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 _parabola_, a conic section or curve, which is distinguished by characteristic properties, every point of it bearing a certain fixed relation to a certain point within it, as the circle does to its centre.--_Dr. Paris’s Notes to Philosophy in Sport, &c._ POWER OF COMPUTATION. The higher class of mathematicians, at the end of the seventeenth 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 Continent did not, however, keep pace with that of the same in England. In 1696, De Laguy, a well-known writer on algebra, and a member of the Academy of Sciences, said that the most skilful 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 expression” as the treating of “the assemblage of all things with which space is filled, from the remotest nebulæ 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. Physical Phenomena. ALL THE WORLD IN MOTION. Humboldt, in his _Cosmos_,[6] gives the following beautiful illustrative proofs of this phenomenon: