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Spherical   /sfˈɛrɪkəl/   Listen
Spherical

adjective
1.
Of or relating to spheres or resembling a sphere.
2.
Having the shape of a sphere or ball.  Synonyms: ball-shaped, global, globose, globular, orbicular, spheric.  "Nearly orbicular in shape" , "Little globular houses like mud-wasp nests"



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"Spherical" Quotes from Famous Books



... its applications to Spherical Projections. Church's Shades, Shadows and Perspective. Davies' Surveying. Church's Analytical Geometry. Church's Calculus. French Language...........Bolmar's Levizac's Grammar and Verb Book. Berard's Lecons Francaises. Chapsal's ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper

... complete military airship in England was built, which bore the grandiloquent title of Nulli Secundus. One of the envelopes constructed by Colonel Templer was used: it was cylindrical in shape with spherical ends. Suspended beneath the envelope by means of a net and four broad silk bands was a triangular steel framework or keel from which was slung a small car. A 50 horsepower Antoinette engine was situated in the forward part of the car which drove two metal-bladed propellers by belts. At the after ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale

... an only begotten; because the scarabaeus is a creature self-produced, being unconceived by a female; for the propagation of it is unique and after this manner:—when the male is desirous of procreating, he takes the dung of an ox, and shapes it into a spherical form like the world; he then rolls it from him by the hinder parts from East to West, looking himself towards the East, that he may impart to it the figure of the world (for that is borne from East to West, while the course of the stars is from West to East;) then having dug a hole, ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to send him. The force was delighted ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... Gagabu, who was to-day charged with the conduct of the feast by Ameni—who on such occasions only showed himself for a few minutes—was a short, stout man with a bald and almost spherical head. His features were those of a man of advancing years, but well-formed, and his smoothly-shaven, plump cheeks were well-rounded. His grey eyes looked out cheerfully and observantly, but had a vivid sparkle when he was excited and began to twitch ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... road was made. Now let us travel on it in the hired landau and four horses driven by a wild-looking coachman, whose locks of jet-black hair protrude on either side of his clean-shaven neck, and match in colour his black astrakan, spherical, brimless headgear. Like all good Persians, he has a much pleated frockcoat that once was black and is now of various shades of green. Over it at the waist he displays a most elaborate silver belt, and yet another belt of leather with a profusion of cartridges stuck ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... ones. In my early work Dr. Draper suggested a very excellent plan for testing a flat surface, which I briefly describe. It is a well known truth that, if an artificial star is placed in the exact center of curvature of a truly spherical mirror, and an eyepiece be used to examine the image close beside the source of light, the star will be sharply defined, and will bear very high magnification. If the eyepiece is now drawn toward the observer, the star disk begins to expand; and if the mirror be a truly spherical one, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... liberty, I yet shrunk from the unknown spaces around me, and rushed back to the shelter of the home-walls. But as I grew older I became more adventurous; and one evening, although the shadows were beginning to lengthen, I went on and on until I made a discovery. I found a half-spherical hollow in the grassy surface. I rushed into its depth as if it had been a mine of marvels, threw myself on the ground, and gazed into the sky as if I had now for the first time discovered its true relation to the earth. The earth was a cup, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... of an ordinary cell presents itself in the form of a nearly spherical vesicle. Delicate methods of staining have shown that the nucleus encloses several round nucleolar corpuscles, and also a reticulum which is attached to its membrane and spreads through its whole substance. The liquid part of the nucleus fills the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... lights of their plumage had dulled. Painted in flat primary colors, they looked like paper dolls pasted on the inky thundercloud. As usual, when they came in a group, they wove in and out in a limited spherical area, achieving extraordinary effects ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... of about twenty-seven feet and point them at both ends; after which, by driving the ends into the soil on opposite sides of our cleared circle of ground, we soon had complete the framework of a hemi-spherical bee-hive-like structure. A second load of wattles was, however, necessary to strengthen this framework to Daphne's liking, and leaving poor Smellie for the nonce to take care of himself, the pair of us set out to procure them. Daphne led me to a dense brake wherein immense numbers of these ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... time, it was also evident that the balloon was again slowly descending with a regular movement. It appeared as if it were, little by little, collapsing, and that its case was lengthening and extending, passing from a spherical to an oval form. Towards midday the balloon was hovering above the sea at a height of only 2,000 feet. It contained 50,000 cubic feet of gas, and, thanks to its capacity, it could maintain itself a long time in the air, although it should reach a ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of judgments cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think must be the right way. The true must be essentially the self-reflecting self-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including its own other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever rounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which Hegel calls the world of ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... of spherical beads in green jade, highly polished, and some as large as pigeon's eggs. They were found in an alabaster box, of such elaborate and beautiful workmanship that the owner deemed it worthy to be presented as a sort of peace-offering to the ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... always delightful to the little ones, and are invaluable to the kindergartner, as they furnish a thorough test of the child's comprehension of the subject she has been handling.[12] We should notice slight divergences from the spherical form in the objects the children name, and speak of them. They will soon be able to tell in every case where the egg or ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... quantity of small paper discs, all of the same size. We place one of the discs anywhere on the surface of the globe. If we move the disc about, anywhere we like, on the surface of the globe, we do not come upon a limit or boundary anywhere on the journey. Therefore we say that the spherical surface of the globe is an unbounded continuum. Moreover, the spherical surface is a finite continuum. For if we stick the paper discs on the globe, so that no disc overlaps another, the surface of the globe will finally become ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein

... the clearing. No sooner in place than a scattering fire by the men is opened upon friends and foes alike. Dilger's battery trains some of its guns down the road. The reserve artillery is already in position at the north of this line, and uses spherical case with rapidity. Howard and his staff are in the thickest of the fray, endeavoring to stem the tide. As well ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... just published (the first innovation made in the Cambridge system of Physical Sciences for many years): and I find in my scribbling-paper notes, integrals, central forces, Finite Differences, steam-engine constructions and powers, plans of bridges, spherical trigonometry, optical calculations relating to the achromatism of eye-pieces and achromatic object-glasses with lenses separated, mechanical problems, Transit of Venus, various problems in geometrical astronomy ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... begin my comparison of all Echinoderms with an analysis of the Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins, because I think I can best show the identity of parts between them, notwithstanding the difference in their external form; the Sea-Urchins having always a spherical body, while the Star-Fishes are always star-shaped, though in some the star is only hinted at, sketched out, as it were, in a simply pentagonal outline, while in others the indentations between the rays ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... remote antiquity acquired the important knowledge of the earth's spherical form; to their bold genius we are indebted for the outline of the geographical system now universally adopted. With a vigorous conception, but imperfect execution, they traced out the scheme of denoting ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... adjusted the focus for him. Each filament was covered with countless tiny spheres that isolated and insulated the nerve from contact. That's why he couldn't feel anything. The spherical microbes did look like bubbles. As yet they didn't seem to have attacked ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace

... another species, the "sapucaya," which has yellow ones. But it is neither the trunk, nor the branches, nor the leaves, nor yet the flowers of this tree, that render it such an object of curiosity. It is the great woody and spherical pericarps that contain the nuts or fruits that are wonderful. These are often as large as the head of a child, and as hard as the shell of the cocoa-nut! Inside is found a large number—twenty or more—of those triangular-shaped nuts which ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... strains of nature's choristers. On his way he beheld a very delightful and level spot of land covered with golden sands and resembling heaven itself, O king, for its beauty. On that plot stood a large and beautiful banian with a spherical top. Possessed of many branches that corresponded with the parent tree in beauty and size, that banian looked like an umbrella set over the plain. The spot underneath that magnificent tree was drenched with water ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... Brazil another species, the Choestostomus pictus, is found, which is equally skilful. With aquatic plants it constructs a spherical nest and arranges it in the midst of the reeds, level with the water. At the lower part a hole is left, through which the female comes to lay. After fertilisation, the couple, as is rarely found among fish, remain in the neighbourhood of their offspring to assist them ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... has raced up on our right, and is delivering shot, shell, spherical case, and canister, with effect, although exposed to a severe and accurate fire from the Enemy. Wilcox, with what is left of the 1st Michigan, after once retaking the batteries on the plateau, from the ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... Earth's Form.—Have any objections to the received theory of the earth's spherical form, or any revival of the old "plane" doctrine, been recently noticed and controverted by scientific ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various

