The Annual of Scientific Discovery, Or, Year-book of Facts in Science and Art

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Gould and Lincoln, 1866
 

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Page 282 - In like manner, we of the living generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the modern period, shrink naturally at first from making what seems so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout our early education we have been accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the chronology of the earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason...
Page 281 - When speculations on the long series of events which occurred in the glacial and post-glacial periods are indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the number of : centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in prehistoric times by investing the causes which have modified the animate...
Page 113 - The combining atoms, hitherto spoken of, are not therefore the molecules of which the movement is sensibly affected by heat, with gaseous expansion as the result. The gaseous molecule must itself be viewed as composed of a group or system of the preceding inferior atoms, following, as a unit, laws similar to those which regulate its constituent atoms. We have, indeed, carried one step backward, and applied to the lower order of atoms, ideas suggested by the gaseous molecule...
Page 205 - As in the case of the solar spectrum, the heat was found to augment from the violet to the red, while in the dark space beyond the red it rose to a maximum. The position of the maximum was about as distant from the extreme red in the one direction, as the green of the spectrum in the opposite one. The augmentation of temperature beyond the red in the spectrum of the electric light is sudden and enormous. Representing the thermal intensities by lines of proportional lengths, and erecting these lines...
Page 67 - ... green and healthy, even to the moment of their being submerged. On this moving and shifting sea M. Bremontier sowed seeds of the common broom, mixed with those of the pinaster; commencing on the side next the sea, or on that from which the wind generally prevailed, and sowing in narrow zones, in a direction at right angles to that of the wind. The first zone was protected by a line of hurdles, and after it was established it protected the second, as the second did the third, and so on. To prevent...
Page x - Up to this very day, there come to me persons of good education, men and women, quite fit for all that you expect from education : they come to me, and they talk to me about things that belong to natural science ; about mesmerism, table-turning, flying through the air ; about the laws of gravity : they come to me to ask me questions ; and they insist against me, who think I know a little of these laws, that I am wrong and they are right, in a manner which shows how little the ordinary course of education...
Page 272 - FRS, who finds that the quantity of solid matter is so great as to exceed by more than four times the proportion of that yielded by the Bath waters. Its composition is also in many respects very different ; for it contains but little sulphate of lime, and is almost free from the salts of magnesium. It is rich in the chlorides of calcium and sodium, and it contains one of the new metals — caesium, never before detected in any mineral spring in England : but its peculiar characteristic is the extraordinary...
Page 206 - ... element can act upon the radiant heat. When permitted to do so, it was found that a layer of dissolved iodine, sufficiently opaque to cut off the light of the midday sun, was almost absolutely transparent to all invisible calorific rays.
Page 112 - ... spectre of the key will be visible. Let this paper be put aside for many months where nothing can disturb it, and then in darkness be laid on a plate of hot metal — the spectre of the key will again appear. In the case of bodies more highly phosphorescent than paper, the spectres of many different objects which may have been laid on it in succession will, on warming, emerge in their proper order.
Page 232 - I do not hesitate to say that if a community of youths of both sexes, whose progenitors were finely formed and powerful, were to be trained to the early practice of smoking, and if marriage were to be confined to the smokers, an apparently new and a physically inferior race of men and women would be bred up.

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