Coleridge, ed. Turnbull - "Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1."

William Shakespeare - "Der Erste Theil von Koenig Heinrich dem vierten"

Pierre Louys - "Les chansons de Bilitis"

Marcus Tullius Cicero - "Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. "

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Botanic Garden

E >> Erasmus Darwin >> The Botanic Garden




He next applied a pump to extract the injection water, the condensed
steam, and the air, from the condensing vessel, every stroke of the
engine.

To prevent the cooling of the cylinder by the contact of the external
air, he surrounded it with a case containing steam, which he again
protected by a covering of matters which conduct heat slowly.

This construction presented an easy means of regulating the power of the
engine, for the steam being the acting power, as the pipe which admits
it from the boiler is more or less opened, a greater or smaller quantity
can enter during the time of a stroke, and consequently the engine can
act with exactly the necessary degree of energy.

Mr. Watt gained a patent for his engine in 1768, but the further
persecution of his designs were delayed by other avocations till 1775,
when in conjunction with Mr. Boulton of Soho near Birmingham, numerous
experiments were made on a large scale by their united ingenuity, and
great improvements added to the machinery, and an act of parliament
obtained for the prolongation of their patent for twenty-five years,
they have since that time drained many of the deep mines in Cornwall,
which but for the happy union of such genius must immediately have
ceased to work. One of these engines works a pump of eighteen inches
diameter, and upwards of 100 fathom or 600 feet high, at the rate of ten
to twelve strokes of seven feet long each, in a minute, and that with
one fifth part of the coals which a common engine would have taken to do
the same work. The power of this engine may be easier comprehended by
saying that it raised a weight equal to 81000 pounds 80 feet high in a
minute, which is equal to the combined action of 200 good horses. In
Newcomen's engine this would have required a cylinder of the enormous
diameter of 120 inches or ten feet, but as in this engine of Mr. Watt
and Mr. Boulton the steam acts, and a vacuum is made, alternately above
and below the piston, the power exerted is double to what the same
cylinder would otherways produce, and is further augmented by an
inequality in the length of the two ends of the lever.

These gentlemen have also by other contrivances applied their engines to
the turning of mills for almost every purpose, of which that great pile
of machinery the Albion Mill is a well known instance. Forges, slitting
mills, and other great works are erected where nature has furnished no
running water, and future times may boast that this grand and useful
engine was invented and perfected in our own country.

Since the above article went to the press the Albion Mill is no more; it
is supposed to have been set on fire by interested or malicious
incendaries, and is burnt to the ground. Whence London has lost the
credit and the advantage of possessing the most powerful machine in the
world!




NOTE XII.--FROST.


_In phalanx firm the fiend of Frost assail._

CANTO I. l. 439.


The cause of the expansion of water during its conversion into ice is
not yet well ascertained, it was supposed to have been owing to the air
being set at liberty in the act of congelation which was before
dissolved in the water, and the many air bubbles in ice were thought to
countenance this opinion. But the great force with which ice expands
during its congelation, so as to burst iron bombs and coehorns,
according to the experiments of Major Williams at Quebec, invalidates
this idea of the cause of it, and may sometime be brought into use as a
means of breaking rocks in mining, or projecting cannon-balls, or for
other mechanical purposes, if the means of producing congelation should
ever be discovered to be as easy as the means of producing combustion.

Mr. de Mairan attributes the increase of bulk of frozen water to the
different arrangement of the particles of it in crystallization, as they
are constantly joined at an angle of 60 degrees; and must by this
disposition he thinks occupy a greater volume than if they were
parallel. He found the augmentation of the water during freezing to
amount to one-fourteenth, one-eighteenth, one-nineteenth, and when the
water was previously purged of air to only one-twenty-second part. He
adds that a piece of ice, which was at first only one-fourteenth part
specifically lighter than water, on being exposed some days to the frost
became one-twelfth lighter than water. Hence he thinks ice by being
exposed to greater cold still increases in volume, and to this
attributes the bursting of ice in ponds and on the glaciers. See Lewis's
Commerce of Arts, p. 257. and the note on Muschus in the other volume of
this work.

This expansion of ice well accounts for the greater mischief done by
vernal frosts attended with moisture, (as by hoar-frosts,) than by the
dry frosts called black frosts. Mr. Lawrence in a letter to Mr. Bradley
complains that the dale-mist attended with a frost on may-day had
destroyed all his tender fruits; though there was a sharper frost the
night before without a mist, that did him no injury; and adds, that a
garden not a stone's throw from his own on a higher situation, being
above the dale-mist, had received no damage. Bradley, Vol. II. p. 232.

