"First Lessons on Natural Philosophy for Children" Gallery

In this section of the book the author is describing the different classes of motion that we are generally concerned with. This diagram is a depiction of the classification of circular motion. This is a small simple diagram, showing that while in physics diagrams are important, they don't need to be complicated. Especially when teaching young children do you want less complexity.

This is diagram utilized in describing what the author terms "curvilinear motion". If you're wondering what that is, you're not alone. It is described as motion along a "curved line", which sounds potentially oxymoronic to the modern physics student. As physics students ourselves, none of us have ever heard parabolic motion described in such a manner. It is possible that this is because the term has either fallen out of use or is somewhat misleading. Either way this shows that physics has changed since 1851.

As one can see this image depicts an archer pulling back on a bowstring. The diagram here serves two major purposes. Firstly, it allows those readers who might not know what a bow and arrow is follow along. And secondly, it allows the reader to visualize, through one diagram, two different states the bow might be in: drawn and undrawn. The idea that an object might be morphed into two different states is important to the idea of elastic objects.

The section from which this image is drawn dealt with categorizing the types of levers. One might easily confused by the description of one lever category: "a lever which has the power between the weight and the fulcrum". This diagram gives a very practical example that also leaves very little room for confusion when referring to the definition.

When the author uses the featured diagram, she is in the midst of driving home the point of the parts and uses of the simple lever. To achieve this she uses several examples, of which one is a Scale. This type of scale hasn't been in use for a long time. This coupled with her usage of the term 'merchant' in the text shows not only a change in the field of physics and machines, but in language as well.

This is yet another diagram that the author uses to visualize what a lever is. Swift spends quite a time hammering home the idea of levers. This is possibly because in her experience they might be a somewhat confounding topic for young children. Who's to say.

When you explain things to children, complex terms and ideas are digestible only when they are described in a non-complex manner. The author is clearly going for the simplistic approach throughout this book, both with her simplistic sentence structure and language as well as her diagrams. Almost nowhere is this as evident as in this pendulum diagram. It is two lines, a circle and a curve, and yet it still gets it's point across.

The showcased diagram of the child on the slope comes close after the introduction of the pendulum and serves as a counter example to everything discussed in the description of the pendulum diagram. It is overly complex and artistic where it doesn't need to be. Why it is there is unclear, maybe it is just to keep the attention of the readers with visual appeal. All that said, it is not indicative of the nature of most of the book.

This is a cut and dry example of what this book excels at, especially in regards to its diagrams. This depiction of a pump is clear, concise, and simple. It does little to overcomplicate anything and any young reader should have little to no difficulty in understanding the workings of said pump with the help of the descriptive text that accompanies the diagram.

This image does not showcase a diagram, rather just a piece of the text. However, this does not diminish the importance of this excerpt. Here the author clearly states that the power given to animals is given by God, as if that is an indisputable, scientific fact. Additionally, the author claims that power and force are interchangeable. They are definitely not interchangeable and are two very different ideas in modern physics. This passage shows the change of physics as a field over the years as well as the sentiments of scientists towards religion.