10 Things not generally Known. 



truth yet laid before the world, was at its first appearance, not 

 only disbelieved, but covered with ridicule. Buckles History 

 of Civilization, vol. i. 



CONIC SECTIONS. 



If a cone or sugar-loaf be cut through in certain directions, 

 we shall obtain figures which are termed conic sections : thus, 

 if we cut through a sugar-loaf parallel to its base or bottom, 

 the outline or edge of the loaf where it is cut will be a circle. 

 If the cut is made so as to slant, and not be parallel to the base 

 of the loaf, the outline is an ellipse, provided the cut goes quite 

 through the sides of the loaf all round ; but if it goes slanting, 

 and parallel to the line of the loaf's side, the outline is a para- 

 bola, a conic section or curve, which is distinguished by charac- 

 teristic properties, every point of it bearing a certain fixed rela- 

 tion to a certain point within it, as the circle does to its centre. 

 Dr. Paris' s Notes to Philosophy in Sport, <c. 



POWEE OF COMPUTATION. 



The higher class of mathematicians, at the end of the seven- 

 teenth century, had become excellent computers, particularly 

 in England, of which Wallis, Newton, Halley, the Gregorys, and 

 De Moivre, are splendid examples. Before results of extreme 

 exactness had become quite familiar, there was a gratifying 

 sense of power in bringing out the new methods. Newton, in 

 one of his letters to Oldenburg, says that he was at one time too 

 much attached to such things, and that he should be ashamed 

 to say to what number of figures he was in the habit of carrying 

 his results. The growth of power of computation on the Conti- 

 nent did not, however, keep pace with that of the same in Eng- 

 land. In 1696, De Laguy, a well-known writer on algebra, and 

 a member of the Academy of Sciences, said that the most skil- 

 ful computer could not, in less than a month, find within a unit 

 the cube root of 696536483318640035073641037. De Morgan. 



" THE SCIENCE OF THE COSMOS." 



Humboldt characterises this " uncommon but definite ex- 

 pression" as the treating of " the assemblage of all things with 

 which space is filled, from the remotest nebulas to the climatic 

 distribution of those delicate tissues of vegetable matter which 

 spread a variegated covering over the surface of our rocks." 

 The word cosmos, which primitively, in the Homeric ages, 

 indicated an idea of order and harmony, was subsequently 

 adopted in scientific language, where it was gradually applied 

 to the order observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies ; 

 to the whole universe ; and then finally to the world in which 

 this harmony was reflected to us. 



