MINOR AXIS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Minor axis

... something like half a million times the distance of Sirius. Now, our own "starry island, or nebula," as Humboldt calls it, "forms a lens-shaped, flattened, and everywhere detached stratum, whose major axis is estimated at seven or eight hundred, and its minor axis at a hundred and fifty times the distance of Sirius from the Earth."[11] And since it is concluded that the Solar System is near the centre of this aggregation, it follows that our distance from the remotest parts ...

— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... investigation easier; for it is equivalent to two forces, one being as the squares of the distances, and another as the square roots of the distances. For the former force, we find that in orbits having the same major axis the mean effect will be as the minor axis of the ellipse inversely, so that two planets moving in different orbits, but at the same mean distance, experience a less or greater amount of centripulsive force from this radial stream, according as their orbits are of less or greater eccentricity, and this in the ratio of the minor axis. ...

— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett