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Equator   Listen
noun
Equator  n.  
1.
(Geog.) The imaginary great circle on the earth's surface, everywhere equally distant from the two poles, and dividing the earth's surface into two hemispheres.
2.
(Astron.) The great circle of the celestial sphere, coincident with the plane of the earth's equator; so called because when the sun is in it, the days and nights are of equal length; hence called also the equinoctial, and on maps, globes, etc., the equinoctial line.
Equator of the sun or Equator of a planet (Astron.), the great circle whose plane passes through through the center of the body, and is perpendicular to its axis of revolution.
Magnetic equator. See Aclinic.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Equator" Quotes from Famous Books



... the voyage Altitude of the peak of Teneriffe Pass the isles of Sal, Bonavista, May, and St. Iago Cross the equator Progress Arrive at the Brazils Transactions at Rio de Janeiro Some particulars of that town Sail thence Passage to the Cape of Good Hope Transactions there Some particulars respecting the Cape Depart for ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... The equator is the line C, D, which upon the globe is a circle, and is sometimes called the equinoctial: Upon this circle the degrees of longitude are reckoned, beginning at C, and counting all round the globe till you come to C again; and O is the middle of the world between A and B, which are the two ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown

... South America and both coasts of South Africa; (3) the European, comprising the coast of Europe, including the inland seas, and the North Atlantic coast of Africa; (4) the Asiatic station, comprising the coast of Asia, including the islands north of the equator, also the east coast of North Africa; (5) the Pacific station, comprising the Pacific coast of North and South America, and Australia and the adjacent islands lying south of the equator. Each station is commanded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... "During the past few years in Colorado, forest fires, which ought never to have been started, have destroyed many million dollars' worth of timber, and the area over which the fires have burned aggregates twenty-five thousand square miles. This area of forest would put on the equator an evergreen-forest belt one mile wide that would reach entirely around the world. Along with this forest have perished many of the animals and thousands of beautiful birds who ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... of Western America, is a country of relatively recent geological birth. The form of the country is remarkable. It shares the topographical features of others of the Andine countries of America—of tropical lowlands and temperate uplands, in which latter nearness to the heat of the Equator is offset by the coolness of the rarefied air of high elevations above sea-level. This structure is the dominant note of the scheme of Nature in Mexico—as it is in Peru and other similar countries—and the anthropo-geographical ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner, the sense of self grows more intense as we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... the equator Father Neptune came on board ... a curious sea-ceremony that must hark back ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... part the most distant conception of the character—or capacity to render it, had she the information. She was not doing Juliet from end to end. She was as far from Juliet as the North Pole is from the Equator. She was doing something else. We could not make out clearly what that character was; but it was something quite different and a good way off. Sometimes we thought it was Lady Macbeth, sometimes Meg Merrilies, sometimes Lucretia Borgia, but never for a moment Juliet. We speak thus ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... one of the three great phosphate rock islands in the Pacific Ocean - the others are Banaba (Ocean Island) in Kiribati and Makatea in French Polynesia; only 53 km south of Equator ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... he said, "the use those stars may be, and are, to us mariners. By their aid, we are enabled to tell where we are, in the midst of the broadest oceans—to know the points of the compass, and to feel at home even when furthest removed from it. The seaman must go far south of the equator, at least, ere he can reach a spot where he does not see the same stars that he beheld from the door ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... headless, or dog-headed, who were supposed to inhabit remote regions. Equally monstrous animals, such as the unicorn and dragon, [4] kept them company. Sailors' "yarns" must have been responsible for the belief that the ocean boiled at the equator and that in the Atlantic—the "Sea of Darkness"—lurked serpents huge enough to sink ships. To the real danger of travel by land and water people ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... built by Rama (or as he calls him, Rajah Ram Chunder) for the passage of the monkey army and their redoubled general, Huniman, from the Indian continent into the island, in order to deliver from captivity Seeta, the wife of the hero. The wind still continuing favourable, the ship quickly passed the equator, and the pole-star was no longer visible—"a proof of the earth's sphericity which I was glad to have had an opportunity of seeing;" and they left, at a short distance to the right, the islands of Mauritius and Bourbon, "which are not far ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... vessels of other nations, besides those of England, and thus committing piracy, he stopped at the Seychelles, and took in a load of slaves for the Mauritius; but being chased by an English frigate as far north as the equator, he found himself in a very awkward condition; not having provisions enough on board his ship to carry him back to the French Colony. He therefore conceived the bold project of proceeding to the Bay of Bengal, in order to get provisions from on board some English ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... Blackstone had figured it at some eight hundred miles in diameter. There seemed a normal atmosphere. We could see areas where the surface was obscured by clouds. And oceans, and land masses. Polar icecaps. Lush vegetation at its equator. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... there was an earlier astronomy, not inconsiderable in amount, of which no history is preserved. For when Eudoxus commenced his labours, the length of the year had already been determined, the equinoxes and solstices had been recognized, the ecliptic, the celestial equator, and the poles of both great circles were known, and the five principal planets were familiar objects. This Early astronomy must have had its history, its stages of development, but we can only with difficulty ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder

