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Henry James had not yet taught the world to read a volume for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his burning-glass turned on alternate sides of the same figure. Psychological study was still simple, and at worst or at best English character was never subtile. Surely no one would believe that complexity was the trait that confused the student of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone.

Again I made a fire by shooting a tow wad into such tinder as we could arrange from my coat lining, having dried this almost into flame by a burning-glass I made out of a watch crystal filled with water, not in the least a weak sort of lens. She ran for fuel, and for water, and now we cooked and ate, the fresh meat seeming excellent to me.

Nay, heretical and damnable as is the fact, his father's surplice was as a moth-eaten garment from the repeated and insidious attacks of this young philosopher. The burning-glass decided his fate.

With these and a bit of dry moss he returned to the aperture in the face of the cliff, where, before entering, he ignited the moss with the aid of a powerful burning-glass which he habitually carried about in his pocket, and then, blowing the moss into flame, kindled one of his torches.

On one occasion he set the trunk of an old tree on fire with a burning-glass: on another, while he was amusing himself with a blue flame, his tutor came into the room and received a severe shock from a highly-charged Leyden jar. During the holidays Shelley carried on the same pursuits at Field Place.

So hot that her husband, even when the sun was as low as this, could light his pipe with a burning-glass a telescope lens whose tube had gone astray, to lead a useless life elsewhere.

A student of ancient tactics would have found there all the old defenses in coral caltrops, and abatis, molded in dark-gray coral, battered and shot-marked. It was a dream of a sunken city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of the hoary Archimedes upon it before the inundation, directing the destruction, by his burning-glass, of the enemy's ships.

I obeyed in silence, and as I happened to have the burning-glass in my pocket, a fire was speedily kindled, and a thick smoke ascended into the air. It had scarcely appeared for two minutes when the boom of a gun rolled over the sea, and looking up, I saw that the schooner was making for the island again.

He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where the sun strikes like a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the pheasant calls to his mate.

In a lighthouse on the dioptric system, the lantern is constructed with eight sides, which form an octagonal prism around the lamp in the centre. The centre of each side is occupied by a plano-convex lens, something similar to a burning-glass, having a diameter of about fifteen inches. This central lens is not sufficient to cover the entire side.