Dinner was their Hegiradinner was their line in traversing the ocean of day: they crossed the equator when they dined.

" "You surely understand the reason why it grows warmer as we approach the equator, and colder as we go from it, whether we go north or south?" Stimson assented; though had the truth been said, he would have been obliged to confess that he knew no more than the facts.

During the first half of the fifteenth century the Portuguese were most enterprising in the work of discovery, and before 1500 they had searched the western coast of Africa, passed the equator, and seen the Cape of Good Hope, which Vasco da Gama doubled in 1497, on his way to India.

The waist-line is not so much "a danger line" to man as to woman, yet man should not wholly ignore his equator.

He did seem once to get into a sort of doze, but it was only for a moment, and then he dreamt he had dug a deep hole into the earth and poured in tons and tons of the Food of the Gods, and the earth was swelling and swelling, and all the boundaries of the countries were bursting, and the Royal Geographical Society was all at work like one great guild of tailors letting out the equator....

Indeed, when we consider the cold and cloudy climate of Europe during a great part of 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.

Urged on by brisk winds the Eagle made excellent speed, and several days before he calculated he would reach it Captain Spark found his vessel "crossing the line"; that is, passing over the imaginary circle which marks the equator.

The air at the poles revolves upon itself without moving forward;at the equator, the velocity, as we have mentioned, is enormous.

It has been found that the most of South Africa stands so high above the sea that the influences of a temperate climate are projected far towards the Equator; so that many white men, women, and children are living and thriving on farms in Mashonaland, seven degrees of latitude nearer the equator than the south end of Florida.

For in no place in the world does the night during the solstice precisely equal the day; and it is certain that on this voyage the Spaniards never reached the equator, for they constantly beheld on the horizon the polar star, which served them as guide.

Does not this fact, as well as the broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and Banana girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have girdled it as long as records go back, hint at a time when there was a tropic continent or archipelago round the whole equator, and at a civilisation and a horticulture to which those of old Egypt are upstarts of yesterday?

" The "kingdom of Gaboon," which straddled the equator, was the worst reputed of all.

This line at 160° W. Long, from Greenwich is 4° below the geographical equator; at 80° it is about 6° north, sweeping along the coast of New Granada; at 20° it comes down and touches the equator; at 40° E. Long., it crosses the Red Sea about 16° north of the equator, and at 120° it falls at Borneo, several degrees below it;and the points of the greatest heat, in this line, are in Abyssinia, nearer the tropic of Cancer than to the equator.

It has been found that all the celestial signs have, by degrees, receded from the vernal equinox, and drawn back to the East: notwithstanding this, the point of the zodiac that cuts the equator is still called the first degree of the ram, though the first star of the ram be thirty degrees beyond it, and all the other signs in the same proportion.

BOSCOVICH, ROGER JOSEPH, an Italian mathematician and astronomer, born at Ragusa; entered the Order of the Jesuits; was professor in Pavia, and afterwards at Milan; discovered the equator of the sun and the period of its rotation; advocated the molecular theory of physics, with which his name is associated; died insane (1701-1787).