... It was this way; I was lyin' down, tryin' to figure the shortes' way to Fort Coquina, an' wishin' I was nearer Broadway than I was to the Equator, when I heard a voice say, 'Blub-blub, muck-a-muck!' an' then I seen two cave-ladies ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... occupy the positions in which they were observed by the early astronomers, because the revolving earth is rocking like a top, with the result that the pole does not always keep pointing at the same spot in the heavens. Each year the meeting-place of the imaginary lines of the ecliptic and equator is moving westward at the rate of about fifty seconds. In time—ages hence—the pole will circle round to the point it spun at when the constellations were named by the Babylonians. It is by calculating the period occupied by this world-curve that the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... They have to be. One can't go very far without them, north of the Equator. But a fresh press counts more than a new suit by a Fifth Avenue tailor left unpressed, and neatness beats lavishness any day in ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... they begin to diminish in number, magnitude, and activity until they almost or quite disappear. A strange fact is that when a new period opens, the spots appear first in high northern and southern latitudes, far from the solar equator, and as the period advances they not only increase in number and size, but break out nearer and nearer to the equator, the last spots of a vanishing period sometimes lingering in the equatorial region after the advance-guard ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... look at a map of Borneo you will see that the Equator divides the island into two parts, so that Borneo is right in the middle of the Torrid Zone. The climate is therefore tropical, that is to say there is no spring, autumn or winter, but only summer, and it is always ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes

... had recovered from the painful constraint induced by this unfathomable joke, Saunders resumed his place, holding the dog by a saddlestrap taken from his own equator. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... in the neighborhood of the equator and the climate had become much warmer. So hot indeed were some nights that they slept out on deck, with the Mermaid flying through the air at a moderate pace, for it was deemed best not to go at any ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood

... world-growth substituted for that of world-production en masse by the action of centrifugal force and discharge from the solar equator. The New Astronomy proposes in this respect two points of remarkable difference from the view formerly entertained. The first relates to the fixing of the planetary orbits, and the other to the process by which the planets have reached their present ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... officers. In 1872 Commander Meade, of the United States navy, alive to the importance of coaling stations even in mid-ocean, made a commercial agreement with the chief of Tutuila, one of the Samoan Islands, far below the equator, in the southern Pacific, nearer to Australia than to California. This agreement, providing among other things for our use of the harbor of Pago Pago as a naval base, was six years later changed into a formal treaty ratified ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... now entered on a new mode of life as a student—wandering over the globe—measuring the height of the mountains, and the temperature of the air and of the springs— observing the manners and habits of animals—investigating plants and flowers. From the equator to the pole, and from the new world to the old, I was constantly engaged in repeating ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various

... paralleling each other at a distance of about seventy-five miles. Centers of population are not shown for the reason that space is not available on so small a drawing. The City of Urid is situated adjacent to the reservoir in the center of drawing, just north of the equator. ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... lower than Shem; Shem will be ever lower than Japheth. All will rise in the Christian grandeur to be revealed. Ham will be lower than Shem, because he was sent to Central Africa. Man south of the Equator—in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa—is inferior to his Northern brother. The blessing was upon Shem in his magnificent Asia. The greater blessing was upon Japheth in his man-developing Europe. Both blessings ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.

... very weary, and the air was intensely close, Singapore being only about seventy-five miles from the Equator, we spent most of that night and of several others in company with a Christian friend and interpreter, in the worst parts of the city; and this, with visits to various regions during the day, gave us a pretty clear understanding of the situation as to the matter of enforcement ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... moral, from these privations, from these continual bivouacs, as dangerous near the pole as under the equator, and from the infection of the air by the putrified carcases of men and horses that strewed the roads, sprang two dreadful epidemics—the dysentery and the typhus fever. The Germans first felt their ravages; they are less nervous and less sober than the French; and they were ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... defendant claimed that he had only parted with his rights as regards London, and that in the provinces he was still entitled to claim a share of the authorship? Pascal long ago pointed out, in his "Pensees," that virtue and vice were largely dependent on distance from the equator (a latitudinarianism in morals that does not seem to have shocked his Port Royal friends). But even he failed to reach this daring conception of "local fame." The marvel is that when once reached it should have been let slip again. It seems to me an invaluable remedy for disputes: ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... little change during the present year. No reunion having yet taken place between the States which composed the Republic of Colombia, our charge d'affaires at Bogota has been accredited to the Government of New Grenada, and we have, therefore, no diplomatic relations with Venezuela and Equator, except as they may be included in those heretofore formed with the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson

... tropic of Capricorn was cut by 105d of longitude, and the 27th of the same month we crossed the Equator on the 110th meridian. This passed, the frigate took a more decided westerly direction, and scoured the central waters of the Pacific. Commander Farragut thought, and with reason, that it was better to remain in deep water, and keep clear of continents ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... portions of his stellar orbit in which the light-yielding element was deficient, and in which case his brilliancy would have suffered the while, and an arctic climate in consequence spread from the poles towards the equator, and thus leave the record of such a condition in glacial handwriting on the everlasting walls of our mountain ravines, of which there is such abundant and unquestionable evidence. As before said, it is the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... dunes of unending sandy surface and scraggly, useless native plants, opened out to the sun. Marsport had been located where the only vein of uranium had been found on Mars, and the growing section was closer to the equator. ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey

... now sailed to the north, and was pursued by Lord Cochrane beyond the Equator. He saw to it that their voyage was an eventful one, for he captured more than one-half of their transports, and completely dispersed the remainder. Cochrane then returned to Brazil, and was instrumental in releasing ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE was brought about by the lowering of the temperature of the tropical regions during the Glacial period, so that even 'the lowlands of these great continents were everywhere tenanted under the equator by a considerable number of temperate forms ("Origin of Species," Edition VI., page 338). My own views are fully explained in Chapter XXIII. of my "Island Life," published in 1880. I quite accept all that Darwin, Hooker, and Asa Gray have written about the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... Southern part, down around Bloomington," Parks said. "Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington, Illinois—Bloomington, Indiana. We really got green hills down there." He drank, and handed the bottle back to Clayton. "Pers-nally, I don't see why anybody'd stay on Mars. Here y'are, practic'ly on the equator in the middle of the summer, and it's colder than ...
— The Man Who Hated Mars • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Nautilus, stationed on the west coast of Africa "blackberrying," so the men called their duty, Tom Fillot, one of their jokers, giving as the reason that the job was "black and berry nasty." The sun shone as it can shine in the neighbourhood of the equator, and the sea looked like so much glistening oil, as it slowly heaved up and sank with the long ground swell, the light flashing from the surface attacking the eyes with blinding power, bronzing the faces of some, peeling the ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn

... pageant of his funeral. His furlough was now nearly expired, and early in December he again embarked for India, leaving his wife and only child, of a few weeks old, behind him. Some verses dated "Christmas Day near the Equator," show how much he ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... make a circle. They make a polygon. If the radius of the circumscribed circle of this polygon is 1,296,000 feet, which is nearly 213 geographical miles, each one of its sides will be a straight line, 6.283 feet long. On the surface of the earth, at the equator, each side of this polygon would be one-sixtieth of a geographical mile, or 101.46 feet. On the orbit of the moon, at its mean distance from the earth, each of these straight sides would be about 6,000 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... the Peninsular line runs within eighty miles of the Equator; and the entire voyage is through a tropical climate, which injures the flavor of the tea. Hence the high price of the celebrated "brick tea," brought across the steppes of Russia. The route by Puget Sound is wholly through temperate latitudes, across ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... Africa it is necessary to take account of the natural division of the continent into distinct economic zones. Immediately under the equator is a wide area of heavy rainfall and dense forest. The rapidity and rankness of vegetable growth renders the region unsuited to agriculture. But the plentiful streams abound in fish and the forests in animals and fruits. The banana and plantain grow there in superabundance, and form ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... Syrian gods, as Ashtaroth was for the goddesses. The general version of the legend of Baal is the same as that of Adonis, Thammuz, Osiris, and the Arabian myth of El Khouder. All allegorize the Sun, six months above and six months below the equator. As a title of honor, the word Baal, Bal, Bel, etc., enters into a large number of Phoenician and Carthaginian proper names, as Hanni-bal, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... country where all climates can be found. As the northern part of the continent is equatorial the greatest degree of heat is there experienced, while the south stretches its length toward the Pole Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is on the equator, and Punta Arenas, in Chile, is the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... a narrow, horizontal, yellow stripe across the center and a large white 12-pointed star below the stripe on the hoist side; the star indicates the country's location in relation to the Equator (the yellow stripe) and the 12 points symbolize the 12 ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... watched the energetic artist die of fever in the just finished house with his usual kind of "I told you so" indifference. Then, for a time, he dwelt alone with his family, his account books, and the Evil Spirit that rules the lands under the equator. He got on very well with his god. Perhaps he had propitiated him by a promise of more white men to play with, by and by. At any rate the director of the Great Trading Company, coming up in a steamer that resembled an enormous sardine ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... exactly on the equator, the vertical rays of the sun at noon during the equinox cast no shadow. That northern capital, therefore, was "held in especial veneration as the favored abode of ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... major chokepoints are the Bering Strait, Panama Canal, Luzon Strait, and the Singapore Strait; the Equator divides the Pacific Ocean into the North Pacific Ocean and the South Pacific Ocean; dotted with low coral islands and rugged volcanic islands in the ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the coordinates of the beacon he had chosen for his appointment point and the robot pilot took him to that area with automatic precision. But once there he had to cruise manually back and forth three times through the perpendicular plane of Earth's equator before picking up the radar pip of the buoy, which was set to broadcast its presence by a circular sweep of radar pulses on a flat plane corresponding to the Earth ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye

... a Ship, having first sailed to the Equator, was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; how the Ancient Mariner cruelly and in contempt of the laws of hospitality killed a Sea-bird and how he was followed by many and strange Judgements: and in what manner ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... one of the inspectors on board is to introduce me, and I have an idea they will make me as comfortable as possible, so that I may not see anything. Not that I would be likely to see anything hidden under a year. Yesterday was the crossing of the Equator. The night before Neptune, one of the crew, and his wife, the ship's butcher, and a kroo boy, as black as coal for the heir apparent came over the side and proclaimed that those who never before had crossed the Equator must be baptized. We had crossed but I was perfectly willing to go through ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... Should the first discovery be verified by further explorations, gold will be more abundant than it now promises to be, and Africa perhaps the richest source of supply. Apropos of this continent, a French traveller is about to prove from the results of a journey from the Cape towards the equator, that the Carthaginian discoveries had been pushed much further towards the south than ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various

... Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak woman. The scorn ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... Timbuktu Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans noticed that the course had been due south. If that direction was persisted in they would cross the equator in six more degrees. The "Albatross" would then abandon the continents and fly not over the Bering Sea, or the Caspian Sea, or the North Sea, or the Mediterranean, but over ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... which are only allowed to be possessed and worn by chiefs, and which are of great value, as each bird produces only two feathers; pearl shells, with corals growing on them, red coral from the islands on the Equator, curious sponges and sea-weed, tapa cloth and reva-reva fringe, arrowroot and palm-leaf hats, cocoa-nut drinking vessels, fine mats plaited in many patterns, and other specimens of ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... parts of Europe and of Asia, as well as eastern North America, and reached from the equator to within nine degrees of the north pole. Even in these widely separated regions the genera and species of coal plants are close akin and ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... that they are from the 10th Soudanese battalion of the Egyptian army. They are recruited from the Dinkas and the Shilluks—two negroid tribes living to the south of the Dervish country, near the Equator." ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... thought of them when in the summer of 1908 I, as President of the United States, went aboard Peary's ship to bid him Godspeed on the eve of what proved to be his final effort to reach the Pole. A year later, when I was camped on the northern foothills of Mt. Kenia, directly under the equator, I received by a native runner the news that he had succeeded, and that thanks to him the discovery of the North Pole was to go on the honor roll of those feats in which we take a peculiar pride because they have been performed by ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... instrument from the case, pulled out the legs of its self-contained tripod, then carried it to a spot near where he had estimated the first charge would be placed. The instrument was equipped with three movable rings to be set for the celestial equator, for the zero meridian, and for the right ascension of any convenient star. Using a regular level would have been much simpler. The instrument had one, but with so little gravity to activate it, the thing ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin

... Jack, and guzzling Jimmy, And the youngest he was little Billee. Now when they'd got as far as the Equator, They'd nothing left but ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells

... of 251 tons was put together at Khartoum, to add to the river flotilla, thus increasing the steam power from four vessels, when I had arrived in 1870, to THIRTEEN, which in 1877 were plying between the capital of the Soudan and the equator. The names of Messrs. Samuda Brothers and Messrs. Penn and Co. upon the three steel steamers and engines which they had constructed for the expedition are now evidences of the civilizing power of the naval and mechanical engineers of Great Britain, which has linked with the great world countries ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... to why hurricanes strike here and nowhere else. I'll try and explain that, too. There is a belt of ocean, just north of and on the equator, known as the 'doldrums,' where it is nearly always calm, and very hot. There is also a belt of air running from Southern Europe to the West Indies where the north-east trade winds blow all the year round. Between this perpetual calm of the doldrums and ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... in the earth's orbit at which the sun is farthest from the equator; winter solstice at about December 22, summer ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... one that you don't know anything, but make them believe that you do know all about it." So says I to him, takin' up me shillalah this way (holding a very crooked stick perpendicular), "We'll take that for the straight line of the earth's equator"—how's that for gehography? (to the audience). Ah, that was straight till the other day I bent it in an argument. "Wery good," says he. "Well," says I, "now the sun rises in the east" (placing the disengaged hand at the eastern end ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... map, you will find that Aspinwall is not very far from the equator. They have no winter there, and ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson

... October they were near the Fort of Hilo on the coast of Peru, far south of the equator. Here at night they anchored about two miles from the village, while they sent four canoes with fifty men in them to seize and plunder the town. In the morning they discovered by the flags which the men had put out, that the town was in the hands of the English. Accordingly, all the men that could ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... illustration to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, we shall see a perfect analogy. We shall find that when the Sun reaches the celestial equator, so that it is equal day and equal night on the Earth, that he is on the line of the celestial horizon; it is cosmic sunrise. Hence Aries, the fiery Azoth, begins his active influx, and extends for thirty degrees, equal to two hours ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... settlers. Certain sections of the world have been especially noted for the prevalence of this disease, making extensive regions practically uninhabitable. The vicinity of Rome, with its swampy marshes and low-lying areas, has been one of these plague spots. The jungles and swamps of the equator and the coastline of Africa and South America and the valley lands of the Mississippi River have all been noted as most dangerous districts for human beings to live in. Even in civilized communities the ravages of the disease have, under conditions most conducive to malaria, been ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... cameras. Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past a control-room port. It was a featureless mass of clouds, save for striations across what must be its equator. It looked like the Lunar Observatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun's ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... annual flood of the Congo commences before any rains have fallen south of the equator, and agree correctly with the floods of the Niger, calculating the water to have flowed from Bambarra at the rate of ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... was an Ice Age fifty thousand or so years ago, when everything that lived had to huddle along the equator. I don't vouch for it. I'm merely ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... the year, we shall find it natural that sun-charms should have played a much more prominent part among the superstitious practices of European peoples than among those of savages who live nearer the equator and who consequently are apt to get in the course of nature more sunshine than they want. This view of the festivals may be supported by various arguments drawn partly from their dates, partly from ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... the Equator, and I donned warmer clothes. We saw whales, sharks, porpoises, rays and thrashers. Entered the Guayaquil River. Here was where Pizarro first landed and obtained a footing. The steamer anchored in quarantine a mile below the city. Yellow fever was raging as usual, and the Quito railroad ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... turning of two wheels. This means that two wheels at opposite ends of a wire must be made to turn at exactly the same rate of speed. Originally, this was tried by clock work, but without success commercially, for the reason that a pendulum does not beat with the same speed at the equator, as at different latitudes, nor at altitudes; and temperature also affects the rate. The solution was found by making the two wheels move by means of a timing fork, which vibrates with the same speed everywhere, and ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... with this last phenomenon only as far as the rotation converts into trade winds* (* The limits of the trade winds were, for the first time, determined by Dampier in 1666.) the polar winds, which, in the low regions of the atmosphere bring back the cold air of the high latitudes toward the equator. To the general impulsion which these trade-winds give the surface of the sea, we must attribute the equinoctial current, the force and rapidity of which are not sensibly modified by the local variations ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... certain rudimentary forms of life. In the rocks in the far northern latitudes, there are found abundant traces of fossils, which goes to prove the correctness of the Yogi Teachings of the origin of life at the north pole, from which the living forms gradually spread south toward the equator, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... is a good place in which to start fruit-growing, that the advantages it possesses cannot be surpassed or even equalled elsewhere, and, further, that as our seasons are the opposite of those in countries situated on the north of the equator, our fruits ripen in the off-seasons of similar fruit grown in those countries, and, with our facilities for cold storage and rapid transit, can be placed on their markets at a time that they are bare of such fruits, ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson

... magnitude, and their apparent countlessness. The most uneducated eye, when raised to the starry heavens on a clear night, fixes here and there upon groups of stars: in the north, Cassiopeia, the Great Bear, the Pleiades—below the Equator, the Southern Cross—must at all times have impressed those who beheld them with a certain sense of unity. Thus the idea of a "constellation" is formed; and this once done, the mind naturally progresses ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson

... together that was for the time being an affair of patrols near a certain border an affair that flashed into fire now and then as between man and man. As between sun and man the firing was fairly continuous for eight hours of most days. Were we not within a hundred miles or so of the equator? In that climatic struggle (so much the more constant of the two for us Northerners) I on my noncombatant job came off lightly, he, as a combatant, suffered. He was down with malaria time and time again. He had it on him that night when he ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... one grinned and removed his soft gray hat, held it against his generous equator, and bowed so low as to set him puffing a little afterward. His eyes, however, ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... geographical knowledge, and before Ceylon had been circumnavigated by Europeans, the mythical delusions of the Hindus were transmitted to the West, and the dimensions of the island were expanded till its southern extremity fell below the equator, and its breadth was prolonged till it touched alike on Africa ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... that its loss entails debility or death, it is natural to expect that its diminution should be regarded with solicitude and apprehension, as betokening a corresponding decrease in the vital energy of its owner. In Amboyna and Uliase, two islands near the equator, where necessarily there is little or no shadow cast at noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul. The Mangaians tell of a mighty warrior, Tukaitawa, whose ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... a peculiarly dangerous one, from the dense fogs that are caused by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. These waters rushing up from the equator here come in contact with the cold currents from the pole. As they meet, they send up such heavy vapor 5 that day can sometimes scarcely be discerned from night; even at little more than arm's length objects cannot be distinguished, while from without, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... to try to pass the center and land, if possible, somewhere on the upper hemisphere, which was the part of the monstrous object that we wanted to investigate. But when at length we thought we were about to fly past the moon's equator successfully, ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... sides of the Cordilleras into the Atlantic. The precipitous steeps of the sierra, with its splintered sides of porphyry and granite, and its higher regions wrapped in snows that never melt under the fierce sun of the equator, unless it be from the desolating action of its own volcanic fires, might seem equally unpropitious to the labors of the husbandman. And all communication between the parts of the long- extended territory might be thought to be precluded by ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... daybreak, dark, gloomy, and inhospitable. Rain fell drearily as we passed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands sighted from the south. We had climbed from Tahiti, seventeen degrees south of the equator, to between eleven and ten degrees south, and we had made a westward of ten degrees. The Marquesas Islands lay before us, dull spots of dark rock upon the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... probe into this vast mystery of the universe!" Carducci wrote in his Idilio Maremmano, the same Carducci who at the close of his ode Sul Monte Mario tells us how the earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods, surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O sun, set across the immense ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... distress, Had crown'd each painful voyage with success; Still, to compensate toils and hazards past, Restored them to maternal plains at last. Thrice had the sun, to rule the varying year, Across the equator roll'd his naming sphere, Since last the vessel spread her ample sail From Albion's coast, obsequious to the gale; 20 She o'er the spacious flood, from shore to shore Unwearying wafted her commercial store; The richest ports of Afric she had view'd, Thence to fair Italy her course pursued; Had ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... often difficult to believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind "the Front," which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more or less "imaginary line drawn across the earth's surface." Imaginary because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length without breadth, then "the Front" is not a line at all, much less a straight ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, if—and there was the rub—IF one were NOT in the direct path of ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... require considerable thickness (let it be equal to a m,) because being placed parallel to the equator, the sun shines upon the upper face till the summer, and on the longest day is elevated 23 deg. 29' above the plane of the dial, and consequently the shadow of a will fall at noon in the line a b, not in the point b, but at an angle of 23 deg. 29' therewith, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various

... the roll of discovery is that of Prince Henry of Portugal, surnamed the Navigator, who is ever to be remembered as the earliest promoter of geographical research. To his efforts was due the first crossing of the Equator, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... nineteen days, we reached a certain undiscovered land, which we believed to be the continent, over against that which we had explored in our former voyage, and which is situated in the torrid zone upon the southern side of the equator, and in 5 deg. of south latitude[1], being 500 leagues from the before-mentioned islands, to the south-west. In this country we found the days and nights to be equal on the 27th of June, when the sun was in the tropic of cancer[2]. We found this country inundated and pervaded ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... no doubt that this absence of any organised opposition was fortunate, for the so-called troops at the disposal of the Governor of the Equator were as miserably inefficient and contemptible, from a fighting point of view, as any General Gordon ever commanded; and at a later stage of his career he plaintively remarked that it had fallen to his lot to lead a greater number of cowardly and unwarlike ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... describe, it may be well you should cast your eyes over the chart made by you of the course of the Amazons, or that of the province of Quito, inserted in your Historical Journal of the Voyage to the Equator. The Portuguese officer, M. de Rebello, after landing Tristan at Loreto, returned to Savatinga, in conformity to the orders he had received of waiting there until Madame Godin should arrive; and Tristan, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard

... disturbed, slowly bored their galleries, I found a book made of thick rough old-fashioned paper, and this I opened carelessly. . . . In it I read, with a thrill of emotion, that from noon until four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 20th of June, 1813, south of the equator, in longitude 110 and latitude 15 (between the tropics, consequently, and in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean) there was fair weather, a beautiful sea, a fine southeast breeze, and in the sky many little clouds called "cat-tails," and that ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... the suddenness of nightfall, for indeed there had been little or no twilight. This convinced me that we must be not far from the equator. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... develops its finest and most remarkable flavor which far surpasses the varieties grown in a temperate region. It however readily adapts itself to soil and climate growing through a wide range of temperature from the Equator to Moscow in Russia in latitude 56 deg., and through all the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... son of Urania [Ur of the Chaldees is subsequently made to contain the root of Uranus]. We have just seen that the Egyptians have their harvest about the time which the sun passes over the equator, and if we go back to the time of Abraham we shall find that the equator [perhaps he means equinox] was in Taurus; the Egyptians must, then, have had their harvest while the sun was in the Bull; the Bull was, therefore, in their figurative way of speaking, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various

... same plane as the orbit, so that at a certain time of the year the north pole is pointed directly at the sun, while at the opposite end of the orbit it points directly away. The result is highly exaggerated seasons. At the poles the temperature runs from 120 deg.C to a low of-80 deg.C. At the equator it remains not far from 10 deg.C all year round. Strong winds blow during the summer and winter, from the hot to the cold pole; few winds during the spring and fall. The appearance of the poles varies during the year from baked deserts to glaciers covered with solid CO{2}. Free water exists ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... Pacific. They consist of six principal and seven smaller islands. The largest is Albemarle. They are all volcanic. Of them Dampier says (chapter v): "The Gallapagos Islands are a great Number of uninhabited Islands, lying under, and on both sides of the Equator. The Eastermost of them are about 110 Leagues from the Main. They are laid down in the Longitude of 181, reaching to the Westward as far as 176, therefore their Longitude from England Westward is about 68 degrees. But I believe our Hydrographers do not place them far enough to the Westward. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various

... notorious. Great saints, great sinners; great philosophers, great quacks; great conquerors, great murderers; great ministers, great thieves; each and all have had their admirers, ready to ransack earth, from the equator to either pole, to find ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... Africa; and last, and the most specific and important of the whole, the accounts received of the country of Adel, and the countries and rivers in and south of Shoa, and those from the Blue Nile in Gojam and Damot to the sea at the mouth of the Jub, under the equator, by Major Harris, late British ambassador ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... won't wash up for them. We got it, and we'll clear it away; and then we'll go somewhere on the carpet. It's not often we get a chance of being out all night. We can go right away to the other side of the equator, to the tropical climes, and see the sun rise over the ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... and who does not speak of 'human fallibility' when he means vice. He told us one day that the Gospel required a line of demarcation between the godly and the ungodly, between Christians and unbelievers; but that it has become imaginary like the meridian and the equator; and that he very much feared the strongest microscope in the laboratories could not find where the boundary line ran between the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and the Kingdom of God in our souls. I am sorry a distant State called ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... is not a mistake: I have seen heavy hail in Africa, N. Lat. 4 degrees; within sight of the Equator. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... the North Pole, and has no less than the whole equator for his horizon. And that idle one low down upon the ground, that we have almost rolled away from, is in India—over the head of a young friend of mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our zenith, as it hangs low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as marking ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... largest islands of the world. Its area is roughly 290,000 square miles, or about five times that of England and Wales. Its greatest length from north-east to south-west is 830 miles, and its greatest breadth is about 600 miles. It is crossed by the equator a little below its centre, so that about two-thirds of its area lie in the northern and one-third lies in the southern hemisphere. Although surrounded on all sides by islands of volcanic origin, Borneo differs from them in presenting but ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... by the currents from the north of Africa, was making rapid progress toward the equator. On the 30th of August they sighted the Madeira group of islands, and Glenarvan, true to his promise, offered to put in there, and land his ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... trade-winds are explained as the effects of the unequal distribution of the sun's heat in different latitudes. The air of the equator, heated more than the northern or southern air, expands more, and overflows, moving in the upper regions of the atmosphere toward the poles; while the lower, colder air on both sides moves toward the equator to preserve equilibrium. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... situated on the other side of the equator, at least two thousand leagues from here," replied ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... is that the people on this side of the equator are generally well disposed towards strangers," said Tom. "I heard the commander say so only a short time ago, and he had been reading some books on the subject." So altogether Tom was persuaded and imbued his companions with the same idea that the proposed voyage ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston

... had arrested the rotation of the solid globe, he had made no stipulation concerning the trifling movables upon its surface. And the earth spins so fast that the surface at its equator is travelling at rather more than a thousand miles an hour, and in these latitudes at more than half that pace. So that the village, and Mr. Maydig, and Mr. Fotheringay, and everybody and everything had been jerked violently forward at about ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... therefore, the intention of government to introduce a bill which should give to her majesty's cruisers and commissioners the same right of search with regard to slave-trading vessels met with below the line, which they already possessed in the case of those which were found north of the equator. This bill was introduced on the 10th of July, and it passed through all its stages in silence until it arrived at the second reading in the house of lords. On that occasion Lord Minto said, that he deemed it necessary to state the present condition of the law relating to the slave-trade, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... encountered in the Atlantic. But there came a long spell of weather, faultless in every respect, and whose only drawback was the dread that each day would be the last of such delight. The sun rose clear and bright, and at high noon, as they approached the equator, it was sometimes hot, but the breeze which continually swept the deck tempered it to the crew and passenger. Had they been caught in a calm the heat would have been suffocating; but Providence favored ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis

... after many years, I find that it has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator', which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had been curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could there ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... read about travels in Africa, knew that Mombasa was situated a few degrees beyond the equator and that the adjoining country, though already conceded to be within the sphere of English interests, was yet in truth little known; it was utterly wild, full of elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... winds is a direct consequence of the earth's rotation, while currents of air from the polar regions are alternating or contending with others from the equator. ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy

... The sun is so warm at midday that an awning is hung over the deck, and the shade it affords is very grateful. We are now in the trade-winds, which blow pretty steadily at this part of our course in a south-westerly direction, and may generally be depended upon until we near the Equator. At midday of the tenth day I find we have run 180 miles in the last twenty-four hours, with the wind still steady on our quarter. We have passed Teneriffe, about 130 miles distant—too remote to see it—though I am told that, had we been twenty miles nearer, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... continued hard frost the greater part of this period. The sky is generally clear, and the snow lies about fifteen, or at the utmost eighteen inches deep. As the climate of a country is not known by merely measuring its distance from the equator, but is affected differently in the same parallel of latitude by its locality, and a variety of circumstances, we find that of Red River, though situated in the same parallel, far different from, and intensely more cold than, that of England. The thermometer is frequently at 30 deg. and 40 deg. ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West

... fortunate isles, for who knows yet where, or which they are? there is room enough in the inner parts of America, and northern coasts of Asia. But I will choose a site, whose latitude shall be 45 degrees (I respect not minutes) in the midst of the temperate zone, or perhaps under the equator, that [604]paradise of the world, ubi semper virens laurus, &c. where is a perpetual spring: the longitude for some reasons I will conceal. Yet "be it known to all men by these presents," that if any honest gentleman will send in so ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... of 'The Military Soudan' the land becomes more fruitful. The tributaries of the Nile multiply the areas of riparian fertility. A considerable rainfall, increasing as the Equator is approached, enables the intervening spaces to support vegetation and consequently human life. The greater part of the country is feverish and unhealthy, nor can Europeans long sustain the attacks of its climate. Nevertheless ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... humming-bird, and Professor GRANT is at present attempting to naturalize it in Saint Domingo. The time is probably not far distant when it will prune its morning wing on the upper pole, and go to roost on the equator. It is, upon the whole, a grasping bird, and inspires the weaker tribes with terror; yet, notwithstanding its fierceness, it perches familiarly on the Arms of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various

... service of Spain, Jean de Bethencourt, reached the Canaries; the Flemings, too, for the first time got as far as the Azores; above all, Gilianez, in 1433, doubling Cape Boyador, or Nun, arrived on the West Coast of Africa to a few degrees above the equator: every one of them returned with wonderful news of his voyage which was looked upon as something marvellous:—accordingly their great contemp- orary, Bracciolini, wrote thus, thinking of the miraculous narrative that was told by each adventurous ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... her wings, and some days afterwards was crossing the equator. She was never known again as a free trader. The captain and mate had both "made their piles," and after arriving at the Atlantic states retired from sea. Pardon G. Simpkins took up his residence in Boston, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... may be briefly stated. The fine particles, consisting for the most part of translucent crystals, or fragments of crystals, formed a canopy high up in the atmosphere, being gradually spread over both sides of the equator till it formed a broad belt, through which the rays of the sun and moon were refracted. Towards dawn and sunset they were refracted and reflected from the facets of the crystal, and thus underwent decomposition into the prismatic colours; as do the rays of the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull

... day is very pleasant, with some wind. We crossed the equator. I sat up in one of the boats a long time. I wish my little brothers were here ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... in each figure at s. In the metaphase (fig. 182) it is the last to come into the equatorial plate, possibly because of its lack of symmetry. The smaller component of this pair is always directed toward the equator of the spindle. Figure 183 shows a small tangential section of a spindle in metaphase, containing the unequal pair and one equal pair. In figure 184 a polar view of a metaphase is shown, the unequal pair, which was somewhat below the others, being indicated by stippling. Figures 184 ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis (Part 1 of 2) • Nettie Maria Stevens



Words linked to "Equator" :   great circle, circle, equatorial, equate



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