small onion. Chickadee doesn't know that this is the spherical gall of the trypeta solidaginis, but he does know that it contains a fat white grub. He knows, too, that there is a beveled passage leading to a cell in the center and that the outer end of this passage is protected by a membrane window. After some ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... came to have 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 ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... in the 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 ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... 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 ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... seen how the road was made. Now let us travel on it in the hired landau and four horses driven by a wild-looking coachman, whose locks of jet-black hair protrude on either side of his clean-shaven neck, and match in colour his black astrakan, spherical, brimless headgear. Like all good Persians, he has a much pleated frockcoat that once was black and is now of various shades of green. Over it at the waist he displays a most elaborate silver belt, and yet another belt ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... prepared is like looking at pictures; and, while useful in opening their eyes and minds to the wonders hidden from our unassisted sight, fails to give the real benefit of scientific training. Plants are built up of cells. The delicate-walled spherical, or polygonal, cells which make up the bulk of an herbaceous stem, constitute cellular tissue (parenchyma). This was well seen in the stem of the cutting of Bean in which the roots had begun to form.[1] The ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... 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
... temper as your hand-forged iron! Even should you hack the ball from out the spherical, Or find it near the pin with lumps of mire on, Your language is not otherwise than clerical. Once only, when your toe received the niblick, The word I saw your lips frame was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... of 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 ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... doubt whether the world is spherical, and is disposed to believe that it is shaped like a pear, and he tries to make a theory of the difference of temperature from this suggestion. We hardly need to follow this now. We know he was entirely wrong in his ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... W. (or thereabout). Having attained this position, the wave was reflected or reproduced, expanding outwards for 180 degrees and travelling backwards again to Krakatoa, from which it again started, and returning to its original form again overspread the globe. This wonderful repetition, due to the spherical form of the earth, was observed no fewer than seven times, though with such diminished force as ultimately to be outside the range of observation by the most sensitive instruments. It is one of the triumphs of modern scientific appliances ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... rapidly on three legs, a hind one had been shot off at the hock. A shell tore up the little step at the headquarters cottage and ripped bags of oats as with a knife. Another shell soon carried off one of its two pillars. Soon a spherical case burst opposite the open door, another tore through the low garret, the remaining pillar went almost immediately to the howl of a fixed shot that Whitworth must have made. Soldiers in Federal blue were torn to pieces in the road and died with the peculiar yell that blends the extorted ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... 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 causes. Thus the maturity of a sidereal system may ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... SCIENTIFIC STONES. So far our tests have been mostly negative. It was said, however, that spherical bubbles sometimes appear in scientific gems. Another characteristic structural defect of practically every scientific gem may be utilized to distinguish them. As is well known, the rough material is formed in boules ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... with 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 progressive motion, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... best illustrated in certain spherical colonies of cells like the tiny green Volvox (now generally regarded as vegetal) of our ponds, or Magosphoera. Here the constituent cells merge their individuality in the common action. We have the first definite many-celled body. It is the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... I like slavery. Oh, I know some of those fatheaded Brotherhood economists call our system economic slavery—and I'll admit that it's pretty hard to crack out of a spherical trust. But that doesn't mean that we have to stay where we are. Mystics aren't owned by their entrepreneurs. Sure, it's a tough haul to beat the boss, but it can be done. I did it, and others do it all the time. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... A SPHERICAL VOLCANIC BOMB, with the interior parts coarsely cellular, coated by a concentric layer of compact lava, and this again by a crust ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... the motive power for the model. This base is recessed on top to receive the main plate A, Fig. 24, and also to hold the glass shade N in position. The base M is 21/2" high and 8" diameter. The glass cover N can have either a high and spherical top, as shown, or, as most people ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... begin my comparison of all Echinoderms with an analysis of the Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins, because I think I can best show the identity of parts between them, notwithstanding the difference in their external form; the Sea-Urchins having always a spherical body, while the Star-Fishes are always star-shaped, though in some the star is only hinted at, sketched out, as it were, in a simply pentagonal outline, while in others the indentations between the rays are very deep, and the rays themselves so intricate in their ramifications as to be broken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... will of a Columbus, a Vasco da Gama or a Magellan which created the devotion to geographical discovery, per se, and made practicable the concept of a spherical earth. The world was opened in imaginative entirety, and it now remained for the geographer to fill in the details ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Malmsey 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 custom. This was simply to relieve that one of their number who for fifty years had kept watch ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... vast brown cloud appeared on the Fort Pilcher promontory. This cloud was nearly spherical in form, with an apparent diameter of about a thousand yards. At the same instant a shock similar to that accompanying the first motor-bomb was felt in the city and surrounding country; but this was not ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... published (the first innovation made in the Cambridge system of Physical Sciences for many years): and I find in my scribbling-paper notes, integrals, central forces, Finite Differences, steam-engine constructions and powers, plans of bridges, spherical trigonometry, optical calculations relating to the achromatism of eye-pieces and achromatic object-glasses with lenses separated, mechanical problems, Transit of Venus, various problems in geometrical astronomy (I ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... 