"Ellipse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... dark blue with a narrow red border on all four sides; centered is a red-bordered, pointed, vertical ellipse containing a beach scene, outrigger canoe with sail, and a palm tree with the word GUAM superimposed in bold red letters; US flag ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... 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
... 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 ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... erosion following those of volcanic activity were evident enough upon the entire landscape. On the west side we had a horseshoe-shaped vertical wall—seemingly containing an extinct crater—and yet another on the north side of the western end of the elongated ellipse which was ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... 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
... ultimate matter is reduced to that of an oblate spheroid described by the revolution of an ellipse ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... 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, ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... 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
... forms the major axis of the ellipse, which it enters near Koodoos Drift and leaves at Paardeberg Drift, and like most South African rivers runs in a deep channel between banks intersected by the tributary dongas which the rains have scored in the soft soil, and which afford almost the only shelter from artillery fire. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... 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
... 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 which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 |
