Volume 1

Lectures on select subjects in mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, pneumatics, optics, geography, astronomy, and dialling / By James Ferguson. With notes, and an additional volume, containing the most recent discoveries in the arts and sciences. By David Brewster.

  • Ferguson, James, 1710-1776.
Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on select subjects in mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, pneumatics, optics, geography, astronomy, and dialling / By James Ferguson. With notes, and an additional volume, containing the most recent discoveries in the arts and sciences. By David Brewster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    37/406 (page 25)
    LECTURES ON * SELECT SUBJECTS. LECTURE I. OF MATTER AND ITS PROPERTIES ties. As the design of the first part of this course is to explain and demonstrate those laws by which the material universe is go- verned, regulated, and continued; and by which the various appearances in nature are accounted for, it is requisite to begin with explaining the properties of matter. By the word matter is here meant every thing j^atter that has length, breadth, and thickness, and resists what, the touch. The inherent properties of matter are solidity, in- it3 proper- activity, mobility, and divisibility.1 The solidity of matter arises from its having length, breadth, and thickness; and hence it is that all bodies are comprehended under some shape or other, and that each particular body hinders all others from occupying the same part of space which it possesses. Thus, if a piece of wood or metal be squeezed ever so hard between two plates, they can- not be brought into contact. And even water or air has this property; for if a small quantity of either be fixed between any other bodies, they cannot be brought to touch one another. A second property of matter is inertia, inactivity, . . , 11*1*1 i Inactivity. or passiveness; by which it always endeavours to Solidity. 1 Some late writers have increased the general properties of matter to twelve, namely, extension, divisibility, figur ability, impenetrability, porosity, rarefactibility, condensibility, compressibility, elasticity, dilatibility, mobility, inactivity. It was formerly thought that fluids were incompressible, and that many bodies were not elastic. The compressibility of fluids, however, is now completely ascertained; and the softest bodies, even clay itself, have been found elastic.—-Ed.