"Ellipse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of their distances." From the second 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 Kepler, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... after. Fame appeared 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
... 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 ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a lurid glare over the vast field of snow; but, as if it too were under the control of the Arctic Spirit, it was nothing more than the mockery of a moon, and was constantly assuming the most fantastic and varied shapes. Now it extended itself laterally into a long ellipse, then gathered itself up into the semblance of a huge red urn, lengthened out to a long perpendicular bar with rounded ends, and finally became triangular. It can hardly be imagined what added wildness and strangeness ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... does not describe a circle round the earth, but an ellipse, of which our earth occupies one of the foci; the consequence is, therefore, that at certain times it approaches nearer to, and at others recedes farther from, the earth, or, in astronomical language, it ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... formal sunken garden, at which you pause, is the greatest beauty of the Villa Pamfili Doria. You stop to look at it by the impulse of your coachman, and then you keep on driving round, in the long ellipse which the road describes, through grassy and woody slopes and levels, watered by a pleasant stream, and through long aisles of pine and ilex. We thought twice round was enough, and told the driver so, to his evident surprise and to our own regret, so far as the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... 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 leopardess, chained ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... 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 began. At a distance of 40-45 miles, a person would have ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... The dimensions of an ellipse are taken at its extreme length and narrowest width, and they are designated in three ways, as by the length and breadth, by the major and minor axis (the major axis meaning the length, and the minor the breadth of the figure), and the conjugate and transverse diameters, ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua 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 schemes in the architecture ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... individual life, and so have been unable to explain apparent anomalies, especially in those cases where it is seen that the effect does not immediately follow the cause. In reality, every force that emerges from a centre of will[23] describes an ellipse, so to speak, which travels through a net-work of other ellipses generated by thousands of other centres of energy, and is accelerated or retarded in its course, according to the direction and nature of the forces with which it is connected. It is for this reason that certain actions meet with their ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... can about the planning of new 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 the Eternal Painter's ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... 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 we can determine the amount of the pull, and hence the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... 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 one part of the road to another, which is called a cycloid, and to which the law of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... ye cannot break,—the force that clips And grasps your circles to the central light; Yours is the prodigal comet's long ellipse, Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night; Yet strives with you no less that inward might No sin hath e'er imbruted; The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes; The Law brooks not to have its solitudes By bigot feet polluted; Yet they who watch your God-compelled return May see your happy perihelion ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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, to ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 1844, swarms of locusts visited the island of Madeira. They were in countless numbers, as thick as the flakes of snow in the heaviest snowstorm, and extended upward as far as could be seen with a telescope. During two or three days they slowly careered round and round in an immense ellipse, at least five or six miles in diameter, and at night alighted on the taller trees, which were completely coated with them. They then disappeared over the sea, as suddenly as they had appeared, and have not since visited the island. Now, in parts of Natal it is believed by some farmers, though ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... 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 is counted to be some 20,000 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... respects be fitly compared to 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 ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... triangle and the square. The spaces which are left should be covered with the tablets of plain wood. Gradually the frame is completely filled with figures; first, with very dissimilar figures, as, for example, a square, a very narrow rectangle, a triangle, a circle, an ellipse and a hexagon, or with ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... 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. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... side of the kopje, and then through a narrow gap of the rocks into a natural amphitheatre, wherein there was ample room for the formation of a great laager, the wagons being arranged in an irregular ellipse, thoroughly hidden from the veldt outside, while the rocks of the kopje roughly formed a rampart of vast strength, and ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... feature of this earthquake, aside from its intensity, was its rotary motion. As seen from the print, the sum total of all displacements represents a very regular ellipse, and some of the lines representing the earth's motion can be traced along the whole circumference. The result of observation indicates that our heaviest shocks are in the direction south-southeast to north-northwest. In that respect the records of the three heaviest earthquakes agree entirely. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... draw attention here to one of these deviations. According to Newton's theory, a planet moves round the sun in an ellipse, which would permanently maintain its position with respect to the fixed stars, if we could disregard the motion of the fixed stars themselves and the action of the other planets under consideration. Thus, if we correct the observed ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... chest, abdomen and pelvis. The second division 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 ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... unwilling 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 ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... near the beach, which much resembled, in its mode of construction, those of Otaheite. It was pleasantly situated in a grove of trees, and appeared to be about thirty feet long, and seven or eight high, with an open end, which represented an ellipse divided transversely. Before it, was spread something white on a few bushes; which we conjectured to be a fishing net, and, to appearance, of a very ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... archetypal form, whether found in a whirlpool or in a nebula. A 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 contrasted with ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... thing to be attended to. Now, the mean or average interval between the centres of the two planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the moon, as it were, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the tower, which rises in diminishing 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 ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... was the creation of the Middle Ages, and arose nearly simultaneously in Europe after the first Crusade, so that it would seem to be of Eastern origin. But it was a graft on the old Roman arch,—in the shape of an ellipse rather than a circle. Aside from this invention, to which we are indebted for the most beautiful ecclesiastical structures ever erected, we owe every thing in architecture to the Greeks and Romans. We have found out no new principles which were not equally known ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle 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 ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... letters, "the simplest diagram I can suggest," Mr. Venn says, "is one like this (the small ellipse in the centre is to be regarded as a portion of the outside of c; i.e. its four component portions are inside b and d but are no part of c). It must be admitted that such a diagram is not quite so simple to draw as one might wish it to be; but then consider what the alternative ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... 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 sun, each day would be of the same length and there would ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... 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 are of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... I the heavy-lined 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 ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... erroneously concluded that the path of the falling body would be a spiral; but Dr. Hooke, on the same occasion on which he made the preceding experiment, read a paper to the society in which he proved that the path of the body would be an eccentric ellipse in vacuo, and an ellipti-spiral if the body moved in a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... wood, the water leapt and gurgled, with a grotesque noise like something swallowing, and then settled again with a second sound. Cyprian could not see into the well clearly, for the opening, from where he stood, was an ellipse, a mere slit, and half masked by thistles and rank grass like a green beard. For where he stood now was three yards away from the well, and he had not yet himself realized that he had sprung back all that distance from the ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... quality), was a newly built house, "reflecting," declared an impressed reporter, "every modern elegance. In front of the boxes," he continued, "are panels, chastely adorned with Corinthian festoons, encircling a gilded eagle emblematic of liberty. Above the proscenium is an ellipse, exhibiting the Australian coat of arms. The ceiling is ornamented by a dome, round which are grouped the nine Muses, and the chandelier is the biggest in the Colony. From the dress-circle there is direct communication ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... 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
... celestial body, the moon, for example, gravitated solely towards the centre of the earth, it would describe a mathematical ellipse; it would strictly obey the laws of Kepler, or, which is the same thing, the principles of mechanics expounded by Newton in the first sections ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 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 ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... 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 ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... 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 of poles thus ...
