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The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed.
By W.H. RIEHL Translated by FRANCES H. KING No time is so rich as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in humorous original types of a distinct genre, who built for themselves a world apart. Everywhere in this period we meet with eccentrics by profession, who with deliberate intention play, as the actors say, a "charged" character-part.
Whatever may have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the translation of F. W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars.
If this hypothesis were advanced, not as a physical explanation of the phenomena, but, like the epicycles and eccentrics of Ptolemy, "to save the appearances," its ingenuity would be greatly to its author's credit; but, like the epicycles and eccentrics, though it represents the phenomena well enough, it contradicts laws of motion, now well known, which ought to be familiar to every physical philosopher.
The tendency of that argument is to represent the Irish or the Celts as a strange and separate race, as a tribe of eccentrics in the modern world immersed in dim legends and fruitless dreams. Its tendency is to exhibit the Irish as odd, because they see the fairies. Its trend is to make the Irish seem weird and wild because they sing old songs and join in strange dances.
Some straight line air compressors are so constructed that the momentum of the piston and other moving parts is nearly sufficient to equalize the strains without a fly wheel; but the fly wheel is there because it insures a definite length of stroke, and because it enables us to operate eccentrics and to regulate the speed of the engine uniformly.
"You would have found it full of eccentrics," said I. "I dare say," said he. "For myself, I said to myself when I took ship, 'Marc'antonio, said I, 'you must make it a rule to be surprised at nothing. But do Englishmen clean hogs'-sties for pleasure?" "And the Princess? She has also travelled?" I asked, meeting his question with another. For the moment my question appeared to disturb him.
The Almagest treats of all manner of astronomical problems, but the feature of it which gained it widest celebrity was perhaps that which has to do with eccentrics and epicycles. This theory was, of course, but an elaboration of the ideas of Hipparchus; but, owing to the celebrity of the expositor, it has come to be spoken of as the theory of Ptolemy.
None the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions, whether they call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be assumptions common enough to stamp those who reject them as eccentrics or lunatics. And the greater and more heterogeneous the population the commoner the assumptions must be.
A A, is one of the cylinders, B B the piston rod, and C C the crank. D is the crank in the intermediate shaft, which works the air pump E. There are double eccentrics fixed on the shaft, whereby the movement of the slide valves is regulated.
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