whole structure has given way at once, like a child's bridge built of cards. It is not known at what time the arch was invented, but it was in comparatively modern times. The hint may have been taken from nature; for there are instances, in alpine countries, of natural arches, where rocks have fallen between rocks, and have there been arrested and suspended, or where burrowing water has at last formed a wide passage under masses of rock, which remain balanced, among themselves, as an arch above the stream. Nothing can surpass the strength and beauty of some modern stone bridges-those, for instance, which span the Thames as it passes through London. Iron bridges have been made with arches twice as large as those of stone, the material being more tenacious, and calculated to form a lighter whole. That of three fine arches, between the city of London and Southwark, is a noble specimen; and, compared with the bridges of half a century ago, it appears almost a fairy structure of lightness and grace. The great domes of churches, as those of St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London, have strength on the same principle as simple arches. They are, in general, strongly bound at the bottom with chains and iron bars, to counteract the horizontal thrust of the superstructure. The Gothic arch is a pointed arch, and is calculated to bear the chief weight on its summit or key-stone. Its use, therefore, is not properly to span rivers as a bridge, but to enter into the composition of varied pieces of architecture. With what effect it does this, is seen in the truly sublime Gothic structures which adorn so many parts of Europe. The following are instances, in smaller bodies, of strength obtained by the arched form: A thin watchglass bears a very hard push; a dished or arched wheel for a carriage is many times stronger to resist all kinds of shocks than a perfectly flat wheel; a full cask may fall with impunity where a strong square box would be dashed to pieces; a very thin globular flask or glass, corked and sent down many fathoms into the sea, will resist the pressure of water around it, where a square bottle, with sides of almost any thickness, would be crushed to pieces. We have an illustration, from the animal frame, of the arched form giving strength, in the cranium or skull, and particularly in the skull of man, which is the largest in proportion to its thickness: the brain required the most perfect security, and, by the arched form of the skull, this has been obtained with little weight. The 44 VOL. XIII. common egg-shell is another example of the same class: what hard blows of the spoon or knife are often required to penetrate this wonderful defence provided for the dormant life! The weakness of a similar substance, which has not the arched form, is seen in a scale from a piece of freestone, which so readily crumbles between the fingers. To determine, for particular cases, the best forms of beams and joists, and of arches, domes, &c., is the business of strict calculation, and belongs, therefore, to mathematics, or the science of measures. It was a beautiful problem of this kind, which Mr. Smeaton, the English engineer, solved so perfectly in the construction of the farfamed Eddystone light-house. (See LightHouse.) About the year STRENGTH, FEATS OF. Doctor Brewster, in his work on Natural Magic, gives some striking instances of muscular strength, and also of the effects produced by applying the principles of the mechanical powers to the human frame, from which we extract the following:-Firmus, a native of Seleucia, who was executed by the emperor Aurelian for espousing the cause of Zenobia, was celebrated for his feats of strength. In his account of the life of Firmus, who lived in the third century, Vopiscus informs us, that he could suffer iron to be forged upon an anvil placed upon his breast. In doing this, he lay upon his back, and, resting his feet and shoulders against some support, his whole body formed an arch, as we shall afterwards more particularly explain. Until the end of the sixteenth century, the exhibition of such feats does not seem to have been common. 1703, a native of Kent, of the name of Joyce, exhibited such feats of strength in London and other parts of England, that he received the name of the second Samson. His own personal strength was very great; but he had also discovered, without the aid of theory, various positions of the body, in which men even of common strength could perform very surprising feats. He drew against horses, and raised enormous weights; but as he actually exhibited his power in ways which evinced the enormous strength of his own muscles, all his feats were ascribed to the same cause. In the course of eight or ten years, however, his methods were discovered, and many individuals of ordinary strength exhibited a number of his principal performances, though in a manner greatly inferior to Joyce. Some time afterwards, John Charles van Eckeberg, a native of Harzgerode, in Anhalt, travelled through Europe, under the appellation of Samson, exhibiting very remarkable examples of his strength. This, we believe, is the same person whose feats are particularly described by doctor Desaguliers. He was a man of the middle size, and of ordinary strength; and, as doctor Desaguliers was convinced that his feats were exhibitions of skill, and not of strength, he was desirous of discovering his methods; and, with this view, he went to see him, accompanied by the marquis of Tullibardine, doctor Alexander Stuart, and doctor Pringle, and his own mechanical operator. They placed themselves round the German so as to be able to observe accurately all that he did; and their success was so great, that they were able to perform most of the feats the same evening by themselves, and almost all the rest when they had provided the proper apparatus. Doctor Desaguliers exhibited some of the experiments before the royal society, and has given such a distinct explanation of the principles on which they depend, that we shall endeavor to give a popular account of them. 1. The performer sat upon an inclined board with his feet a little higher than his hips. His feet were placed against an upright board well secured. Round his loins was placed a strong girdle with an iron ring in front. To this ring a rope was fastened. The rope passed between his legs through a hole in the upright board, against which his feet were braced, and several men or two horses, pulling on the rope, were unable to draw him out of his place. 2. He also fastened a rope to a high post, and, having passed it through an iron eye fixed in the side of the post some feet lower down, secured it to his girdle. He then planted his feet against the post near the iron eye, with his legs contracted, and, suddenly stretching out his legs, broke the rope, and fell backwards on a feather bed. 3. In imitation of Firmus, he laid himself down on the ground, and when an anvil was placed upon his breast, a man hammered with all his force a piece of iron, with a sledge-hammer, and sometimes two smiths eut in two with chisels a great cold bar of iron laid upon the anvil. At other times, a stone of huge dimensions was laid upon his belly, and broken with a blow of the great hammer. 4. The performer then placed his shoulders upon one chair, and his beels upon another, forming with his back-bone, thighs and legs, an arch. One - two men then stood upon his belly, rising up and down while the performer breathed. A stone one and a half feet long, one foot broad, and half a foot thick, was then laid upon his belly and broken by a sledge-hammer-an operation which was performed with much less danger than when his back touched the ground. 5. His next feat was to lie down on the ground. A man being then placed on his knees, he drew his heels towards his body, and, raising his knees, he lifted up the man gradually, till, having brought his knees perpendicularly under him, he raised his own body up, and, placing his arms around the man's legs, rose with him, and set him down on some low table or eminence of the same height as his knees. This feat he sometimes performed with two men in place of one. 6. In his last, and apparently most wonderful performance, he was elevated on a frame work, and supported a heavy cannon placed upon a scale at some distance below him, which was fixed to a rope attached to his girdle. Previous to the fixing of the scale to the rope attached to his girdle, the canno and scale rested upon rollers; but when al was ready, the rollers were knocked away, and the cannon remained supported by the strength of his loins. These feats may be briefly explained thus:-The feats No. 1, 2 and 6, depend entirely on the natural strength of the bones of the pelvis, which form a double arch, which it would require an immense force to break, by any external pressure directed to the centre of the arch; and as the legs and thighs are capable of sustaining four or five thousand pounds when they stand quite upright, the performer has no difficulty in resisting the force of two horses, or in sustaining the weight of a cannon weighing two or three thousand pounds. The feat of the anvil is certainly a very surprising one. The difficulty, however, really consists in sustaining the anvil; for when this is done, the effect of the hammering is nothing. If the anvil were a thin piece of iron, or even two or three times heavier than the hammer, the performer would be killed by a few blows; but the blows are scarcely felt when the anvil is very heavy, for the more matter the anvil has, the greater is its inertia. and it is the less liable to be struck out of its place; for when it has received by the blow the whole momentum of the hammer, its velocity will be so much less than that of the hammer as its quantity of matter is greater. When the blow, indeed, is struck, the man feels less of the weight of the anvil than he did be fore, because, in the reaction of the stone, all the parts of it round about the hammer rise towards the blow. This property is illustrated by the well-known experiment of laying a stick with its ends upon two drinking glasses full of water, and striking the stick downwards in the middle with an iron bar. The stick will in this case be broken without breaking the glasses or spilling the water. But if the stick is struck upwards as if to throw it up in the air, the glasses will break if the blow be strong, and if the blow is not very quick, the water will be spilt without breaking the glasses. When the performer supports a man upon his belly, he does it by means of the strong arch formed by his back-bone and the bones of his legs and thighs. If there were room for them, he could bear three or