Excerpt from Natural Philosophy for General Readers and Young People The present work has its origin in an attempt to comply with a suggestion which has frequently been made to me, that I should prepare an abridged edition of my translation of Ganot's Elements de Physique, which could be used for purposes of more elementary instruction than that work, and in which the use of mathematical formulae would be dispensed with. But I soon found that to do anything of the kind which would be more than a mere series of extracts would be very difficult, and hence I turned my attention to another book by the same author, which has had a very extensive circulation in France, his Cours elementaire de Physique, and this I have taken as the basis of the present book. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."