The World's Greatest Books — Volume 15 — Science

The theory of definite electrolytical or electro-chemical action appears to me to touch immediately upon the absolute quantity of electricity belonging to different bodies. As s...

We observe that there are certain products as the result of the combustion of a candle, and that of these products one portion may be considered as charcoal, or soot; that charc...

Of all the organisms of the system one of the most extraordinary is the pterichthys, or winged fish, which the writer had the pleasure of introducing to the acquaintance of geol...

Let us assume the quantity of blood which the left ventricle of the heart will contain when distended to be, say, two ounces (in the dead body I have found it to contain upwards...

The duration of the life of animals varies within very wide limits. As a general rule, small animals do not live so long as large ones, but there is no absolute relation between...

It is now to be remarked that there is nothing in the whole series of operations displayed in inorganic geology which may not be accounted for by the agency of the ordinary forc...

In nature to-day, one of the lowest animal forms is a tiny speck of living plasm called the _amoeba_. We have still more elementary forms, such as the minute particles which mak...

To these succeed transported soils (_alluvium_), containing the gigantic bones of ancient mammalia, such as the mastodons, the dinotherium, and the megatheroid animals, among wh...

Pain is much less developed in insects than in warm-blooded vertebrates. Otherwise, one could not see either an ant, with its abdomen or antennæ cut off, gorge itself with honey...

So long as the _ranunculus aquatilis_, the water buttercup, is under water its leaves are all finely indented, and the divisions are furnished with capillaries; but as soon as t...

In the preservation of the average proportion of land and sea, the igneous agents exert a conservative power, restoring the unevenness of the surface which the levelling power o...

The most important step in establishing a relation between electric and magnetic phenomena and those of light must be the discovery of some instance in which one set of phenomen...

How beautifully simple then, by the aid of these discoveries, appears the process of nutrition in animals, the formation of their organs, in which vitality chiefly resides. Thos...

3. _Gases._ Gases exist free in the atmosphere, but may be confined. Their parts are highly movable; they are compressible and expansible, and their volumes are inversely as the...

Further, an examination of animals shows that though their superficial characteristics, such as colour and size, are changeable, yet their more radical characteristics do not ch...

In what follows I shall use the word "community" in its widest sense, as including any group of persons who are connected by a common interest--families, schools, clubs, sects,...

How will the struggle for existence act in regard to variation? Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply under Nature? I think...

Perpendicular, deep indentings in the forehead between the eyebrows, I never met save in men of sound understanding and free and noble minds, unless there were some positively c...

Whatever its defects on the scientific side, Buffon's plan was simplicity itself, and was adopted largely, if not entirely, in consequence of his contempt--real or affected--for...

If Jupiter was viewed from the sun it would never appear retrograde or stationary, as it is seen sometimes from the earth, but always to go forward with a motion nearly uniform....

By estimating the ratio of its length to its breadth, and measuring the former, M. Struve concludes that at this epoch the distance of the two stars, centre from centre, might b...

Natural selection sees grandeur in the "view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one." Derivation sees, the...

Acknowledgment and thanks for the use of the following selections are herewith tendered to the Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Ill., for "Senses of Insects," by Auguste...

In inflammation all three irritative processes occur side by side. Indeed, we may frequently see that when the organ itself is made up of different parts, one part of the tissue...