"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... public spout, Spread phosphorus of zeal on scraps of fustian, And go like walking "Lucifers" about Mere living bundles of combustion. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... "Civill warre having set all Ireland in a combustion, the Queene [Elizabeth] more easily to subdue the rebels, did take silver coyne from the Irish, some few years before her death, and paid her army with a mixed base coyne, which, by proclamation, was commanded to be spent and received, for sterling silver ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... hours wore on the excitement of her oratorical effort subsided and a natural physical reaction began. Her pulses, which had been beating so strenuously as to keep her brain in a state of combustion, were now correspondingly below their normal fullness and rapidity, and the exhausted nerves demanded repose. It was at such times as these that Mrs. Frankland's constitutional buoyancy of spirit sank down on an ebb tide; it was at such times that her usually ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... of chemistry and mechanics, did it. It had long been known that, if a horseshoe nail were tied to a cord and the point heated to whiteness, the iron nail could be made to burn in common air by being whirled in a circle. The ring of sparks proved a combustion. Mr. Bessemer was the first however to show that if air was forced, not upon the surface, but into and amongst the particles of molten iron, the same sort ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... I can. This is the best evidence yet of the truth of your story. Superficially, atomic power would seem to preclude the use of coal and oil. However, quite apart from the energy gained by their combustion they remain, and always will remain, the basic raw material for all organic chemistry. Plastics, dyes, pharmaceuticals, solvents. Industry could not exist without them, even in an atomic age. Still, if coal and oil are the low price for which ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... stagnating in his pose, he is a man that the first casual gaze instantly returns to with sharpened focus. You have seen gymnasts whose normal movements were slowly performed springs, just as rust is a slow combustion and fire the same thing in less time. Well, Clinton Browne strongly suggested that sort of athlete. Add to this a regularly formed, clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful face, with a pair of wonderfully piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black eyes, and one need not marvel ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... health is overuse of sugar in concentrated form, candy, etc., especially by the sedentary. One reason why sugar has a high food value is that it is readily utilized for combustion, and if taken between meals greatly increases the calories and may ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... with sheet iron so as to prevent drafts of air from deflecting the flame from the center of the boiler coils. The cover is provided with ventilators, so that the burner will not be smothered. If enough oxygen does not enter the interior of the boiler coils, poor combustion will result, and the gasolene flame will not develop its maximum heat. Upon referring again to the diagram, it will be seen that the exhaust steam pipe from the engine discharges into the stack of the boiler covering. This discharge ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... Dr. Lardner termed it. Elaborate calculations were made by that gentleman to prove that the provision of ventilating shafts would be altogether insufficient to prevent the dangers arising from the combustion of coke, producing carbonic acid gas, which in large quantities was fatal to life. He showed, for instance, that in the proposed Box tunnel, on the Great Western Railway, the passage of 100 tons would deposit about 3090 lbs. of noxious gases, incapable ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... when the materials of the house were in ashes, the conflagration died. But the southern insurrection was the burning of a coalmine—a fire ravaging where human skill could scarcely gain access, kindled among stores of combustion scarcely to be calculated by human experience, growing fiercer the deeper it descended, and at every new burst undermining the land, and threatening to carry down into its gulfs all that was stately or venerable on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... between the contacts to renew the burner. Sawyer and Man proposed, in 1878, to make the bottom plate of glass instead of metal, and provided ingenious arrangements for charging the lamp chamber with an atmosphere of pure nitrogen gas which does not support combustion. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... at work to supply the waste caused by never-ceasing combustion. There is, besides, a constant interchange of electricities between the ocean and the burning mountains, the upheaving from the ocean bed having probably some connection ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... a goling, or fireplace of mud and stone, some three feet high, four or five feet long by one and a half wide, with two, three, or more side ventilators and draught-holes. By this ingenious contrivance he manages to increase the combustion of the dried dung, the most trying fuel from which to get a flame. On the top of this stove a suitable place is made to fit the several raksangs (large brass pots and bowls), in which the brick tea, duly pounded first in a stone or wooden mortar, is ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... be met with in these bitter invectives, is one of its great excellences. The author might here turn his philippics against Salmasius to good account. The rout in Heaven is like the fall of some mighty structure, nodding to its base, "with hideous ruin and combustion down." But, perhaps, of all the passages in Paradise Lost, the description of the employments of the angels during the absence of Satan, some of whom "retreated in a silent valley, sing with notes angelical to many a harp their ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... host, an elderly gentleman of fortune. "If we had such impure gas as is found in many of the villages and small cities not so very far West, I'd never light a burner in my library again. As it is, I do so very rarely. The products of gas combustion act on the bindings until firm calf drops in pieces, and even law-sheep loses its coherency, as the argument of the opposing counsel does when your ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... would like them to. The progressive stereotype, powerful to incite work, almost completely obliterates the attempt to decide what work and why that work. Laissez-faire, a blessed release from stupid officialdom, assumes that men will move by spontaneous combustion towards a pre-established harmony. Collectivism, an antidote to ruthless selfishness, seems, in the Marxian mind, to suppose an economic determinism towards efficiency and wisdom on the part of socialist officials. Strong government, imperialism at home and abroad, at its best deeply ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... has also succeeded in establishing a traffic in gunpowder, by inventing a carriage of sheet iron, lined with wood, in which four-and-a-half tons of gunpowder can be conveyed without fear of explosion either from concussion or external combustion. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... every direction. All hands, so to speak, are strained to extra duty to discharge the noxious accumulation. The lungs labor to discharge the load thrown back upon them, with hastened respiration, increased combustion, and feverish heat. The pores of the mucous membrane in the nose, throat, alimentary canal, or bronchial passages, are forced by an aggravated discharge (or catarrh), and this congestive and inflammatory ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... light, heat, and gravitation, as well as substituting repulsion for centrifugal force, and must forever disprove the theory of solar light being the result of mere metallic incandescence, or any other equally exhausting combustion. The latter theory, with such supposed expedients in nature, to carry out the mighty design of creation, belittles the subject by its transitoriness, and is, therefore, unworthy the conception of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the revolution begun thirty years ago, by the curate of the village of Dolores in the province of Gunanajuato. "It is very easy," says Zavala, it is about the most sensible remark, "to put a country into combustion, when it possesses the elements of discord; but the difficulties of its re- ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained the work of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... these items is the most important of the three. In most cases the greatest preventable waste of coal in a boiler plant is directly due to excess air. Excess air simply means the amount of air which gets into the furnace and boiler which is not needed for completing the combustion of the coal. Very often twice as much air is admitted to the boiler setting as is required. This extra or excess air is heated and carries heat out through the chimney instead of heating the water ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm
... air up the chimney, enough cool air to take its place must be drawn into the room through every opening and crevice. The result is a mighty draft that rushes past those unfortunate enough to be sitting about the fire and carries rapidly up the chimney almost all of the heat of combustion. ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the battles ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... him on every point, and uniformly to be in the wrong—his mind was kept in a furnace heat, until he became as completely burnt out as a Dutch family pipe which has passed through three generations of hard smokers. In this manner did he undergo a kind of animal combustion consuming away like a farthing rushlight, so that when grim Death finally snuffed him out, there was scarcely left enough of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... as an instance of the scientific enthusiasm of the man, that he was wont to carry about with him bottles containing oxygen, which he had obtained from cabbage-leaves, as also coils of iron wire, with which he could illustrate the brilliant combustion which ensued on burning the latter in ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... condensed into our present world. But unfortunately for this brilliant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the nebulae, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebulae. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... overboard, and another hole having been cut in the deck on the other side, the other pump was rigged, and double the quantity of water poured into the hold; but it was evident to Philip that the combustion increased. The smoke and steam now burst through the interstices of the hatchways and the holes cut in the deck with a violence that proved the extent of the fire which raged below, and Philip thought it advisable to remove all the women and ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... 1919, Jabez Burns & Sons, New York, patented their Jubilee roaster, an inner-heated machine in which the gas is burned inside a revolving cylinder in a combustion chamber protected from direct coffee contact. The heat is deflected downward and then passes upward through ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... small radiant and arborescent crystallizations on dirty windows in London, and have found them to consist of sulphate of ammonia. This salt, or at least, sulphite of ammonia (which becomes sulphate by exposure to air), is an abundant product of the combustion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... which they still burn fuel; and next, because the fuel they require is very expensive. A pound of bread or beef, or oats or beans, costs a great deal more than a pound of coal; while it does not, by its combustion, generate nearly so much heat. The steam-engine, therefore, took the place of animal power, and for a long time stood alone; and nearly all the motive power derived from heat is still produced by the mechanism which Watt brought to such great ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... nine per diem, a total of seventy five; and the work of the engine-room and the ship's carpenters consisted in plugging fractures with stays, plates, and wedges. Presently the steam-gauge (manomtre) gave way, making it impossible to register pressure; the combustion chamber showed a rent of eighteen inches long by one wide, the result of too rapid cooling; and, lastly, the donkey-engine struck work. Under these happy circumstances bursting was not to be expected; breaking down was, a regular collapse ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... 0.03 or 6/13 grain every two hours at first, less frequently later, was the second mistake, for opium brings on general depression. It not only dulls sensation, but it inhibits combustion thereby lessening nerve supply, weakens the heart action, and masks the physiological as well as the pathological state. The disadvantages of such an influence should be apparent to even a medical novice. ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... necessary for bodily growth and development is a sufficiency of pure air. This is necessary, since the oxygen of the air is not only the active agent in the maintenance of life, but is also requisite for the combustion of the foodstuffs conveyed into the body. Much has been done within recent years in our schools to provide well-ventilated classrooms and to instruct teachers how to keep the air of the school pure. Here again the problem is to a large extent a social ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... section, and Figure 317 is an end view of the boiler and setting at the furnace end. The boiler is supported on each side by channel iron columns, these being riveted to the boiler shell angle pieces which rest upon the columns. The heat and products of combustion pass from the furnace along the bottom of the boiler, and at the end pass into and through the tubes and thence over the top of the boiler to the chimney flue. There is shown in the bridge wall an opening, and its service ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... hands of a clock continue in their course because of the energy locked up in a compressed spring or elevated weight. The gun projects the bullet because of the sudden chemical union of carbon with saltpeter and sulphur. The steam engine takes its energy from the steam secured by combustion of coal ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... other towns, for lighting wide public thoroughfares, squares, and large open spaces. If, however, it is desired to obtain a flame with a much higher temperature, it is necessary to resort to a special arrangement for heating the air intended for combustion with the gas. The principle of heating the air by means of waste heat escaping with the products of the waste gas—the regenerative principle—was adopted by Mr. F. Siemens, and applied not only to gas burners, but to high ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... guaranteed the Protestant Religion, were incensed by this interference with the prerogative of the Crown; while all ardent patriots were influenced by the unwarranted and unsolicited interference of a foreign potentate. Every element of combustion being present, meetings were held everywhere, inflammatory speeches were made on every public occasion, and patriotic resolutions were passed. Pulpit and platform rang with repeated cries of "No Popery," and echoed at the Lord Mayor's banquet, at the Guildhall, and even at Covent Garden Theatre in ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... grease on my hands and a smudge on my nose, smelling of sweat." Mrs. Foote repressed a shudder and lowered her eyes. "But I couldn't be fair about it. Your father has no more chance of explaining the thing to you—than my wife has of explaining the theory of an internal-combustion engine.... We employers can't do it. We're on the other side. We can't see anything but our own ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Cooker," which we used, a maximum result is secured from the heat of the primus. The hot gases from the combustion of the kerosene, before they escape into the outside air, have to circulate along a tortuous path, passing from the hot interior to the colder exterior compartments, losing heat all the time. Thus a hot hoosh is preparing in the central vessel side ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... carried it everywhere: so wonderful a machine is this of ours for disseminating