|
|
|
More "Ellipse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where the area of the feeding regions has been very large the massing of human beings has probably reached its extreme limit.[16] Of course, in the case of a navigable river, for example, the commercial centre might be elongated into a line and the circle of the city modified into an ellipse with a long diameter considerably exceeding eight miles, as, for example, in the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... completed by a double ditch across the intervening region. Like Qodshu, it was thus situated in the midst of an artificial island beyond the reach of the battering-ram or the sapper. The encompassing wall, which tended to describe an ellipse, hardly measured two miles in circumference; but the suburbs extending, in the midst of villas and gardens, along the river-banks furnished in time of peace an abode for the surplus population. The wall still rises some five and twenty to thirty feet above the plain. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... hung masses of glossy black hair, waving along the brows and falling over the shoulders in curling clusters. Within this ebon framework were features to mock the sculptor's chisel. The mouth, with its delicate rose-coloured ellipse; the nose, with smooth straight outline, and small recurvant nostril; the arching brows of jet; the long fringes upon the eyelids; all were vividly before me, and all unlike the features of Eugenie Besancon. The colour of the skin, too—even ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the eighth being lost. From Apollonius's prefaces we can judge of the relation of his work to Euclid's Conics, the content of which answered to the first three Books of Apollonius. Although Euclid knew that an ellipse could be otherwise produced, e. g. as an oblique section of a right cylinder, there is no doubt that he produced all three conics from right cones like his predecessors. Apollonius, however, obtains them in the most general way by cutting any oblique cone, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Finally, how could the planets have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... the differences between the appearances of a given thing in the various perspectives. Suppose, say, that a certain penny appears in a number of different perspectives; in some it looks larger and in some smaller, in some it looks circular, in others it presents the appearance of an ellipse of varying eccentricity. We may collect together all those perspectives in which the appearance of the penny is circular. These we will place on one straight line, ordering them in a series by the variations in the apparent size of the penny. Those perspectives in which the penny appears as ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... to the Spanish line, and pouring in its fire as it went from a distance of forty-five hundred yards, the American squadron swept round in a long ellipse and sailed back, now bringing its starboard batteries into play. Six times it passed over this course, the last two at the distance of two thousand yards. From the great cannon, and from the batteries of smaller rapid-fire guns, a steady stream of projectiles was hurled inward, frightfully ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... arches offered considerable obstruction to the navigation. To give the largest amount of waterway, and at the same time reduce the gradient of the road over the bridge to the greatest extent, Mr. Telford adopted the following expedient. He made the general body of the arch an ellipse, 150 feet on the chord-line and 35 feet rise, while the voussoirs, or external archstones, being in the form of a segment, have the same chord, with only 13 feet rise. "This complex form," says Mr. Telford, "converts each side of the vault of the arch into ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... realise our will as the centre of our individuality, but we should do better to picture our individuality as an ellipse rather than a circle, a figure having two "conjugate foci," two equilibriated centres of revolution rather than a single one, one of which is the will-power or faculty of doing, and the other the consciousness or perception of being. If we realise only one of these two centres ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... a poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite tentacles, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... "One cannot play with human chemicals any more than with real ones. We know by experience that at times they are fulginous and ready to break into open flames." But there are two elements which have to be treated with the greatest care: Religion and Race. They are the two foci of the ellipse in which moves history; the two shores between which oscillates the tossing tide of humanity. Lord Morley calls them "the two incendiary forces of history, ever shooting jets of flame from undying embers." This explains why the soil of history is so volcanic, so filled with burning lava which time ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... loop, wheel; cycle, orb, orbit, rundle, 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; oval, ovate; elliptic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of which they built a village and called it Shi-ti-mu. Numerous traces of small-roomed houses can be seen on this mound and on some of the lower surroundings. The uneven summit is about 300 by 200 feet, and the village seems to have been built in the form of an irregular ellipse, but the ground plan is ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... ask:- What am I to substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy the doctrine which it professes to interpret—that does not convert it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar- loaf an ellipse, adding—"By which term I here mean a cone;"—and then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among the conic sections! And yet—notwithstanding the repugnancy of the doctrine, in its unqualified ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... believe that 'to Him' and 'for good' are 'all things,' we cannot tell how all will come circling round. We are like men looking only at one small segment of an ellipse ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... of the moon is generally represented, for convenience, as an ellipse about the earth, it is, in reality, a varying curve, having the sun for its real focus, and always concave toward the latter. This is a fact that can be more readily explained with the aid of ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... east, casting 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 ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... orbits of a planet are not exactly circular, what is their exact shape? Kepler solved this problem, and proved that the exact path of a planet round its central body the sun was that of an ellipse, or an elongated circle. Thus he gave to the world the first of his famous laws which stated that each planet revolves round the sun in an orbit which has an elliptic form, the sun occupying ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... 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 ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... paternal influence of the fiery orb, are also obedient to the world that governs them. These secondary asters, or satellites, follow the planets in their course, and revolve round them in an ellipse, just as the others rotate round the Sun. Every one knows the satellite of the Earth, the Moon. All the other planets of our system have their own moons, some being even more favored than ourselves in this respect, and having several. Mars has two; ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... sections of a cone. It is an oval curve, which may be drawn by fixing two pins in a sheet of paper at S and H, fastening a string, SPH, to the two pins, and stretching it with a pencil point at P, and moving the pencil point, while the string is kept taut, to trace the oval ellipse, APB. S and H are the foci. Kepler found the sun to be in one focus, say S. AB is the major axis. DE is the minor axis. C is the centre. The direction of AB is the line of apses. The ratio of CS to CA is the excentricity. The position of the planet at ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... science, also, similarity of outline does not always indicate identity of character. Compare the different circles,—the perfect circle, in which every point of the periphery is at the same distance from the centre, with an ellipse in which the variation from the true circle is so slight as to be almost imperceptible to the eye; yet the latter, like all ellipses, has its two foci by which it differs from a circle, and to refer it to the family of circles instead of the family ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... with the charm of a French subject, and impressionism could be fully justified of its follower in Pymantoning as well as in Paris. That golden dust along the track; the level tops of the buggies drawn up within its ellipse, and the groups scattered about in gypsy gayety on the grass there; the dark blur of men behind the barrier; the women, with their bright hats and parasols, massed flower-like,—all made him long to express them in lines and dots and breadths of pure color. He had caught the ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... it is called by Darwin circumnutation. The movement belongs to all young growing parts of plants. The great sweeps of a twining stem, like that of the Morning-Glory, are only an increase in the size of the circle or ellipse described.