The Popular Science Review: A Quarterly Miscellany of Entertaining and Instructive Articles on Scientific Subjects, Volume 6James Samuelson, Henry Lawson, William Sweetland Dallas Robert Hardwicke, 1867 - Science |
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Popular passages
Page 68 - There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair.
Page 68 - The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase; it will be...
Page 155 - I observed that the flame exhibited pulsations which were exactly synchronous with the audible beats. This phenomenon was very striking to every one in the room, and especially so when the strong notes of the violoncello came in. It was exceedingly interesting to observe how perfectly even the trills of this instrument were reflected on the sheet of flame. A deaf man might have seen the harmony.
Page 381 - The colloidal is, in fact, a dynamical state of matter, the crystalloidal being the statical condition. The colloid possesses Energia. It may be looked upon as the probable primary source of the force appearing in the phenomena of vitality.
Page 208 - N. lat., whereas the north-east trades seldom blow south of the equator. The effect of the northern trades blowing across the equator to a great distance will be to impel the warm water of the tropics over into the Southern Ocean. But this is not all ; not only would the median...
Page 383 - The natural excitation of osmose in the substance of the membranes or cell-walls dividing such solutions, seems therefore almost inevitable. In osmose there is, further, a remarkably direct substitution of one of the great forces of nature by its equivalent in another force — the conversion, as it may be said, of chemical affinity into mechanical power. Now what is more wanted in the theory of animal functions than a mechanism...
Page 84 - We may thus very well suppose that an extremely small withdrawal of heat from the sun might cause a copious condensation, and this change of molecular state would, of course, by means of altered reflection, &c., alter to a considerable extent the distribution over the various particles of the sun's surface of an enormous quantity of heat, and great mechanical changes might very easily result...
Page 137 - Polygonum (aviculare~), called cow-grass, grows most ' " luxuriantly, the roots sometimes two feet in depth, and the " plants spreading over an area from four to five feet in " diameter. The dock (Rumex obtusifolius or R.
Page 137 - English emigration is not more surely doing its work than the stealthy tide of English weeds, which are creeping over the surface of the waste, cultivated, and virgin soil, in annually increasing numbers of genera, species, and individuals.
Page 137 - ... feet. The watercress increases in our still rivers to such an extent as to threaten to choke them altogether ; in fact, in the Avon, a still deep stream running through Christ Church, the annual cost of keeping the river free for boat navigation, and for purposes of drainage, exceeds 300/. I have measured stems twelve feet long and three quarters of an inch in diameter. In some of the mountain districts, where the soil is loose, the white clover is completely displacing the native grasses, forming...