Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:24:39

Excerpt #1, from A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer

…quickly, it sends forth a similar light. Q. Does HEAT ALWAYS produce LIGHT? A. No: the heat of a stack of hay, or reeking dunghill, though very great, is not sufficient to produce light. Q. Why is a YELLOW FLAME brighter than a RED HOT COAL? A. Because yellow rays always produce the greatest amount of light; though red rays produce the greatest amount of heat. Q. Why is the LIGHT of a fire MORE INTENSE sometimes than at others? A. The intensity of fire-light depends upon the whiteness to which the carbon is reduced, by combustion. If the carbon be white hot, its combustion is perfect, and the light intense; if not, the light is obscured by smoke. Q. Why will not CINDERS BLAZE, as well as FRESH coals? A. The flame of coals is made chiefly by hydrogen gas. As soon as this gas is consumed, the hot cinders produce only an invisible gas, called carbonic acid. Q. Where does the hydrogen gas of a fire come from? A. The fuel is decomposed (by combustion) into its simple elements, carbon and hydrogen gas. (see p. 33) Q. Why does not a FIRE BLAZE on a FROSTY NIGHT, so long as it does upon another night?…

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Excerpt #2, from Argonaut stories, by Jerome Hart

…the summit by now. His curiosity got the better of him. “Are you the party that went up with a little blonde lady three weeks ago?” he asked. “I may be,” said Harrison. “She seemed kind of light for this country,” pursued the bartender. “Hope she’s standing it all right. Did she come down with you?” “I brought her with me,” said Harrison. “Isn’t she coming in? She doesn’t have to pass through the saloon here if she don’t like. She can—-” Harrison’s hand went to his forehead. “She’s dead,” he said. A teamster came in the side door and spoke to him, and he followed the man out. So did two of the dance-hall girls and the first bartender. Outside in one of the big freighting sleds lay Mrs. Harrison. Her flaxen hair waved as in life over the girlish face, hard now as marble and colder. The moon shone full upon her, and a snow crystal hung here and there on the little fur parkee that she wore. She might have been a marble Madonna there in the moonlight. Through the open door came the noise of the next waltz. One of the girls slipped in, and the orchestra stopped. Quickly a little group began to gather, but Harrison did not move. He seemed as in a trance, staring open-eyed, mistily, at the frozen woman in the sled….

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Excerpt #3, from The Principles of Biology, Volume 2 (of 2), by Herbert Spencer

…of capillary tension must result–a tendency of the liquid to pass into the leaves resisted below by liquid cohesion. Now, had the vessels impermeable coats, only their upper extremities would under these conditions be slowly emptied. But their coats, in common with all the surrounding tissues, are permeable by air. Hence, under this state of capillary tension, air will enter; and as the upper ends of the tubes, being both smaller in diameter and less porous than the lower, will retain the liquids with greater tenacity, the air will enter the wider and more porous tubes below–the ducts of the stem and branches. Thus the entrance of air no more proves that these ducts are not sap-carriers, than does the emptiness of tropical river-beds in the dry season prove that they are not channels for water. There is, however, a difficulty which seems more serious. It is said that air, when present in these minute canals, must be a great obstacle to the movement of sap through them. The investigations of Jamin have shown that bubbles in a capillary tube resist the passage of liquid, and that their resistance becomes very great when the bubbles are numerous–reaching, in some experiments, as much as three atmospheres. Nevertheless the inference that any such resistance is offered by the air-bubbles in the vessels of a plant, is, I think, an erroneous one. What happens in a capillary tube having impervious sides, with which these experiments were made,…

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Excerpt #4, from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

…say. James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other…

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Excerpt #5, from The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, by Ernst Haeckel

…forms and functions, when we have a sociological knowledge of the various classes that compose it, and the laws of their association and division of labor; and when we have made an anthropological study of the nature of the persons who have united, under the same laws, for the formation of a community and are distributed in its various classes. The familiar arrangement of these classes, and the settling of the rank in the mass and the governing body, show us how this complex social organism is built up step by step. But we have to look in the same way on the cell-state, which is made up from the separate individualities in human society or in the kingdom of the tissue-animals, or the branches in the kingdom of the tissue-plants. Their complex organism, composed of various organs and tissues, can only be understood when we are acquainted with their constituent elements, the cells, and the laws according to which these elementary organisms unite to form cell-communities and tissues, and are in turn modified in the divers organs in the division of labor. We must, therefore, first establish the scale of the morphonta, and the laws of their association and ergonomy, according to which the several stages or conditions of morphological individuality build on each other. Three such stages may be at once distinguished: (1) the cell (or, more correctly, the plastid), (2) the person (animal) or branch…