[1] ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... will get us out of the asteroid belt without collisions, take us as close to the sun as possible without having it capture us, and land us in space about ten thousand miles from Earth. From then on I'll throw the asteroid into a braking ellipse around the earth, and I'll be able to make any ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... place," he said, pointing to an opening in the cliff. This opening was about forty feet from the ground, and ellipse-shaped. It cannot have been more than twenty feet high by ten wide, and was partially hidden by ferns and bushes that grew about it in the surface of the cliff. Keen as my eyes were, I doubt if I should ever have noticed ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... house 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 General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... 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, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... half-mile one, and, as the length of the race was five miles it would be necessary to make ten laps or circuits. The course was in the shape of an ellipse, with rather sharp turns at either end, where the contestants, if they did not want a spill, or a bad skid, must slacken their pace. It was on the two straight stretches that speed could ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... than thirty feet per second would cause the golden missile to fly only part way around, while a greater velocity would give it an elliptical instead of a circular orbit, and in this ellipse it would continue to revolve around the asteroid in the character of ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... 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 ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... 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 ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... the others we had seen, was made of hewn stone, smoothly cut and fitted together without any cement. Indeed they needed none, for the thinnest knife-blade could not have been inserted between them. To the north of this guard-house we found a reservoir in the form of an ellipse, its axis one hundred and fifty yards in length, its breadth at least one hundred, and its depth about fifty feet, paved at the bottom, and built up at the sides with hewn stone. At the northern side an aqueduct ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... great lengths of coastline shooting out of sight at the edge of the screen. Mr. Yardo has the cross-hairs centered on the dot which is Gilgamesh. The dot is changing shape; it is turning into a short ellipse, a longer one. The gyros are leaning her out ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... the colloquial usage as represented by Sacchetti, whose dialogue is intensely idiomatic. Also in piazza is, I believe, used by the historians (I think even by Macchiavelli), when speaking of popular turn-outs. The ellipse took my fancy because of its colloquial stamp. But I gather from your objection that it seems too barbarous in a modern Italian ear. Will you whisper your final opinion in ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... entertainment which has retained something of its pristine simplicity. To-day, as in the old Roman circuses, tiers of seats run round the course, which in the larger circuses is still in the form of an ellipse, with its vertical axis, where the horses and performers enter, cut away. But the modern world has nothing in this connection to compare with the Circus Maximus of Rome, which, according to Pliny, held a quarter of a million spectators. It is singular, however, that while the old Roman circuses ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... pressure forcing the suck currents at a great speed, and forces the comet current to pass through sun currents. Some comets pass in and out of their sun currents at regular intervals and are called periodic, i.e., its orbit is an ellipse. ...
— ABC's of Science • Charles Oliver
... and relations not apparent to Sense, or not presentable to Sense. Could we realise all the links in this chain, by placing the objects in their actual order as a VISIBLE series, the reasoning would be a succession of perceptions. Thus the path of a planet is seen by reason to be an ellipse. It would be perceived as a fact, if we were in a proper position and endowed with the requisite means of following the planet in its course; but not having this power, we are reduced to infer the unapparent points in its ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... that rolls in dim eclipse Wide wheeling round its long ellipse,— His name Urania writes with these And ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and this, I think, was Jervis's opinion. But the small part which remains of the original edge furnishes proof in two respects that this was not a watch-glass. In the first place, on taking a careful tracing of this piece of the edge, I found that its curve was part of an ellipse; but watch-glasses, nowadays, are invariably circular. In the second place, watch-glasses are ground on the edge to a single bevel to snap into the bezel or frame; but the edge of this object was ground to a double bevel, like the edge of a spectacle-glass, ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... in twenty seconds he heard another crack, and still another, which sent him into a hard gallop. As the horse quickened his pace, Kettle dropped the reins, and grasping Corporal around the neck, hung on desperately as the horse sped around the great ellipse. At a word from Sergeant Briggs, the horse stopped and walked sedately to the middle of the hall. Kettle slipped off and staggered to ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... the ellipse, the cone, and the pyramid, with other comparatively simple forms of solid geometry, present themselves to the student as elementary tests of draughtsmanship—of the power, that is, of representing solid bodies upon a plane surface. Such forms being more simple and regular ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... receive the nations that go up there to worship. The dome broods over all, like a giant's head motionless in meditation. The vastness of the structure takes hold of a man as he issues from the street by which he has come from Sant' Angelo. In the open space, in the square and in the ellipse between the colonnades and on the steps, two hundred thousand men could be drawn up in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... circles I am only speaking generally; as a matter of fact, the orbits of the planets are not perfect circles, though some are more circular than others. Instead of this they are as a circle might look if it were pressed in from two sides, and this is called an ellipse. The path of our own earth round the sun is one of the most nearly circular of them all, and yet even in her orbit she is a good deal nearer to the sun at one time than another. Would you be surprised to hear that she is nearer in our winter and further away ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... tongue a mighty waterfall rushed over the precipice, looking at that distance like a cascade of smoke. This torrent, which he remembered was called Raaba, fell into a great pool and there divided itself into two rushing branches that enclosed an ellipse of ground, surrounded on all sides by water, for on its westernmost extremity the branches met again and after flowing a while as one river, divided once more and wound away quietly to north and south further than the eye could reach. ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... of five or six. No less subject to variation is the number of pieces joined to make a cell: pieces of two kinds, some, the oval ones, forming the honey-pot; others, the round ones, serving as a lid. I count, on an average, eight to ten pieces of the first kind. Though all cut on the pattern of an ellipse, they are not equal in dimensions and come under two categories. The larger, outside ones are each of them almost a third of the circumference and overlap one another slightly. Their lower end bends into a concave curve to form the bottom of the bag. Those inside, which are ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... and nearly circular walled-plain, 111 miles in diameter, situated close to the N.W. limb, and consequently always foreshortened into a more or less elongated ellipse. But for this it would be one of the grandest objects in the first quadrant. Under the designation of "Mercurius Falsus" it received great attention from Schroter, who gives several representations of it in his Selenotopographische Fragmente, which, though drawn in his usual conventional ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... and the hyperbolic 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 deemed to be endless for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... 