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But it is the seeds which are curious, and which give to the tree the odd name of "volador," or "flier." These seeds have each a pair of membranaceous and striated wings, which, when the seeds fall, are turned to meet the air at an angle of 45 degrees; and thus a rotatory motion is produced, and the falling seeds turn round and round like little fly-wheels.
There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three oclock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two and three times to see that all was in order, before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud. Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little bits.
Captain Allistoun tore himself away from the delight of leaning against the binnacle, and began to walk the poop, swaying and reeling to preserve his balance.... The pump-rods, clanking, stamped in short jumps while the fly-wheels turned smoothly, with great speed, at the foot of the mainmast, flinging back and forth with a regular impetuosity two limp clusters of men clinging to the handles.
If the unmistakably spiral nebulæ resemble bursting fly-wheels or grindstones from whose perimeters torrents of sparks are flying, the Orion Nebula rather recalls the aspect of a cloud of smoke and fragments produced by the explosion of a shell.
The piston is connected with the engine-crank and revolves the shaft, which is in turn connected with the driving-wheels. This is called a two-cycle motor, because two complete revolutions are necessary to accomplish all the operations. Many machines are fitted with heavy fly-wheels, the swift revolution of which carries the impetus of the power stroke through the other three operations.
They tell me that the interplanetary spaces are full of the debris of shattered asteroids; so, perhaps, even among them there are such things as disease and death. Yet just to look at them must remind a man of what a bacillus of a thing he is the whole human race like some sprinkling of impalpable powder upon the surface of one of the most insignificant fly-wheels of a monstrous machine.
A little more of us was called into action, but never the whole. The central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without disturbance, like a Government office. The great wheels of intelligence turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I have gone on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the hundreds.
There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three o-clock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two and three times to see that all was in order, before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud. Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little bits.
Thus, without fly-wheels, but with fluid circulations through apertures, we may make a model spring balance or a model luminiferous ether, either without or with the rotational quality corresponding to that of the true luminiferous ether in the magnetic fluid in short, do all by the perforated solids with circulations through them that we saw we could do by means of linked gyrostats.
The inclosing circle represents in each case in section an inclosing spherical shell to prevent the interior from being seen. In the inside of one there are fly-wheels, in the inside of the other a massless spring. The projecting hooked rods seem as if they are connected by a spring in each case.
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