The Luxembourg gardens lead to the Avenue de l'Observatoire, a broad and verdant pleasaunce with a noble fountain at the head, in the midst of which an armillary sphere is held up by four undraped female figures representing the four quarters of the globe, at whom a circle of tortoises spout water from the surface of the basin.
"A Wanderer in Paris"
E. V. Lucas
But that armillary sphere he had so ably made for himself out of twisted rods had undone him: his grandmother, terrified by the child's interest in these mystic convolutions, had betrayed the magical instrument to his father.
"Dreamers of the Ghetto"
I. Zangwill
Most of this bench is covered with tiles of Moorish design, but on the front each is stamped with an armillary sphere in which the axis is yellow, the lines of the equator and tropics green, and the rest blue.
"Portuguese Architecture"
Walter Crum Watson