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. In ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... its general appearance. It is in vain, that mathematicians represent a plain surface as produced by the flowing of a right line. It will immediately be objected, that our idea of a surface is as independent of this method of forming a surface, as our idea of an ellipse is of that of a cone; that the idea of a right line is no more precise than that of a plain surface; that a right line may flow irregularly, and by that means form a figure quite different from a plane; and that therefore we ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... her hat, all wound round her head, yards and yards of it. No, it's false, it was pinned on under that little cap thing. And after the second act when she came on to bow she carried a bunch of flowers—oh, that big," her arms outlined a wide ellipse, "the same colors as her dress, red carnations and some sort of yellowish flower I ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Gr. [Greek: dia], through, [Greek: metron], measure), in geometry, a line passing through the centre of a circle or conic section and terminated by the curve; the "principal diameters" of the ellipse and hyperbola coincide with the "axes" and are at ... (continued in volume 8, slice ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... obliquely to within a few hundred feet of the low-lying town, then the screw churned up a furious wake as the anxious Tagalog on the bridge swung her back into the Straits to circle in a new attempt. Carried by the tidal rush the old tub circled in a great ellipse. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... or another, continual here on the round world. For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's orbit,—swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to ellipse, vibrating like a mighty pendulum, the "horologe of eternity" itself, with tremendous oscillations, through the depths of space,—he taught us that the earth endures; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... offers some arrangements that are all its own as regards the process of concentrating the light. It is lighted, in fact, by a small incandescent lamp of 2 candle-power, placed within the apparatus and supplied by an accumulator. The reflector is represented by a portion of an ellipse so calculated that one of the foci corresponds to the lamp and the other to the extremity of the instrument. A commutator, B, permits of establishing or interrupting the current at will. A rheostat added to the accumulator makes it possible ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... 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
... the second, not altogether insignificant, use of these words and distinctions, we sometimes find in the examination of a literary composition such remarks as follow: here is a pleonasm, here an ellipse, there a metaphor, here again a synonym or an equivoke. This means that in one place is an error consisting of using a larger number of words than is necessary (pleonasm); that in another the error arises from too few having been used (ellipse), ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... yearn With trembling 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 ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... summit or highest level of it is in the southwest; longest diameter is from northwest to southeast. From Crossen, whither Friedrich is now driving, to the Jablunka Pass, which issues upon Hungary, is above 250 miles; the AXIS, therefore, or longest diameter, of our Ellipse we may call 230 English miles;—its shortest or conjugate diameter, from Friedland in Bohemia (Wallenstein's old Friedland), by Breslau across the Oder to the Polish Frontier, is about 100. The total area of Schlesien is counted to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite qualities in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can co-exist. 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 men can incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... devised for the purpose, Professor Marey found that a bird's wing moves in an ellipse, with a pointed summit (Fig. 10). The insect beats the air in a distinctly horizontal plane, but the bird in a vertical plane. The wing of an insect is impervious to the air; while the bird's wing resists the air only on its under side. Hence, there are ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... thick, oaken, iron-studded door through which he had been thrust was evidently enormously thick, while the chamber itself was some fifteen feet wide by about thirty-five feet long, the end wall opposite the door being curved somewhat in the form of an ellipse, meeting in a blunt angle exactly opposite the door. And high up in this angle, about eight feet above the floor, was a small, iron-barred window, which might, but for the bars, have been large enough to permit of the egress of a man ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... ultimate matter is reduced to that of an oblate spheroid described by the revolution of an ellipse ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... ever into space. Any portion of a circle, for instance, is, by the law of its being, compelled, if it continue its course, to return to the point from which it set out; so also any portion of the oval curve (called an ellipse), produced by cutting a cylinder obliquely across. And if a single point be marked on the rim of a carriage wheel, this point, as the wheel rolls along the road, will trace a curve in the air from ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... globes, while at regular intervals blue domes like gigantic azure bubbles interrupted the streets of square and colonnaded houses, that began around the amphitheatre, with pale saffron tones, and grew in intensity until the edges of the huge populous ellipse were laid like a deep orange rim upon the green country side. The light falling upon this reflected, refracted and dispersed, seemed to convert it into a liquid and faintly throbbing lake of color, cut up into segments by the dark lanes ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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
... advice. Who 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 ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... 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 rarely ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... on in the ellipse, and another man fitted an arrow to his bowstring, and as he rode ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... are as the cubes of the distance' means that all motion is the result of two forces acting upon prakriti, and that where the two forces are balanced, or equal, the result in motion is a circle or ellipse, the square of the Repulsion being equal to the cube of the Attraction to make them equal and produce a circle. In other cases they ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... be combined in this manner. The movements are rectilinear, but two rectilinear vibrations of equal amplitude acting at right angles to each other generate a circle if they alternate precisely, an ellipse if the alternations are less regular or the amplitudes unequal. A cyclic vibration may also be obtained from a pendulum free to swing in a rotary path. In these ways a most wonderful series of drawings have been obtained, and the similarity of these to some of the ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... demand for a special training. This divergence, however, is limited in its sweep and its duration. The difference exists for a definite purpose, and goes only to a definite extent. The curves of separation swell out as childhood recedes, like an ellipse, and, as old age draws on, approach, till they unite like an ellipse again. In old age, the second childhood, the difference of sex becomes of as little note as it was during the first. At that period, the ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Elevation (height) altajxo. Elf koboldo, feino. Elicit eltiri. Elide elizii. Eligible elektebla. Eligibility elektebleco. Eliminate elmeti. Elision elizio. Elite eminentularo. Ell ulno. Ellipse elipso. Elm ulmo. Elocution parolscienco. Eloquence elokventeco. Eloquent elokventa. Elope forkuri. Else alie. Elsewhere aliloke. Elude lerte eviti. Emaciated malgrasega. Emanate deveni. Emancipate liberigi. Embalm balzamumi. Embankment surbordo ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... 