"This apparatus, sir," he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an
academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, "is one of the great
Pascal's grandest claims upon our admiration."
"I don't understand."
The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a
little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for
catching ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top,
carefully fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that
he had set in the clay, and at the opposite end to the great
reservoir, represented by the flower-pot. Next, by means of a
watering-pot, he poured in sufficient water to rise to the same level
in the large vessel and in the tiny circular funnel at the end of the
elder stem.
Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.
"Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body," said
the mechanician; "never lose sight of that fundamental principle;
still it can be compressed, though only so very slightly that we
should regard its faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the
amount of surface presented by the water at the brim of the
flower-pot?"
"Yes, sir."
"Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger
than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid.
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