Mr. Hunter by very curious experiments discovered that the living
principle in fish, in vegetables, and even in eggs and seeds, possesses
a power of resisting congelation. Phil. Trans. There can be no doubt but
that the exertions of animals to avoid the pain of cold may produce in
them a greater quantity of heat, at least for a time, but that
vegetables, eggs, or seeds, should possess such a quality is truly
wonderful. Others have imagined that animals possess a power of
preventing themselves from becoming much warmer than 98 degrees of heat,
when immersed in an atmosphere above that degree of heat. It is true
that the increased exhalation from their bodies will in some measure
cool them, as much heat is carried off by the evaporation of fluids, but
this is a chemical not an animal process. The experiments made by those
who continued many minutes in the air of a room heated so much above any
natural atmospheric heat, do not seem conclusive, as they remained in it
a less time than would have been necessary to have heated a mass of beef
of the same magnitude, and the circulation of the blood in living
animals, by perpetually bringing new supplies of fluid to the skin,
would prevent the external surface from becoming hot much sooner than
the whole mass. And thirdly, there appears no power of animal bodies to
produce cold in diseases, as in scarlet fever, in which the increased
action of the vessels of the skin produces heat and contributes to
exhaust the animal power already too much weakened.

It has been thought by many that frosts meliorate the ground, and that
they are in general salubrious to mankind. In respect to the former it
is now well known that ice or snow contain no nitrous particles, and
though frost by enlarging the bulk of moist clay leaves it softer for a
time after the thaw, yet as soon as the water exhales, the clay becomes
as hard as before, being pressed together by the incumbent atmosphere,
and by its self-attraction, called _setting_ by the potters. Add to this
that on the coasts of Africa, where frost is unknown, the fertility of
the soil is almost beyond our conceptions of it. In respect to the
general salubrity of frosty seasons the bills of mortality are an
evidence in the negative, as in long frosts many weakly and old people
perish from debility occasioned by the cold, and many classes of birds
and other wild animals are benumbed by the cold or destroyed by the
consequent scarcity of food, and many tender vegetables perish from the
degree of cold.

I do not think it should be objected to this doctrine that there are
moist days attended with a brisk cold wind when no visible ice appears,
and which are yet more disagreeable and destructive than frosty weather.
For on these days the cold moisture, which is deposited on the skin is
there evaporated and thus produces a degree of cold perhaps greater than
the milder frosts. Whence even in such days both the disagreeable
sensations and insalubrious effects belong to the cause abovementioned,
viz. the intensity of the cold. Add to this that in these cold moist
days as we pass along or as the wind blows upon us, a new sheet of cold
water is as it were perpetually applied to us and hangs upon our bodies,
now as water is 800 times denser than air and is a much better conductor
of heat, we are starved with cold like those who go into a cold bath,
both by the great number of particles in contact with the skin and their
greater facility of receiving our heat.

It may nevertheless be true that snows of long duration in our winters
may be less injurious to vegetation than great rains and shorter frosts,
for two reasons. 1. Because great rains carry down many thousand pounds
worth of the best part of the manure off the lands into the sea, whereas
snow dissolves more gradually and thence carries away less from the
land; any one may distinguish a snow-flood from a rain-flood by the
transparency of the water. Hence hills or fields with considerable
inclination of surface should be ploughed horizontally that the furrows
may stay the water from showers till it deposits its mud. 2. Snow
protects vegetables from the severity of the frost, since it is always
in a state of thaw where it is in contact with the earth; as the earth's
heat is about 48 deg. and the heat of thawing snow is 32 deg. the vegetables
between them are kept in a degree of heat about 40, by which many of
them are preserved. See note on Muschus, Vol. II. of this work.




NOTE XIII.--ELECTRICITY


_Cold from each point cerulean lustres gleam._

CANTO I. l. 339.


ELECTRIC POINTS.

There was an idle dispute whether knobs or points were preferable on the
top of conductors for the defence of houses. The design of these
conductors is to permit the electric matter accumulated in the clouds to
pass through them into the earth in a smaller continued stream as the
cloud approaches, before it comes to what is termed striking distance;
now as it is well known that accumulated electricity will pass to points
at a much greater distance than it will to knobs there can be no doubt
of their preference; and it would seem that the finer the point and the
less liable to become rusty the better, as it would take off the
lightening while it was still at a greater distance, and by that means
preserve a greater extent of building; the very extremity of the point
should be of pure silver or gold, and might be branched into a kind of
brush, since one small point can not be supposed to receive so great a
quantity as a thicker bar might conduct into the earth.