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 ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... out from a ship lying at the forward end of the ellipse for a moment into the sky and then it swung slowly round until it rested on the path from the observatory to the valley, and Lennard for a moment felt himself blinded by its rays. Then it lifted and a most ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the way. They trod daintily, like little ladies, along a circling track that goats made and men had certainly done nothing to improve. We made an almost complete ellipse around and down, and rode at last over dry dung at the bottom, into which the donkeys' feet sank as into a three-pile carpet. You could see the stars overhead, but nothing, where we were, except that window and a shaft of ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... 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 has its apogee and its perigee. At its apogee the moon is at 247,552 miles ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... consists of only half an ellipse, the southern half being replaced by the area H, which we have already described. It has a rectangular niche to the west containing a fine trilithon with a cover-slab ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... revolves around the sun in an orbit called an ellipse. This is not a fixed form, but slowly varies from year to year. It is now gradually becoming circular. It will, however, not become an exact circle. Astronomers assure us that, after a long lapse of time, it will commence to elongate as an ellipse again. Thus, it ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... 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 brink when the ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... the structure is the cupola; and that is the one thing which Michelangelo bequeathed to the intelligence of his successors. The curve which it describes finds no phrase of language to express its grace. It is neither ellipse nor parabola nor section of the circle, but an inspiration of creative fancy. It outsoars in vital force, in elegance of form, the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of Brunelleschi, upon which it was actually modelled. As a French architect, adverse to Michelangelo, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... score of satellites, the variety of orbital and axial movement which is developed taxes the computing genius of the ablest astronomer. The path which our earth follows around the sun, though it may in general and for convenience be described as a variable ellipse, is, in fact, a line of such complication that if we should essay a diagram of it on the scale of this page it would not be possible to represent any considerable part of its deviations. These, in fact, would elude depiction, even if the draughtsman had a sheet ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... alternate curves and graceful sallies, they pursue and circumvent each other. First one hops a few feet, then the other, each one standing erect in true military style while his fellow passes him and describes the segment of an ellipse about him, both uttering the while a fine complacent warble in a high but suppressed key. Are they lovers or enemies? the beholder wonders, until they make a spring and are beak to beak in the twinkling of an eye, and perhaps mount ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... that will get us out of the asteroid belt without any collisions, take us as close to the sun as possible without having it capture us, and land us in space about ten thousand miles from earth. From then on I'll throw the asteroid into a braking ellipse around the earth and I'll be able to ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... of careful observation and study, Kepler arrived at the conclusion that the form of the planet's orbit is an ellipse, and that the Sun occupies one of the foci. He afterwards determined that the orbits of all the planets are ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... those of the lower, but this is not always the case. Sometimes the whole of the upper portion uniting the arcs of the ends is struck from one centre, in which case the arch becomes a three-centred one, being, in fact, half an ellipse. Towards the close of the style the curvature of the upper portion is so slight that it can hardly be distinguished from a straight line, and as the debasement progressed it became really straight. Ogee arches are also found at this period, and foiled arches are very frequent. When ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... aspect that will occur to most people. They will think of a circular base from which a continuous side slopes up to a point situated above its centre, as one would feel it. The fact that in almost every visual aspect the base line is that of an ellipse, not a circle, comes as a surprise ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... proclaim her whereabouts to those who still remember her. It is good to pause awhile and etheralize oneself in the neighbourhood of her dust. She lived a quiet life in an old brown house, since rebuilt, that overlooks the Coliseum, on whose comely ellipse and blood-stained history she loved to pasture eyes and imagination. Often I walked thence with her, in those sparkling mornings, up the Palatine hill, to stroll about the ilexes and roses in view of the Forum, to listen to the blackbirds, or the siskins in that pine tree. She was of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... in Layroh's resonant voice. "They who slumber here are a race born far from this planet. They are the Shining Ones of Rikor. Rikor is a tiny planet circling a wandering sun whose orbit is an ellipse so vast that only once in a hundred thousand years does it approach your solar system. Rikor's sun was nearly dead and the Shining Ones had to find a new home soon or else perish. Then their planet swung near the Earth, and their scouts ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... in all riding in this race. The race course was a large three-mile ring of the form of an ellipse in front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier five feet high, just before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous slope, an Irish barricade ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... complicated curves are made use of in modern engineering, but with these the general reader can have no concern: the Ponte della Trinita at Florence is the most graceful instance I know of such structure; the arch made use of being very subtle, and approximating to the low ellipse; for which, in common work, a barbarous pointed arch, called four-centred, and composed of bits of circles, is substituted by the English builders. The high ellipse, I believe, exists in eastern architecture. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... entirely automatic. If the pressure on the wind wheel, which it will be seen is set off the centre line of the mill and tower, exceeds that found desirable—and this can be regulated by means of a spring on the fantail—the windmill automatically turns on the turn-table and presents an ellipse to the wind instead of a circular face, thus decreasing the area exposed to the wind gradually until the wheel reaches its final position, or is hauled out of gear, when the edges only are opposed to the full force of the wind. The whole weight of the mill is taken upon a ball-bearing ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.—That is nothing to another ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not be supposed that the revolving movement is as regular as that given in the above illustration; in very many cases the tip describes an ellipse, even a very narrow ellipse. To recur once again to our illustration, if we suppose only the northern and southern surfaces of the sapling alternately to grow rapidly, the summit would describe a simple arc; if the growth first travelled a very little to the western face, and during ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... the step towards making an ellipse, or, as they call it when shaped for a reflecting telescope, a parabola. You know what ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... It is much in the form of an amphitheatre, and the surface of the ground seems to be slightly scooped out, so that it resembles the shallow basin of a shell. It is thus a much better site for an assemblage of the populace than if it were a perfect level. A semicircle or truncated ellipse of stately and ancient edifices surround the piazza, with arches opening beneath them, through which streets converge hitherward. One side of the piazza is a straight line, and is occupied by the Palazzo Publico, which is a most noble and impressive Gothic structure. It has not the mass of the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it was called, and I explained that it was named Grimaldi, being also well known to observers as the darkest tinted of all the large lunar formations. As seen from the earth it appears a narrow ellipse, but we could see its full width, which is 129 miles, the length being 148 miles. It is also noteworthy as one of the few plains which are convex in section, and it is so large that its area is equal to the combined area of the whole of the counties of England ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Attractions (some evidently referring to Maclaurin's), Integrals, Conic Sections, Kepler's Problem, Analytical Geometry, D'Alembert's Theorem, Spherical Aberration, Rotations round three axes (apparently