Produced by Charles Keller
A HISTORY OF SCIENCE
MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
By Henry Smith Williams, M.D., Ll.D.
Assisted By Edward H. Williams, M.D.
In Five Volumes
Volume III.
CONTENTS
BOOK III
CHAPTER I. THE SUCCESSORS OF NEWTON IN ASTRONOMY
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 observation of meteors--His inability to explain these bodies--The important work of James Bradley--Lacaille's measurement of the arc of the meridian--The determination of the question as to the exact shape of the earth--D'Alembert and his influence upon science--Delambre's History of Astronomy--The astronomical work of Euler.
CHAPTER II. THE PROGRESS OF MODERN ASTRONOMY
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 grouping of the heavenly bodies--The nebula, hypothesis,--Immanuel Kant's conception of the formation of the world--Defects in Kant's conception--Laplace's final solution of the problem--His explanation in detail--Change in the mental attitude of the world since Bruno--Asteroids and satellites--Discoveries of Olbersl--The mathematical calculations of Adams and Leverrier--The discovery of the inner ring of Saturn--Clerk Maxwell's paper on the stability of Saturn's rings--Helmholtz's conception of the action of tidal friction--Professor G. H. Darwin's estimate of the consequences of tidal action--Comets and meteors--Bredichin's cometary theory--The final solution of the structure of comets--Newcomb's estimate of the amount of cometary dust swept up daily by the earth--The fixed stars--John Herschel's studies of double stars--Fraunhofer's perfection of the refracting telescope--Bessel's measurement of the parallax of a star,--Henderson's measurements--Kirchhoff and Bunsen's perfection of the spectroscope--Wonderful revelations of the spectroscope--Lord Kelvin's estimate of the time that will be required for the earth to become completely cooled--Alvan Clark's discovery of the companion star of Sirius--The advent of the photographic film in astronomy--Dr. Huggins's studies of nebulae--Sir Norman Lockyer's "cosmogonic guess,"--Croll's pre-nebular theory.
CHAPTER III. THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: A History of Science — Volume 3 by Williams
- 2: Croll on Climate and Time Cyclones and anti cyclones
- 3: Stellar distances are measured
- 4: Was Johannes Hevelius 1611 1687
- 5: The parallaxes can be determined equally well
- 6: Wherefore the meteor seemed to move the contrary way
- 7: Might cause a libratory motion of the earth's axis
- 8: Came under the patronage of Cassini
- 9: Was Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre 1749 1822
- 10: Was on the planetary perturbations
- 11: Marshalled in galaxies of millions
- 12: Continuing his observations of the innumerable nebulae
- 13: THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS OF KANTTaken together
- 14: The scattered elements of a denser kind
- 15: Have exact movements in circular orbits
- 16: But Laplace will longer be remembered
- 17: Surrounded by a nebulosity which
- 18: The molecules farthest from the sun
- 19: When Piazzi forestalled their efforts
- 20: Leverrier sent to the Berlin observatory
- 21: And the disturbing pulls of Saturn's orthodox satellites
- 22: The outer rings pressing outward
- 23: As a polyp buds out from its parent polyp
- 24: That celestial vagabond the comet
- 25: Repelled from the cometary body by the sun
- 26: Made captive in a planetary net
- 27: Double StarsWhen John Herschel
- 28: From which the parallax might be estimated
- 29: Relative brightness becomes absolute lustre
- 30: Particularly by the studies of Rutherfurd and of Secchi
- 31: But by the curious testimony of the ubiquitous spectroscope
- 32: The linking of nebulae with stars
- 33: Is but an amplification of that nebular hypothesis which
- 34: In the person of William Smith
- 35: Preferred to believe that the fossils
- 36: In 1816 the famous Ossements Fossiles
- 37: And the largest quadruped of the West India Islands
- 38: As late as 1827 books were published denouncing Buckland
- 39: Whatever their varying phases of cosmogonic thought
- 40: This iconoclast was Charles Lyell
- 41: That the species existing at any particular period must
- 42: Whether terrestrial or aquatic
- 43: Which Lyell adopted and extended
- 44: Though not dealing primarily with paleontology
- 45: The distinguished British paleontologist
- 46: Prestwich were expressed as follows First
- 47: At Engis he had found human bones
- 48: To a paleolithic or rough stone age
- 49: These belong to the genus Orohippus Marsh
- 50: The eocene Orohippus was the size of a fox
- 51: On the evidence of paleontology
- 52: To doubt evolution today is to doubt science
- 53: This soil is being swept away by perennial showers
- 54: Hutton looks about him for a clew
- 55: In the economy of life and vegetation
- 56: Which are evidently of marine origin
- 57: Not only those consisting of such calcareous masses
- 58: From seeing revolutions of the planets
- 59: NEPTUNISTS VERSUS PLUTONISTSIn the mean time
- 60: Those of felspar and quartz first
- 61: Partially disintegrating the crystals of felspar and mica
- 62: Together with more or less of the intumescent granite
- 63: As Hutton had from the first alleged
- 64: Which Cuvier and Brongniart had observed near Paris
- 65: Charpentier laughed at the mountaineer's grotesque idea
- 66: Cannot always be distinguished from erosions
- 67: Upon which the moraines have been preserved
- 68: De Saussure speaks also of a detached bowlder
- 69: Of a chronological succession of strata
- 70: Murchison and Sedgwick's Silurian
- 71: If Devonian rocks are at the surface in any given region
- 72: We live on the border of the last glacial epoch
- 73: Like waves of the present seas vastly magnified
- 74: And hurling literal thunderbolts had real existence
- 75: As Chladni thought more probable
- 76: Who first measured the height of the aurora
- 77: Thought it due to electrified ferruginous dust
- 78: When his first volume of meteorological essays was published
- 79: Compared with the torrid region now considered
- 80: Perhaps also the diurnal propers
- 81: Is combined with particles of caloric
- 82: I laid a thermometer upon grass wet with dew
- 83: That the covered were sometimes dewed
- 84: Some compensation will be made to us
- 85: ISOTHERMS AND OCEAN CURRENTSThe very next year after Dr
- 86: But the superheated equatorial air
- 87: Is the Gulf Stream as Humboldt understood it
- 88: Dove classified the winds as permanent
- 89: In which case it is called a cyclone
- 90: The anti cyclone is of relative insignificance
- 91: By observing the snowfall in the mountains
- 92: Who championed the vibratory theory of heat
- 93: A cylindrical mercury thermometer
- 94: Being now one hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit
- 95: Had any such decomposition taken place which
- 96: Just as sound is a pulsation in the air
- 97: Or angle of refraction of the principal beam
- 98: Coventry's exquisite micrometers
- 99: Brought the doctrine to complete demonstration
- 100: And voted Fresnel into its ranks
- 101: The immediate ancestor of the modern galvanic battery
- 102: Volta himself being the chief discoverer
- 103: Platina melted as readily in it as wax in a common candle
- 104: But in that year it occurred to Jean Christian Oersted
- 105: The conductor works on the magnetic needle through glass
- 106: And thus two principal helices were produced
- 107: For on substituting a small hollow helix
- 108: Passed away to the galvanometer
- 109: In his experiments Hertz showed that
- 110: Projected from the cathode with great velocity
- 111: The interconvertibility of electricity and magnetism
- 112: Through the vista of half a century
- 113: His name was James Prescott Joule
- 114: Causes an INDESTRUCTIBLE quantitatively
- 115: The measure of the force v is mc squared
- 116: Besides causing a real cessation of motion
- 117: Motion must cease to exist as motion
- 118: Young was the friend and confrere of Davy
- 119: Two years later Joule wished to read another paper
- 120: For several years no older physicist
- 121: Of such workers as Thomson Lord Kelvin
- 122: Here and there a thinker like Rankine did
- 123: When the experiments of Heinrich Hertz
- 124: For the nineteenth century physicist
- 125: Incompressibility and elastic rigidity
- 126: It has seemed to most physicists of recent decades
- 127: Once established in a frictionless medium
- 128: What if vortex rings were started in this ether
- 129: Had been revived about a century later by William Herapath
- 130: Is about one half millionth of an inch
- 131: The molecules being widely separated
- 132: Maintaining what appears to be a gaseous
- 133: Faraday liquefied carbonic acid gas
- 134: CHAPTER III THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 1 p