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We know now how to ascertain as a fact the way in which the heavenly bodies move, and we know that they do not move in circles, or even in accurate ellipses, or in any other kind of simply describable curve. This may be painful to a certain hankering after simplicity of pattern in the universe, but we know that in astronomy such feelings are irrelevant.
We have referred to the fact that the great planets, and especially Jupiter, frequently interfere with the motions of comets. This interference is not limited to the original alteration of their orbits from possible parabolas to ellipses, but is sometimes exercised again and again, turning the bewildered comets into elliptical paths of all degrees of eccentricity.
Sure enough, bending over the basin, I heard a buzz of wheels, and looked up to see the whole machine springing like a score of whipping-tops gone mad, the brass balls swinging and rotating so fast that the eye lost them in little twinkling circles and ellipses, the wheels whirring and filling the room with their hum. My astronomer had dived under the bench.
Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder to the close-pent inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful, certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol.
The common pea was the subject of a valuable memoir by Dutrochet, who discovered that the internodes and tendrils revolve in ellipses. The ellipses are generally very narrow, but sometimes approach to circles. I several times observed that the longer axis slowly changed its direction, which is of importance, as the tendril thus sweeps a wider space.
It is assumed that there is such a thing as a circle, and that all its radii are equal; such things as ellipses, and that the sums of the focal distances are equal for every point in an ellipse; such things as parallel lines, and that those lines are everywhere equally distant.
where the words "have I taken" are wanting in last line, but are supplied from the preceding one. One bird best to defend the fatherland, where the word "is" is lacking. Alas I the grief to me of great-hearted Aeneas, when the words "is present," "comes," or something of the kind, are understood. There are many kinds of Ellipses in Homer; the effect of the figure is quickness.
His first law states that the planets describe ellipses with the sun at a focus of each ellipse. These two laws were published in his great work, Astronomia Nova, sen. Physica Coelestis tradita commentariis de Motibus Stelloe; Martis, Prague, 1609.
It must not, indeed, be overlooked or unacknowledged, that the planets do not move in exact circles, but diverge slightly into ellipses. The fact is by no means without significance, and that of an important kind.
As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua, and had a strong passion for Greek."
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