Various

“ The 18th century, however, may be called emphatically the age of caricature. The spirit is evident in letters as in art; in the fierce grotesques of Swift, in the coarser charges of Smollett, in the keen ironies of Henry Fielding, in the Aristophanic tendency of Foote’s farces, no less than in the masterly moralities of Hogarth and the truculent satires of Gillray. ”

“ During the middle ages a vast mass of grotesque material was accumulated, but selection becomes even more difficult than with the scarce relics of antiquity. With the building of the cathedrals originated a new style of art; a strange mixture of memories of paganism and Christian imaginings was called into being for the adornment of those great strongholds of urban Catholicism, and in this the coarse and brutal materialism of the popular humour found its largest and freest expression. ”

“ This quality, apparent enough in the beginnings of capital, applies equally to all its forms and stages; because whether a capitalist stocks his warehouse with goods and produce, improves land, lends on mortgage or other security, builds a factory, opens a mine, or orders the construction of machines or ships, there is the element of self-deprival for the present, with the risk of ultimate loss of what is his own, and what, instead of saving and embodying income productive form, he might choose to consume. ”

“ Thus while Keene takes things dispassionately as they come, seeing only the humorous side of them, we find Du Maurier ever and anon attacking some new phase of snobbishness or philistinism or cant. For all his kindliness in depicting congenial scenes, he is at times as unrelenting a satirist as Rowlandson. The other Punch artists, whose work is in the same field, resemble Keene in this respect rather than Du Maurier. Mr Leonard Raven-Hill recalls Charles Keene not merely in temperament but in technique; like Keene, too, he finds his subjects principally in bourgeois life. ”

“ In distinction from the earlier period, the modern school of American caricature is strongly national, not only in subject, but in origin, training and in mental attitude, exception being made of a few notable figures, such as Michael Angelo Woolf, born in England, and of a somewhat Cruikshankian technique. He came to America while young, and contributed a long series of what may be called slum-fantasies, instinct alike with laughter and sorrow, at times strangely combining extravagant melodrama with a most plausible and convincing impossibility. ”

“ The same substance may be able to exist in two different states at the same temperature and pressure, as when water and its saturated vapour are contained in the same vessel. The conditions under which the thermal and mechanical equilibrium of two fluids, two mixtures, or the same substance in two physical states in contact with each other, is possible belong to thermodynamics. All that we have to observe at present is that, in the cases in which the fluids do not mix of themselves, the potential energy of the system must be greater when the fluids are mixed than when they are separate. ”

“ If the tension of the surface between the solid and one of the fluids exceeds the sum of the other two tensions, the point of contact will not be in equilibrium, but will be dragged towards the side on which the tension is greatest. If the quantity of the first fluid is small it will stand in a drop on the surface of the solid without wetting it. If the quantity of the second fluid is small it will spread itself over the surface and wet the solid. The angle of contact of the first fluid is 180° and that of the second is zero. ”

“ For any given liquid surface, as the surface which separates water from air, or oil from water, the surface-tension is the same at every point of the surface and in every direction. It is also practically independent of the curvature of the surface, although it appears from the mathematical theory that there is a slight increase of tension where the mean curvature of the surface is concave, and a slight diminution where it is convex. ”

“ It is that portion of the annual produce reserved from consumption to supply future wants, to extend the sphere of production, to improve industrial instruments and processes, to carry out works of public utility, and, in short, to secure and enlarge the various means of progress necessary to an increasing community. It is the increment of wealth or means of subsistence analogous to the increment of population and of the wants of civilized man. Hence J.S. Mill and other economists, when seeking a graphic expression of the service of capital, have called it “abstinence.” ”

“ Patriotism, the grandeur of work, the soul-satisfying power of justice, are the poet’s dominant ideals. For many years the national struggle for liberty had forced the best there was in heart and brain into the atmosphere of political intrigue and from one battlefield to another ”

“ In many experiments bodies are floated on the surface of water in order that they may be free to move under the action of slight horizontal forces. Thus Sir Isaac Newton placed a magnet in a floating vessel and a piece of iron in another in order to observe their mutual action, and A.M. Ampère floated a voltaic battery with a coil of wire in its circuit in order to observe the effects of the earth’s magnetism on the electric circuit. When such floating bodies come near the edge of the vessel they are drawn up to it, and are apt to stick fast to it. ”

“ To any advance in the arts of industry or the comforts of life, a rate of production exceeding the rate of consumption, with consequent accumulation of resources, or in other words, the formation of capital, is indispensable. ”

“ If the electromotive force is from the acid to the mercury the surface-tension increases; if it is from the mercury to the acid, it diminishes. Faraday observed that a large drop of mercury, resting on the flat bottom of a vessel containing dilute acid, changes its form in a remarkable way when connected with one of the electrodes of a battery, the other electrode being placed in the acid. When the mercury 267 is made positive it becomes dull and spreads itself out; when it is made negative it gathers itself together and becomes bright again. ”

“ The punishment is probably retained, partly from ingrained habit, partly from a sense of its appropriateness for certain crimes, but also that the ultima ratio may be available in cases of sufficient gravity to the commonweal. The apparent discrepancy between the number of trials and convictions for murder is not in England any evidence of hostility on the part of juries to capital punishment, which has on the whole lessened rather than increased since the middle of the 19th century. ”

“ He is, however, a jester primarily: an artist, too, of high achievement. Two others stand out as masters of the art of social caricature—Frederick Barnard and Mr J.F. Sullivan. Barnard’s illustrations to Dickens, like his original sketches, have a lively humour—the humour of irrepressible high spirits—and endless invention. High spirits and invention are characteristics also of Mr Sullivan. It is at the British artisan and petty tradesman—at the grocer given to adulteration and the plumber who outstays his welcome—that he aims his most boisterous fun. ”

“ Cultivation does not in fact, as that theory supposes, begin with the best, and move downwards to the poorer soils in the order of their inferiority. The light and dry higher lands are first cultivated; and only when population has become dense and capital has accumulated, are the low-lying lands, with their greater fertility, but also with their morasses, inundations, and miasmas, attacked and brought into occupation. Rent, regarded as a proportion of the produce, sinks, like all interest on capital, in process of time, but, as an absolute amount, increases. ”

“ But in spite of these evidences of Greek and Roman humour, in spite of the famous comic statuette of Caracalla, and of the more famous graffito of the Crucifixion, the caricaturists of the old world must be sought for, not among its painters and sculptors, but among its poets and dramatists. The comedies of Aristophanes and the epigrams of Martial were, to the Athens of Pericles and the Rome of Domitian, what the etchings of Gillray and the lithographs of Daumier were to the London of George III. and the Paris of the Citizen King. ”

“ The idea of surface-tension introduced by Segner had a most important effect on the subsequent development of the theory. We may regard it as a physical fact established by experiment in the same way as the laws of the elasticity of solid bodies. We may investigate the forces which act between finite portions of a liquid in the same way as we investigate the forces which act between finite portions of a solid. The experiments on solids lead to certain laws of elasticity expressed in terms of coefficients, the values of which can be determined only by experiments on each particular substance. ”

“ The equilibrium of C is therefore stable. It is easy to show that if C had been placed in any other position than the middle, its equilibrium would have been stable. Hence the film is stable as regards longitudinal displacements. It is also stable as regards displacements transverse to the axis, for the film is in a state of tension, and any lateral displacement of its middle parts would produce a resultant force tending to restore the film to its original position. Hence if the length of the cylindric film is less than its circumference, it is in stable equilibrium. ”

“ The time of vibration is of course itself a function of the nature of the fluid and of the size of the drop. By the method of dimensions alone it may be seen that the time of infinitely small vibrations varies directly as the square root of the mass of the sphere and inversely as the square root of the capillary tension; and it may be proved that its expression is
V being the volume of the vibrating mass.
In consequence of the rapidity of the motion some optical device is necessary to render apparent the phenomena attending the disintegration of a jet. ”

“ Violent as the action of his figures frequently is, it is always convincing. Such triumphs as the tragedy of the kind-hearted man and the ungrateful bull-calf; the spinster’s cat that ate rat poison, and many others, force the most serious to laughter by their amazing velocity of action and their unctuousness of expression. Frost is to American caricature what “Artemus Ward” has been to American humour, and his field of publication has been chiefly the monthly magazine. ”

“ The flint arrow-heads, the stone and bronze utensils of fossiliferous origin, and the rude implements of agriculture, war and navigation, of which we read in Homer, were the forerunners of that rich and wonderful display of tools, machines, engines, furnaces and countless ingenious and costly appliances, which represent so large a portion of the capital of civilized countries, and without the pre-existing capital could not have been developed. ”

“ In like manner we may by experiment ascertain the general fact that the surface of a liquid is in a state of tension similar to that of a membrane stretched equally in all directions, and prove that this tension depends only on the nature and temperature of the liquid and not on its form, and from this as a secondary physical principle we may deduce all the phenomena of capillary action. ”

“ The primitive cultivators of the soil, whether those of ancient times or the pioneers who formed settlements in the forests of the New World, soon discovered that their labour would be rendered more effective by implements and auxiliary powers of various kinds, and that until the produce from existing means of cultivation exceeded what was necessary for their subsistence, there could be neither labour on their part to produce such implements and auxiliaries, nor means to purchase them. Every branch of industry has thus had a demand for capital within its own circles from the earliest times. ”

“ The capital of a country can scarce be said to be less than the whole sum of its investments in a productive form, and possessing a recognized productive value.
Adam Smith’s distinction of “fixed” and “circulating” capital in the Wealth of Nations (book ii. c. i.) cannot fail to be always useful in exhibiting the various forms and conditions under which capital is employed. Yet the principal phenomena of capital are found to be the same, whether the form of investment be more or less permanent or circulable. ”

“ Having applied the secondary principle of surface-tension to the various particular cases of capillary action, Young proceeded to deduce this surface-tension from ulterior principles. He supposed the particles to act on one another with two different kinds of forces, one of which, the attractive force of cohesion, extends to particles at a greater distance than those to which the repulsive force is confined. He further supposed that the attractive force is constant throughout the minute distance to which it extends, but that the repulsive force increases rapidly as the distance diminishes. ”