four, or, in their stead, a great stone, to be broken with one blow. A number of feats of real and extraordinary strength were exhibited about a century ago, in London, by Thomas Topham, who was five feet ten inches high, and about thirty-one years of age. He was entirely ignorant of any of the methods for making his strength appear more surprising; and he often performed by his own natural powers what he learned had been done by others by artificial means. A distressing example of this occurred in his attempt to imitate the feat of the German Samson by pulling against horses. Ignorant of the method which we have already described, he seated himself on the ground, with his feet against two stirrups, and by the weight of his body he succeeded in pulling against a single horse; but in attempting to pull against two horses, he was lifted out of his place, and one of his knees was shattered against the stirrups, so as to deprive him of most of the strength of one of his legs. The following are the feats of real strength which doctor Desaguliers saw him perform.1. Having rubbed his fingers with coal ashes to keep them from slipping, he rolled up a very strong and large pewter plate. 2. Having laid seven or eight short and strong pieces of tobacco-pipe on the first and third finger, he broke them by the force of his middle finger. 3. He broke the bowl of a strong tobaccopipe, placed between his first and third finger, by pressing his fingers together sideways. 4. Having thrust such another bowl under his garter, his legs being bent, he broke it to pieces by the tendons of his hams, without altering the bending of his leg. 5. He lifted with his teeth, and held in a horizontal position for a considerable time, a table six feet long, with half a hundred weight hanging at the end of it. The feet of the table rested against his knees. 6. Holding in his right hand an iron kitchen poker three feet long and three inches round, he struck upon his bare left arm, between the elbow and the wrist, till he bent the poker nearly to a right angle. 7. Taking a similar poker, and holding the ends of it in his hands, and the middle against the back of his neck, he brought both ends of it together before him; and he then pulled it almost straight again. This last feat was the most difficult, because the muscles which separate the arms horizontally from each other, are not so strong as those which bring them together. 8. He broke a rope about two inches in circumference, which was partly wound about a cylinder four inches in diameter, having fastened the other end of it to straps that went over his shoulder. 9. Doctor Desaguliers saw him lift a rolling stone of about 800 pounds weight with his hands only, standing in a frame above it, and taking hold of a frame fastened to it. Hence doctor Desaguliers gives the following relative view of the strengths of individuals. Strength of the weakest men, 125 lbs. The weight of Topham was about 200 lbs. One of the most remarkable and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame, is that in which a heavy man is raised with the greatest facility, when he is lifted up the instant that his own lungs and those of the persons who raise him are inflated with air. The heaviest person in the party lies down upon two chairs, his legs being supported by the one and his back by the other. Four persons, one at each leg, and one at each shoulder, then try to raise him; and they find his dead weight to be very great, from the difficulty they experience in supporting him. When he is replaced in the chair, each of the four persons takes hold of the body as before, and the person to be lifted gives two signals by clapping his hands. At the first signal, he himself and the four lifters begin to draw a long and full breath; and when the inhalation is completed, or the lungs filled, the second signal is given for raising the person from the chair. To his own surprise and that of his bearers, he rises with the greatest facility, as if he were no heavier than a feather. When one of the bearers performs his part ill, by making the inhalation out of time, the part of the body which he tries to raise is left, as it were, behind. Among the remarkable exhibitions of mechanical strength and dexterity, we may enumerate that of supporting pyramids of men. This exhibition is a very ancient one. It is described, though not very clearly, by the Roman poet Claudian; and it has derived some importance in modern times, in consequence of its having been performed in various parts of Great Britain by the celebrated traveller Belzoni, before he entered upon the more estimable career of an explorer of Egyptian antiquities. The simplest form of this feat consists in placing a number of men upon each other's shoulders, so that each row consists of a man fewer, till they form a pyramid terminating in a single person, upon whose head a boy is sometimes placed with his feet upwards. STRIPED SNAKE. (See Serpent.) TERGOUW. (See Gouda.) THORN, EGYPTIAN. (See Acacia.) THUG. (See Phansygurs, in this Appendix.) TIERRA DEL FUEGO. (See Terra del Fuego.) TIN GLASS. (See Bismuth.) TUMBLE BUG. (See Beetle.) U. ANS. (See Ulans.) WAHOO. (See Elm.) WAKEFIELD, Priscilla, died in August, WEATHERCOCK. (See Vane.) WHARRA-TREE. (See Screw-Pine.) WHISPERING GALLERIES. In whispering galleries, or places where the lowest whispers are