... definable as the space contained by three or more planes intersecting in a common point; it is familiarly represented by a corner. The angle between two planes is termed dihedral, between three trihedral, between any number more than three polyhedral. A spherical angle is a particular dihedral angle; it is the angle between two intersecting arcs on a sphere, and is measured by the angle between the planes containing the arcs and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... spyglass. This gave us the parallax of his observation. Breslau, of course, we knew, and so we could place Zitta's, and with these poor data I went to work to construct, if I could, an orbit for this Io-Phoebe mass of brick and mortar. Haliburton, not strong in spherical trigonometry, looked out logarithms for me till breakfast, and, as soon as it would do, went over to Mrs. Bowdoin, to borrow her telescope, ours ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... were isolated in vast spherical steel chambers with thick walls, so that nothing but air pressure would be hurled against them, and this, of course, would be self-neutralizing, coming as it did from ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... surface. On the very top of some of the telegraph-posts were the nests of the oven-bird, looking like carved round blocks of wood, placed there for ornament. These nests are made of mud, and are perfectly spherical in form, the interior being divided into two quite ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... contain a bright red sand. They were, in fact, volcanic bombs that had been formed by the ejection of molten lava to a great height from active volcanoes; these had become globular in falling, and, having cooled before they reached the earth, they retained their forms as hard spherical bodies, precisely resembling cannon shot. The exterior was brown, and appeared to be rich in iron. The smaller specimens were the more perfect spheres, as they cooled quickly; but many of the heavier masses had evidently reached the earth when only half solidified, and had ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker

... So far our tests have been mostly negative. It was said, however, that spherical bubbles sometimes appear in scientific gems. Another characteristic structural defect of practically every scientific gem may be utilized to distinguish them. As is well known, the rough material is formed in boules or pear-shaped ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... P. F. Mottelay appeared at London in 1893. Gilbert (1540-1603) was physician to Queen Elizabeth and President of the College of Physicians at London. His De Magnete was the first noteworthy treatise on physics printed in England. He treated of the earth as a spherical magnet and suggested the variation and declination of the needle as a means ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... and the effects of the caloric which tends to separate them. Hence the caloric not only surrounds the particles of all bodies on every side, but fills up every interval which the particles of bodies leave between each other. We may form an idea of this, by supposing a vessel filled with small spherical leaden bullets, into which a quantity of fine sand is poured, which, insinuating into the intervals between the bullets, will fill up every void. The balls, in this comparison, are to the sand which surrounds them exactly in the same situation as the particles ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... by Lines & Numbers; from thence, Astronomy, Cosmgraphy, and Navigation proved and delineated by the Doctrine of Plane and Spherical ...
— The Compleat Cook • Anonymous, given as "W. M."