I had been reading Euler), Floating bodies, Evolute of Ellipse, Newton's treatment of the Moon's Variation. I attempted to extract something from Vince's Astronomy on the physical explanation of Precession: but in despair of understanding it, and having made out an explanation for myself by the motion round three axes, I put together a little treatise ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... together without any cement. Indeed they needed none, for the thinnest knife-blade could not have been inserted between them. To the north of this guard-house we found a reservoir in the form of an ellipse, its axis one hundred and fifty yards in length, its breadth at least one hundred, and its depth about fifty feet, paved at the bottom, and built up at the sides with hewn stone. At the northern side an aqueduct entered it, and this ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... our will as the centre of our individuality, but we should do better to picture our individuality as an ellipse rather than a circle, a figure having two "conjugate foci," two equilibriated centres of revolution rather than a single one, one of which is the will-power or faculty of doing, and the other the consciousness ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Indians were riding on in the ellipse, and another man fitted an arrow to his bowstring, and as he ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... restrained. In alternate curves and graceful sallies, they pursue and circumvent each other. First one hops a few feet, then the other, each one standing erect in true military style while his fellow passes him and describes the segment of an ellipse about him, both uttering the while a fine complacent warble in a high but suppressed key. Are they lovers or enemies? the beholder wonders, until they make a spring and are beak to beak in the twinkling ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... and magnetic excitements. The crystals of several rocks give out light during the process of crystallization. Thousands of miles of the earth's surface must once have presented the lurid glow of a vast furnace full of igneous rocks. Even now, the copper color of the moon during an ellipse shows us that the earth is a source of light.[262] The mountains on the surface of Venus and the moon, and the continents and oceans of Mars, attest the existence of upheaval and subsidence, and of volcanic fires, capable of producing ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... projected by the beholder against any plane surface behind it, is a circle only when a perpendicular, let fall on the plane from the eye, passes through the centre of the sphere. In other positions the projection of the sphere becomes an ellipse, or one of its varieties, the parabola and hyperbola. The parabola is the boundary of the projection of a sphere upon a plane, when the eye is just as far from the plane as the outer edge of the sphere is, and the hyperbola is a similar curve formed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... 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, which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... in front, True son of a sea-king sire, And Christian Foote, and Dupont (Dupont, who led his ships Rounding the first Ellipse Of thunder and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... lady's watch, and this, I think, was Jervis's opinion. But the small part which remains of the original edge furnishes proof in two respects that this was not a watch-glass. In the first place, on taking a careful tracing of this piece of the edge, I found that its curve was part of an ellipse; but watch-glasses, nowadays, are invariably circular. In the second place, watch-glasses are ground on the edge to a single bevel to snap into the bezel or frame; but the edge of this object was ground to a double bevel, like the edge of a spectacle-glass, which fits ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... from the distance, but every one of its lakes and meadows, forests and wild gardens, has a charm and a grandeur of its own. There are lakes of many kinds. One named for the painter, now dead, who many times sketched and dreamed on its shores, is a beautiful ellipse; and its entire edge carries a purple shadow matting of the crowding forest. Its placid surface reflects peak and snow, cloud and sky, and mingling with these are the green and gold of pond-lily glory. Another lake is stowed away in an ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... particular wave, these will all have, when C arrives at B, a common plane which will touch them, namely a circle BN similar to CH; and this will be intersected at its middle and at right angles by the same plane which likewise intersects the circle CH and the ellipse AB. ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... its shape, the oval, ellipse, or ring form of the line around the cartouch, it not having an end; that the pharaohs, always having in mind immortality, have placed their names within that form. The incised oval capable of producing millions of impressions, would also ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... treatise on aesthetics, to deny to this quality the name of expression; we might commonly say that the circle has one expression and the oval another. But what does the circle express except circularity, or the oval except the nature of the ellipse? Such expression expresses nothing; it is really impression. There may be analogy between it and other impressions; we may admit that odours, colours, and sounds correspond, and may mutually suggest one another; but this ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... 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, the transverse ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere co-existence of these opposite qualifies in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can coexist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If man can incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... I consists of only half an ellipse, the southern half being replaced by the area H, which we have already described. It has a rectangular niche to the west containing a fine trilithon with a cover-slab ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... side by side in two parallel lines, which are connected at the ends by other kilns so as to make a complete circuit. The original form of the complete series was elliptical in plan, but the tendency in recent years has been to flatten the sides of the ellipse and bring them together, thus giving two parallel rows joined at the ends by a chamber or passage at right angles. Coal or gas is burnt in the chamber or section that is being fired-up, the air necessary for the combustion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Society in December, 1679. Newton had 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
... results have been the remote consequence of studies which no one would have expected to lead to them! Could the mathematicians, who, in the schools of Alexandria, investigated the properties of the ellipse, have foreseen that nearly two thousand years afterwards their speculations would explain the solar system, and a little later would enable ships safely to circumnavigate the earth? Even in M. Comte's opinion, it is well for mankind that, in those early days, knowledge ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... unworthy of note, that the nice balance between shall and will is much impaired by the constant use of the ellipse, "I'll, you'll," &c.; and that volition and intention are, to a great extent, co-existent and inseparable in the first person: the metaphysical reasons for this do not ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... relations not apparent to Sense, or not presentable to Sense. Could we realise all the links in this chain, by placing the objects in their actual order as a VISIBLE series, the reasoning would be a succession of perceptions. Thus the path of a planet is seen by reason to be an ellipse. It would be perceived as a fact, if we were in a proper position and endowed with the requisite means of following the planet in its course; but not having this power, we are reduced to infer the unapparent points in its course from ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... sight of a cloud of paroquets that swept in a screaming ellipse for a better branch to nest in and added the one touch of gorgeous color needed to make the whole scene utterly unearthly and unlike anything he had ever dreamed of, or had seen in pictures, or had had described to him. He stood at gaze—forgetful ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... 