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More "Elliptical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a yellowish-grey tinge, more or less rufous on the head, neck, shoulder and sides of body; a hairy brown muzzle, with pale under-lip; long whiskers, some white, the posterior ones dark; under-parts white; fur soft and fine. The upper lip is lobed as in the hare; ears elliptical, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... (a species of Empis) has been described which excites the female by manipulating a large balloon. "This is of elliptical shape, about seven millimeters long (nearly twice as long as the fly), hollow, and composed entirely of a single layer of minute bubbles, nearly uniform in size, arranged in regular circles concentric with the axis of the structure. The beautiful, glistening whiteness of the object when the sun ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... independent synchronous discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel, Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... the positions and movements of the planets during the period covered by the outward voyage of the Areonal is sufficiently explained by the notes printed thereon. It may, however, be pointed out that though the orbits of the planets are all elliptical, especially those of Mercury and Mars, they are so nearly true circles that, when reduced to the scale of these diagrams, they practically become circles. The exaggerated ellipses so often found in astronomical books are ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... holes, scorpions, and large square gratings over narrow loopholes. There was no window on it, but here and there slits, old embrasures of pierriers and archegayes. At the foot of this high wall was seen, like the hole at the bottom of a rat-trap, a little wicket gate, very elliptical in ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... is constructed a large stone basin, open at the bottom, through which springs bubble. From this reservoir the new aqueduct leads. It is an elliptical tunnel of brick, placed under ground, and marked by turrets of brick and stone placed along ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... any discoveries more truly original, or which required for their establishment a more powerful and vigorous mind. The speculations of his predecessors afforded him no assistance. From the cumbrous machinery adopted by Copernicus, Kepler passed, at one step, to an elliptical orbit, with the sun in one of its foci, and from that moment astronomy became a demonstrative science. The splendid discoveries of Newton sprung immediately from those of Kepler, and completed the great ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... of the fact that at the long ranges the angle of fall of the bullets is much greater than at short ranges, it follows that at short ranges the elliptical figure (beaten zone) is much more elongated than at long ranges. In other words, the longer the range, the shorter is the depth of the beaten zone. This is ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... and spreading branches. The leaves of this tree are of a remarkable deep green, are notched about the edges, and are generally from a foot to eighteen inches in length. The fruit itself grows indifferently on all parts of the branches; it is in shape rather elliptical than round, is covered with a rough rind, and is usually seven or eight inches long; each of them grows singly and not in clusters. This fruit is fittest to be used when it is full grown, but is still green; in which state its taste has some distant ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Silkolene coated with varnish is used for the coverings. Ribs (spruce) are curved one inch to the foot, the deepest part of the curve (4 inches) being one foot back from the front edge of the horizontal beam. Struts (also of spruce, as is all the framework) are elliptical in shape. The main beams are in three sections, nearly half round in form, and joined ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... a connecting tube, is an advantage in the same direction, and avoids almost entirely the racking strains due to irregular furnace action. The weight of water carried is less, and that of the boiler may also be made less; while the elliptical form of the two ends gives greater ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... With respect to the extent of the order in the Islands of New Zealand, some recent specimens gathered upon the northern, prove one of its pines to be a Podocarpus; and another, producing a cone, and solitary, alternate scattered elliptical leaves, shows its relation to Agathis of Salisbury, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... AND IRREGULAR CURVES.—This is the hardest thing to do with drawing tools. A properly constructed elliptical figure is difficult, principally, because two different sized curves are required, and the pen runs from one curve into the other. If the two curves meet at the wrong place, you may be sure you will have a ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... orbit of Mars and of the very great difference between his apparent diameters at different times which first led Copernicus to conceive the heliocentric idea. Of Reinhold it is recorded that he considered the orbit of Mercury elliptical, and that he advocated a theory of the moon, according to which her epicycle revolved on an elliptical orbit, thus in a measure anticipating one of the great discoveries of Kepler to which we shall refer presently. The Landgrave of Hesse was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... equally eloquent; some are copious and fluent as it were in their utterance, while others are confined to a few important sounds: no bird, like the fish kind, is quite mute, though some are rather silent. The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood. (* See Spectator, Vol. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... order in any branch of natural phenomena is but the prelude to the formulation of a set of laws, the simpler as the order is more universal, which describe, and as we say, explain it. Thus the perception of the even, elliptical courses of the heavenly bodies led to the statement of the law of gravitation and the ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... the manner requisite to make the Object appear Green, Blew, &c. the Figures of these Particles have a great, but not the only stroak. 'Tis true indeed that the protuberant Particles may be of very great variety of Figures, Sphaerical, Elliptical, Conical, Cylindrical, Polyedrical, and some very irregular, and that according to the Nature of these, and the situation of the Lucid body, the Light must be variously affected, after one manner from Surfaces (I now speak of Physical Surfaces) consisting of Sphaerical, and in another ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... altogether radical on my part, then, for me to assert that many of the stylistic peculiarities found in these Sonnets are attributable to the locale of their inspiration the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. One can plainly hear the jar and jounce of the elliptical wheels, the cry, "Step lively!" the six o'clock stampede, the lament of the strap-hanging multitude in ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... used loosely; he was too much preoccupied to be careful about trifles; he probably had John in his mind, and did not bother himself about Alfonso; King Ferdinand, to whom he was writing, did not need to have such points minutely specified, and could understand an elliptical statement; and the fact stated by Columbus was simply that during a residence of fourteen years in Portugal he had not been able to enlist even that enterprising government in behalf ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... bodies which the sun maintains in their elliptical orbit by the great law of gravitation, some possess satellites of their own. Uranus has eight, Saturn eight, Jupiter four, Neptune three perhaps, and the Earth one; this latter, one of the least important of the solar world, is called the Moon, and it is that one that the enterprising genius ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... travel in long elliptical or parabolic orbits round the sun at great velocities. They seem to consist partly of glowing vapours, especially hydrogen, and partly of meteoric stones. 'Shooting stars,' that is to say, stones which fall to the earth, are known to swarm in their wake, and are believed to be ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... flues, filled with straw, are erected, either one at the center or, if the heap is elliptical, one near each end, and the stone and coal are built up around them; thus, when they are burned out, a chimney or two is secured, which may be damped by pieces of stone or sod. Upon this first layer of stone is spread a layer of coal, and upon that a thicker layer of stone (12 inches), ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... Mercury, which of course is within that of the Earth, is not circular, but elliptical, and very eccentric, so elongated that at certain times of the year this planet is extremely remote from the solar focus, and receives only half as much heat and light as at the opposite period; and, in consequence, his distance from the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... old ever jousted on a lovelier field than the green little valley toward which the Hon. Sam waved one big hand. It was level, shorn of weeds, elliptical in shape, and bound in by trees that ran in a semicircle around the bank of the river, shut in the southern border, and ran back to the northern extremity in a primeval little forest that wood-thrushes, even then, were ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... passages we have to cross stretches of flat prose twisted into rhyme; Pope seems to have intentionally pitched his style at a prosaic level as fitter for didactic purposes; but besides this we here and there come upon phrases which are not only elliptical and slovenly, but defy all grammatical construction. This was a blemish to which Pope was always strangely liable. It was perhaps due in part to over-correction, when the context was forgotten and the subject had lost its freshness. Critics, again, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... on the map) 40 miles long from east to west, 28 miles wide, and about 886 square miles in area. The next isoseismal (2) includes the places in which some buildings were ruined, but not as a rule completely, and in which there was no loss of life. Its bounding line is also elliptical, the longer axis being about 71 miles long and running nearly east and west. Towards the south this zone is interrupted by the sea. It will be noticed that these isoseismals are not concentric, the second extending much farther to the west and south-west than in the opposite direction. ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... as thus presented was one of the most difficult we can perceive of, but the difficulty was only an incentive to attacking it with all the greater energy. So long as the motion was supposed purely elliptical, so long as the action of the planets was neglected, the problem was a simple one, requiring for its solution only the analytic geometry of the ellipse. The real difficulties commenced when the mutual action of the planets was ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... the Battle of Paardeberg has been somewhat inaccurately given. Paardeberg is a prominent hill on the right bank of the Modder, four miles W.S.W. of the battle centre, Cronje's laager at Vendutie Drift, and lies on the extreme edge of the elliptical arena on which the battle was fought. It seems to have been chosen as the official word because the hill was the only distinctive physical feature shown on the banks of the river in the incomplete surveys of the time, and because the alternative would have been Stinkfontein, a farm ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... to the west, and back again to the north. If the movement had been quite regular, the apex would have described a circle, or rather, as the stem is always growing upwards, a circular spiral. But it generally describes irregular elliptical or oval figures; for the apex, after pointing in any one direction, commonly moves back to the opposite side, not, however, returning along the same line. Afterwards other irregular ellipses or ovals are successively described, with their longer [page 2] axes directed to different points ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... evidently impossible for us to attempt to climb it that evening, and we looked about the desolate recesses for a sheltered camping-spot. A high granite wall surrounded us upon three sides, recurring to the southward in long elliptical curves; no part of the summit being less than 2,000 feet above us, the higher crags not infrequently reaching 3,000 feet. A single field of snow swept around the base of the rock, and covered the whole amphitheatre, except where ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... an elliptical carriage spring composed of a single piece, F, or two separate pieces, E E, of steel, united by means of blocks and bolts, substantially as herein ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... shade of brown. Coloured sporidia of this kind are common in Xylaria and Hypoxylon, as well as in certain species of the section Superficiales. Coloured sporidia are often large and beautiful: they are mostly of an elongated, elliptical form, or fusiform. As noteworthy may be mentioned the sporidia of Melanconis lanciformis, those of Valsa profusa, and some species of Massaria, the latter being at first invested with a hyaline coat. Some coloured sporidia ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Fitch wandered to the banks of the Ohio, where opium helped him end his life in an obscure Kentucky inn, while his steamboat rotted on the shores of the Delaware. Then John Stevens of Hoboken began a series of experiments in 1791, trying elliptical paddles, smoke-jack wheels, and other ingenious contrivances, which soon found the oblivion of Fitch's inventions. Subsequently Rumsey, another ingenious American, sought with no better success to drive a boat by expelling water from the stern. When it was announced ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... form. The grave king of Sparta, the furious demagogue of Athens, the general encouraging his army, the captive supplicating for his life, all are represented as speakers in one unvaried style,—a style moreover wholly unfit for oratorical purposes. His mode of reasoning is singularly elliptical,—in reality most consecutive,—yet in appearance often incoherent. His meaning, in itself sufficiently perplexing, is compressed into the fewest possible words. His great fondness for antithetical expression has not a little conduced to this effect. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wild growths. From the summit of the southern front we sighted the Cima de Ginamar, popularly called El Pozo (the Well). It is a volcanic blowing-hole of oval shape, about fifty feet in long diameter, and the elliptical mouth discharged to the north the lava-bed before seen. Apparently it is connected with the Bandana Peak, further west. Here the aborigines martyred sundry friars before the Conquistadores 'divided land and water' amongst them. The guide declared that the hole ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... old Eddy to preach to us in rhetoric? 'Before you attempt composition, be sure that you have a rounded thought.' This isn't round, it's elliptical. Big Olaf is a friend useful. He's a shrewd fellow, who's been looking stupid for some time. The 'bunch' hasn't been treating him square. You can guess what that means. Anyway, he is sore as well as shrewd, and now I fancy he belongs ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... visible in the sky. Two of them, Ollier's Comet and Halley's, are known to return into sight after intervals of seventy-four and seventy-six years, during which they have visited portions of space a few hundred millions of miles further than the orbit of Neptune. Six comets travel in elliptical orbits that are never so far from the sun as the planet Neptune, and return into visibility in short periods that never exceed seven or eight years. These interior comets of short period seem to be regular members of our world-system in the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... succeeding ellipse. The next day I watched a plant similarly secured until the tendril (which was highly sensitive) made an ellipse in a line exactly to and from the light; the movement was so great that the tendril at the two ends of its elliptical course bent itself a little beneath the horizon, thus travelling more than 180 degrees; but the curvature was fully as great towards the light as towards the dark side of the room. I believe Dutrochet was misled by not having secured the internodes, and ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation of either the beads or the parallelograms. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... light we can get to see this object well, and so, although the three-inch will show it, we shall use the five-inch. Beginning with a power of one hundred diameters, which exhibits it as a minute elliptical ring, rather misty, very soft and delicate, and yet distinct, we increase the magnification first to two hundred and finally to three hundred, in order to distinguish a little better some of the details of its shape. Upon the whole, however, we find ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... kuklos, a circle; eidos, form). Applied to those scales of fishes which have a regularly circular or elliptical outline ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... observe and imitate the impersonal and elliptical construction of Malay sentences. Notice how much more is left to the imagination than in English, and get rid of the notion that it is necessary to express invariably by nouns or pronouns the agents or objects of the actions spoken of. Ideas are conveyed ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... unrest in the balcony because Faust was singing through laryngitis and a cloud of fog in his throat. A critic who wrote in terms of elliptical rhythms and tonal arabesques tiptoed out for a smoke. One of those sympathetic fits of coughing swept the house. But Lilly sat hunched in her habitual beatific attitude against the chair back, the old opera flowing back to her in association that ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... with a sharp grating sound as of iron cutting into ice, came suddenly to a stop, and the persons gathering round had an opportunity to examine it. It was the work of a village genius, and consisted of some boards, cut in an elliptical form (as, perhaps, the most convenient), supported by two pieces of iron, parallel to each other, to which the boards were fastened, and running the whole length from bow to stern. In the forward part was rigged a mast, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... that of Righistan, it is in my opinion rather more picturesque. There are strangely grouped ruins, the remains of arcades, half-unroofed cupolas, columns without capitals, the shafts of which have retained all the brightness of their enamelling; then a long row of elliptical porticoes closing in one side of the vast quadrilateral. The effect is really grand, for these old monuments of the splendor of Samarkand stand out from a background of sky and verdure that you would seek in vain, even at the Grand Opera, if our actor does not ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... where it was found, on a high tomb with panelled sides, each having seven recesses separated by tiny buttresses. The canopy, ogee-shaped above, and with a plain elliptical arch below, was much mutilated, but seems to have been crocketed and terminated by a finial. It owes its present form to Mr. Cottingham, who restored ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... also used as a special exhibit, and was featured by an Indian maiden standing on a pedestal 23 feet high and holding in her outstretched hand a bundle of tobacco. A miniature log cabin advertised a special brand of tobacco. The horticultural exhibit consisted of an open, three-towered elliptical pavilion and a horn of plenty, apparently pouring apples on a pyramid of natural fruit below. This was made primarily an apple exhibit, more than 800 barrels being used for the purpose. Peaches, melons, pears, cranberries, and other fruits were ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... elliptical. Thus, it was common to add at the end of the letter something like, "I leave it to you to decide." This might be put, "As the king, my lord, sees fit, let him do." But a scribe would often merely say, "As the king sees fit." Such elliptical sentences are ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... May, walking in the woods, I came upon the nest of a whip-poor-will, or rather its eggs, for it builds no nest,—two elliptical whitish spotted eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot was within a yard of the mother bird before she flew. I wondered what a sharp eye would detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the bird, so I came ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... which must be considered the most important is that of the "line." A line is described in chalk or paint upon a large space of floor. Instead of one line, there may also be two concentric lines, elliptical in form. The children are taught to walk upon these lines like tight-rope walkers, placing their feet one in front of the other. To keep their balance they make efforts exactly similar to those of real tight-rope walkers, except that they have no danger with which to reckon, ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... be mostly circular in plan, ranging from about thirty to fifty feet in diameter, with walls averaging three feet in thickness, one or more of these being surrounded by an outer wall, approximately elliptical in plan, of some five feet in thickness. There were five of these structures still standing in a sufficient state of preservation to render them recognisable at a distance as buildings, and a great many more—the precise number ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... The elliptical roof, under which the boat at first passed, suddenly rose; but the darkness was too deep, and the light of the lantern too slight, for either the extent, length, height, or depth of the cave to be ascertained. Solemn silence reigned in this basaltic cavern. Not a sound could ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... approaches the semi-elliptical form; but the larger axis of the ellipsis, which would be the cord of the arch, is many times longer than the transverse. Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... end of the web for the first turn. Sew into an elliptical form three and one-half inches long for the sole. Sew two more rows without widening for the sides of the foot; then sew two rows across the front for the toe; the third row bring all around the top to ...
— Spool Knitting • Mary A. McCormack
... wilderness of ranges, with its waters starting for either ocean. From the first ridge we crossed after leaving Canyon we had a singular view of range beyond range cleft by deep canyons, and abounding in elliptical valleys, richly grassed. The slopes of all the hills, as far as one could see, were waving with fine grass ready for the scythe, but the food of wild animals only. All these ridges are heavily timbered ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Haddon refers (Geographical Journal, Vol. XVI., p. 422) to conical ground houses with elliptical and circular bases found in villages on the top of steep hills behind the Mekeo district and on the southern spur of Mt. Davidson, and says that in some places, as on the Aduala affluent of the ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... Shortly afterwards, however, the computation of a terrestrial degree given by Abbe Picard, and the determination of the Meridional arc, arrived at by the Cassinis, father and son, led scientific men to an entirety different result, and induced them to consider the earth an elliptical figure, elongated towards the polar regions. Passionate discussions arose from this decision, and in them originated immense undertakings, from which astronomical and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Wallenstein, that soldier of fortune, [Footnote: See below, pp. 223, 226.] he nevertheless established several of the fundamental laws of modern astronomy, such as those governing the form and magnitude of the planetary orbits. It was Kepler who made clear that the planets revolve about the sun in elliptical rather than ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... heard conversing in a broad Northumbrian accent, with a burr in most of their words. They were broad-shouldered men, capable of doing any amount of hard work. We came in sight of a fine stone bridge with nine elliptical arches, which connects Newcastle with Gateshead, on the opposite bank. Above it is another magnificent bridge; it is double, the lower roadway, ninety feet above the river, being used for carriages and foot ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... fight?" he said inquiringly, and as he asked his question he fitted his long, elliptical shield well upon his left arm and arranged ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... as it is rendered, without authority by the philosopher Partington) of an ellipse, where it slowly grinds on for ever about its own axis, while the planets, turning about their axes, revolve in elliptical orbits of various dimensions and different ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... of the valley would suggest the existence of the grand elliptical crater of some extinct volcano. But instead of the black sulphuric scoria, that you might expect to see strewed over its base, you behold a verdant landscape of smiling loveliness, park-like plains interposed with groves and copses, here and there a mound of ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... those of the planets. In the case of the latter the orbit is that of an ellipse, while in the case of the comet the orbit may be either that of a parabola or a hyperbola, which may be looked upon as elongated ellipses open at one end. There are, however, some comets whose orbits are perfectly elliptical, and whose return may be calculated with a fair ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... touch with it, just as potently as ever it did. And simply as a wild story, one fancies that it will appeal quite as effectually, no matter how many editions may be its future, to a public perhaps unsympathetic toward its elliptical satire, its caustic wit, its fantastic course of narrative, and its incongruous wavering between the flippant, the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... English Gothic she had been rereading an analysis of the structural features of the principal English cathedrals; and she was murmuring over to herself the phrase: "The longitudinal arches of Lincoln have an approximately elliptical form," when there came a knock on the door, and Maria's voice announced: "There's a lady ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... hundred yards or more to the bushy margin of a creek beyond. A smaller stream or a branch of this same appears at one time to have run close to the hill, leaving faint traces of its contour on the meadow, and one small elliptical swale or soft, boggy spot, a few yards across, near the lower corner of Mr. Newell's barn. It was while digging a shallow pit in this swale that the relic was found. It is a gigantic human figure lying on its back, with ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... been was an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the egg-head, with its converging ends curving around the ...
— Acid Bath • Vaseleos Garson
... A construction of bricks or stones so placed as by mutual pressure to support each other and a superincumbent weight. They may be semi-circular, segmental, elliptical, stilted, horse-shoe, pointed, trefoiled, ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... was elliptical, nine feet deep, and about twenty-four feet long. Wood was piled in it, and rocks from the dismantled Kaumakapili church. The fire burned until the stones became red and then white, and they, too, were turned with long poles to make the heat even. I inspected the heating process several times. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Balances, and Escapements: and I find applications of Babbage's symbolism to an escapement which I proposed. I have various investigations about the Earth, supposed to project at middle latitudes above the elliptical form. In November an account of the Dolcoath failure (by Whewell) was ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... each of the several intervals a severed ring. Most of these rings broke up, their fragments conglomerated and forming a sphere; one in particular separating into a multitude of minuter spheres, others assuming a highly elliptical form, condensing here and thinning out there; while the central mass grew brighter and denser as it contracted; till there lay before me a perfect miniature of the solar system, with planets, satellites, asteroids, and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... freshness and spontaneity of Mr. MILNE'S humour. The only question was whether an author so fastidiously unstagey, who never underlines his intentions, would be able to accommodate himself to the conditions of a medium that discourages the elliptical method. Well, he did it, and very artfully. He began by making concessions to the habits of his new audience. He wouldn't try them too high at first. In the person of Robert Crawshaw, M.P. (Mr. NIGEL PLAYFAIR), he introduced them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... bright daylight ahead, and in a few more strides the last trees were passed, and they came out suddenly in an amphitheatre of bare rocks, almost elliptical, but coming together at the head, and bending away like ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... rather broad, pubescent. Proboscis small, withdrawn; eyes pubescent; antennae very short, arista very long; scutellum large, conical, very prominent, extending beyond the base of the abdomen; abdomen nearly elliptical, not longer than the thorax; legs rather broad, pubescent, without bristles; wings rather long and broad; veins of equal size, costal vein ending at rather before half the length of the wing, radial ending at somewhat in front of the tip of the wing, cubital ending at hardly in front of the tip, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... as a school. Of the abbey church an insignificant portion alone remains, and of it the most interesting part is the spire. In the Chapelle des Bourbons (15th cent.) are enormous corbels under the empty niches. About 300 yards distant is the Maison Abbatiale, 15th cent., with flattened elliptical-headed windows and ogee arches over the doors. At the entrance is a collection of columns, capitals, etc., from the first church founded in the 10th cent. Upstairs there is a small museum; entrance, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... he struck his horse with a passion that astonished the animal and the next moment shamed himself. He stooped instantly and apologized to the quivering creature; and was as instantly forgiven. Then he began to talk to himself in those elliptical, unfinished sentences, which the inner man understands, and so thoroughly finishes—" If I were not morally sure—It is as plain as can be—How in the name of wonder?—I'll say so much for myself—I am ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... bands of blue (top), white, red (double width), white, and blue, with the coat of arms in a white elliptical disk on the hoist side of the red band; above the coat of arms a light blue ribbon contains the words, AMERICA CENTRAL, and just below it near the top of the coat of arms is a white ribbon with ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... genius, the German Kepler, worked out the mathematical laws which govern the movements of the planets. He made it clear that the planets revolve around sun in elliptical instead of circular orbits. Kepler's investigations afterwards led to the discovery of the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... passages in this document are very involved and elliptical, and in some places the sense is not at all clear. The translation is necessarily somewhat free, at times, in wording; but it is believed that the author's meaning is, as a rule, accurately rendered.—Rev. T. C. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... permitted, I might enter still further into detail, and show that the polarization between the plane and the circular is elliptical, and even the positions of the longer and shorter axes and the direction of motion in each case. But sufficient has, perhaps, been said ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... power of illumination which strike most vertically;) and note that there is, therefore, to every solid curvature of surface, a necessarily proportioned gradation of light, the gradation on a parabolic solid being different from the gradation on an elliptical or spherical one. Now, when your purpose is to represent and learn the anatomy, or otherwise characteristic forms, of any object, it is best to place it in this kind of direct light, and to draw it as it is seen when we look at it in a direction at right angles to that of ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... is a full constructed hill, surrounded by an innumerable number of others, differing in shape and dimensions, arched in various forms, circular, and elliptical, which communicate by passages, occupied by guards and attendants, and surrounded by nurseries and magazines. But when the community is in an infant state, these are contiguous to the royal residence; and in proportion as the size of the queen increases, her chamber is ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... in a singular way. They have their apexes or points on the outer edge of the bone; and these apexes or points are so contrived, that, lying upon, and seemingly losing themselves, on the processes of the anterior maxillary, they complete, superiorly and posteriorly, that elliptical bony opening into the nose which was commenced by the maxillary anteriorly and inferiorly. The nasal cavity of the dog, therefore, and of all carnivorous animals, terminates by a somewhat circular opening, more or less in the form of an ellipse. This bony aperture varies in size in different ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... properly furnished, will supply a more convenient form of free elevator. One side will be used by those who are going up and the other by those who wish to come down. The "well" of the staircase for such a lift is made in elliptical form, like the shadow projection of a circle. Steps can be provided so that, when not in motion, the lift will be a staircase not differing much from ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... outer wall of this cluster to the unaided eye appears to be elliptical, but it will be seen from the plan that the ellipse is somewhat pointed on the side farthest from the cliff. As in other cases of ancient pueblos with curved outlines, the outer wall seems to have been built first, and the inner ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... fame, and he could not but choose life for him. Yet, as the multitudinous sounds about him yielded for a moment to that brother's shout, and he knew that the moment had come, which would soon settle all, he found himself staring at the elliptical edge of the hangar, with an anticipation which held in it as much terror as joy, for the end of a great hope or the beginning of a great triumph was compressed into this trembling ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... I struck it stood an extraordinary hill or ridge, consisting of a huge red turtle back having a number of enormous red stones almost egg-shaped, traversing, or rather standing in a row upon, its whole length like a line of elliptical Tors. I could compare it to nothing else than an enormous oolitic monster of the turtle kind carrying its eggs upon its back. A few cypress pine-trees grew in the interstices of the rocks, giving it a most elegant appearance. Hoping to find ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... riches of the people," said Mr. de Saint Cricq, a minister who has laid not a few shackles upon our commerce. This was no elliptical expression, meaning that the "results of labor constitute the riches of the people." No,—this statesman intended to say, that it is the intensity