... thing that happens on removing a gaseous atom from its "hole" (see pp. 21 to 23) or encircling "wall," is that the contained bodies are set free, and, evidently released from tremendous pressure, assume spherical or ovoid forms, the atoms within each re-arranging themselves, more or less, within the new "hole" or "wall." The figures are, of course, three-dimensional, and often remind one of crystals; tetrahedral, octagonal, and other like forms being of constant ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

... energy fields. Magnetic and gravitational and electrostatic fields rotate polarized light or bend light or do this or that as the case may be. But all previous modifications of the constants of space had been in essentially spherical fields. All previous fields had extended in all directions, increasing in intensity as the square of the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... the conception of a spherical earth was gradually grasped, and the heavenly bodies were perceived all to revolve round it: some moving regularly, as the stars, all fixed together into one spherical shell or firmament; some moving ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... cloaks were of buffalo-calf skin about four feet in length, elaborately decorated with bead-work in stripes. The outer was covered with rows of blue and white bead-work, the second was green and yellow, and the third blue and red. All were further adorned by spherical brass bells attached all about the borders ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... molecular change. I have seen in fine volcanic sandstone clear evidence of all the calcareous matter travelling at least 4 1/2 feet in distance to concretions on either hand (page 113 of "S. America") (541/2. "Some of these concretions (flattened spherical concretions composed of hard calcareous sandstone, containing a few shells, occurring in a bed of sandstone) were 4 feet in diameter, and in a horizontal line 9 feet apart, showing that the calcareous matter must have been drawn to the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... alone in space, finally descended to the ocean, where she was rocked in the cradle of the deep seven hundred, years. She made use of this time to create, out of the eggs of a wild duck, the canopy of the heavens, and the spherical earth, with its islands, rocks, and continents. At the end of these seven hundred years, Ilmater gave birth to Wainamoinen, having waited all this time to be delivered of him, and having vainly called all living creatures to her aid. After coming into the world, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... parapara (Sapindus saponaria, or soap-berry), an operation said to be very injurious to the linen. The bark of the fruit produces a strong lather; and the fruit is so elastic that if thrown on a stone it rebounds three or four times to the height of seven or eight feet. Being a spherical form, it ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... earth, another sun and moon, and another world.[1] Pope Zachary answered, that if he taught such an error he ought to be deposed. This cannot be understood as a condemnation of the doctrine of Antipodes, or the spherical figure of the earth, as some writers have imagined by mistake. The error here spoken of is that of certain heretics, who maintained that there was another race of men, who did not descend from Adam, and were not redeemed by Christ. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... with a rubber blanket. It has withstood the exposure perfectly well for a year, without injury. The gauge, made from flat rubber, is altogether so cheap and so convenient that I am now experimenting with one of this description having a black cloth covering upon the outside. The balloon is of spherical shape, the black cloth covering is of cylindrical shape, and I hope that this device will serve every necessary purpose. A sectional view of the air-cushion is offered as a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... scattered, was but finite, the matter on the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend towards all the matter on the inside, and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass. But if the matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space, it could never convene into one mass, but some of it would convene into one mass, and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered, at great distances, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... physicists were busy on this, Fuller was designing the mechanical details of the projector. It must be able to turn through a spherical angle of 180 degrees, and was necessarily controlled electrically from the inside. The details of the projector were worked out by six that evening, and the numerous castings and machined pieces that were to be used were to be made in the ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... If a spherical ball of any metal be plunged below the surface of a molten bath of the same or another metal, the cold ball will displace its own volume of molten metal. If the densities of the cold and molten metal be the same, there will ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various

... consists in their preserving their original white colour to the last, which is a great desideratum. Billiard-balls constitute another considerable item of ivory consumption. They cost from 6s. to 12s. each; and the nicety of our ornamental turning produces balls not only of the most perfect spherical form, but accurately corresponding in size and weight even ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various