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 touched ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... ones in any appreciable degree. Thus, if a cone be cut by a plane at right angles to its axis we get a circle. If, instead of being perfectly at right angles, the plane subtends with the axis an angle of 89 deg. 59', we have an ellipse which no human eye, even when aided by an accurate pair of compasses, can distinguish from a circle. Decreasing the angle minute by minute, the ellipse becomes first perceptibly eccentric, then manifestly so, and by and by acquires so ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... came. Night slowly brought her beauty and her mystery upon the world. The filmy pattern opened. There was a tautness in the lines that made one feel they would twang with delicate music if the wind swept its hand more rapidly across them. And now and again all vibrated, each line making an ellipse between its fastened ends, then gradually settling back to its thin, almost invisible bed. Cables of thick, elastic darkness ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... lower, at each yard their height is diminished by the thickness of a brick, and finally they disappear about the middle of the total length. At the point shown in our Fig. 94 the arch has lost its supports and rests directly upon the pavement of the channel. Its ellipse is composed of eight voussoirs, four on each side, and a key with a small wedge-shaped stone voussoir on each side of it. Between the two points shown in our Figs. 93 and 94 the upper and lower sewers have become one, the vaulted roof of the first ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... so-called "altar stone," over fifteen feet long; in a line with this, through the opening of the ellipse, is the "Friar's Heel," a monolith standing outside the circles. The larger stones or "sarsens" are natural to the Marlborough Downs, but the unhewn or "blue" stones are mysterious. They are composed of a kind of igneous rock not found anywhere near ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... contrary is the case. (12) They are often formed against our will. VII. (108:13) The mind can determine in many ways the ideas of things, which the understanding forms from other ideas: thus, for instance, in order to define the plane of an ellipse, it supposes a point adhering to a cord to be moved around two centers, or, again, it conceives an infinity of points, always in the same fixed relation to a given straight line, angle of the vertex ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... 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 ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... ELLIPSE. In geometry, an oval figure, formed of the section of a cone by a plane cutting through both its ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... papers Atmospheric agents, influence of, by Mr. Rigby Attraction, capillary Books reviewed Bottles, to cut, by Mr. Prideaux Broccoli, winter Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Cattle breeding Diclytra v. Dielytra Drainage and capillary attraction Ellipse Fir leaves, uses of dried, by Mr. Mackenzie Forests, royal Frog, reproduction of, by Mr. Lowe Fruit preserving Fungi, eatable Gloucestershire, trip through Grove Gardens, noticed Guano, Peruvian Heating, galvanised ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... Institute last winter, showed that in his science, also, similarity of outline does not always indicate identity of character. Compare the different circles,—the perfect circle, in which every point of the periphery is at the same distance from the centre, with an ellipse in which the variation from the true circle is so slight as to be almost imperceptible to the eye; yet the latter, like all ellipses, has its two foci by which it differs from a circle, and to refer it to the family of circles instead of the family of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... sporidium augments in size very rapidly, becoming at times irregular, and sometimes even as much as from two to three times its original dimensions, then there appears at the surface, usually at one of the poles of the ellipse, a small prominence, with an extremely fine membrane, which does not appear to separate itself from that which surrounds the sporidium, and it is difficult to say whether it is a prolongation of the internal membrane going across the outside, or simply a prolongation caused by a continuation of ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... solved the problem of three—or more—bodies? Osnome is a planet of a sun in a group of seventeen suns, is it not? The gravitational field about even two suns is so exceedingly complex that a planet could take up an orbit only such that one sun was at each of the two foci of the ellipse of its orbit, and then only provided the suns were of very nearly the same mass, and stationary, which in turn means they must have no attraction for each other. No, I think his complex system of seventeen suns would not be so ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... cases of stable and of unstable motion. Imagine a satellite and its planet, and consider each of them to be of indefinitely small size, in fact particles; then the satellite revolves round its planet in an ellipse. A small disturbance imparted to the satellite will only change the ellipse to a small amount, and so the motion is said to be stable. If, on the other hand, the disturbance were to make the satellite depart from its initial elliptic orbit in ever widening circuits, the motion would be ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... 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 of the early Renaissance. ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... 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 ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... knife and musical in a flute. He has all the qualities of substances, and likewise all the properties of figures. He is acute and He is obtuse, because He is at one and the same time all possible triangles; his radii are at once equal and unequal, because He is both the circle and the ellipse—and He is the hyperbola besides, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... architecture, as it has been variously called, 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 ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... or the faint trill of the song sparrow; and Phoebe's clear, vivacious assurance of her veritable bodily presence among us again is welcomed by all ears. At agreeable intervals in her lay she describes a circle or an ellipse in the air, ostensibly prospecting for insects, but really, I suspect, as an artistic flourish, thrown in to make up in some way for the deficiency of her musical performance. If plainness of dress indicates powers of song as it usually does, then Phoebe ought to be unrivaled in musical ability, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... it Shi-ti-mu. Numerous traces of small-roomed houses can be seen on this mound and on some of the lower surroundings. The uneven summit is about 300 by 200 feet, and the village seems to have been built in the form of an irregular ellipse, but the ground plan ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about you and the well-groomed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... last to that which we sought a huge ellipse and dome of stones and earth, rising and broadening under our very eyes. It was on a farm among the granite hills, many miles from Rosebery. 'It's only a glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone Kaffir hut,' Spenser commented. 'It's ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... of a style strange to me, but suggested Indian origin. It was long and low, with lofty towers at the corners, and one huge dome in the middle, rising from the roof to half the height of the towers. The main entrance was in the centre of the front—a low arch that seemed half an ellipse. No one was visible, the doors stood wide open, and I went unchallenged into a large hall, in the form of a longish ellipse. Toward one side stood a cage, in which couched, its head on its paws, a huge leopardess, chained by a steel ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... in 622 A.D. 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
