The Family Library (Harper)., Volume 78

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Page 159 - Or hear'st thou rather pure ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell ? before the sun, Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite.
Page 133 - Sometime, we see a cloud that's dragonish, A vapour, sometime, like a bear, or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon't, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs; They are black vesper's pageants.
Page 48 - Jupiter a moderate-sized orange, in a circle nearly half a mile across; Saturn a small orange, on a circle of four-fifths of a mile...
Page 306 - The place where we stood shook most dreadfully : after some time, the violent paroxysm ceasing, I stood up, and turning my eyes to look for Euphemia, saw only a frightful black cloud. We waited till it had passed away, when nothing but a dismal and putrid lake was to be seen where the city once stood.
Page 150 - I had often, in the pride of half-knowledge, smiled at the means frequently employed by gardeners to protect tender plants from cold, as it appeared to me impossible that a thin mat or any such flimsy substance, could prevent them from attaining the temperature of the atmosphere, by which alone I thought them liable to be injured. But when I had learned that bodies on the surface of the earth become...
Page 104 - Temperature may be conceived to depend upon the velocities of the vibrations; increase of capacity on the motion being performed in greater space ; and the diminution of temperature during the conversion of solids into fluids or gases, may be explained on the idea of the loss of vibratory motion, in consequence of the revolution of particles round their axes, at the moment when the body becomes fluid or aeriform, or from the loss of rapidity of vibration in consequence of the motion of the particles...
Page 163 - ... the ratio between the sine of the angle of incidence and the sine of the angle of refraction is a constant, depending only upon the nature of the two media.
Page 104 - The immediate cause of the phenomenon of heat, then, is motion ; and the laws of its communication are precisely the same as the laws of the communication of motion.
Page 157 - As when a wandering fire, Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night Condenses, and the cold environs round, Kindled through agitation to a flame, Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool ; There swallowed up and lost, from succour far...
Page 104 - It seems possible to account for all the phenomena of heat, if it be supposed that in solids the particles are in a constant state of vibratory motion, the particles of the hottest bodies moving with the greatest velocity, and through the greatest space; that in fluids and elastic fluids, besides the vibratory motion, which must be conceived greatest in the last, the particles have a motion round their own axes, with different velocities...

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