If an insulated metallic ball is armed with a point, like a needle,
projecting from one part of it, the electric fluid will be seen in the
dark to pass off from this point, so long as the ball is kept supplied
with electricity. The reason of this is not difficult to comprehend,
every part of the electric atmosphere which surrounds the insulated ball
is attracted to that ball by a large surface of it, whereas the electric
atmosphere which is near the extremity of the needle is attracted to it
by only a single point, in consequence the particles of electric matter
near the surface of the ball approach towards it and push off by their
greater gravitation the particles of electric matter over the point of
the needle in a continued stream.

Something like this happens in respect to the diffusion of oil on water
from a pointed cork, an experiment which was many years ago shewn me by
Dr. Franklin; he cut a piece of cork about the size of a letter-wafer
and left on one edge of it a point about a sixth of an inch in length
projecting as a tangent to the circumference. This was dipped in oil and
thrown on a pond of water and continued to revolve as the oil left the
point for a great many minutes. The oil descends from the floating cork
upon the water being diffused upon it without friction and perhaps
without contact; but its going off at the point so forcibly as to make
the cork revolve in a contrary direction seems analogous to the
departure of the electric fluid from points.

Can any thing similar to either of these happen in respect to the
earth's atmosphere and give occasion to the breezes on the tops of
mountains, which may be considered as points on the earths
circumference?


FAIRY-RINGS.

There is a phenomenon supposed to be electric which is yet unaccounted
for, I mean the Fairy-rings, as they are called, so often seen on the
grass. The numerous flashes of lightning which occur every summer are, I
believe, generally discharged on the earth, and but seldom (if ever)
from one cloud to another. Moist trees are the most frequent conductors
of these flashes of lightning, and I am informed by purchasers of wood
that innumerable trees are thus cracked and injured. At other times
larger parts or prominences of clouds gradually sinking as they move
along, are discharged on the moisture parts of grassy plains. Now this
knob or corner of a cloud in being attracted by the earth will become
nearly cylindrical, as loose wool would do when drawn out into a thread,
and will strike the earth with a stream of electricity perhaps two or
ten yards in diameter. Now as a stream of electricity displaces the air
it passes through, it is plain no part of the grass can be burnt by it,
but just the external ring of this cylinder where the grass can have
access to the air, since without air nothing can be calcined. This earth
after having been so calcined becomes a richer soil, and either funguses
or a bluer grass for many years mark the place. That lightning displaces
the air in its passage is evinced by the loud crack that succeeds it,
which is owing to the sides of the aerial vacuum clapping together when
the lightning is withdrawn. That nothing will calcine without air is now
well understood from the acids produced in the burning of phlogistic
substances, and may be agreeably seen by suspending a paper on an iron
prong and putting it into the centre of the blaze of an iron-furnace; it
may be held there some seconds and may be again withdrawn without its
being burnt, if it be passed quickly into the flame and out again
through the external part of it which is in contact with the air. I know
some circles of many yards diameter of this kind near Foremark in
Derbyshire which annually produce large white funguses and stronger
grass, and have done so, I am informed, above thirty years. This
increased fertility of the ground by calcination or charring, and its
continuing to operate so many years is well worth the attention of the
farmer, and shews the use of paring and burning new turf in agriculture,
which produces its effect not so much by the ashes of the vegetable
fibres as by charring the soil which adheres to them.

These situations, whether from eminence or from moisture, which were
proper once to attract and discharge a thunder-cloud, are more liable
again to experience the same. Hence many fairy-rings are often seen near
each other either without intersecting each other, as I saw this summer
in a garden in Nottinghamshire, or intersecting each other as described
on Arthur's seat near Edinburgh in the Edinb. Trans. Vol. II. p. 3.




NOTE XIV.--BUDS AND BULBS.


_Where dwell my vegetative realms benumb'd
In buds imprison'd, or in bulbs intomb'd._

CANTO I. l. 459.


