Their wings, all glorious to behold!
Bedeck’d with azure, jet, and gold,
Wide they display: the spangled dew
Reflects their eyes and various hue.
Gay.
The most perfect works of art betray a meanness, a poverty, an inability in the workman; but the works of nature plainly prove, that “the hand which formed them was divine.”
Amusing Experiments with the Thermometer.
A thermometer is amusing in a room, to enable us to know with accuracy the real degree of heat, as our own feelings are so very deceptive. According to their state of health at the time, different persons will give a different judgment on the subject. After hot weather, a day which is not very cold, will yet feel so to us, and after cold weather we shall be ready to think a day warm, which is not so severe as the preceding. In winter, a thermometer in a sitting-room enables us to regulate its heat. Too great warmth produced by a fire is injurious to health, as it relaxes the strength, and consumes the pure oxygenous air, so necessary for respiration.
Experiments will shew how differently the feelings of different individuals may be affected by the same degree of heat.
Let one person go out into the cold air in winter for a few minutes, and let another sit by a warm fire; then introduce both into a room without a fire: the person from the cold will feel it warm, and the other will feel it cold.
A much more entertaining experiment will shew, that what will be cold to the one hand, will be warm to the other. Pour warm water into one basin, cold water into a second, and a mixture of hot and cold water into a third; then put the one hand into the cold water, and the other into the warm, for two minutes, and after that put both hands into the lukewarm water, and to the one hand it will feel cold, and to the other hot.
The Barometer.
Rules for judging of and predicting the State of the Weather by the Barometer.
The rising of the mercury presages, in general, fair weather, and its falling, foul weather, as rain, snow, high winds, and storms.