of labor, which measures riches; and the proof of this is, ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... were of our English make, but though very good of the kind, yet far short of what might be expected, could we once find a way of making Glasses Elliptical, or of some more true shape; for though both Microscopes, and Telescopes, as they now are, will magnifie an Object about a thousand thousand times bigger then it appears to the naked eye; yet the Apertures of the Object-glasses ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... the posterior part of the cranial cavity, immediately above the medulla oblongata; it is globular or elliptical in shape, the transverse diameter being greatest. The body of the cerebellum is composed of gray matter externally and of white matter in the center. The cerebellum has the function of co-ordinating movements; ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... emanation which should produce the irregular refraction, I wished to try what Elliptical waves, or rather spheroidal waves, would do; and these I supposed would spread indifferently both in the ethereal matter diffused throughout the crystal and in the particles of which it is composed, according to the last mode in which I have explained transparency. It seemed ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... was unanimously adopted. That this valley must be our future place of abode was at once decided by all of us. A more careful examination showed its superficies to be over sixty-two square miles. Allowing thirteen miles for the elliptical lake stretching out under the Kenia cliffs, and fifteen miles for the woods which clothed the heights around the valley, there remained above thirty miles of open park-land surrounding the lake, except where the Kenia cliffs touched the water, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... of three stories, not placed one above the other, but descending in terraces from the top of the hill, deserves a visit or two. You will there see a pretty court surrounded with columns and small rooms, one of which—of an elliptical shape and opening on a garden, and lighted by the evening twilight, but shielded from the sun by windows and by curtains, the glass panes and rings of which have been found—is the pleasantest nook cleared out among these ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... President April 30, 1789." Some critics insist upon the insertion of on before a date, as "on April 30," but general usage justifies its omission. With equal force they might urge the use of in before 1789. The entire expression of day, month, and year is elliptical. ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... the preceding, more elliptical in outline, with a thinner shell and with large granules throughout the endoplasm. The nucleus is spherical and subcentral in position and possesses a distinct central granule. This may be a small variety ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... interruptions in the surface of the mirror indicate a diminution in the quantity of the milk, with the exception, however, of small oval or elliptical plates which are found in the mirror, on the back part of the udders of the best cows, as represented in the cut already given, marked A. These ovals have a peculiar tint, which is occasioned by the downward direction of the hair which forms them. In the best cows these ovals exist with the ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... moving forwardly, or changing the position of its body horizontally, in performing the undulatory motion of the wing, it causes the body to rock, so that at the point where the wing joins the body, an elliptical motion ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... rotation would suffice to differentiate that part of the ether from the rest, and give to it a degree of individuality not possessed by the rest; and such an atom might be called a state of ether. In like manner, if other forms of motion, such as transverse waves, circular and elliptical spirals, or others, exist in the ether, then such movements give special character to the part thus active, and it would be proper to speak of such states of the ether, but even thus the word would not be used in the ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... covers the gills of the young plant and later is seen as a collar-like ring on the stem, soft, lax, deflexed, in old specimens it is often destroyed. The spores are white and broadly elliptical. ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... classes, or he may go lengthwise of the building and see what the various nations have to show in a given class. No better plan could be devised if they are all to be assembled under one roof. The same plan has been tried before, especially in the great elliptical building at Vienna. It is probable that the Philadelphia plan of isolated buildings may find imitators in the future, and then this plan of national and subjective arrangement may be carried out without the violent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... strata consist of a series of marls and limestones, many of them thinly laminated, and which appear to have slowly accumulated in a lake probably fed by springs holding carbonate of lime in solution. The elliptical area over which this fresh-water formation has been traced extends, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, for a distance of ten miles east and west from Berlingen, on the right bank of the river to Wangen, and to Oeningen, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... of the people," say some theorists. This was no elliptical expression, meaning that the "results of labor constitute the riches of the people." No; these theorists intended to say, that it is the intensity of labor which measures riches; and the proof of this ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... pronounced movements of natural objects. If the reader will turn to the poem, "A Roxbury Garden", he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up and down, elliptical curve of a ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... occurred between Peronne and Montdidier. To his father he wrote with more precision, but in his usual elliptical style. ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... of the water. It will be understood that the motion of the walking bar being circular, and that of the heads of the paddles being vertical and nearly rectilinear, the motion of the blades of the paddles must be elliptical, inclining to the horizontal; and that the position of the paddles is kept so nearly vertical that they will meet with less resistance in entering or leaving the water than those of a common paddle wheel, ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... theory was advanced by Dr. Croll, and is still entertained by many. The path of the earth round the sun is not circular, but elliptical, and there are times when the gravitational pull of the other planets increases the eccentricity of the orbit. It was assumed that there are periods of great length, separated from each other by still longer periods, when this eccentricity of the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... forms a large shrub or low tree with oblong, elliptical, sub-evergreen leaves. The flowers are white and borne in large corymbs, which are followed by scarlet berries ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... is formed by the fitting of the ovoid (egg-shaped) end of one bone into an elliptical cavity of a second bone. Examples of condyloid joints are found at the knuckles and where the wrist bones articulate with the radius and ulna. They move easily in two directions, like hinge joints, and ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... the star is becoming more and more elliptical," Arcot replied. "As the other sun pulls us, the star beneath us grows smaller with the distance; then, as we begin to fall back toward it, it grows larger again. Since this is taking place many ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... additional complication; until at last Kepler swept all these circles away, and substituted the conception of an exact ellipse. Even this is found not to represent with complete correctness the accurate observations of the present day, which disclose many slight deviations from an orbit exactly elliptical. Now Dr. Whewell has remarked that these successive general expressions, though apparently so conflicting, were all correct: they all answered the purpose of colligation; they all enabled the mind to represent to itself with ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of languages in Geneva, based on the diary of Razumov. It is a favourite device of Conrad's which might be described as, structurally progressing from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. His novel, Chance, is a specific instance of his intricate and elliptical method. Several personages of the story relate in almost fugal manner, the heroine appearing to us in flashes as if reflected by some revolving mirror. It is a difficult and elusive method, but it presents us with many facets of character ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the usual form. The retained que is therefore emphatic.—Voeux very frequent in poetry for prieres, for metrical reasons. The whole expression is elliptical: qui te rend [a moi ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... stables, farms, etc., is enormous. The tracks are level, with start and finish directly in front of the grand stand, and are either one mile or one-half mile in length. They are always of earth, and are usually elliptical in shape, though the "kite-shaped track" was for a time popular on account of its increased speed. In this there is one straight stretch of one-third mile, then a wide turn of one-third mile, and then a straight run of one-third mile back ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and elliptical to an unusual degree; often a curious suspension and withholding in a statement, a suggestive incompleteness, both ends of his thought, as it were, left in the air; sometimes the substantive, sometimes the nominative, is wanting, and all for a purpose. The poet ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... as ad impetum valida. See a like elliptical use of idem Sec. 23: eadem temperantia; Sec. 10: iisdem nemoribus. Also of ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... consistent idea of one body's moving upon another, and of its rest immediately upon the contact, or of its returning back in the same line in which it came; or of its annihilation; or circular or elliptical motion: and in short, of an infinite number of other changes, which we may suppose it to undergo. These suppositions are all consistent and natural; and the reason, Why we imagine the communication of motion ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... miles from the surface, a distance reduced to about 5 miles by the travellers' glasses. Away to their left appeared Helicon, a ring mountain about 1600 feet high; and still further to the left the eye could catch a glimpse of the cliffs enclosing a semi-elliptical portion of Mare Imbrium, called the Sinus Iridium, or Bay ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... celebration of his father's funeral games. It was composed of two theatres of wood, placed on pivots, so that they could be turned round, spectators and all, and placed face to face, thus forming a double theatre, or amphitheatre, which ending suggested its elliptical shape. Statilius Taurus, the friend of Augustus, B.C. 30, erected a more durable amphitheatre, partly of stone and partly of wood, in the Campus Martius. Others were afterwards built by Caligula and Nero. The amphitheatre of Nero was of wood, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... or more to the bushy margin of a creek beyond. A smaller stream or a branch of this same appears at one time to have run close to the hill, leaving faint traces of its contour on the meadow, and one small elliptical swale or soft, boggy spot, a few yards across, near the lower corner of Mr. Newell's barn. It was while digging a shallow pit in this swale that the relic was found. It is a gigantic human figure lying on its back, with its head to the east and feet to the west. The head is in the position commonly ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... is a relation between the magnitudes of the orbits of the five principal planets and the five regular solids of geometry. At first he inclined to believe that the orbit of Mars is oval, nor was it until after a wearisome study that he detected the grand truth, its elliptical form. An idea of the incorruptibility of the celestial objects had led to the adoption of the Aristotelian doctrine of the perfection of circular motions, and to the belief that there were none but circular motions in the heavens. He bitterly complains of this as having ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... and earth could not be seen because of the sun. There was nothing to do now but ride out the rest of the trip as comfortably as possible until it was time to throw the asteroid into an ever-tightening series of elliptical orbits around earth, known as braking ellipses. The method would use earth's gravity to slow them down to the proper speed. A single atomic bomb and a half dozen tubes ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... I claim an elliptical carriage spring composed of a single piece, F, or two separate pieces, E E, of steel, united by means of blocks and bolts, substantially as herein shown ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... PERCEPTION.