Abstract
“ELEMENTS OF HYDROSTATICS” is a subject the limits of which are sufficiently well known to require little definition. In the present instance it includes a fairly complete treatment of centres of pressure of rectilinear areas and circles by what used to be called, at Cambridge, “three-day methods”—also sections on rotating liquids and on tensions of vessels and curves of buoyancy. The book will do admirably for the ordinary run of students preparing for examinations in this subject, and the copious problems and examples should commend it to science students; but there are one or two points in which improvement is desirable. “Whole pressure” has been too long a fetish of the third-rate schoolmaster, who “thinks he is wise when he is not.” But instead of banishing this misleading idea to a few lines of small print (or, better, omitting it altogether), and replacing the term “whole pressure” elsewhere by “resultant thrust on a plane area,” Prof. Loney makes confusion worse confounded by speaking, so far as we can make out, indiscriminately of “whole pressure,” “whole pressure or thrust” and “whole thrust.” Again, there is no reason why we should be left in the dark as to the precise distinction between a perfect fluid and an ordinary fluid, or the reason why the principles of hydrostatics apply with sufficient approximation to the latter; these points are hinted at, but might with advantage be stated more explicitly. The usual figure of the air-condenser, with its valves hanging in an impossible position, is once more reproduced.
Elements of Hydrostatics.
By S. L. Loney Pp. viii + 248 + xii. (Cambridge: University Press, 1900.)
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Elements of Hydrostatics . Nature 63, 57 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/063057a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/063057a0