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... periodic time of each planet is connected with its average distance by this law; but there is another application of Kepler's law which gives us information of the distance and the period of the moon in former stages of the earth-moon history. Although the actual path of the moon is of course an ellipse, yet that ellipse is troubled, as is well known, by many disturbing forces, and from this cause alone the actual path of the moon is far from being any of those simple curves with which we are so ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... as to three more in Arabic, the eighth being lost. From Apollonius's prefaces we can judge of the relation of his work to Euclid's Conics, the content of which answered to the first three Books of Apollonius. Although Euclid knew that an ellipse could be otherwise produced, e. g. as an oblique section of a right cylinder, there is no doubt that he produced all three conics from right cones like his predecessors. Apollonius, however, obtains them in the most general way by cutting any oblique cone, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... is set off the centre line of the mill and tower, exceeds that found desirable—and this can be regulated by means of a spring on the fantail—the windmill automatically turns on the turn-table and presents an ellipse to the wind instead of a circular face, thus decreasing the area exposed to the wind gradually until the wheel reaches its final position, or is hauled out of gear, when the edges only are opposed to the full force ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... precise and exact line, like a formula of mathematics, to which the neophyte can refer for deductions of Grace to suit any premises or conditions. This, of course, is contrary to the spirit of beautiful design; and the ingenious Hay,—who maintains that his "composite ellipse" is capable of universal application in the arts of ornamental composition, and that by its use any desirable lines in mouldings or vases can be mechanically produced, especially Greek lines, falls into the grave error of endeavoring to materialize ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... shore of a great sea. But it was the structure rising up from that shore that drew a sharp exclamation from me. Shaped in a rough ellipse, yet mounted high toward a common point, was a large building of multiple hues and colors. The upper portion was eroded to crumbling ruins, the lower part studded with many ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... in which no trees are to be seen, where, indeed, none grow. There are extensive lakes, always under water, even at the lowest ebb of the inundation. They are of all sizes and every possible configuration, from the complete circle through all the degrees of the ellipse, and not unfrequently in the form of a belt, like the channel of a river running for scores of miles between what might readily be mistaken for banks covered with a continuous thicket of low bushes, which are nothing more ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... altigi. Elevation (height) altajxo. Elf koboldo, feino. Elicit eltiri. Elide elizii. Eligible elektebla. Eligibility elektebleco. Eliminate elmeti. Elision elizio. Elite eminentularo. Ell ulno. Ellipse elipso. Elm ulmo. Elocution parolscienco. Eloquence elokventeco. Eloquent elokventa. Elope forkuri. Else alie. Elsewhere aliloke. Elude lerte eviti. Emaciated malgrasega. Emanate deveni. Emancipate liberigi. Embalm balzamumi. Embankment surbordo bordmarsxejo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... was a half-mile one, and, as the length of the race was five miles it would be necessary to make ten laps or circuits. The course was in the shape of an ellipse, with rather sharp turns at either end, where the contestants, if they did not want a spill, or a bad skid, must slacken their pace. It was on the two straight stretches ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... us out of the asteroid belt without collisions, take us as close to the sun as possible without having it capture us, and land us in space about ten thousand miles from Earth. From then on I'll throw the asteroid into a braking ellipse around the earth, and I'll be able to make any small ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... 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 taken ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... pressure falls off uniformly, so that the pressure-curve is a straight line PDF sloping downwards and cutting AM in F, then the energy-curve will be a parabola curving downwards, and the velocity-curve can be represented by an ellipse, or circle with centre F and radius FA; while the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... that the axis of the instrument is that of greatest moment of inertia. 4thly. That if we screw the two pairs of opposite horizontal bolts to different distances from the axis, the path of the instantaneous pole will no longer be equidistant from the axis, but will describe an ellipse, whose longer axis is in the direction of the mean axis of the instrument. 5thly. That if we now make one of the two horizontal axes less and the other greater than the vertical axis, the instantaneous pole will separate from the ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... (Charadrius dominicus).—"In fall it flies over the ocean from Nova Scotia to South America, 2,400 miles—the longest known flight of any bird. In spring it returns by way of the Mississippi Valley. Thus the migration routes form an enormous ellipse, with a minor axis of 2,000 miles and a major axis stretching 8,000 miles from arctic America to Argentina." (Cooke.) The Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea), is "the champion long-distance migrant of the world. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Roman Invasion—F. Lamayer (Vertical line in action; dignified, measured, ponderous); The Flock—P. Moran (The horizontal, typifying quietude, repose, calm, solemnity); The curved line: variety, movement; Man with Stone—V. Spitzer (Transitional Line, Cohesion); The Dance—Rubens (The ellipse: line of continuity and unity); Swallows—From the Strand (The diagonal: line of action; speed) Aesthetics of Line, Continued, Where Line is the motive and Decoration is the Impulse; Winter Landscape—After Photograph ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... that port. Crab-like, she crawled obliquely to within a few hundred feet of the low-lying town, then the screw churned up a furious wake as the anxious Tagalog on the bridge swung her back into the Straits to circle in a new attempt. Carried by the tidal rush the old tub circled in a great ellipse. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... little procession at the corner of New York Avenue and Seventeenth Street. To the right gleamed the lights of the cavalry corral on the ellipse back of the White House, and on the left were the buildings of the quartermaster general's depot. Lloyd drew Baker to one ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... contradictory to its own express declarations,—again and again I ask:- What am I to substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy the doctrine which it professes to interpret—that does not convert it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar- loaf an ellipse, adding—"By which term I here mean a cone;"—and then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among the conic sections! And yet—notwithstanding the repugnancy of the doctrine, in its unqualified sense, to Scripture, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... present occupy this remarkable site consist of a strong wall, guarded by numerous bastions and pierced by four gateways, which runs round the brow of the hill in a slightly irregular ellipse, of some interesting remains of buildings within this walled space, and of a few insignificant traces of inferior edifices on the slope between the plain and the summit. As it is not thought that any of these remains are of a ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... [Greek: dia], through, [Greek: metron], measure), in geometry, a line passing through the centre of a circle or conic section and terminated by the curve; the "principal diameters" of the ellipse and hyperbola coincide with the "axes" and are at ... (continued in volume 8, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... taken in charge by the scouts, with Jupiter for their chief, and are forced to accompany the fleet, but not all are impressed. If a strange comet undertakes to run across Jupiter's bows the latter brings it to, and makes prize of it by throwing it into a relatively small ellipse with the sun for its focus. Thenceforth, unless, as happened to the unhappy comet of Lexell, it encounters Jupiter again in such a way as to be diverted by him into a more distant orbit, it can never get away. About thirty comets ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... 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 ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... there of which the compass knew nothing, how many cunning laws lay contained in embryo within an equation, the mysterious nut which must be artistically cracked to extract the rich kernel, the theorem! Take this or that term, place the sign before it and forthwith you have the ellipse, the trajectory of the planets, with its two friendly foci, transmitting pairs of vectors whose sum is constant; substitute the—sign and you have the hyperbola with the antagonistic foci, the desperate curve that dives ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... obstruction to the navigation. To give the largest amount of waterway, and at the same time reduce the gradient of the road over the bridge to the greatest extent, Mr. Telford adopted the following expedient. He made the general body of the arch an ellipse, 150 feet on the chord-line and 35 feet rise, while the voussoirs, or external archstones, being in the form of a segment, have the same chord, with only 13 feet rise. "This complex form," says Mr. Telford, "converts each side ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the crotalus jaw at the mouth of the mask over the head of each figure. This is again found on the body of the snake in Plate LX, and in other places. Other important questions can be settled by comparison of the two plates. For example, at Palenque we often find a sign composed of a half ellipse, inside of which bars are drawn. I shall elsewhere