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The rope vibrated leisurely to the blow, like the long string of a pendulum starting from a rest. But no swinging motion was imparted to the body of Senor Hirsch, the well-known hide merchant on the coast. With a convulsive effort of the twisted arms it leaped up a few inches, curling upon itself like a fish on the end of a line.
That I more than half believed it, will be evident from the fact that, although I frequently carried the pendulum, as I shall call it, to the window sill, and set it in motion by way of experiment, I had not, up to the time of a certain incident which I shall very soon have to relate, had the courage to keep up the oscillation beyond ten or a dozen strokes; partly from fear of the trees, partly from a dim dread of exercising power whose source and extent were not within my knowledge.
Tom had dashed it there and blown off somewhere, leaving me, as he usually does, to make my own decisions. Should I tell Harry? Should I not tell Harry? Was it my right? Was it not his due? I vibrated between these inexorable questions, but, like the pendulum I was, I struck no answer anywhere. I had half made up my mind to let matters take their own course.
The kind of motion which is thus transformed is not even a to-and-fro swing of an atom, or molecule, like the swing of a pendulum bob, but that due to a change of form of the atoms within the molecule, otherwise there could be no such thing as spectrum analysis. Vibratory motion of the matter becomes undulatory motion in the ether.
Its chief drawback is its length and weight, which render it more or less of a fixture. Fortunately, Mr. C. E. Benham of Colchester has devised a Miniature Twin Elliptic Pendulum which possesses the advantages of the Goold, but can be transported easily and set up anywhere.
Marine watches, and other instruments, were provided; and M. Dagelet was particularly directed to make observations with M. Condamine's invariable pendulum, to determine the differences in gravity, and to ascertain the true proportion of the equatorial to the polar diameter of the earth.
The girl was found asleep, but delirious, her large eyes, in which the blue and brown tints met in a kind of lake color, being wide open, and almost lost in their long lashes, while flood and fire, sun and frost, had beaten upon the slender encasement of her gentle life, that still kept time like some Parian clock saved from a conflagration, in whose crystal pane the golden pendulum still moves, though the hands point astray in the mutilated face.
In the conical pendulum, or steam engine governor, which consists of two metal balls suspended on rods hung from the end of a vertical revolving shaft, the centrifugal force is manifested by the divergence of the balls, when the shaft is put into revolution; and the centripetal force, which in this instance is gravity, predominates so soon as the velocity is arrested; for the arms then collapse and hang by the side of the shaft.
The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure. In it hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum. It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it has.
But still, in philosophy and general literature, there have been sufficient proofs that the pendulum, which for nearly two hundred years had been swinging one way, was now beginning to swing back again; and as its last oscillation brought it far from the true centre, so it may be, that its present impulse may be no less in excess, and thus may bring on again, in after ages, another corresponding reaction.
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