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Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition 46 0 Browse Search
Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight) 4 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight). You can also browse the collection for Urba (Switzerland) or search for Urba (Switzerland) in all documents.

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Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight), D. (search)
s. The lake of Joux is supplied from the river Orbe in the Jura and the lake of Rousses, and has no visible outlet. It, however, maintains about an even level, and has evidently, as observed by Saussure, subterranean issues by which the waters are engulfed and disappear. The inhabitants of this valley keep up their absorbing-wells with care, and open new ones 15 to 20 feet in depth whenever the surface water appears to be too slowly carried off. The waters reappear in a large spring called Orbe, two miles below the southern extremity of the lake, issuing at a point 680 feet below the level of the surface of the lake. A potato-starch manufactory at Villetaneuse, three miles from St. Denis, France, is rid of 16,000 gallons of fetid waste water per day, with what effect upon neighboring or distant wells or springs does not appear. The town of Alexandria, Virginia, is situated upon an impervious clay of from 10 to 15 feet thickness, and a common mode of house and closet drainage is
Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight), M. (search)
oon be seen; and thus the mariner is guided on his way. The Italian Riccioli, in his work upon Geography and Hydrography, states that before 1270 the French mariners used a magnetized needle, which they kept floating in a small vessel of water supported on two tubes so as not to sink. The magnetic needle is mentioned by Peter Adsiger in a Latin essay in 1269, in which the south pole is said to vary a little to the west; and by Raymond Lully of Majorca, in his Fenix de las Maravillas del Orbe, published in 1286. A passage in the Spanish Leyes de las Partidas of the middle of the thirteenth century runs as follows: The needle which guides the mariner in the dark night, and shows him how to direct his course both in good and bad weather, is the intermediary between the loadstone and the North Star. Dante, about 1300, refers to the needle which points to the star. Marco Polo, the great traveler, was in the service of Kublai Khan, the conqueror of China, from 1274 to 1291, an