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 in ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... is a portion of a spherical surface of polished aluminium, a mode of preparing which will be given directly. The cathode having been placed inside the bulb, the wide glass tube is carefully drawn down and cut off at such a point that when the cathode is in position its centre of curvature ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... and the real brightness of individual stars as compared with one another. Taking the apparent semidiameter of the nubecula major at three degrees, and regarding its solid form as, roughly speaking, spherical, its nearest and most remote parts differ in their distance from us by a little more than a tenth part of our distance from its center. The brightness of objects situated in its nearer portions, therefore, cannot be much exaggerated, nor that of its remoter much enfeebled, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... shall roll around this central ball on all sides an ignited ocean of liquid fire two thousand miles in depth, the peculiar residence of the wicked, the sulphurous lake spoken of in the Apocalypse. Thirdly, around this infernal sea a vast spherical arch will hang, a thousand miles thick, a massive and unbroken shell, through which there are no spiracles, and whose external surface, beautiful beyond conception, becomes the heaven of the redeemed, where Christ himself, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the 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 take place by simple mutual contact at two points (yugmaprades'a) whereas in others ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... around the next corner with the rotary motion of a slightly inebriate straddle-legged old planet, he almost collided with another body which was more nearly spherical and which had apparently no legs at all, only two wide-toed "Old Lady's Comforts" showing beneath the hem of her dress. These toes were now set far apart. The very short old lady above them seemed to have caved in above the waistline, but below it she ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... stepping stones to lead us on to better ones. In 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
... or micrococci, are the simplest of the fungi, and appear as minute organisms of spherical form. They multiply by fission, a single coccus forming two, these two producing four, and so on. They present a variety of appearances under the microscope. From single isolated specimens (which under the highest magnifying ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... 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
... the Madonna! It is quite peculiar to Leonardo, and does not in the least recall the virgins of Perugino nor those of Raphael: the upper part of the head is spherical, the forehead well developed; the oval of the cheeks sweeps down to a delicately curved chin; the eyes with lowered lids are circled with shadow; the nose, although fine, is not in a straight line with the forehead, like those of the Greek statues; the nostrils seem to quiver as if ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the water jugs of both the Shinumos and Zunians are in the form of canteens, usually more or less spherical, and varying in capacity from a pint to four gallons. On each side there is a small handle in the form of a loop or knob, through or around which is placed a small shawl or strip of cloth, or a cord long enough to pass over the forehead so as to suspend the vessel against the back ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... with greater skill, making cylindrical burrows often four to five feet deep, and terminating in a round chamber. Others build a massive oven-shaped structure of clay on a branch or other elevated site. Many of those that creep on trees nest in holes in the wood. The marsh-frequenting kinds attach spherical or oval domed nests to the reeds; and in some cases woven grass and clay are so ingeniously combined that the structure, while light as a basket, is perfectly impervious to the wet and practically indestructible. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... (those having most power of illumination which strike most vertically;) and note that there is, therefore, to every solid curvature of surface, a necessarily proportioned gradation of light, the gradation on a parabolic solid being different from the gradation on an elliptical or spherical one. Now, when your purpose is to represent and learn the anatomy, or otherwise characteristic forms, of any object, it is best to place it in this kind of direct light, and to draw it as it is seen when we look at it in a direction at right angles to that of the ray. This is ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... and then ceases. Meanwhile, the bodies close together, and the eyenots or vacuoles melt together, the two nuclei become one and disappear, and in eighteen hours the entire body of "either has melted into other," and a motionless, and for a time irregular, sac is left. This now becomes smooth, spherical, and tight, being fixed and motionless. This is a typical process; but the mingled weariness and pleasure realized in following such a form without a break through all the varied changes into this condition is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... Basil says (Hom. ii in Hexaem.): "It is certain that the heaven was created spherical in shape, of dense body, and sufficiently strong to separate what is outside it from what it encloses. On this account it darkens the region external to it, the light by which itself is lit up being shut out from that region." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... 