—When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience. When we see an object, say a penny, we seem to be aware of its "real" shape we have the impression of something circular, not of something elliptical. In learning to draw, it is necessary to acquire the art of representing things according to the sensation, not according to the perception. And the visual appearance is filled out with feeling of what the object would be like to touch, and so on. This filling out and supplying ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... used old Eddy to preach to us in rhetoric? 'Before you attempt composition, be sure that you have a rounded thought.' This isn't round, it's elliptical. Big Olaf is a friend useful. He's a shrewd fellow, who's been looking stupid for some time. The 'bunch' hasn't been treating him square. You can guess what that means. Anyway, he is sore as well as shrewd, and now I fancy he belongs ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... presented was one of the most difficult we can perceive of, but the difficulty was only an incentive to attacking it with all the greater energy. So long as the motion was supposed purely elliptical, so long as the action of the planets was neglected, the problem was a simple one, requiring for its solution only the analytic geometry of the ellipse. The real difficulties commenced when the mutual action of the planets was taken into account. It is, ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface rendered definite by increase and decline of light—(for every curve of surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical one)—it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is the essential business of a painter to get good color, whether he imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving, where ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the rear and sometimes both at the rear and front. These portions thus cease to vibrate. Only the small free parts vibrate and these only at the edges. As the voice progresses up the scale the stop action ceases, the elliptical opening and the cup become smaller, and the entire vocal tract is, comparatively speaking, contracted. This register practically belongs only to sopranos and tenors. For example, although some baritones are capable of adjusting their vocal tracts to this register, ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... 3/4in. long and hardly 1/4in. in diameter. The stems are stout, round, hollow, and glaucous; they are furnished with leaves of various shapes at the nodes, as lance-shaped, long oval, heart-shaped and plain, elliptical and pointed, wavy and notched, and arrow-shaped, lobed, and toothed. The root leaves are mostly ovate, lanceolate, and entire. The whole plant is smooth and glaucous. From the description given, ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... them new life. Singing on, they halted at opposite ends of the beat, patted thighs, called figures, leaped high, crossed shins, cracked heels, cut double-shuffles, balanced, swung round the bottle, lifted it, drank, replaced it, and resumed their elliptical ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... unsatisfactory, and Fitch wandered to the banks of the Ohio, where opium helped him end his life in an obscure Kentucky inn, while his steamboat rotted on the shores of the Delaware. Then John Stevens of Hoboken began a series of experiments in 1791, trying elliptical paddles, smoke-jack wheels, and other ingenious contrivances, which soon found the oblivion of Fitch's inventions. Subsequently Rumsey, another ingenious American, sought with no better success to drive a boat by expelling ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... sound as of iron cutting into ice, came suddenly to a stop, and the persons gathering round had an opportunity to examine it. It was the work of a village genius, and consisted of some boards, cut in an elliptical form (as, perhaps, the most convenient), supported by two pieces of iron, parallel to each other, to which the boards were fastened, and running the whole length from bow to stern. In the forward part was rigged a mast, to which was attached a sail, like the mainsail of ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... planets. In the case of the latter the orbit is that of an ellipse, while in the case of the comet the orbit may be either that of a parabola or a hyperbola, which may be looked upon as elongated ellipses open at one end. There are, however, some comets whose orbits are perfectly elliptical, and whose return may be calculated with a fair ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... afforded by a connecting tube, is an advantage in the same direction, and avoids almost entirely the racking strains due to irregular furnace action. The weight of water carried is less, and that of the boiler may also be made less; while the elliptical form of the two ends ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... these plants would fare no better. Therefore we must do artificially what the rain does out-of-doors—wash away the accumulated dust, so that respiration may be unimpeded. Moreover, these little pores, which are shaped like the semi-elliptical springs of a carriage, are self-acting valves. A plant exhales a great deal of moisture in invisible vapor. A sunflower has been known to give off three pounds of water in twenty-four hours. This does no harm, unless the moisture ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... language we would state that the shape of the path of the earth around the sun was sometimes much more elongated and elliptical than at others. The line drawn through the longest part of an ellipse is called the major axis. Now the sun does not occupy the center of this line, but is placed to one side of it; or, in other words, occupies one focus of the ellipse. It ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... yellowish-green, dioecious, growing in axillary racemes. The male flowers have a corolla of six petals, the three smaller ones arranged alternately. In the female flower the stamens are represented by three glands situated at the base of the petals. Fruit, an elliptical drupe. ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... of it the most interesting part is the spire. In the Chapelle des Bourbons (15th cent.) are enormous corbels under the empty niches. About 300 yards distant is the Maison Abbatiale, 15th cent., with flattened elliptical-headed windows and ogee arches over the doors. At the entrance is a collection of columns, capitals, etc., from the first church founded in the 10th cent. Upstairs there is a small ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... is much larger and better built than we had expected. Many of the houses, especially on the outskirts, are elliptical in section, and have walls of small stones closely set in mud plaster. In the center of the town the houses are covered with painted plaster and are in the usual Latin-American style. Great numbers of quaint little coaches, with a single horse, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... rounded spur of a range behind, jutting out into the small plain before mentioned, and might be partly artificial. On the summit, which commanded a fine view of the country around, with the white cliffs and dark woods of the Amerrique range in front, was an Indian cairn, elliptical in shape, about thirty feet long and twenty broad. Several small trees had sprung up amongst the stones. Near the centre two holes had been dug down about four feet deep. Our guide told us that he and his brother had made them, to hide themselves in from the soldiers during the last ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... that circular or elliptical tubes might better answer the intended purpose; and in March, 1845, he gave instructions to two of his assistants to prepare drawings of such a structure, the tubes being made with a double thickness of plate at top and bottom. The results of the calculations made as to the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... projectiles, and to those formed by the flection of elastic surfaces, may be described on a large scale simply by causing a straight line or beam to revolve as on the axis of a cone, in contact with a parabolic or elliptical section. Thus a consecutive series of convex parabolic or elliptical curves may be substituted in ship-building for hollow fantastical lines. The benefits from which application are, increased velocity, capacity, strength, buoyancy, facility of steering, ease in hard seas, and exemption from ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... uttered these last words, throwing into them a threat more in the tone than the language, I became aware of a thin ray of light penetrating the seemingly solid wall just in front of me, and bending silently forward could dimly distinguish the elliptical head of Bungay as he applied one eye to a small opening he had industriously made between the logs. Grasping Mrs. Brennan firmly by the hand so that we should not become separated, I crept across the intervening blackness, and reached ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... than the preceding, more elliptical in outline, with a thinner shell and with large granules throughout the endoplasm. The nucleus is spherical and subcentral in position and possesses a distinct central granule. This may be a small variety ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... in character, with an elliptical pediment, was set up in 1725, the cost being partly met by private subscriptions. It must have struck most people as incongruous, for it was not liked, and in 1848 it ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... at last determined to demesmerise me. He began to make elliptical movements with his hands, the reverse of those which he had made at the commencement; I could now open my eyes without any kind of effort, my whole muscular system became perfectly obedient to my will; I was able to get up, and was perfectly awake; but I remained ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... monastery the chief entrance is a simple but effective arched doorway, now plastered and whitewashed. The double door frame projects pilaster-like, with a four-membered cornice above, from which rises an elliptical arch, with an elliptical cornice ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... his collection of Japanese art objects, invited him to his room. It was a small room on the top floor, cluttered up with a mass of antiques. He first placed before Frederick a number of Japanese sword-guards, tsubas, as the Japanese call them, small elliptical pieces of metal, about which a man's hand can easily reach. They are decorated with figures in slight relief, partly of the same metal as the ground, partly damascened, or inlaid with ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... billiard sharp whom any one catches His doom's extremely hard - He's made to dwell In a dungeon cell On a spot that's always barred; And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger-stalls, On a cloth untrue With a twisted cue, And elliptical billiard balls! ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... latter is our centre, and are drawn by the weight and mass of the great central sun to become its satellites, then we move in a nobler orbit and receive fuller and more blessed light and warmth. They who have themselves for their centres are like comets, with a wide elliptical course, which carries them away out into the cold abysses of darkness. They who have God for their sun are like planets. The old fable is true of these 'sons of the morning'—they make music as they roll and they flash back ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... of these sticks is seldom a true circle, but bear in mind, when giving your order, to ask for those which are rather flat than otherwise. I mean that the section should be elliptical, and not circular. The shape of the stick then more nearly approaches that of the blade of a sabre, and if you understand sword exercise and make all cuts and guards with the true edge, you are far more likely ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... eighteen to twenty inches deep, had been dug, to carry away the water which fell from the roof. Near the middle of this house, which measured about forty feet from side to side, a large fire had been kept burning for several hours, the ashes being removed from time to time. The ash bed was elliptical in form, measuring about thirteen feet from east to west, and five from north to south. Under the center of it was a hole, ten inches across and a foot deep, filled with clean white ashes in which was a little charcoal, packed very hard. At the western end, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... mostly circular in plan, ranging from about thirty to fifty feet in diameter, with walls averaging three feet in thickness, one or more of these being surrounded by an outer wall, approximately elliptical in plan, of some five feet in thickness. There were five of these structures still standing in a sufficient state of preservation to render them recognisable at a distance as buildings, and a great many more—the precise number I did not trouble to ascertain—of ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... which of course is within that of the Earth, is not circular, but elliptical, and very eccentric, so elongated that at certain times of the year this planet is extremely remote from the solar focus, and receives only half as much heat and light as at the opposite period; and, in consequence, his distance from ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Rouvel being still rung for a quarter of an hour at nine o'clock in the evening. It is the ancient Curfew, and the Tower de la Grosse Horloge is nothing more than the historic belfry of Rouen, although one might imagine by the way it stands over the street on an elliptical arch, that it had formed one of the gates ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... lunations, but also of "anomalistic" months. The "anomalistic month" is the time occupied by the moon in travelling from its perigee, that is its point of nearest approach to the earth, round to its perigee again. For the moon's orbit round the earth is not circular, but decidedly elliptical; the moon being 31,000 miles nearer to us at perigee than it is at apogee, its point of greatest distance. But it moves more rapidly when near perigee than when near apogee, so that its motion ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... chruadalaich, he fell by the hand of Oscar the bold hero, it would rather be said, thuit e le laimh Oscair an laoch cruadalach. The latter of these two modes of expression may perhaps be defended on the ground of its being elliptical; and the ellipsis may be supplied thus: mac Ioseiph [is e sin] an saor; laimh Oscair [neach is e] an laoch cruadalach. Still it must be allowed, in favour of the rule in question, that the observance of it serves to mark the relation of the ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... (Geographical Journal, Vol. XVI., p. 422) to conical ground houses with elliptical and circular bases found in villages on the top of steep hills behind the Mekeo district and on the southern spur of Mt. Davidson, and says that in some places, as on the Aduala affluent of the Angabunga (i.e., St. Joseph's) ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked, further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... ahead, and in a few more strides the last trees were passed, and they came out suddenly in an amphitheatre of bare rocks, almost elliptical, but coming together at the head, and bending away like a comma ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... purchase of culture. The great centres had begun to exercise dominion over her. She had ever been a lonely little soul, with no confidante of her own sex. Speech had never been fluent with her, and she was still elliptical, curt, and in a sense inexpressive. She had no chatter, and the ways of women were in many directions alien to her. Miss Franklin had been her teacher, and yet, while respecting her, she had never learned ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... a seat, and endeavoured to assume an air of indifference, though I was far from feeling indifferent, and my eyes as before kept eagerly scanning the fair masters. Now and then, the tournure of an ankle—I had seen Isolina's—or the elliptical sweep of a fine figure, inspired me with fresh hope: but as the mascaritas who owned them were near enough to have seen, and yet took no notice of me, I conjectured—in fact, hoped—that none of them was she. Indeed, a well-turned ankle ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... be mentioned that there is yet another kind of curved space: " elliptical space." It can be regarded as a curved space in which the two " counter-points " are identical (indistinguishable from each other). An elliptical universe can thus be considered to some extent as a ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... circular slowly-revolving disc, set at an angle and properly furnished, will supply a more convenient form of free elevator. One side will be used by those who are going up and the other by those who wish to come down. The "well" of the staircase for such a lift is made in elliptical form, like the shadow projection of a circle. Steps can be provided so that, when not in motion, the lift will be a staircase not differing ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... minor orbs; there are clustering stellar aggregations showing every variety of richness, of figure, and of distribution; there are all the various forms of star cloudlets, resolvable and irresolvable, circular, elliptical, and spiral; and lastly, there are irregular masses of luminous gas clinging in fantastic convolutions around stars and star systems. Nor is it unsafe to assert that other forms and varieties of structure will yet be discovered, or that hundreds ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... particular jerk, by means of which the sago within is shortly granulated very fine, and becomes what is technically termed "pearled." It is then taken out and put into iron vessels, called quallies, for the purpose of being dried. These quallies are small elliptical pans, and resemble in form the sugar coppers of the West Indies, and would each hold about five gallons of fluid. They are set a little inclining, and in a range, over a line of furnaces, each one ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... into points, black eyebrows, and long effeminate black lashes. You would have expected his dress in the city to be just a trifle flashy, not enough so to be loud, but sinning as to the trifles of good taste. The two men conversed in short elliptical sentences, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... terminated by Lewis XIV. One half, beginning from a narrow strip of ground, called the Jardin de l'Infante, is decorated externally with large pilasters of the Composite order, which run from top to bottom, and with pediments alternately triangular and elliptical, the tympanums of which, both on the side of the Louvre, and towards the river, are charged with emblems of the Arts and Sciences. The other part is ornamented with coupled pilasters, charged with vermiculated rustics, and ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... which required for their establishment a more powerful and vigorous mind. The speculations of his predecessors afforded him no assistance. From the cumbrous machinery adopted by Copernicus, Kepler passed, at one step, to an elliptical orbit, with the sun in one of its foci, and from that moment astronomy became a demonstrative science. The splendid discoveries of Newton sprung immediately from those of Kepler, and completed the great chain of truths which constitute ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... on their long, elliptical errands. The colored planets and moons, the nebular masses and the cold, dead worlds lying in the silent morgue of eternity tell the wonderful story of ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... tell where he had become familiar with the items communicated; again, a chance correspondent failed to note the locality. In putting on paper these popular beliefs and notions, the abbreviated, often rather elliptical, vernacular in which they are passed about from mouth to mouth has to ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... is not as regular as that of Righistan, it is in my opinion rather more picturesque. There are strangely grouped ruins, the remains of arcades, half-unroofed cupolas, columns without capitals, the shafts of which have retained all the brightness of their enamelling; then a long row of elliptical porticoes closing in one side of the vast quadrilateral. The effect is really grand, for these old monuments of the splendor of Samarkand stand out from a background of sky and verdure that you would ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... to reflect the bright face of the moon was easily moved now, and Tom stooped down and picked up one by one the three triangular pieces, and laid them upon the bench, to find then that a good-sized elliptical piece, something in shape like a fresh-water mussel-shell, yet remained upon the stones. This he raised, and found that it fitted in at ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... the precincts of Richmond Hill, then he struck his horse with a passion that astonished the animal and the next moment shamed himself. He stooped instantly and apologized to the quivering creature; and was as instantly forgiven. Then he began to talk to himself in those elliptical, unfinished sentences, which the inner man understands, and so thoroughly finishes—" If I were not morally sure—It is as plain as can be—How in the name of wonder?