It has been remarked before that this district is an
Anathoth, a place of responses or echoes, and therefore proper for
such experiments: we may further add that the pauses in echoes,
when they cease and yet are taken up again, like the pauses in
music, surprise the hearers, and have a fine effect on the
imagination.
The gentleman above mentioned has just fixed a barometer in his
parlour at Newton Valence. The tube was first filled here (at
Selborne) twice with care, when the mercury agreed and stood
exactly with my own; but being filled again twice at Newton, the
mercury stood, on account of the great elevation of that house,
three-tenths of an inch lower than the barometers at this village,
and so continues to do, be the weight of the atmosphere what it
may. The plate of the barometer at Newton is figured as low as 27;
because in stormy weather the mercury there will sometimes
descend below 28. We have supposed Newton-house to stand two
hundred feet higher than this house: but if the rule holds good,
which says that mercury in a barometer sinks one-tenth of an inch
for every hundred feet elevation, then the Newton barometer, by
standing three-tenths lower than that of Selborne, proves that
Newton-house must be three hundred feet higher than that in which
I am writing, instead of two hundred.
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