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 by three airscrews, supported ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... their forced tramp, a few spherical case-shot by Holcroft drove out the American riflemen. His gunners had at last silenced the Lewiston batteries, and finding the river range, sunk almost every boat that attempted to cross. The Indians were ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... investigated. The earliest pictures all show this. Preconceived ideas prejudiced the observers, and their sketches were mostly structureless.... It should not be forgotten that the Coronal rays project outward into space from a spherical Sun and do not lie in a plane as they appear to the eye in photographs and drawings." After remarking on the value of photographs of the Corona up to a certain point because of their automatic accuracy Mrs. Todd very sensibly ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface rendered definite by increase and decline of light—(for every curve of surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical one)—it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is the essential business of a painter to get good colour, whether he imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving, where the things ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that the totality of matter is finite?—that it can be viewed, spiritually, from the outside,—even from such a distance as to appear infinitely small? If so, can there be infinite power, either material or spiritual? If the universe is spherical because its molecules are, can the molecules compose any other than the spherical form? Do we gain much by reasoning from an assumption below the ken of the microscope to a conclusion above ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... strolling down the garden among the winding paths, when I came suddenly upon Father Payne, who was hurrying towards the house. He had in each of his hands a large roughly spherical stone, and looked at me a ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of sensory 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 ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... huddled around the teletype, watching as the decoded message was punched out on the tape. "It started coming in just now," Tiger said. "And they've been beaming the signal in a spherical pattern, apparently trying to pick up the nearest ship they could get. There's certainly some sort ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... been low-caste Hindus of the coolie class. They carried nothing on their persons except a little food—a few broken chupatis, a handful of coarse grain, an onion or two, and a few cardamoms tied up in a bit of cloth. Each had a powder-flask and a small bag with some spherical bullets in it hung on a string passed over one shoulder. The weapons found were mostly old Tower muskets, the marks on which showed that at one time they had belonged to various native regiments in the service of the East India Company. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... agreed that the "proligerous pellicle" of M. Pouchet, the "plastide particle" of Professor Bastian, the "monas" of O.F. MA1/4ller, the "bioplast" of Professor Beale, etc., are essentially one and the same thing, except in name. They are mere moving specks, or nearly spherical particles, which exhibit the first active movements in organic solutions. They vary in size from the one hundred-thousandth to the one twenty-thousandth of a second of an inch in diameter, and appear at first hardly more ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... activity differs in detail, rather than in principle, from that of the protoplasm of the nettle. Under sundry circumstances the corpuscle dies and becomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of which is seen a smaller spherical body, which existed, but was more or less hidden, in the living corpuscle, and is called its nucleus. Corpuscles of essentially similar structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining of the mouth, and scattered through the whole framework of the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... large ogive arches of an admirable and powerful proportion which form the inferior part of the Apsis, and support a gallery serving as a basis to the upper story, have come to light. On this story, which is separated from the cul-de-four (spherical vault) by a single moulding, are three large ogive windows, the middle one of which is of colossal dimensions, and between the columns below are in a symmetrical manner placed, on each side, the doors of the treasury and chapter-room, ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... 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 living substance may thus be put into an excitatory ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... is very small, and is nearly spherical. There is a membrana nictitans; and the eyelid is very loose upon the eyeball: it is probably capable of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... as though it understood my words or the gesture of menace. The cilia fluttered about its spherical body. Bands of lambent color flashed. I could not rid myself of the curious certainty, that it was trying ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... too good to be true, we need not be surprised. Few things in the universe are as superficially they look. The earth looks flat and, as long as we gaze on it, it never will look any other way, but it is spherical for all that. The earth looks stationary and if we live to be as old as Methuselah we never will see it move, but it is moving—seventy-five times faster than a cannon ball! The sun looks as though it rose in the east and set in the west, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... 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 ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... the wheel in a trailing orbit, the huge spherical shape of Project Hot Rod glowed its characteristic green—another application of the laser principle, but this one macroscopic in comparison to the tiny laser ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... by heavenly compulsion; knaves and thieves, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that they are evil in, by a ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of Thales, 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, Chilo, Cleobulus, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... not yield to medicine or time; but I begin to eat now, which is a favourable symptom. Under a lofty tree at Simba's, a kite, the common brown one, had two pure white eggs in its nest, larger than a fowl's, and very spherical. The Banyamwesi women are in general very coarse, not a beautiful woman amongst them, as is so common among the Batusi; squat, thick-set figures, and features too; a race of pagazi. On coming inland from sea-coast, the tradition says, they ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... 