A tree is properly speaking a family or swarm of buds, each bud being an
individual plant, for if one of these buds be torn or cut out and
planted in the earth with a glass cup inverted over it to prevent its
exhalation from being at first greater than its power of absorption, it
will produce a tree similar to its parent; each bud has a leaf, which is
its lungs, appropriated to it, and the bark of the tree is a congeries
of the roots of these individual buds, whence old hollow trees are often
seen to have some branches flourish with vigour after the internal wood
is almost intirely decayed and vanished. According to this idea Linneus
has observed that trees and shrubs are roots above ground, for if a tree
be inverted leaves will grow from the root-part and roots from the
trunk-part. Phil. Bot p. 39. Hence it appears that vegetables have two
methods of propagating themselves, the oviparous as by seeds, and the
viviparous as by their buds and bulbs, and that the individual plants,
whether from seeds or buds or bulbs, are all annual productions like
many kinds of insects as the silk-worm, the parent perishing in the
autumn after having produced an embryon, which lies in a torpid state
during the winter, and is matured in the succeeding summer. Hence
Linneus names buds and bulbs the winter-cradles of the plant or
hybernacula, and might have given the same term to seeds. In warm
climates few plants produce buds, as the vegetable life can be
compleated in one summer, and hence the hybernacle is not wanted; in
cold climates also some plants do not produce buds, as philadelphus,
frangula, viburnum, ivy, heath, wood-nightshade, rue, geranium.

The bulbs of plants are another kind of winter-cradle, or hybernacle,
adhering to the descending trunk, and are found in the perennial
herbaceous plants which are too tender to bear the cold of the winter.
The production of these subterraneous winter lodges, is not yet perhaps
clearly understood, they have been distributed by Linneus according to
their forms into scaly, solid, coated, and jointed bulbs, which however
does not elucidate their manner of production. As the buds of trees may
be truly esteemed individual annual plants, their roots constituting the
bark of the tree, it follows that these roots (viz. of each individual
bud) spread themselves over the last years bark, making a new bark over
the old one, and thence descending cover with a new bark the old roots
also in the same manner. A similar circumstance I suppose to happen in
some herbaceous plants, that is, a new bark is annually produced over
the old root, and thus for some years at least the old root or caudex
increases in size and puts up new stems. As these roots increase in size
the central part I suppose changes like the internal wood of a tree and
does not possess any vegetable life, and therefore gives out no fibres
or rootlets, and hence appears bitten off, as in valerian, plantain, and
devil's-bit. And this decay of the central part of the root I suppose
has given occasion to the belief of the root-fibres drawing down the
bulb so much insisted on by Mr. Milne in his Botanical Dictionary, Art.
Bulb.

From the observations and drawings of various kinds of bulbous roots at
different times of their growth, sent me by a young lady of nice
observation, it appears probable that all bulbous roots properly so
called perish annually in this climate: Bradley, Miller, and the Author
of Spectacle de la Nature, observe that the tulip annually renews its
bulb, for the stalk of the old flower is found under the old dry coat
but on the outside of the new bulb. This large new bulb is the flowering
bulb, but besides this there are other small new bulbs produced between
the coats of this large one but from the same caudex, (or circle from
which the root-fibres spring;) these small bulbs are leaf-bearing bulbs,
and renew themselves annually with increasing size till they bear
flowers.

Miss ---- favoured me with the following curious experiment: She took a
small tulip-root out of the earth when the green leaves were
sufficiently high to show the flower, and placed it in a glass of water;
the leaves and flower soon withered and the bulb became wrinkled and
soft, but put out one small side bulb and three bulbs beneath descending
an inch into the water by long processes from the caudex, the old bulb
in some weeks intirely decayed; on dissecting this monster, the middle
descending bulb was found by its process to adhere to the caudex and to
the old flower-stem, and the side ones were separated from the flower-
stem by a few shrivelled coats but adhered to the caudex. Whence she
concludes that these last were off-sets or leaf-bulbs which should have
been seen between the coats of the new flower-bulb if it had been left
to grow in the earth, and that the middle one would have been the new
flower-bulb. In some years (perhaps in wet seasons) the florists are
said to lose many of their tulip-roots by a similar process, the new
leaf-bulbs being produced beneath the old ones by an elongation of the
caudex without any new flower-bulbs.

By repeated dissections she observes that the leaf-bulbs or off-sets of
tulip, crocus, gladiolus, fritillary, are renewed in the same manner as
the flowering-bulbs, contrary to the opinion of many writers; this new
leaf-bulb is formed on the inside of the coats from whence the leaves
grow, and is more or less advanced in size as the outer coats and leaves
are more or less shrivelled. In examining tulip, iris, hyacinth, hare-
bell, the new bulb was invariably found _between_ the flower-stem and
the base of the innermost leaf of those roots which had flowered, and
_inclosed_ by the base of the innermost leaf in those roots which had
not flowered, in both cases adhering to the caudex or fleshy circle from
which the root-fibres spring.

Hence it is probable that the bulbs of hyacinths are renewed annually,
but that this is performed from the caudex within the old bulb, the
outer coat of which does not so shrivel as in crocus and fritillary and
hence this change is not so apparent. But I believe as soon as the
flower is advanced the new bulbs may be seen on dissection, nor does the
annual increase of the size of the root of cyclamen and of aletris
capensis militate against this annual renewal of them, since the leaf-
bulbs or off-sets, as described above, are increased in size as they are
annually renewed. See note on orchis, and on anthoxanthum, in Vol. II.
of this work.




NOTE XV.--SOLAR VOLCANOS.


_From the deep craters of his realms of fire
The whirling sun this ponderous planet hurld_.

CANTO II. l. 14.


Dr. Alexander Wilson, Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow, published a
paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1774, demonstrating that the
spots in the sun's disk are real cavities, excavations through the
luminous material, which covers the other parts of the sun's surface.
One of these cavities he found to be about 4000 miles deep and many
times as wide. Some objections were made to this doctrine by M. De la
Laude in the Memoirs of the French Academy for the year 1776, which
however have been ably answered by Professor Wilson in reply in the
Philos. Trans. for 1783. Keil observes, in his Astronomical Lectures, p.
44, "We frequently see spots in the sun which are larger and broader not
only than Europe or Africa, but which even equal, if they do not exceed,
the surface of the whole terraqueous globe." Now that these cavities are
made in the sun's body by a process of nature similar to our earthquakes
does not seem improbable on several accounts. 1. Because from this
discovery of Dr. Wilson it appears that the internal parts of the sun
are not in a state of inflammation or of ejecting light, like the
external part or luminous ocean which covers it; and hence that a
greater degree of heat or inflammation and consequent expansion or
explosion may occasionally be produced in its internal or dark nucleus.
2. Because the solar spots or cavities are frequently increased or
diminished in size. 3. New ones are often produced. 4. And old ones
vanish. 5. Because there are brighter or more luminous parts of the
sun's disk, called faculae by Scheiner and Hevelius, which would seem to
be volcanos in the sun, or, as Dr. Wilson calls them, "eructations of
matter more luminous than that which covers the sun's surface." 6. To
which may be added that all the planets added together with their
satellites do not amount to more than one six hundred and fiftieth part
of the mass of the sun according to Sir Isaac Newton.

Now if it could be supposed that the planets were originally thrown out
of the sun by larger sun-quakes than those frequent ones which occasion
these spots or excavations above-mentioned, what would happen? 1.
According to the observations and opinion of Mr. Herschel the sun itself
and all its planets are moving forwards round some other centre with an
unknown velocity, which may be of opake matter corresponding with the
very antient and general idea of a chaos. Whence if a ponderous planet,
as Saturn, could be supposed to be projected from the sun by an
explosion, the motion of the sun itself might be at the same time
disturbed in such a manner as to prevent the planet from falling again
into it. 2. As the sun revolves round its own axis its form must be that
of an oblate spheroid like the earth, and therefore a body projected
from its surface perpendicularly upwards from that surface would not
rise perpendicularly from the sun's centre, unless it happened to be
projected exactly from either of its poles or from its equator. Whence
it may not be necessary that a planet if thus projected from the sun by
explosion should again fall into the sun. 3. They would part from the
sun's surface with the velocity with which that surface was moving, and
with the velocity acquired by the explosion, and would therefore move
round the sun in the same direction in which the sun rotates on its
axis, and perform eliptic orbits. 4. All the planets would move the same
way round the sun, from this first motion acquired at leaving its
surface, but their orbits would be inclined to each other according to
the distance of the part, where they were thrown out, from the sun's
equator. Hence those which were ejected near the sun's equator would
have orbits but little inclined to each other, as the primary planets;
the plain of all whose orbits are inclined but seven degrees and a half
from each other. Others which were ejected near the sun's poles would
have much more eccentric orbits, as they would partake so much less of
the sun's rotatory motion at the time they parted from his surface, and
would therefore be carried further from the sun by the velocity they had
gained by the explosion which ejected them, and become comets. 5. They
would all obey the same laws of motion in their revolutions round the
sun; this has been determined by astronomers, who have demonstrated that
they move through equal areas in equal times. 6. As their annual periods
would depend on the height they rose by the explosion, these would
differ in them all. 7. As their diurnal revolutions would depend on one
side of the exploded matter adhering more than the other at the time it
was torn off by the explosion, these would also differ in the different
planets, and not bear any proportion to their annual periods. Now as all
these circumstances coincide with the known laws of the planetary
system, they serve to strengthen this conjecture.

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