United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And, as he sat meditating thus, breathing the clear air, feeling the tempered, yet genial, sun-heat, many questions began to resolve themselves.
That day, then, packing up what I most required, I started for Bunder Gori, and unloaded, after a three miles' march, at an old well in rear of the village, selecting as a camping-ground the least comfortable place I could find, and not allowing the tent to be pitched, though the sun-heat was 112 degrees, and the sand was blowing in perfect clouds.
And when the summer does come with its scanty sun-heat, that heat is not accumulated as it is by our dense and moisture-laden atmosphere, the marvellous effects of which we have already shown.
On a narrow strip of shingle, close to the water's edge, there were a few tufts of carex gone to seed; and a little way back up the rocky bank at the foot of a crumbling wall so inclined as to absorb and radiate as well as reflect a considerable quantity of sun-heat, was the garden, containing a thrifty thicket of Cowania covered with large yellow flowers; several bushes of the alpine ribes with berries nearly ripe and wildly acid; a few handsome grasses belonging to two distinct species, and one goldenrod; a few hairy lupines and radiant spragueas, whose blue and rose-colored flowers were set off to fine advantage amid green carices; and along a narrow seam in the very warmest angle of the wall a perfectly gorgeous fringe of Epilobium obcordatum with flowers an inch wide, crowded together in lavish profusion, and colored as royal a purple as ever was worn by any high-bred plant of the tropics; and best of all, and greatest of all, a noble thistle in full bloom, standing erect, head and shoulders above his companions, and thrusting out his lances in sturdy vigor as if growing on a Scottish brae.
First, a carpet, to make it soft for him; then a coloured fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of foliage to shade him from sun-heat, and shade also the fallen rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nourish the springs among the moss.
Selberg was at Batavia during the wet season, when torrents of rain, of whose abundance and volume Europeans can form no idea, alternate with a sun-heat that cracks the earth and pumps up pestilence from the low marshy ground upon which this fever-nest is built. He had abundant opportunity to investigate the causes and symptoms of the fevers and other prevalent maladies.
We now have another elaborate estimate of the comparative amounts of heat actually received by Mars and the Earth, dependent on their very different amounts of atmosphere, and this estimate depends almost wholly on the comparative albedoes, that of Mars, as observed by astronomers being 0.27, while ours has been estimated in a totally different way as being 0.75, whence he concludes that nearly three-fourths of the sun-heat that Mars receives reaches the surface and determines its temperature, while we get only one-fourth of our total amount.
Only since it was adopted and enforced by Zöllner in 1865, can it be regarded as permanently acquired to science. The rapid changes in the cloud-belts both of Jupiter and Saturn, he remarked, attest a high internal temperature. For we know that all atmospheric movements on the earth are sun-heat transformed into motion.
The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession, all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament.
A Mouchot of the future will invent a machine to guide the rays of the sun and make them work, so that we shall no longer seek sun-heat stored in coal in the depths of the earth.