—I'll say so much for myself—I am sorry that I went there—A couple of uninteresting women—This ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... humble appreciation of her bounty and her bravery. "Be patient with me," he pleaded. "Enid will recoup you for all you have suffered. It will win back all your funds. I have made it as near pure poetry as our harsh, definite life and our elliptical speech will permit." And straightway his mind was filled with dreams of conquering, even while he faced his love, so strangely are courtship and ambition mingled in the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... much more remarkable. It stands on a slight eminence in the level ground between the hill on which the Fort stands and another somewhat lower granite hill, and is about a third of a mile from the Fort. It consists of a wall, rather elliptical than circular in form, from thirty to forty feet high, fourteen feet thick near the ground, and from six to nine thick at the top, where one can walk along a considerable part with little difficulty. This wall is built of the same small, well-trimmed blocks ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... to the other emanation which should produce the irregular refraction, I wished to try what Elliptical waves, or rather spheroidal waves, would do; and these I supposed would spread indifferently both in the ethereal matter diffused throughout the crystal and in the particles of which it is composed, according to ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... the law of elliptical, or, to speak more exactly, of conic-section, movement, permits of no doubt as to the condition of materiality. The comet is obviously drawn by the influence of the sun's mass, and is subservient to that all-pervading law of sympathetic ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... computation of a terrestrial degree given by Abbe Picard, and the determination of the Meridional arc, arrived at by the Cassinis, father and son, led scientific men to an entirety different result, and induced them to consider the earth an elliptical figure, elongated towards the polar regions. Passionate discussions arose from this decision, and in them originated immense undertakings, from which ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... of compression stenosis is that of an elliptical or scabbard-shaped lumen when the bronchus is at rest or during inspiration. Concentric funnel-like compression stenosis, while rare, may be produced ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... which are the daughter-cells, destined to form by their products the many varied tissues and organs of the developing larva and adult frog. After three or four days the egg changes from its globular form into an oval or elliptical mass, and from one end of this a small knob projects to become a flattened waving tail a few days later. On the sides of the larger anterior portion shallow grooves make their appearance and soon break through from the throat or pharynx ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of Newton's error, and the discovery that a projectile would move in an elliptical orbit when under the influence of a force varying in the inverse ratio of the square of the distance, led Newton, as he himself informs us in his letter to Halley, to discover "the theorem by which he afterward examined the ellipsis," and to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglyphical. It translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expressions. This is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however, give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We take the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... I used were of our English make, but though very good of the kind, yet far short of what might be expected, could we once find a way of making Glasses Elliptical, or of some more true shape; for though both Microscopes, and Telescopes, as they now are, will magnifie an Object about a thousand thousand times bigger then it appears to the naked eye; yet the Apertures of the Object-glasses are so ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might not be the same; that persons, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the second volume there is a frontispiece representing a portable universal furnace, made of strong wrought iron plates and lined with bricks bedded in fire-proof loam. The height of the furnace is two feet. The body of the furnace is elliptical. There are three openings in front of the furnace, one above the other, furnished with sliding doors, and fitted with ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... ancient wall is the celebrated Arcade, which formed part of the wall of the King's Palace; and this queer old lane running up through the walls like a sewer is Cuckoo lane; and that is Bugle street, where in olden times the warden blew; and here are the remains of Canute's palace, with its elliptical and circular arches and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... spirited action into the performance; there were vigorous gestures, a frequent smiting of the chest with the open hand, and a strenuous movement of the pelvis and lower part of the body called ami. This consisted of rhythmic motions, sidewise, backward, forward, and in a circular or elliptical orbit, all of which was done with the precision worthy of an acrobat, an accomplishment attained only after long practice. It was a hula of classic celebrity, and was performed without the accompaniment ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... can give an idea of the rapid, abrupt, elliptical style of this familiar correspondence, where the meaning is sometimes suggested by a single word, unintelligible to any but those for whom it ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... is sublime or pathetic, witty or satirical, it must be unfit for children. Knowledge cannot be detailed, or accurately explained, in poetry; the beauty of an allusion depends frequently upon the elliptical mode of expression, which passing imperceptibly over all the intermediate links in our associations, is apparent only when it touches the ends of the chain. Those who wish to instruct, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... but no settled career before him. The news from Palermo may be said to have converted him from an arithmetician into an astronomer. He was already in possession of a new and more general method of computing elliptical orbits; and the system of "least squares," which he had devised though not published, enabled him to extract the most probable result from a given set of observations. Armed with these novel powers, he set to work; and the communication in November of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... coming to the Sun from a great distance must have one exact amount of proper motion to produce a parabola: all other amounts would give hyperbolas or ellipses. And if there are no hyperbolic orbits, then it is infinity to one that all the orbits are elliptical. This is just what they would be if comets had ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... this picture, in the matter of balance, contains a principle: The line of the figure curves in toward the flower and pot which become the radius of the whole inner contour. This creates an elliptical line of observation, which being the arc on this radius receives a pull toward its centre. There is a modicum of balance in the mere weight of this empty space, but when given force by its isolation, plus the concession to its centripetal significance, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Inferno, VII. 75. "Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti, "is more than concise: it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first thought often lies coiled up and hidden under a second; the words which state the conclusion involve the premises and develop the subject." ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... distinct step in advance of this. The scientist observing the path of a planet travelling round the sun, finds that its course is that of an ellipse. He studies the path of a second planet, and finds that this also travels along an elliptical orbit. Later he finds that all planets he is able to observe travel in the same kind of path—then he hazards a general statement, and says, "All planets travel round their suns in elliptical orbits." But now he has left the realm of certainty for that of ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... some are like an ellipsis.[A] Q. Are there any other utensils into which meat is put that are circular? A. Yes, please, sir, my mother has some circular plates; and, please, sir, my mother has some elliptical dishes. Q. Any thing besides? A. Yes, please, sir, my mother has a circular table; and, please, sir, my mother has a rectangular one, and it is ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... quello del re per le sue parole). It is difficult, however, in this instance as in many others, to discover with certainty Boccaccio's exact meaning, owing to his affectation of Ciceronian concision and delight in obscure elliptical forms of construction; whilst his use of words in a remote or unfamiliar sense and the impossibility of deciding, in certain cases, the person of the pronouns and adjectives employed tend still farther to darken ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... treated by excising a triangular or elliptical portion of skin and cartilage from the posterior surface of the pinna and uniting the cut edges with sutures. Abnormally large ears may be diminished in size by the removal of a V-shaped portion from the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... been, in many cases, sunk by means of boring apparatus, in preference to the usual process of excavation, and the practice has since been adopted in South Wales. In England the usual form of the pit is circular, but elliptical and rectangular pits are also in use. On the Continent polygonal-shaped shafts are not uncommon, all of them, of whatever shape, being constructed with a view to resist the great pressure exerted ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... mind caused by a sudden recognition of objects long forgotten—a tree or a bit of bog-land. The familiar country, evocative of a great part of my childhood, carried my thoughts hither and thither. My thoughts ranged like the swallows; the birds had no doubt just arrived, and in swift elliptical flights they hunted for gnats along the banks of the old weedy canal. That weedy canal along which the train travelled took my thoughts back to the very beginning of my life, when I stood at the carriage window and plagued my father and mother with ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... reducing the intra-ocular tension is by the suction method, which consists in the use of certain cups from which the air is exhausted by means of a suction apparatus. Domec uses an elliptical eye cup, the concave margins of which fit closely about the globe. The air is exhausted with each respiration of the patient and from 50 to 200 tractions are made at each sitting. Domec is of the opinion that this method succeeds in two ways, namely, in producing analgesia by traction ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... bridge designed and built under Telford's superintendence was one of no great magnitude, across the river Severn at Montford, about four miles west of Shrewsbury. It was a stone bridge of three elliptical arches, one of 58 feet and two of 55 feet span each. The Severn at that point is deep and narrow, and its bed and banks are of alluvial earth. It was necessary to make the foundations very secure, as the river is subject to high floods; and this was effectuality ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... People were heard conversing in a broad Northumbrian accent, with a burr in most of their words. They were broad-shouldered men, capable of doing any amount of hard work. We came in sight of a fine stone bridge with nine elliptical arches, which connects Newcastle with Gateshead, on the opposite bank. Above it is another magnificent bridge; it is double, the lower roadway, ninety feet above the river, being used for carriages and foot passengers, while the upper ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... interjectional expression, when it may be rendered, it may be so, so it is, is it so, &c. Sometimes ironically, sometimes expressing chance, &c.; in the course of time it became superseded by the more modern term perhaps. Instances of similar elliptical expressions are common at the present day, and will readily suggest themselves: the modern please, used ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... bulletin of the United States bureau of fisheries,[123] Dr. Evermann asserted concerning Clinton's drawing of Otsego bass, which he had examined, that "the cut, although crude, plainly shows Coregonus clupeaformis. The form is elliptical, and the back shows the dark streaks along the rows of scales usually characteristic of that species." The same author, in collaboration with Dr. Jordan,[124] says concerning the common whitefish: "This species, like others of wide distribution, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel, Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... assemblage rose from their stone seats and fell flat on their faces. It was then that I noticed, for the first time, an oval or elliptical plate of shining gold set in the wall of the cavern just above the outer ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... was cloudy, and the moon had, for several hours, an immense elliptical ring round it—a common phenomenon in ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... satisfactorily determined. With respect to the extent of the order in the Islands of New Zealand, some recent specimens gathered upon the northern, prove one of its pines to be a Podocarpus; and another, producing a cone, and solitary, alternate scattered elliptical leaves, shows its relation to Agathis of Salisbury, or Dammar pine ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... explained in his elliptical style. "You're one them dames uses a fella like he was a napkin, then trows him down. You used me twice and used me good. I desoived the second one, for I'm the kind o' guy gets his once and comes back for more in the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... concepts, while modern science seeks laws—constant relations between variable magnitudes. The concept of circularity was sufficient to Aristotle to define the movement of the heavenly bodies. But, even with the more accurate concept of elliptical form, Kepler did not think he had accounted for the movement of planets. He had to get a law, that is to say, a constant relation between the quantitative variations of two or several elements of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the movement of the planets and the small satellites. The chief point of difference between them and the planets is, that their orbits are very elongated; and, instead of being nearly circular, they take the elliptical form. In consequence of the nature of these orbits, the same comet may approach very near the Sun, and afterwards travel from it to immense distances. Thus, the period of the Comet of 1680 has been estimated at ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... and seem to defy the approaching train. But engineering skill has here contrived to surmount all the obstacles set up by Nature. The train goes waltzing round the most striking curves, some of them almost elliptical. Tremendous gradients lead through tunnels and over bridges, and the swerving carriages run often in alarming proximity to the edge of precipitous ravines. What a splendid position for defensive purposes! Had the present war been declared three weeks ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... that at the long ranges the angle of fall of the bullets is much greater than at short ranges, it follows that at short ranges the elliptical figure (beaten zone) is much more elongated than at long ranges. In other words, the longer the range, the shorter is the depth of the beaten zone. This is shown ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... period it has shown a sharp and well-defined outline, and at no time has it coalesced or been joined to any belt in its proximity, as has been alleged by some observers. During the year 1885 the middle of the spot was very much paler in colour than the margins, causing it to appear as an elliptical ring. The ring form has continued up to the present time. While the outline of the spot has remained very constant, the colour has changed materially from year to year. During the past three years (1884- '86) it has at times been very faint, so as barely to be visible. The persistence ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... irregular curves require the most care to form properly. Let us try first the elliptical curve (Fig. 148). The proper thing is, first, to draw a line (A), which is called the "major axis." On this axis we mark for our guidance two points (B, B). With the dividers find a point (C) exactly midway, and draw a cross line (D). This is called the "minor axis." If we choose to do so we ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... a yellowish-grey tinge, more or less rufous on the head, neck, shoulder and sides of body; a hairy brown muzzle, with pale under-lip; long whiskers, some white, the posterior ones dark; under-parts white; fur soft and fine. The upper lip is lobed as in the hare; ears elliptical, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... we approached the spot, we found that what had appeared at a distance to be but a single group of trees, was, in fact, a small grove extending along the shore, and fringing a little cove of nearly elliptical form, which at this point set into the land. The narrow, shelving beach, rivalled the whiteness of a fresh snow-drift. The trees were mostly cocoa-palms; indeed, scarcely any others could flourish in such a spot; and there were no shrubs or undergrowth of any kind. The cove was perhaps ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... from Battery-street, which is a spacious and elegant promenade, on the south westerly part of the city. It was formerly a fort, and is about one hundred and seventy feet in diameter, of a circular or elliptical form. It has lately become a place of great resort in the warm season of the year. Everything which labor and expence, art and taste could effect was done to render it convenient, showy and elegant. An awning covered the whole area ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... in long elliptical or parabolic orbits round the sun at great velocities. They seem to consist partly of glowing vapours, especially hydrogen, and partly of meteoric stones. 'Shooting stars,' that is to say, stones which fall to the earth, are known to swarm in their wake, and ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... roomy and luxurious cabin which was furnished with a degree of mingled elegance and comfort that was seldom found afloat in those days, and indeed is very far from being common even now. The whole of the after end of this cabin was occupied by a series of windows of semi-elliptical shape, beyond which the sparkling sea could be seen, and through which a delicious, balmy, refreshing breeze was blowing. A broad locker arrangement, handsomely worked in choice mahogany, stretched right ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... of a series of marls and limestones, many of them thinly laminated, and which appear to have slowly accumulated in a lake probably fed by springs holding carbonate of lime in solution. The elliptical area over which this fresh-water formation has been traced extends, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, for a distance of ten miles east and west from Berlingen, on the right bank of the river to Wangen, and to Oeningen, near Stein, on the left bank. The organic remains have been ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... of this phenomenon, "though curious, was far from pleasing"—"an elliptical basin, seven miles in its transverse axis, filled half with smooth water of the deepest cerulean hue, and half with a sheet of glittering snow-white salt, girded on three sides by huge hot-looking mountains, that dip their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... are of a remarkable deep green, are notched about the edges, and are generally from a foot to eighteen inches in length. The fruit itself grows indifferently on all parts of the branches; it is in shape rather elliptical than round, is covered with a rough rind, and is usually seven or eight inches long; each of them grows singly and not in clusters. This fruit is fittest to be used when it is full grown, but is still green; in which state its taste has some distant ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... of admirable drawings of the great planet made by Mr. Griffiths in 1897. The first picture shows the appearance of the globe at 10h. 20m. Greenwich time on February 17th, 1897, through a powerful refracting telescope. We at once notice in this drawing that the outline of Jupiter is distinctly elliptical. The surface of the planet usually shows the remarkable series of belts here represented. They are nearly parallel to each other ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... was a poet. He was called a tramp; but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a philosopher, an artist, a traveller, a naturalist and a discoverer. But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of verse; he lived his poetry. His Odyssey would have ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... "Slave of Love," a sobriquet which could only have attached itself to him in after-life and as a consequence of his passion for Fitoeh. Sir R. F. Burton suggests, with great probability, that the name, as it stands in the text, is a contraction, by a common elliptical process, of the more acceptable, form Zein-ud-din ul Asnam, i.e. Zein-ud-din (Adornment of the Faith) [he] of the Images, Zein (adornment) not being a name used by the Arabic-speaking races, unless with some such addition as ud-Din ("of the Faith"), and the affix ul Asnam ( "[He] of the Images") ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... ready to say anything at a minute's notice. A friend of mine in Ilocos Norte once lost a ring, and asked her servant if he knew anything about it. The boy replied instantly, "Seguro raton," which is an elliptical form of "Surely a rat ate it." The boy had not stolen the ring, but he jumped at anything to ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... curve can be studied by us: the comet is visible only when near the sun. The same curve around the sun may be an orbit that will bring it back again, [Page 127] or one that will carry it off into infinite space, never to return. One rate of speed on the curve indicates an elliptical orbit that returns; a greater rate of speed indicates that it will take a parabolic orbit, which never returns. The exact rate of speed is exceedingly difficult to determine; hence it cannot be confidently asserted that any comet ever visible will not return. They may all belong to the solar system; ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... satisfactorily than we can Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune. Two facts with reference to him have long been well known, the one, that the polar compression in his case is much greater than it is in any of the interior planets, so that when seen through a telescope of very moderate power his disc is evidently elliptical, while the compression of the interior planets can only be detected by the most delicate micrometrical measurements—the other, that his apparent surface is always crossed by several alternating belts of light ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... A gilt cable moulding ornamented her sheer strake; a beautifully carved and gilded full-length figure of a woman wearing a star of cut-glass facets on her forehead formed her figurehead; and her quarters were adorned with a considerable amount of gilded scroll-work. Her elliptical stern bore, in large gilded block letters, the words: Stella ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... of this sentence is somewhat obscure and elliptical, but would seem to indicate that the Portuguese fear the diminution of their trade in China with its natives, and the loss of their prestige in the carrying trade outside ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... head, and beyond the circle two figures on their knees, in the act of adoration. Having passed the first gate, long arched galleries are discovered, about twelve feet wide and twenty feet high, cased with stucco, sculptured and painted; the vaults, of an elegant elliptical figure, are covered with innumerable hieroglyphics, disposed with so much taste, that notwithstanding the singular grotesqueness of the forms, and the total absence of demi-tint or aerial perspective, the ceilings make an agreeable whole, a rich and harmonious association ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... cupellation in flattened elliptical buttons, adhering but only slightly to the cupel. Its upper surface should show faint markings as if it were crystalline. The presence of platinum renders it still more crystalline, but removes the characteristic lustre and renders the metal dull and grey. Copper, if not completely ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... artfully entwined so as to give support to each other; the whole was covered with a thatch of dried grass and reeds; they were not larger than two people could conveniently occupy. In one of the huts, which was of a more elliptical shape and of larger dimensions than the other, was a bunch of hair that had been recently clipped from either the head or beard. This proves that these operations are not done solely by fire, as Captain Cook supposed,* but by ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
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