Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta
General
Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta
Literary curiosa; Literature -- Dictionaries
In the Manfroni Palace at Venice is a square room about twenty-five feet
high, with a concave roof, in which a person standing in the centre, and
stamping gently with his foot on the floor, hears the sound repeated a
great many times; but as his position deviates from the centre, the
reflected sounds grow fainter, and at a short distance wholly cease. The
same phenomenon occurs in the large room of the Library of the Museum at
Naples.
EXTRAORDINARY FACTS IN ACOUSTICS.
An intelligent and very respectable gentleman, named Ebenezer Snell, who
is still living, at the age of eighty and upwards, was in a corn-field
with a negro on the 17th of June, 1776, in the township of Cummington,
Mass., one hundred and twenty-nine miles west of Bunker Hill by the
course of the road, and at least one hundred by an air-line. Some time
during the day, the negro was lying on the ground, and remarked to
Ebenezer that there was war somewhere, for he could distinctly hear the
cannonading. Ebenezer put his ear to the ground, and also heard the
firing distinctly, and for a considerable time. He remembers the fact,
which made a deep impression on his mind, as plainly as though it was
yesterday.
Over water, or a surface of ice, sound is propagated with remarkable
clearness and strength. Dr. Hutton relates that, on a quiet part of the
Thames near Chelsea, he could hear a person read distinctly at the
distance of one hundred and forty feet, while on the land the same could
only be heard at seventy-six. Lieut. Foster, in the third Polar
expedition of Capt. Parry, found that he could hold conversation with a
man across the harbor of Port Bowen, a distance of six thousand six
hundred and ninety-six feet, or about a mile and a quarter. This,
however, falls short of what is asserted by Derham and Dr. Young,—viz.,
that at Gibraltar the human voice has been heard at the distance of ten
miles, the distance across the strait.
Dr. Hearn, a Swedish physician, relates that he heard guns fired at
Stockholm, on the occasion of the death of one of the royal family, in
1685, at the distance of thirty Swedish or one hundred and eighty
British miles.
The cannonade of a sea-fight between the English and Dutch, in 1672, was
heard across England as far as Shrewsbury, and even in Wales, a distance
of upwards of two hundred miles from the scene of action.
Puzzles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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