The Popular Science Review: A Quarterly Miscellany of Entertaining and Instructive Articles on Scientific Subjects, Volume 3

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James Samuelson, Henry Lawson, William Sweetland Dallas
Robert Hardwicke, 1864
 

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Page 165 - ... in large boilers, or launched in red-hot balls of stone and iron, or darted in arrows and javelins, twisted round with flax and tow, which had deeply imbibed the inflammable oil ; sometimes it was deposited in fire-ships, the victims and instruments of a more ample revenge, and was most commonly blown through long tubes of copper which were planted on the prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of savage monsters, that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and consuming fire.
Page 166 - By these precautions, the secret was confined, above four hundred years, to the Romans of the East; and at the end of the eleventh century, the Pisans, to whom every sea and every art were familiar, suffered the effects, without understanding the composition, of the Greek fire.
Page 165 - ... sand, urine, or vinegar, were the only remedies that could damp the fury of this powerful agent, which was justly denominated by the Greeks, the liquid, or maritime, fire.
Page 166 - It came flying through the air, says Joinville,22 like a winged longtailed dragon, about the thickness of a hogshead, with the report of thunder and the velocity of lightning; and the darkness of the night was dispelled by this deadly illumination.
Page 500 - The sun raises the vapours of the equatorial ocean ; they rise, but for a time a vapour screen spreads above and around them. But the higher they rise, the more they come into the presence of pure space, and when, by their levity, they have penetrated the...
Page 371 - Scotch fir (Pinus silvestris), often three feet in diameter, which must have grown on the margin of the peat-mosses, and have frequently fallen into them. This tree is not now, nor has ever been in historical times, a native of the Danish islands, and when introduced there has not thriven...
Page 499 - ... vapour of the air which filled the Royal Institution theatre, during the delivery of the discourse, absorbed 90 or 100 times the quantity of radiant heat which was absorbed by the main body of the air of the room. Looking at the single atoms, for every 200 of oxygen and nitrogen there is about 1 of aqueous vapour.
Page 500 - The rain quits the ocean as vapour; it returns to it as water. How are the vast stores of heat, set free by the change from the vaporous to the liquid condition, disposed of ? Doubtless in great part they are wasted by radiation into space. Similar remarks apply to the cumuli of our latitudes. The warmed air, charged with...
Page 141 - Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you.
Page 84 - ... it was close beneath a deep crevice in the tree, across which was stretched a dense white web. The lower part of the web was broken, and two small birds, finches, were entangled in the pieces ; they were about the size of the English siskin, and I judged the two to be male and female. One of them was quite dead, the other lay under the body of the spider not quite dead, and was smeared with the filthy liquor or saliva exuded by the monster. I drove away the spider and took the birds, but the...

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