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On each side lay shallow sheets of stagnant water overlying a treacherous bottom of semi-fluid mud, which rose above the surface here and there in moist, sweltering banks, mottled over with occasional patches of unhealthy vegetation.
The most remarkable feature is a conical hill, about one thousand feet high, the upper part of which is exceedingly steep, and on one side overhangs its base. The rock is phonolite, and is divided into irregular columns. On viewing one of these isolated masses, at first one is inclined to believe that it has been suddenly pushed up in a semi-fluid state. At St.
He lives composedly in semi-fluid mud, or lies torpid in the hard baked clay at the bottom of the dry tank from which all the water has utterly evaporated in the drought of summer.
According to the account now generally accepted, the original material of the earth seems to have been a semi-solid or semi-fluid mass formed by the condensation of the still more fluid or even gaseous nebula out of which all the planets of the solar system have been formed and of which the sun is the still fiery core.
It is pounded into a semi-fluid mess, after which it is allowed to stand a few days and ferment; it is then worked about with the hands until it acquires the proper consistency for eating, when it is stored in gourds and calabashes.
If water insinuates itself between the strata, it creates a sliding surface, or it may, by its expansion in freezing, separate beds of rock, which had been nearly continuous before, widely enough to allow the gravitation of the superincumbent mass to overcome the resistance afforded by inequalities of face and by friction; if it finds its way beneath hard earth or rock reposing on clay or other bedding of similar properties, it converts the supporting layer into a semi-fluid mud, which opposes no obstacle to the sliding of the strata above.
Comparative anatomists have proved that the human brain, from its first appearance as a semi-fluid and shapeless mass, passes in succession through the several structures that constitute the permanent and perfect brains of fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammalia; but ultimately it passes beyond them all, and acquires a marvellous development of its own. And so it is with the human soul.
Is not the peristaltic movement of the bowels, by which the solid matter is removed, also a vital phenomenon? Is not the conception of a pipe or a tube that forces semi-fluid matter along its hollow interior, by the contraction of its walls, quite beyond the reach of mechanics?
But the studies of a German physicist, Professor O. Lehmann, seem to prove that even this means is not infallible. Professor Lehmann has succeeded, in fact, in obtaining with certain organic compounds oleate of potassium, for instance under certain conditions some peculiar states to which he has given the name of semi-fluid and liquid crystals.
This fermentation is caused by the combustion of a portion of the carbon in the iron, and as soon as the excess of this is consumed, the cinders and slag sink to the bottom of the oven, leaving the semi-fluid mass on the top.
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