... to the degree in which this particular form may have participated, he can understand all, do all, and be such an attached friend to one that he may come to feel contempt and indifference towards every other beauty. Therefore to her should be consecrated the spherical apple as to her who seems to be all in all; not to Venus, who is beautiful but is surpassed in wisdom by Minerva, and by Juno in majesty; not to Pallas than whom Venus is more beautiful, and the other more magnificent; not to Juno, who is not the goddess of intelligence ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... separate beneficial lenient Spaniard decimal license speak exhilarate mechanical specimen familiarize mediaeval speech fiber medicine spherical fibrous militia subtle genuine motor surely gluey negotiate technical height origin tenement hideous pacified their hundredths phalanx therefore hysterical physique thinnest icicle privilege until irremediable prodigies vengeance laboratory rarefy visible laid ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... glass was the work of a minute. Oh, joy! The fibrin was not coagulated. The red globules appeared cleanly circular, flattened, biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings. The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... six o'clock, the barometer showed an elevation of 26,400 feet, or five miles to a fraction. The prospect seemed unbounded. Indeed, it is very easily calculated by means of spherical geometry, what a great extent of the earth's area I beheld. The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere. Now, in my case, the versed sine—that is to say, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... minute, not seeming readily to crystallize with each other; each in itself of uniform shape and size, spherical as the egg which contains the germ of life, and small as the egg from which the life of ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Granite and its Varieties. Decomposing into Spherical Masses. Rude columnar Structure. Graphic Granite. Mutual Penetration of Crystals of Quartz and Feldspar. Glass Cavities in Quartz of Granite. Porphyritic, talcose, and syenitic Granite. Schorlrock and Eurite. Syenite. Connection of the Granites and Syenites ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... leaves with long petioles; leaflets lanceolate, acuminate, smooth, dark green. Calyx of 4 imbricated sepals. Corolla of 4 unguiculate petals, between white and straw color, 1' long. Stamens indefinite, violet-colored. Ovary unilocular, many-ovuled. Berry spherical with many seeds buried ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera

... Root nearly spherical, but tapering to pear-shaped at the base; nearly one-third produced above ground. Size large; well-grown specimens measuring seven or eight inches in diameter, and nine or ten inches in depth. Skin smooth, and of a rich purplish rose-color below ground; brown above the surface, where exposed ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... lived than beneficial to posterity. This design was to sail to India by taking a western direction. By the accounts of travellers who had visited that part of Asia, it seemed almost without limits on the east; and by attending to the spherical figure of the earth Columbus drew the natural conclusion, that the Atlantic ocean must be bounded on the west either by India itself, or by some continent not far distant ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... that threatened, Naida did not need to be told that the need for action was pressing. She shouted at her companions some order which Kirby did not understand. From a pouch at her side, she snatched out a greyish, spherical vegetable substance which looked almost like a tennis ball. Then she braced herself as if to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... the elements of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry and their practical applications to Surveying, Geodesy, and Astronomy, with convenient and accurate "five place" tables for the use of the student, engineer, and surveyor. Designed for High Schools, ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg

... and now again they were ready to start. Suddenly the Very Young Man spied a huge, round, whitish-brown object lying beside a tree-trunk near by. He went over and stood beside it. Then he called his friends excitedly. It was irregularly spherical in shape and stood higher than his knees—a great jagged ball. The Very Young Man bent down, broke off a piece of the ball, and, stuffing it into his mouth, began ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... undulated margins, of a pale green colour, embroidered with yellow, borne on foot-stalks without wings. The fruit whilst young is pear-shaped, yellow, longitudinally striated and sweet; but, as it ripens, it becomes spherical, of ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean,—the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... metals; and in his own shops at Pimlico Bramah employed a machine with revolving cutters to plane metallic surfaces for his patent locks and other articles. He also introduced a method of turning spherical surfaces, either convex or concave, by a tool moveable on an axis perpendicular to that of the lathe; and of cutting out concentric shells by fixing in a similar manner a curved tool of nearly the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... unmanageable fineness, depends on the experimental fact that when a fine point of quartz is held in a high pressure oxygen gas blow-pipe flame, the friction of the flame gases suffices to overcome the tendency of the capillary forces to produce a spherical drop, and actually causes a fine thread to be projected outwards in the direction of ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... by his father. He does not seem to think this detracts much from their value. Others will come, with less pronounced characteristics, and, therefore, more perplexing. The Madrassee will be there, with his spherical turban and his wonderful command of colloquial English; he is supposed to know how to prepare that mysterious luxury, "real Madras curry." Bengal servants are not common in Bombay, fortunately, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... importance of these results, it still remained to be determined whether the forces resided in the centres of the planets or belonged to each individual particle of which they were composed. Newton removed this uncertainty by demonstrating that if a spherical body acts upon a distant body with a force varying as the distance of this body from the centre of the sphere, the same effect will be produced as if each of its particles acted upon the distant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... heights, immediately eastward of Friedrich, there is a kind of hollow, or scooped-out place; shallow valley of some extent, which deserves notice against to-morrow: but in general the ground is lazily spherical, and without noticeable hollows or valleys when fairly away from the River. A dull blunt lump of country; made of sand and mud,—may have been grassy once, with broom on it, in the pastoral times; is now under poor plough-husbandry, arable or scratchable in all parts, and looks rather miserable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... being brought up with a round turn and required to part company with his ears or nose, or to be turned adrift on the cold charity of the world, deprived of his hands by the crude and summary justice of Khorassan. His eyes are brown and large, and spherical almost as an owl's eyes, and they bulge out in a manner that exposes most of the white. He wears long hair, curled up after the manner of Persian la-de-da-dom, and in his crude, uncivilized sphere evidently fancies himself something of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... heart is removed towards the abdomen. In the wonderfully deformed parasitic Isopods of the Porcellanae (Entoniscus porcellanae), the spherical heart of the female is confined to a short space of the elongated first abdominal segment, and seems to possess only a single pair of fissures. In the male of Entoniscus Cancrorum (n. sp.), the heart (Figure 16) is situated in the third abdominal segment. In the ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller

... reputation and experience. On a felt-covered stand close by him lay a couple of heavy spherical objects, fashioned of some shining-surfaced metal and about the size of a cricket ball, which he had previously noticed and handled in looking round. He snatched one of them up now, and flung it hard and straight at Joseph Chestermarke, intending to stun him. ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... should be corrected by pruning. We have lately seen the beneficial effects of close pruning on such plants; they had been cut in severely last season by removing strong, straggling branches of old wood, to give some a spherical and others a pyramidal form. When pruned, the ball was reduced, the plant fresh potted in a smaller-sized pot, and the peat soil rammed as hard as it was possible to make it; then watered, and introduced to heat. The plants treated ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane

... though that was merely a guess, for in the distance I could only make out several dark forms rising out of the grassland like trees, or possibly buildings, one of them being a great deal taller than the others, with a spherical shape on top that only faintly resembled a tree's crown. If it was indeed a tree, it was the largest that I have ever seen, for it looked to be upwards of 800 ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... of tissue looked nothing like the normal pink appearance of healthy lungs. Studded with yellowish spherical abscesses they lay swollen and engorged within the gaping cavity of ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone

... R. Wood, of Cincinnati, was granted a United States patent on a spherical coffee roaster for use on kitchen stoves. It attained considerable popularity among housewives who preferred to do their own roasting. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... green velvet on the edge of a convex mirror. The sun sunk in fleecy golden vapours behind it. It now dwindled to discoloured and irregular spots, which appeared like objects floating, amidst the blue mists of distance, on the verge of the main, and immediately all was lost beneath the spherical, watery surface. ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... making cylindrical burrows often four to five feet deep, and terminating in a round chamber. Others build a massive oven-shaped structure of clay on a branch or other elevated site. Many of those that creep on trees nest in holes in the wood. The marsh-frequenting kinds attach spherical or oval domed nests to the reeds; and in some cases woven grass and clay are so ingeniously combined that the structure, while light as a basket, is perfectly impervious to the wet and practically indestructible. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... body of water. This, by gravitation, is reduced to a spherical form, and by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation, is become oblate. The purpose of this fluid body is essential in the constitution of the world; for, besides affording the means of life and motion to a multifarious race of animals, it is the source of growth and circulation to the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... been smoothly spherical before; it heaved itself into strange protuberances as he watched. He flipped his hand to set up another vortex of light, and he saw the first rip ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... furnace. It was covered with a white cloth. He took it off. The vessel was about four feet high, round, and shaped somewhat like a washing tub, but it was made of glass more than an inch thick. In it a spherical mass, a little larger than a football, of a peculiar, livid colour. The surface was smooth, but rather coarsely grained, and over it ran a dense system of blood-vessels. It reminded the two medical men of those huge tumours which are preserved in spirit in hospital museums. ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... master of the morsel and the field. But the chickadee does not care. He flies down and spies a stalk of golden-rod above the snow on which there is a round object looking like a small onion. Chickadee doesn't know that this is the spherical gall of the trypeta solidaginis, but he does know that it contains a fat white grub. He knows, too, that there is a beveled passage leading to a cell in the center and that the outer end of this passage is protected by a membrane window. ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... asserts that the use of the word "Ye" always involves extra overhead expense—and a quotation from Shakespeare on the back of the menu, he doubted, might mean a couvert charge. But he was distinctly cheered when the kidneys and bacon arrived—a long strip of bacon gloriously balanced on four very spherical and well-lubricated kidneys. Smiling demurely, even blandly, Lawton rolled his sheave of bacon to and fro upon its kidneys. "This is the first time I ever saw bacon with ball bearings," he ejaculated. He gazed with the eye of a connoisseur upon the rather candid works of ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... (A), arising from the epidermal cells, from which they are early cut off by a cross-wall. In the upper cell several walls next arise, forming a short stalk, composed of three rows of cells, and an upper nearly spherical cell—the sporangium proper. The latter now divides by four walls (B, C, i-iv), into a central tetrahedral cell, and four outer ones. The central cell, whose contents are much denser than the outer ones, divides again by walls parallel to ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell

... tubercle in books amount to about this, that the tubercle is an amount of fleshy substance which may be albumen, fibrin, or any other substance collected and deposited at one place in the human body, and covered with a film composed generally of fibrinous substances, and deposited in its spherical form, and separated from all similarly formed spheres by fascia. They may be very numerous, for many hundreds may occupy one cubic inch and yet one is distinct from all others. They seem to develop only where fascia is abundant; in the lungs, liver, bowels and ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... bearings of the propeller shafts, always difficult to regulate and keep in order on the twin screw system, are selfadjusting and accommodate themselves to every change of the direction of the shafts. This is effected by their being spherical externally, and resting in corresponding cavities in the stern braces or hangers. The spring bearings for supporting the middle of the shafts are also arranged on a ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... to that from which it emanates in the real object. In reflectors this is effected by giving a parabolic form to the concave surface of the mirror. In refractors there is a twofold difficulty to be overcome. In the first place, a lens with spherical surfaces does not bend all the rays that pass through it to a focus at precisely the same distance. The rays that pass near the outer edge of the lens have a shorter focus than that of the rays which pass near ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss

... the ship's captain, inside the airlock, when I boarded the big, spherical space-liner. A tubby little man, with shoulders and arms he had never developed doing secretarial work, and a good-natured, ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... it is subjected to a high degree of heat obtained by the combustion of pulverized coal, which is injected into the interior of the kiln. This combustion effects a chemical decomposition of the chalk, and causes it to assume a plastic consistency and to collect together in the form of small spherical balls, which are known as "clinker." Kilns are usually arranged with a slight incline, at the upper end of which the chalk is fed in and gradually works its way down to the interior flame of burning fuel at the other end. When it arrives at the lower end, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... purchase of the new rifle which I had promised myself. This was a very expensive but beautiful weapon, very light compared with my old rifle, for it weighed, all complete and including the shoulder strap, less than six pounds. It had a plain blue cylindrical barrel, gauged to take a half-inch spherical bullet with three drachms of powder, was fitted with a nipple for percussion caps, and provided with a fixed sight for a range of one hundred yards and two flap sights for two hundred and five hundred yards respectively, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... non-cohesive foil, it was found to resist under manipulation. This resistance is in accordance with the well-known law that all crystalline bodies, when unobstructed, assume a definite form. With gold the tendency is to a spherical form. The process of crystallization is always from within outward. The mallet was introduced to overcome the resistance caused by the development of the cohesive property. Pounding gold with a mallet only increases its crystallization. A crystalline body coming in contact with a fibrous one ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler

... l. 17. If the nucleus of the earth was thrown out from the sun by an explosion along with as large a quantity of surrounding hot vapour as its attraction would occasion to accompany it, the ponderous semi-fluid nucleus would take a spherical form from the attraction of its own parts, which would become an oblate spheroid from its diurnal revolution. As the vapour cooled the water would be precipitated, and an ocean would surround the spherical nucleus with a superincumbent ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... the figure, which appeared even to decrease as they approached it, seemed to be under four feet, and its form, as far as the imperfect light afforded them the means of discerning, was very nearly as broad as long, or rather of a spherical shape, which could only be occasioned by some strange personal deformity. The young sportsman hailed this extraordinary appearance twice, without receiving any answer, or attending to the pinches by which his companion ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... are spherical, R.J.E. Clausius and O.F. Mossotti found a relation between the dielectric constant and the space actually occupied by the molecules, viz. K (1 2a)/(1 - a), or a (K - 1)/(K 2), where K is the dielectric constant and a the fraction of the total volume actually occupied by matter. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... effect, to heighten the musical feeling of a passage, but ... the rhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences.... Return in 'polyphonic prose' is usually achieved by the recurrence of a dominant thought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but still giving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... stomach, figure 5F, i', which may be traced through twenty-five or thirty sections in this series. The epithelium of the stomach is fairly thick, and consists of five or six layers of compact, indistinctly outlined cells with spherical nuclei. Ventrad to the stomach is seen, in figure 5F, a section of the duodenum, i, which extends, with gradually diminishing caliber, for twenty-five or thirty sections caudad to the posterior limit of the stomach, ...
— Development of the Digestive Canal of the American Alligator • Albert M. Reese

... secret downwards between inner walls of the house, penetrating everywhere. One went down to a boiler behind the kitchen-range and filled it, and as the fire that was roasting the joint heated the boiler, the water mounted again magically to the cistern-room and filled another cistern, spherical and sealed, and thence descended, on a third journeying, to the bath and to the lavatory basin in the bathroom. All this was marvellous to Edwin; it was romantic. What! A room solely for baths! And a huge painted zinc ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... early or absorbed more rapidly. I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent; the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere; the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... Fiske that the spherical form of the earth was known long before Columbus, and that he derived his knowledge of the existence of the westernmost shore of the Atlantic Ocean through information which he received of the voyages of the Norsemen, on his visit to Iceland in 1477, his opinion ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro

... rifled gun on the parapet of Jackson, of the same calibre as that of the Louisiana, had not been able to reach. Three schooners had been struck, one at the distance of 4,000 yards, during the first two days of the bombardment, not only by rifled, but by VIII-and X-inch spherical projectiles; and the second division had been compelled to shift its position. Looking only to the Louisiana, the decision of the naval officers was natural enough; but considering that time pressed, that after five ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan

... body in space is a very complicated process. I see suddenly before me, for example, a white ball. This has the effect of conveying to me more than a mere sensation of whiteness. I deduce the spherical character of the ball from the gradations of light and shade upon its surface. I form a correct appreciation of its distance from my eye, and hence again I deduce an inference as to the size of the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler



Words linked to "Spherical" :   nonspherical, round, sphere, circular



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