— Omaha Dwellings, Furniture and Implements • James Owen Dorsey,
... was compensation no doubt to some present to watch the grotesque contortions of the singer squeezing out of him the precious pathos of his song—in which he screwed his eyes together like the man in Browning's "Christmas Eve," and opened his mouth in a long ellipse in the middle of one cheek; but neither was that the kind of entertainment she had purposed. She sat ready, against the moment when he should end, to let loose the most thunderous music in her mental ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... virtue we are able to repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse—a pure metaphor, but a tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!—tragedy, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... zone, belt, cordon, band; contrate wheel[obs3], crown wheel; hub; nave; sash, girdle, cestus[obs3], cincture, baldric, fillet, fascia, wreath, garland; crown, corona, coronet, chaplet, snood, necklace, collar; noose, lasso, lassoo[obs3]. ellipse, oval, ovule; ellipsoid, cycloid; epicycloid[Geom], epicycle; semicircle; quadrant, sextant, sector. sphere &c. 249. V. make round &c. adj.; round. go round; encircle &c. 227; describe a circle &c. 311. Adj. round, rounded, circular, annular, orbicular; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... riding on in the ellipse, and another man fitted an arrow to his bowstring, and as he ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... notion 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 horses ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... circle are invariable geometrical figures, rigorously 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. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... 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
... curve, that never returns into itself at all, but has, on the other hand, a course which sets outwards each way for ever. The parabolic curve, as it is called, is a line partaking of the closeness of the ellipse on the one hand, and the openness of the hyperbola on the other. A parabola is an ellipse passing into a hyperbola; or, in other words, it is a part of an ellipse whose length, compared with its breadth, is too great to be estimated, and is consequently ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... that Mo[h.]ammed fled from Mecca, and within a century from that time the crescent had replaced the cross in Christian Asia, in Northern Africa, and in a goodly portion of Spain. The Arab empire was an ellipse of learning with its foci at Bagdad and Cordova, and its rulers not infrequently took pride in demanding intellectual rather than commercial treasure as the result ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... 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. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... by the moon in her revolution round the earth, the Cambridge Observatory had demonstrated that this path is a re-entering curve, not a perfect circle, but an ellipse, of which the earth occupies one of the foci. It was also well understood that it is farthest removed from the earth during its apogee, and approaches most nearly to it at ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... Back and forth he swung at least a dozen times, 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
... speeches, each of which by the necessity of the case is more or less a definite and detachable unit, the periods flow into one another. Like the orbit of a planet, the movement of the verse never closes its ellipse and begins again. Each of the twelve books is a single organic rhythmical structure. But one cannot very well quote a ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... lids eterne, Ineffably content from infinitely far Only to gaze On his bright Mistress's responding rays, That never know eclipse; And, once in his long year, With praeternuptial ecstasy and fear, By the delicious law of that ellipse Wherein all citizens of ether move, With hastening pace to come Nearer, though never near, His Love And always inaccessible sweet Home; There on his path doubly to burn. Kiss'd by her doubled light That whispers of its source, The ardent secret ever clothed with Night, Then go forth in new force ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... 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
... proving, that, if a body in space, free to move, received a single impulse, 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
... 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
... board by the pen. There is no limit, theoretically, to the number of 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 ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... 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 ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... unprofitable, almost wooden, thing, which seemed never to have any other purpose than to act as a support for the plant. But the tricks of gardeners are capable of everything, so much so that the stalk yields to the grower's suggestions and becomes fleshy and swells into an ellipse similar to the turnip, of which it possesses all the merits of corpulence, flavour and delicacy; only the strange product serves as a base for a few sparse leaves, the last protests of a real stem that refuses to lose its attributes ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... rhythmic play of Nature as regards her forces. Throughout all her regions she oscillates from tension to vis viva, from vis viva to tension. We have the same play in the planetary system. The earth's orbit is an ellipse, one of the foci of which is occupied by the sun. Imagine the earth at the most distant part of the orbit. Her motion, and consequently her vis viva, is then a minimum. The planet rounds the curve, and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... muttered the doctor. "I never saw one quite like it, but it is meant to project something. I can't make out the curve of that mirror. It isn't a parabola and it isn't an ellipse. It must be a high degree subcatenary or else built on ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... section. The first consists of mountains, many of them rising to towering heights, the highest, indeed, east of the Rocky Mountains. It is bounded on the east by the Blue Ridge and on the west by the Smoky Mountains. The section inclosed within these limits is in shape somewhat like an ellipse. Its length is about one hundred and eighty miles; its average breadth from twenty to fifty miles. It is a high plateau, from the plane of which many lofty mountains everywhere rise, and on its border the culminating points of the Appalachian ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore |
