The Rain Cloud
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- History-of-science enthusiasts interested in 19th-century English popular-science writing
- English learners who want to practice reading with short original English texts
- Readers interested in Project Gutenberg and early ebook culture
- Researchers seeking leads to original English meteorological literature
Not a good fit for
- Students hoping to systematically learn modern meteorology
- Readers who need a Chinese translation and do not wish to read the English original
- General literary readers seeking plot-driven reading experiences
Reading tips
- Read through once for the gist, then look up unfamiliar words paragraph by paragraph, paying attention to English expressions for meteorological terms.
- Read alongside modern popular meteorology materials to distinguish 19th-century views from today's scientific conclusions.
- Use it as a ten-minute daily short English reading, and after each session retell a paragraph in your own words.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
FAQ
Is this book a novel or a science text?
What is Project Gutenberg?
What barriers do Chinese readers face with this book?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Charles Tomlinson (1808–1897) was a British popular science writer and engraver. He worked for many years as a wood engraver and applied his craft to the production of scientific books, bridging text and image in accessible presentations of knowledge. His representative work, The Rain Cloud, deals with meteorological phenomena such as the formation, shapes and fall of clouds and rain. It is science writing for general readers, aiming at clarity and using observation and metaphor to make abstract atmospheric processes tangible. Besides this work, he wrote several other scientific books on nature and everyday experience. Only one of his works is currently held in this collection, and public information is limited, so biographical details cannot be given at length; his surviving writings nonetheless show a concern for accuracy and readability, combining popular science with engraved illustration. He was a nineteenth-century British practitioner of science communication who joined craftsmanship to writing.