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 ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... not always explain to me. For instance, why a piece of iron which is rubbed on a cylinder, should become magnetic. How does this happen? The magnetic sparks come to it,—but how? It is the same with people in the world; they are rubbed about on this spherical globe till the electric spark comes upon them, and then we have a Napoleon, or a Luther, or some ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... pour a liquid iridescence through their wings. All the high lights of their plumage had dulled. Painted in flat primary colors, they looked like paper dolls pasted on the inky thundercloud. As usual, when they came in a group, they wove in and out in a limited spherical area, achieving ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... be three meters long. They are spherical in outline and the lower one-third or one-half is entire, like the palm of the hand. The upper part is divided into from 80 to 100 segments each from 1.5 to 6 cm. wide and appearing like fingers spread apart. The petioles supporting the leaves are about ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... 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, the grains ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... earned by his father. He does not seem to think this detracts much from their value. Others will come, with less pronounced characteristics, and, therefore, more perplexing. The Madrassee will be there, with his spherical turban and his wonderful command of colloquial English; he is supposed to know how to prepare that mysterious luxury, "real Madras curry." Bengal servants are not common in Bombay, fortunately, for they would only add to the perplexity. The larger the series of specimens ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... probably everywhere in space, of like magnitude and constitution. Although possessing a definite finite magnitude, they are, by virtue of their very nature, indivisible. Their shape we may take to be spherical; they are inert (in the physical sense), unchangeable, inelastic, and impenetrable by the ether. Apart from the attribute of inertia, the most important characteristic of these ultimate atoms is their chemical affinity—their ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... from two points very remote from one another on the earth's surface. The ascertainment of these angular distances ascertained their supplements; and since the angle at the earth's centre subtended by the distance between the two places of observation was deducible by spherical trigonometry from the latitude and longitude of those places, the angle at the moon subtended by the same line became the fourth angle of a quadrilateral of which the other three angles were known. The four angles being thus ascertained, and two sides of the quadrilateral ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... for most 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 ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... catching fish, and occasionally diving below the surface. On the very top of some of the telegraph-posts were the nests of the oven-bird, looking like carved round blocks of wood, placed there for ornament. These nests are made of mud, and are perfectly spherical in form, the interior being divided ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of judgments cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think must be the right way. The true must be essentially the self-reflecting self-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including its own other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever rounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which Hegel calls the world of the bad infinite, and which ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... 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 having a guest to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... 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 ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... heights, immediately eastward of Friedrich, there is a kind of hollow, or scooped-out place; shallow valley of some extent, which deserves notice against to-morrow: but in general the ground is lazily spherical, and without noticeable hollows or valleys when fairly away from the River. A dull blunt lump of country; made of sand and mud,—may have been grassy once, with broom on it, in the pastoral times; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... back so distinctly that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than I; and, at the end of the second term, I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... be as well to explain that the breakfast consisted of very bad coffee, with goat's milk, hard, coarse bread, and goat's butter, which tasted exactly like indifferent lard. The so-called butter, by a strange custom of Cotrone, was served in the emptied rind of a spherical cheese—the small caccio cavallo, horse cheese, which one sees everywhere in the South. I should not have liked to inquire where, how, when, or by whom the substance of the cheese had been consumed. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... idea of a central world-mountain may well have come from India. The "scholars" of his time were quite unable to appreciate this beginning of science, which actually led to the contention of this school, in the first century B.C., that the earth was of spherical shape. Tsou Yen himself was ridiculed as a dreamer; but very soon, when the idea of the reciprocal destruction of the elements was applied, perhaps by Tsou Yen himself, to politics, namely when, in connection with the astronomical calculations much cultivated by this school and through ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... a 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax; they could calculate eclipses of the moon, and use them for the correction of their lunar tables. They understood spherical trigonometry, and determined the motions of the sun and moon, involving an accurate definition of the year and a method of predicting eclipses; they ascertained that the earth was a sphere, and reduced the phenomena ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... reputation and experience. On a felt-covered stand close by him lay a couple of heavy spherical objects, fashioned of some shining-surfaced metal and about the size of a cricket ball, which he had previously noticed and handled in looking round. He snatched one of them up now, and flung it hard and straight at Joseph Chestermarke, intending ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... 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
... 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 |