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Excerpt #6, from Mental Radio, by Upton Sinclair

…hanging out. Pursuing the tests past the period until more than 300 have been had, we find that Mr. Sinclair drew a cow’s head three times. Once the percipient’s response was technically a failure; it resembled horns, or rather antlers. The second time she got a chicken’s face, again strictly a failure, but at least something with animal life. The third time was the “cow with tongue hanging out.” And there were three other times that Mrs. Sinclair either drew a cow’s head or wrote “cow” or “calf.” For the first see Figures 15, 15a. In the second instance the agent had drawn a face, not that of a cow but of a man. The third was a brilliant success, not in name but in form. The agent had drawn what was doubtless intended for a donkey with a harness band across its neck. In the reproduction the donkey’s long ears were metamorphosed to resemble horns, and across the cow’s neck is a band, which the lady interpreted in the following script: “Cow’s head in stock.” March 2, 1929. The agent drew six concentric circles (Fig. 144). As in the case of the balloon (see Figs. 95, 95a), the percipient seemed to “see” only part of the original. She also draws concentric circles, but omits about a quarter of each (Fig. 144a). We can allow space but for one more exhibit, and this because of its…

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Excerpt #7, from The Railway Children, by E. Nesbit

…pockets. “He did, of course,” said Phyllis, in haste; “directly we heard she was ill we got the roses ready and waited by the gate. It was when you were making the brekker-toast. And when he’d said ‘Thank you’ for the roses so many times–much more than he need have–he pulled out the line and gave it to Peter. It wasn’t exchange. It was the grateful heart.” “Oh, I BEG your pardon, Peter,” said Bobbie, “I AM so sorry.” “Don’t mention it,” said Peter, grandly, “I knew you would be.” So then they all went up to the Canal bridge. The idea was to fish from the bridge, but the line was not quite long enough. “Never mind,” said Bobbie. “Let’s just stay here and look at things. Everything’s so beautiful.” It was. The sun was setting in red splendour over the grey and purple hills, and the canal lay smooth and shiny in the shadow–no ripple broke its surface. It was like a grey satin ribbon between the dusky green silk of the meadows that were on each side of its banks. “It’s all right,” said Peter, “but somehow I can always see how pretty things are much better when I’ve something to do. Let’s get down on to the towpath and fish from there.” Phyllis and Bobbie remembered how the boys on the canal-boats had thrown coal at them, and they said so….

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Excerpt #8, from The Knights of the Round Table: Stories of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, by Frost

…land. The wind swept across it, and the rain came at us in sheets. We didn’t mind it much, with our mackintoshes on, but I did think that it was fair to ask Helen what she thought of the poet who said that this Avalon was a place “Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.” “Maybe it is,” she answered, pulling her water-proof hood down so that scarcely a bit of her could be seen, except the tip of her nose; “this rain doesn’t fall; it just comes against us sideways.” So the poet’s reputation was saved. It could not rain so hard as this very long, and by and by it stopped altogether. Then it began again, and there were showers all day. Sometimes it looked as if it were going to stop for good, but we could scarcely get our waterproofs off before it began all over. “Isn’t it curious,” I said, “that a storm coming up just here should remind me of a story? It is about a time when Gawain had to go out in bad weather. This is the right time to tell the story, too, while we are looking for this particular Camelot. For the story begins at Camelot, and the learned man who first dug it out of its old manuscript and printed it says that Camelot was in Somerset.”King Arthur was keeping Christmas at Camelot with his knights. The feast lasted for many days. On New Year’s Day, as they all sat in the hall, the King and the Queen and the knights, there rode in the most…

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Excerpt #9, from Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain

…roof. I had been longing to have personal experience of peasant life–be “on the inside” and see it for myself, instead of at second hand in books. This was an opportunity and I was excited about it and glad. The kitchen was not clean, but it was a sociable place, and the family were kind and full of good will. There were three little children, a young girl, father, mother, grandparents, some dogs, and a plurality of cats. There was no discord; perfect harmony prevailed. Our table was placed on the lawn on the river bank. One had no right to expect any finer style here than he would find in the cheapest and shabbiest little tavern in America, for the Hôtel du Rhône Moine was for foot wanderers and laborers on the flatboats that convey stone and sand and wood to Lyons, yet the style was superior–very much so. The tablecloth was white, and it and the table furniture were perfectly clean. We had a fish of a pretty coarse grain, but it was fresh from the river and hot from the pan; the bread was good, there was abundance of excellent butter, the milk was rich and pure, the sugar was white, the coffee was considerably better than that which is furnished by the choice hotels of the capitals of the Continent. Thus far, peasant life was a disappointment, it was so much better than anything we were used to at home in some respects. Two of the dogs came out, presently, and…

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Excerpt #10, from The Reign of Greed, by José Rizal

…the least thought of honor or the faintest twinge of shame. When the former owner returned and learned what had happened, when he saw his fields in another’s possession,–those fields that had cost the lives of his wife and daughter,–when he saw his father dumb and his daughter working as a servant, and when he himself received an order from the town council, transmitted through the headman of the village, to move out of the house within three days, he said nothing; he sat down at his father’s side and spoke scarcely once during the whole day. CHAPTER X WEALTH AND WANT On the following day, to the great surprise of the village, the jeweler Simoun, followed by two servants, each carrying a canvas-covered chest, requested the hospitality of Cabesang Tales, who even in the midst of his wretchedness did not forget the good Filipino customs–rather, he was troubled to think that he had no way of properly entertaining the stranger. But Simoun brought everything with him, servants and provisions, and merely wished to spend the day and night in the house because it was the largest in the village and was situated between San Diego and Tiani, towns where he hoped to find many customers. Simoun secured information about the condition of the roads and asked Cabesang Tales if his revolver was a sufficient protection against…

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Excerpt #11, from Behind the Beyond, and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge, by Stephen Leacock

…Then they began pumping in gas. The sensation of this part of it I cannot, unfortunately, recall. It happened that just as they began to administer the gas, I fell asleep. I don’t quite know why. Perhaps I was overtired. Perhaps it was the simple home charm of the surroundings, the soft drowsy hum of the gas pump, the twittering of the dentists in the trees–did I say the trees? No; of course they weren’t in the trees–imagine dentists in the trees–ha! ha! Here, take off this gaspipe from my face till I laugh–really I just want to laugh–only to laugh—- Well,–that’s what it felt like. Meanwhile they were operating. [Illustration: I did go . . . I kept the appointment.] Of course I didn’t feel it. All I felt was that someone dealt me a powerful blow in the face with a sledgehammer. After that somebody took a pickax and cracked in my jaw with it. That was all. It was a mere nothing. I felt at the time that a man who objects to a few taps on the face with a pickax is overcritical. I didn’t happen to wake up till they had practically finished. So I really missed the whole thing. The assistants had gone, and the dentist was mixing up cement and humming airs from light opera just like old times. It made the world…

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Excerpt #12, from My Reminiscences, by Rabindranath Tagore

…employ an epic to teach language is like using a sword to shave with–sad for the sword, bad for the chin. A poem should be taught from the emotional standpoint; inveigling it into service as grammar-cum-dictionary is not calculated to propitiate the divine Saraswati. All of a sudden our Normal School career came to an end; and thereby hangs a tale. One of our school teachers wanted to borrow a copy of my grandfather’s life by Mitra from our library. My nephew and classmate Satya managed to screw up courage enough to volunteer to mention this to my father. He came to the conclusion that everyday Bengali would hardly do to approach him with. So he concocted and delivered himself of an archaic phrase with such meticulous precision that my father must have felt our study of the Bengali language had gone a bit too far and was in danger of over-reaching itself. So the next morning, when according to our wont our table had been placed in the south verandah, the blackboard hung up on a nail in the wall, and everything was in readiness for our lessons with Nilkamal Babu, we three were sent for by my father to his room upstairs. “You need not do any more Bengali lessons,” he said. Our minds danced for very joy. Nilkamal Babu was waiting downstairs, our books were lying open on the table, and the idea of getting us once more to go through the…

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