United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Only a few crazy fanatics have fallen victims to it, and if lunatic asylums were not frequently cheated of their dues, these would not be left at large, but shut up together in high-walled enclosures, where, like Sydney Smith's 'gramnivorous metaphysicians, or Reaumur's spiders, they could only injure one another and destroy their own webs.
At Cape Horn, Reaumur's thermometer stood at four degrees; a temperature rendered very disagreeable by our having so recently suffered from oppressive heat. We now hailed with renewed enjoyment the daily increasing warmth. My sailors had heard much of the dreadful storms which raged at all seasons round Cape Horn, and destroyed so many ships.
It is with Réaumur that we are first of all tempted to compare him; and some have chosen to see in him only one who has continued Réaumur's work. In reality he has eagerly read Réaumur, although at heart he does not really enjoy his writings; he has drunk from this fruitful source, but he owes him no part of his own rich harvest.
From our observatory on Venus Point, we found its latitude 17° 29' 17", and its longitude 149° 29'. The variation of the needle was 6° 50' east, and its inclination 29° 30'. The barometer ranged from 29' 80" to 29' 70"; Reaumur's thermometer from twenty-three and a half to twenty-four and a half.
Even so did Reaumur's Bees perish in the glass funnel, where their liberty depended only upon their cutting through a bit of gauze. This fact strikes me as rich in inferences. What!
Again, we need only recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to verify certain experiments of Réaumur's, was so completely and immediately fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest of his life. Again, we may ask what Claude Bernard would have been had he not met Magendie?
Reaumur's thermometer seldom falls to the freezing point; yet gardens cannot flourish, on account of the frequent fogs. Some wersts farther inland, beyond the injurious influence of the fog, plants of the warmest climates prosper surprisingly. Cucumbers of fifty pounds' weight, gourds of sixty-five, and other fruits in proportion, are produced in them.
Ayscough the Instrument-Maker on Ludgate Hill, what scales they were. He immediately assured me, that one was Fahrenheit's, & shew'd me one exactly so divided. The other he took for Reaumur's, but, as he said there were different scales of his contrivance, he could not exactly tell, w^ch of them it was.
From Reaumur's day to our own, however, is but as the twinkling of an eye; and many lives of men, placed end to end, form but a second in the history of Nature's thought. Although the idea that our eyes have followed attains its supreme expression in our domestic bees, it must not be inferred therefrom that the hive reveals no faults.
Things being thus arranged, I carry off my forty captives and go to the identical spot where C. muraria works, in the pebbly bed of the Aygues. The trip will have a double object: to observe Reaumur's Mason and to set the Sicilian Mason at liberty. The latter, therefore, will also have two and a half miles to travel home.
Word Of The Day