intelligence! Think of it! When my father was born——but that is another story. To return: we had here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of—your cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the Viscount's usual ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... They are tired of the services— tired of the meaningless prayers—tired of hearing each other say, "Hear us, good Lord"—tired of the texts, tired of the sermons, tired of the lies about spontaneous combustion as a punishment for blasphemy, tired of the bells, and they long to hear the doxology of superstition. They long to have Common Sense lift its hands in ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... MACQUART, born in 1789; a soldier in 1809; married in 1829 to a market dealer, Josephine Gavaudan, a vigorous, industrious, but intemperate woman; has three children by her; loses her in 1851; dies himself in 1873 from spontaneous combustion, brought about by alcoholism. A fusion of characteristics. Moral prepotency of and physical likeness to his father. A soldier, then a basket-maker, afterwards lives ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... there in Scripture, fire stands for a symbol of destroying power. But that is a less frequent use than that in which it stands as a symbol of life. In a very real sense life is warmth and death is cold. Is not respiration a kind of combustion? Do not physiologists tell us that? Is not the centre of the system and the father of all physical life that great blazing sun which radiates heat? And is not this promise, 'I will send fire on the earth,' the assurance that into the midst of our death there shall come the quick energy of a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the substance reported by Capt. Callam to have fallen upon his vessel, near Java, "offered complete resemblance to the residue resulting from combustion of a steel wire in a flask of oxygen." (Zurcher, Meteors, p. 239.) Nature, Nov. 21, 1878, publishes a notice that, according to the Yuma Sentinel, a meteorite that "resembles steel" had been found ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Blanc from the Valley of Chamouni is considered, and with justice, as the most toilsome feat that a strong man can execute in two days. The combustion of two pounds of coal would place ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... leave from the King to visit England, where he arrived on the eighteenth of May, 1826. He there proceeded to construct a working engine on the principle above mentioned, but soon discovered that his flame-engine, when worked by the combustion of mineral coals, was a different thing from the experimental model he had tried in the highlands of Sweden, with fuel composed of the splinters of fine pine wood. Not only did he fail to produce an extended and vivid flame, but the intense heat so seriously affected all the working parts of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with resistless fire. Usually the fuse was timed to explode on the morning of the third day. Sometimes, when sermons of extraordinary power had followed each other in rapid succession, the fire broke out by a sort of spontaneous combustion on the night of the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... working the engine; but to find the correct dimensions of the inner parts of the boiler, and of the valve-gearing, by which the movements of the steam are governed, requires a very considerable knowledge of the chemistry of combustion, of practical geometry, and of the physical properties of steam. So nice, indeed, is the valve-adjustment of the locomotive, as depending upon the work it has to do, whether fast or slow, light or heavy, that a single eighth of an inch too much or too little will so affect its power as to entirely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... wax tapers, terebene, pine-knots, were all represented in the Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the great staples of Attica, became scarcer as the war went on. "A bibulous wick" was a sinner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp and hasten combustion was little short of a crime. Management in the use of oil—otherwise considered the height of niggardliness—was the rule, and could be all the more readily understood by the Confederate student when he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as well; ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... report to the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists for the year 1913, stated that the method giving the most uniform results was that of ashing the beer with an excess of standard calcium acetate, and that while the moist combustion method in the hands of those familiar with it gave satisfactory results, the various collaborators working with the method did not get as uniform results as with the method of ashing with calcium acetate. J. Assoc. Off. ...
— A Study Of American Beers and Ales • L.M. Tolman
