"Oblate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plain, our horizon is always a circle; either of which marks is incompatible with any other than a globular form. I assert further, that the earth is that particular kind of a globe which is termed an oblate spheroid; because it is found by measurement in the direction of the meridian, that the length on the surface of the earth which subtends a given angle at its centre, diminishes as we recede from the equator and approach the poles. But these propositions, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... semblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing these oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as "bull's eyes" were ruthlessly destroyed, in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvellous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... like Saturn's ring, rotating at its original speed. As we cannot suppose that the ring would usually be of uniform thickness and strength, it eventually breaks up into fragments, the larger of which attracts the smaller into itself, and the whole is formed by its revolving motion into an oblate spheroid circling round the contracted sun in the centre. In this manner, the planet Uranus was shelled off from our sun, which originally filled the whole of the vast sphere, of which the distance from Uranus to the centre of the present sun is but the radius. The planet ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... irregular shape when detached from the sun," said Scrope, "the vaporization of its surface, and, of course, of its projecting angles, together with its rotatory motion on its axis and the liquefaction of its outer envelope, would necessarily occasion its actual figure of an oblate spheroid. As the process of expansion proceeded in depth, the original granitic beds were first partially disaggregated, next disintegrated, and more or less liquefied, the crystals being merged in the elastic ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... quantity of surrounding hot vapour as its attraction would occasion to accompany it, the ponderous semi-fluid nucleus would take a spherical form from the attraction of its own parts, which would become an oblate spheroid from its diurnal revolution. As the vapour cooled the water would be precipitated, and an ocean would surround the spherical nucleus with a superincumbent atmosphere. The nucleus of solar lava would likewise become harder as it became cooler. To understand how the strata of the earth ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
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