show that there is reason to believe the ellipse is to represent the concave of the sky, its diameter to be the level earth, and in some cases at least the bars to be the descending and fertilizing rain. The bars are sometimes two, three, and ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... This direction, which the meteor must have followed, is exactly that of the magnetic meridian, which is a remarkable result. The greatest of these stones fell at the south-eastern extremity of the large axis of the ellipse, the middle-sized in the centre, and the smaller at the other extremity. Hence it appears, that the largest fell first, as might naturally be supposed. The largest of all those that fell, weighs seventeen pounds and a half. The ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... However, a striking difference between his intermittent song-flights and those of the bobolink is to be noted. The latter usually rises in the air, soars around in a curve, and returns to the perch from which he started, or to one near by, describing something of an ellipse. The lark bunting generally rises obliquely to a certain point, then descends at about the same angle to another perch opposite the starting-point, describing what might be called the upper sides of an isosceles triangle, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... of highly conventionalized spirals: translate it from angular to curved and we have the wave-band; isolate it and we have the volute. Egg and dart are phallic emblems, female and male; or, if you prefer, as ellipse and straight line, they are symbols of finite existence ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... gave his fancy play in the choice of an oval, greater at one end than the other, endeavouring to satisfy some ideas about epicyclic motion, but could not find a satisfactory curve. He then had the fortunate idea of trying an ellipse with the same axis as his tentative oval. Mars now appeared too slow at the apses instead of too quick, so obviously some intermediate ellipse must be sought between the trial ellipse and the circle on ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... plane, sections of a cone. It is an oval curve, which may be drawn by fixing two pins in a sheet of paper at S and H, fastening a string, SPH, to the two pins, and stretching it with a pencil point at P, and moving the pencil point, while the string is kept taut, to trace the oval ellipse, APB. S and H are the foci. Kepler found the sun to be in one focus, say S. AB is the major axis. DE is the minor axis. C is the centre. The direction of AB is the line of apses. The ratio of CS to CA is the excentricity. The position of the planet at A is ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... the shape of an ellipse, the sides of which were formed by great clifflike mountains, and the other two by hills lower, but still of considerable boldness and size. The longest radius was perhaps six or eight miles, and the shortest three or four. At one end a canyon dropped away to a lower ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... considered as matter, then, we are confronted with new difficulties; for all matter must exert gravitation. Weight is our sole test of the very existence of matter; it is the balance which has proved that nothing ever disappears. Imponderable matter is no more possible than a triangular ellipse. Away, then, with such a mischief-breeding conception! Let this last-surviving fetich be ousted from the fair temple of inorganic science. Undulations have been measured and counted; quantitative relations, like those expressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 this blood-red distorted moon gave ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the stump, an 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 entirely. This ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... bodies did not attract one another at all, but only moved under the influence of the sun, they would move in orbits having the form of ellipses. They are found to move very nearly in such orbits, only the actual path deviates from an ellipse, now in one direction and then in another, and it slowly changes its position from year to year. These deviations are due to the pull of the other planets, and by measuring the deviations we can determine the amount of the pull, and hence the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... gravitation. We may regard all these bodies as projected into space, and thus moving according to laws similar to that which governs the motion of a stone thrown from the hand. If two bodies alone were concerned, say the sun and a planet, the orbit of the lesser around the greater would be an ellipse, which would never change its form, size, or position. That the orbits of the planets and asteroids do change, and that they are not exact ellipses, is due to their attraction upon each other. The question is, do these mutual attractions completely ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... as a rule, the centres of the upper portion lie immediately below those of the lower, but this is not always the case. Sometimes the whole of the upper portion uniting the arcs of the ends is struck from one centre, in which case the arch becomes a three-centred one, being, in fact, half an ellipse. Towards the close of the style the curvature of the upper portion is so slight that it can hardly be distinguished from a straight line, and as the debasement progressed it became really straight. Ogee arches are also found at this period, ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... talked in paradox and ellipse. He threw his sentences into air, and let them find ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is the same as though carried by the inner circle while rolling within the outer one, the latter being fixed; the points P and R describing the diameters L M and K N, the point D a circle, and S an ellipse; C D being the train-arm. The distance R P being always the diameter of one circle and the radius of the other, the sizes of the wheels can be in effect varied ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... a score of satellites, the variety of orbital and axial movement which is developed taxes the computing genius of the ablest astronomer. The path which our earth follows around the sun, though it may in general and for convenience be described as a variable ellipse, is, in fact, a line of such complication that if we should essay a diagram of it on the scale of this page it would not be possible to represent any considerable part of its deviations. These, in fact, would elude depiction, even ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... 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 ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... 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 has its apogee and its perigee. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... aid, that he paid no heed to the fact that their captors led them right round to the far 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, ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... the smaller curves of which they are composed; and if these great lines be taken, rejecting the minutiae of variation, the resultant form will almost always be angular, and full of character and decision. In the flock-like fields of equal masses, each individual mass has the effect, not of an ellipse or circle, but of a rhomboid; the sky is crossed and checkered, not honeycombed; in the lower cumuli, even though the most rounded of all clouds, the groups are not like balloons or bubbles, but like towers or mountains. And the result of this arrangement in masses more or less angular, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... machine, specially devised for the purpose, Professor Marey found that a bird's wing moves in an ellipse, with a pointed summit (Fig. 10). The insect beats the air in a distinctly horizontal plane, but the bird in a vertical plane. The wing of an insect is impervious to the air; while the bird's wing resists the air only on its under side. Hence, there are two sorts of effects; in the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... make a cell: pieces of two kinds, some, the oval ones, forming the honey-pot; others, the round ones, serving as a lid. I count, on an average, eight to ten pieces of the first kind. Though all cut on the pattern of an ellipse, they are not equal in dimensions and come under two categories. The larger, outside ones are each of them almost a third of the circumference and overlap one another slightly. Their lower end bends into a concave curve to ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... for both narrator and listener were hungry. The two now sat face to face, their legs forming a sort of an ellipse, with the roast mutton in the centre, and for several minutes a formidable gritting of teeth, as huge pieces of the mutton passed through them, were the only sounds that broke the stillness ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... 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 that ellipse—produces ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
