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After proceeding through the jungle for what must have been upward of five miles we emerged suddenly into a large clearing in the exact center of which stood as strange an appearing village as one might well imagine. Large trees had been chopped down fifteen or twenty feet above the ground, and upon the tops of them spherical habitations of woven twigs, mud covered, had been built.
The eye, the outer instrument of vision, is a most beautiful and ingenious machine. All its parts are arranged with such a delicate adjustment to one another, and such an exquisite adaptation of every part to the great object of the whole, that the eye is properly regarded as one of the wonders of nature. The eyeball is nearly spherical in shape, but is slightly elongated from before backwards.
If this construction is made on a plane surface, we have an uninterrupted disposition in which there are six discs touching every disc except those which lie on the outside. On the spherical surface the construction also seems to promise success at the outset, and the smaller the radius of the disc in proportion to that of the sphere, the more promising it seems.
If, however, we would compare the geographical knowledge of the ancients with that of the moderns, we confess to the immeasurable inferiority of the ancients in this branch. When Eratosthenes began his labors, it was known that the surface of the earth was spherical.
The Punans carefully sow the seed they have swallowed, and transplant the young seedlings to the most suitable positions. The milky juice of the creeper is gathered and treated in much the same way as the gutta. It is rolled up while hot into spherical lumps, each of which is pierced with a hole for convenient transportation.
Kepler also discovered the important fact, that spherical surfaces were not capable of converging rays to a single focus, and he conjectured, what Descartes afterwards proved, that this property might be possessed by lenses having the figure of some of the sections of the cone.
The planets resemble the earth in describing elliptical orbits round the sun, in being attracted by it and by one another, in being nearly spherical, revolving on their axes, etc.; and, as we have now reason to believe from the revelations of the spectroscope, are composed, in great part at least, of similar materials; but it is not known that any of these properties, or all of them together, are the conditions on which the possession of inhabitants is dependent, or are marks of those conditions.
And it is evident that when the matter is not homogeneous, but of such a constitution that the movement is communicated in it more rapidly toward one side than toward another, these waves cannot be spherical: but that they must acquire their figure according to the different distances over which the successive movement passes in equal times.
Should it not be found to coincide with what some may say is physiological truth, it will not invalidate the discovery itself; for of that I am far more positive than Harvey was of the discovery of the circulation of the blood; or of Galileo of the spherical shape of the earth. And I ask that it shall not be judged by my theory, but from the practice.
Scarcely exotic are the yuccas, with their spherical heads of sharp radiating blades; scarcely exotic the cactacea, of varied forms for species of both are indigenous to the soil, and both are found among the flora of a not far-distant region. The scene before my window is not one of still life.
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