A History of Science — Volume 3

for, as has been said already, neither a current nor the action of waves upon an extensive beach produces such effects. The general direction of the channels and furrows indicat...

With the present book we enter the field of the distinctively modern. There is no precise date at which we take up each of the successive stories, but the main sweep of developm...

The work of William Herschel--His discovery of Uranus--His discovery that the stars are suns--His conception of the universe--His deduction that gravitation has caused the group...

James Hutton and the study of the rocks--His theory of the earth--His belief in volcanic cataclysms in raising and forming the continents--His famous paper before the Royal Soci...

Biot's investigations of meteors--The observations of Brandes and Benzenberg on the velocity of falling stars--Professor Olmstead's observations on the meteoric shower of 1833--...

William Smith and fossil shells--His discovery that fossil rocks are arranged in regular systems--Smith's inquiries taken up by Cuvier--His Ossements Fossiles containing the fir...

James Clerk-Maxwell's conception of ether--Thomas Young and "Luminiferous ether,"--Young's and Fresnel's conception of transverse luminiferous undulations--Faraday's experiments...

Josiah Wedgwood and the clay pyrometer--Count Rumford and the vibratory theory of heat--His experiments with boring cannon to determine the nature of heat--Causing water to boil...

THE SUCCESSORS OF NEWTON IN ASTRONOMY (1) (p. 10). An Account of Several Extraordinary Meteors or Lights in the Sky, by Dr. Edmund Halley. Phil. Trans. of Royal Society of Londo...

Galvani and the beginning of modern electricity--The construction of the voltaic pile--Nicholson's and Carlisle's discovery that the galvanic current decomposes water--Decomposi...

(1) (p. 25). William Herschel, Phil. Trans. for 1783, vol. LXXIII. (2) (p. 30). Kant's Cosmogony, ed. and trans. by W. Hartie, D.D., Glasgow, 900, pp. 74-81. (3) (p. 39). Exposi...

(1) (p. 81). Baron de Cuvier, Theory of the Earth, New York, 1818, p. 98. (2) (p. 88). Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (4 vols.), London, 1834. (p. 92). Ibid., vol. III., p...

(1) (p. 235). Davy's paper before Royal Institution, 1810. (2) (p. 238). Hans Christian Oersted, Experiments with the Effects of the Electric Current on the Magnetic Needle, 181...

(1) (p. 123). James Hutton, from Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1788, vol. I., p. 214. A paper on the "Theory of the Earth," read before the Society in 1781. (2...

The work of Johannes Hevelius--Halley and Hevelius--Halley's observation of the transit of Mercury, and his method of determining the parallax of the planets--Halley's observati...

Faraday narrowly misses the discovery of the doctrine of conservation--Carnot's belief that a definite quantity of work can be transformed into a definite quantity of heat--The...

(1) (p. 267). The Forces of Inorganic Nature, a paper by Dr. Julius Robert Mayer, Liebig's Annalen, 1842. (2) (p. 272). On the Calorific Effects of Magneto-Electricity and the M...

(1) (p. 215). Essays Political, Economical, and Philosophical, by Benjamin Thompson, Count of Rumford (2 vols.), Vol. II., pp. 470-493, London; T. Cadell, Jr., and W. Davies, 17...

(1) (p. 182). Theory of Rain, by James Hutton, in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1788, vol. 1, pp. 53-56. (2) (p. 191). Essay on Dew, by W. C. Wells, M.D., F.R....