Abstracts, abridgments, summaries have the same use with burning-glasses

Abstracts, abridgments, summaries have the same use with burning-glasses
to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination

JONATHAN SWIFT
Irish satirist and man of letters
(1667 - 1745)

A burning glass is a large convex lens that can concentrate the sun's rays onto a small area, heating up the area and thus resulting in ignition of the exposed surface.

They were used in 18th-century chemical studies for burning materials in closed glass vessels where the products of combustion could be trapped for analysis. The burning glass was a useful contrivance in the days before electrical ignition was easily achieved

Originally shared by Jon “the chef” Hole

Coffee Time
1672 to 1689—Two Sous per Dish, Sugar Included ( Photo )

Emile Souvestre (1806–1854) "Coffee keeps, so to say, the balance between bodily and spiritual nourishment."

Isid Bourdon "The discovery of coffee has enlarged the realm of illusion and given more promise to hope."

An old Bourbon proverb "To an old man a cup of coffee is like the door post of an old house—it sustains and strengthens him."

"What first made coffee-houses suspicious to those in authority, however, is their true resource—the advantages they offer for meeting one's kind, for social converse and the contemplation of life. Hence it must be that they have so happy a tact for locality.

They seek shade, pleasant corners, open squares, the prospect of water or wide landscapes.
In Constantinople they enjoy an infinite choice of site, so huge is the extent of that city, so broken by hill and sea, so varied in its spectacle of life.
The commonest type of city coffee-room looks out upon the passing world from under a grape-vine or a climbing wistaria.
Credit  WILLIAM H. UKERS, M.A. 1922