carried to distances at which the direct sound is inaudible, the sound may be conveyed in two ways, either by repeated reflections from a curved surtace in the direction of the sides of a polygon inscribed in a circle, or where the wa perer is in the focus of one reflecting surface, and the hearer in the focus of another reflecting surface, which is placed so as to receive the reflected sounds. The first of these ways is exemplified in the whispering gallery of St. Paul's, and in the octagonal gallery of Gloucester cathedral, which conveys a whisper seventy-five feet across the nave, and the second in the baptistery of a church in Pisa, wherr the architect Giovanni Pisano is said to have constructed the cupola on purpose. The cupola has an elliptical form; and when a person whispers in one focus, it is distinctly heard by the person placed in the other focus, but not by those who are placed between them. The sound first reflected passes across the cupola, and enters the ears of the intermediate persons; but it is too feeble to be heard, till it has been condensed by a second reflection to the other focus of the ellipse. A naval officer, who travelled through Sicily in the year 1824, gives an account of a powerful whispering place in the cathedral of Girgenti, where the slightest whisper is carried, with perfect distinctness, through a distance of 250 feet, from the great western door to the cornice behind the high altar. By an unfortunate coincidence, the focus of one of the reflecting surfaces was chosen for the place of the confessional; and, when this was accidentally discovered, the lovers of secrets resorted to the other focus, and thus became acquainted with confessions of the gravest import. This divulgence of scandal continued for a considerable time, till the eager curiosity of one of the dilettanti was punished by hearing his wife's avowal of her own infidelity. This circumstance gave publicity to the whispering peculiarity of the cathedral; and the confessional was removed to a place of greater secrecy. (See Brewster's Natural Magic.) WHITEBACKS. (See Duck.) WHITEWOOD. (See Tulip-Tree.) WILD BOAR. (See Hog.) WILMOT,John. (See Rochester, Earl of.) WINDHAM, William, a senator and statesman of some eminence, was the son of colonel Windham, of Felbrigge, in Norfolk. He was born in London, in 1750, and educated at Eton, whence he was removed first to the university of Glasgow, and subsequently to University college, Oxford. He entered parliament in 1782, as member for Norwich, at which time he was secretary to the earl of Northington, lord-lieutenant of Ireland. He sided with the opposition, until the celebrated secession from the whig party in 1793, when he followed the lead of Mr. Burke, and was appointed secretary at war, with a seat in the cabinet. This office he retained until the resignation of Mr. Pitt, in 1801, and distinguished himself by his opposition to the ephemeral treaty of Amiens. On Mr. Addington's being driven from the helm, in 1805, a new administration was again formed by Mr. Pitt, which was terminated by his death in 1806, when lord Grenville, in conjunction with Mr. Fox, made up the administration well known by the designation of "all the talents." In this short-lived cabinet Mr. Windham held the post of secretary of war and colonies, in which capacity he carried into a law his bill for limited service in the regular army. His death took place in 1810, in consequence of a contusion of the hip, produced by a fall. The eloquence of Mr. Windham was forcible, pointed, and peculiar, and he produced considerable impression, both as an orator and a statesman, although, perhaps, rather by the honest ardency of many of his strong opinions, than by their political or philosophical accuracy. He was a sound scholar, and highly esteemed in private life. WINNEBAGOES. (See Indians, Ameri can.) WITHERITE. (See Barytes.) WITHERSPOON, John, is at the end of this Appendix. WOODBINE. (See Honeysuckle.) WOODCHUCK. (See Marmot.) WORCESTER; capital of Worcester county, Massachusetts, 40 miles northnorth-west of Providence, 40 west by south of Boston, 420 from Washington; population in 1830, 4271; valuation, $2,357,896. It is a neat and flourishing town, with considerable trade and manufactures. Among the public buildings are a court-house, jail, county penitentiary, lunatic hospital, town-hall, four meeting-houses, three for Congregationalists and one for Baptists. There are three printing-offices, from which four newspapers are issued weekly. The American antiquarian society, founded and endowed by the late Isaiah Thomas, LL. D., have a handsome hall, a valuable cabinet, and a library of about 8000 volumes, containing many ancient and rare books and works on American history, to which strangers are freely admitted. The Blackstone canal extends from Worcester along the valley of the Blackstone river, forty-five miles, to Providence. A rail-road from Boston to Worcester has been commenced. The town, called Quinsigamond by the natives, was granted, in 1668, to major-general Daniel Gookin and others. The first planting was begun in 1674. The inhabitants having been twice driven away by the Indian wars, the third and permanent settlement was commenced in 1713. The town was incorporated in 1722, and on the erection of Worcester county, in 1732, became the capital. Wou-wou. (See Ape.) |