"Precession" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to announce to us the completion of his Essay on the Pericyclical Motions of the Earth's Axis, and the precession of the equinoctial points. If an old Roman of the period of the Republic had returned to life, and talked of the impending election of some laurel-crowned consul, or of the last battle with Mithridates, his ideas would not have been more ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... first at the astronomical attributes of this once molten globe. From its rotation there result the oblateness of its form, the alternations of day and night, and (under the influence of the moon) the tides, aqueous and atmospheric. From the inclination of its axis, there result the precession of the equinoxes and the many differences of the seasons, both simultaneous and successive, that pervade its surface. Thus the multiplication of effects is obvious. Several of the differentiations due to the gradual cooling of the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... so that after the lapse of becoming periods the original state of things is restored. Such periodic phenomena abound in astronomy. There is the annual fluctuation of the seasons; there is the eighteen or nineteen year period of the moon; there is the great period of the precession of the equinoxes, amounting to twenty-six thousand years; and then there is the stupendous Annus Magnus of hundreds of thousands of years, during which the earth's orbit itself breathes in and out in response to the attraction of the planets. But these ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... concerning the Origin of the Constellations and Origin of all Worship, has assigned many plausible reasons to prove that Libra was formerly the sign of the vernal, and Aries of the autumnal equinox; that is, that since the origin of the actual astronomical system, the precession of the equinoxes has carried forward by seven signs the primitive order of the zodiac. Now estimating the precession at about seventy years and a half to a degree, that is, 2,115 years to each sign; and observing that Aries was in its fifteenth degree, 1,447 years before Christ, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... of this song is played annually at the precession of the Gardeners: the title only is old; the rest is the work of Burns. Every trade had, in other days, an air of its own, and songs to correspond; but toil and sweat came in harder measures, and drove melodies out of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... secondly, it has served as a basis of subsequent star-catalogues.[1] The Ptolemaic catalogue embraces only those stars which were visible at Rhodes in the time of Hipparchus (c. 150 B.C.), the results being corrected for precession "by increasing the longitudes by 2 deg. 40', and leaving the latitudes undisturbed" (Francis Baily, Mem. R.A.S., 1843). The names and orientation of the constellations therein adopted are, with but few exceptions, identical with those used at the present day; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various |
