Abstract
DR. JOSEPH NEEDHAM, of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office, directed my attention to an experiment by Lord Rayleigh on a piece of crown glass under long-continued strain1. Lord Rayleigh's results suggest further consideration of a curiously curved, small pebble of a fine-grained quartzose sandstone briefly described elsewhere. Figs. 1 and 2 illustrate almost diametrically opposite aspects of the pebble. By turning the specimen downward from the position shown in Fig. 2 around a horizontal axis through an angle of about 35°, the view represented by Fig. 3 is obtained. These illustrations show that the pebble is equally well-rounded on all sides, characteristic of all water-worn pebbles of the lenticular shape which it would have assumed had it not been folded across the middle. A slight, abnormal inflation is noticeable in Fig. 1 on the concave side along the middle zone where the curvature is the sharpest, apparently due to a localization of compression. This, coupled with the gently concave sky-line seen on the top in Fig. 3 showing the transverse curvature of an anticlastic surface developed on the convex side, affords indisputable evidence for a bending at least partly of elastic nature. Such bending could only have taken place after the lenticular pebble had been formed; for otherwise the anticlastic curvature could not have escaped erosion.
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Nature, 145, 29 (1940).
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LEE, J. A Bent Pebble. Nature 157, 590 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/157590b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/157590b0
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