"Great circle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hastening on us with a mad rush. It started three or four hundred meters off on our right. There is a lightning flash and we see the torpedo cross our bows, too low, fortunately. A submarine has tried to attack us but has missed. We describe a great circle in order to avoid a second attack. Fortunately night falls to end the chase, and we make for the Italian coast. Although the sea is smooth, the third boat is lurching terribly. About midnight I hear terrible cries from this boat. It is dark as pitch and impossible to make out anything ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... carefully marked the course, according to the custom of skippers and mariners, and moreover I took the sun's altitude several times with a quadrant and other instruments, and in agreement with Alfragan I found that each degree [i. e. of longitude, measured on a great circle] answers to 56-2/3 miles. So that one may rely upon this measure. We may therefore say that the equatorial circumference of the earth is 20,400 miles. A similar result was obtained by Master Joseph, the physicist [or, perhaps, physician] and astronomer, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... dog-watch every night. We were a long way south; I cannot remember the exact latitude, but I know it was drawing close upon sixty degrees. There was a talk in the midshipmen's berth amongst us that the captain was trying his hand at the great Circle course, but none of us knew much about it down in that gloomy, 'tween-decks, slush-flavoured cavern in which we youngsters lived. I was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little bit of a midshipman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred and terror of the ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... could she sit where the dead savage's body, still festering in the sun, attracted the buzzing blue flies by thousands, to drink up the blood that lay thick on the earth in a pool around it. Hard by, the natives sat, keen as lynxes, in a great circle just outside the white taboo-line, where, with serried spears, they kept watch and ward over the persons of their doubtful gods or victims. M. Peyron, alone preserving his equanimity under these adverse circumstances, hummed low to himself in very ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... one of the leading members of the great circle of Russian writers who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, gathered around the Sovremmenik (Contemporary) under Nekrasov's editorship—a circle including Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Byelinsky, and Herzen. He had not the marked genius of the first ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
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