... German authors of note suppose language to have sprung up among men of itself, like spontaneous combustion in oiled cotton; and seem to think, that people of strong feelings and acute minds must necessarily or naturally utter their conceptions by words—and even by words both spoken and written. Frederick Von ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this, they acted without concert, and were at length subdued separately. This conflagration was quenched in blood; two hundred thousand souls, on both sides, having perished; but the remaining matter is very capable of combustion. I have this information from a person who was on the spot at the time, and whose good faith, understanding, and means of information, leave no doubt of the facts. He observed, however, that the numbers above ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... had forgotten the chimneys, it is so long since they went out of use. It is nearly a century since the crude method of combustion, on which you depended for ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look at the respective net results. France lies down to rot into grand Spontaneous-Combustion, Apotheosis of Sansculottism, and much else; which still lasts, to her own great peril, and the great affliction of neighbors. Poor England, after such enormous stumbling among the chimney-pots, and somnambulism ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... requires no preparation. Still others use tinder made by burning linen rags, as our forefathers used to do. This will not flame, but merely smoulders until the breath blows it into a glow. The tinder is made by charring linen rags, that is, burning them to a crisp, but stopping the combustion before they ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... to Santa Ysobel to find the murderer of Thomas Gilbert. That means a stirring to the depths of that little town. This underneath-the-surface combustion will get poked into a flame—she's going to burst out, and somebody's going to get burned. We don't want that to ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that's ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... beards of barley and seeds of the finest grasses, and the contact with irritant, chemical powders, liquids, and gases (ammonia from manure or factory, chlorin, strong sulphur fumes, smoke, and other products of combustion, etc.) may start the inflammation. The eyelids often undergo extreme inflammatory and dropsical swelling in urticaria (nettlerash, surfeit) and in the general inflammatory dropsy known ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... false impression of its mind and heart if it allowed any one to suppose that Food is the chief object of its quest. It is true that Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle for units of nourishing combustion; but on those occasions when the Club feels most truly Itself it ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... methods by which ordinary coal gas can be enriched, so as to give an increased luminosity to the flame, I wish now to discuss the methods by which the gas can be burnt, in order to yield the greatest amount of light, and also the compounds which are produced during combustion. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... of his succession, showy, ambitious, and malignant, followed; each with some vivid literary contribution, some powerful and popular work, a new despotic of combustion in that mighty mine on which stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with the rest of the family, without fear and without reproach. These lesser country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion. The chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the warmest welcome. If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,—The dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney. If you can't afford this, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... compassion; so her strength led her on to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her gravitas,—which implied great things;—but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of things—she lost her morale and became ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... heat of formation of nitro-starch as 812 cals. for 1 grm., and the heat of total combustion as equal to 706.5 cals. for 207 grms., or for 1 grm. 3,413 cals. The heat of decomposition could only be calculated if the products of decomposition were given, but they have not as yet been studied, and the quantity of oxygen contained in the ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... takes place when moist vegetable substances are exposed to oxygen is that of slow combustion ('eremacausis'), the oxygen uniting with the wood and liberating a volume of carbonic acid equal to itself, and another portion combining with the hydrogen of the wood to form water. Decomposition takes place on contact with a ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... and it takes all of Aunt Augusta's energy, common-sense and force of character to keep him and the two chips he carries on his shoulders, as a defiance to the world in general, from being in a constant state of combustion. He has been ostensibly the Mayor of Glendale for twenty-five years, and Aunt Augusta has done the work of the office very well indeed, while he has blown up things in general with great energy. He couldn't draw a long ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... this technology revolution is in the information and information management areas- which, in the U.S., are heavily commercially oriented. Future military application may well be analogous to the impact of the internal combustion engine and wireless radio on land, sea, and air forces in the 1920s and 1930s. The size of this technological lead between ourselves and the rest of the world, especially in the base for new information products and services, should widen further in knowledge and in application. ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... where a considerable portion of the small army of the United States was placed under his command. It was generally understood to be the desire of the Administration that hostilities should begin without orders, by a species of spontaneous combustion; but the coolness and prudence of General Taylor made futile any such hopes, if they were entertained, and it required a positive order to induce him, in March, 1846, to advance towards the Rio Grande and to cross the disputed territory. He arrived at a ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the Correlation, Conservation, Persistence, or Limitation of Force, as applied to the human body and the human mind. We cannot create force anywhere; we merely appropriate existing force. The heat of our fires has been derived from the solar fire. We cannot lift a weight in the hand without the combustion of a certain amount of food; we cannot think a thought without a similar demand; and the force that goes in one way is unavailable in any other way. While we are expending ourselves largely in any single function—in muscular exercise, in digestion, in thought and feeling, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... varnishing the paper to prevent the escape of the gas, and supposing, erroneously, that the fault lay in the latter, they sought about for a new gas more suitable to the paper. This they found, as they supposed, in the gas which resulted from the combustion of wet straw and wool, which had an upward tendency, they thought, on account of its electrical properties, which caused it to be repelled from the ground. It is scarcely necessary now to point out that the true cause of the upward tendency lay in the rarefaction of the air by ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... inside, and upon submitting the envelop to his nose, he distinguished the faint fragrance of pressed flowers. It was perhaps a blessing in disguise that the duty of sorting the outgoing mail did not fall to his lot. One added bit of information would have resulted in spontaneous combustion. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... railway centres on the old North Missouri Railway, for the benefit of local unions of the working men. In 1882, I made a dramatization of Mrs. Burnett's 'Editha's Burglar'. With this as a curtain-raiser, and a rather slap-stick farce called 'Combustion', I made a tour of the country with a company I organized, and with which I ran in debt several thousand dollars. In 1889, a four-act version of 'The Burglar', arranged by me, was played in New York, and was successful, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead, filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... submitting to the conscious triumph? Give her her part of vanity, of youth, of desire to rule and be admired. Meanwhile Mr. Clive's drawings have been crackling in the fireplace at her feet, and the last spark of that combustion is ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Were the atmosphere to consist wholly of oxygen; and the different kinds of objects which compose, and are found upon, the globe, to remain what they are; the world would run through its stages of decay, renovation, and final destruction, in a rapid cycle. Combustion, once excited, would proceed with ungovernable violence; the globe, during its short existence, would be in a continual conflagration, until its ashes would be its only remains: animals would live ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... consider the somewhat puerile theories of Vitruvius, or the myths which testify to the importance attached to fire by primeval man, we are at liberty to suppose that a conflagration caused by lightning or by the spontaneous combustion of vegetable materials in a state of fermentation, or other similar phenomena, made known to man the power of fire, and the use it might be to him. The accidental striking together of two flints produced a spark; observation taught men to obtain a ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... of Granville Sharpe, diligently laboring in his vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficent amelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at the same time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that the earth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium would render all his benevolent schemes of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the combustion of the carbon of which the electrodes are composed. Thus, the illumination is the result of directly burning a fuel. The current, in passing from one electrode to the other, through the gap, produces such an intense heat that the ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... eyes, which it had been the duty of the same person to close immediately after death, and set fire to the wood with averted face, in testimony that he performed that office not of good will, but of necessity. As the combustion proceeded, various offerings were cast into the flames. The manes were believed to love blood; animals, therefore, especially those which they had loved while alive, were killed and thrown upon the pile, as horses, dogs and doves, besides the beasts commonly used in sacrifice, as sheep ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Schuyler seeth to the Manufacturing of suitable Cloathing for all her family, all of which is the produce of her plantation in which she is helped by her Mama & Miss Polly and the whole is done with less Combustion & noise than in many Families who have not more than 4 or 5 Persons in the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... p. 675) says in a note: "Il resulte de l'ensemble de ce passage que les matieres designees par Marco Polo sous le nom de 'espodie' (spodium) etaient des scories metalliques; en general, le mot spodium designe les residus de la combustion des matieres vegetales ou des ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... formation of gases or airs, the agency of caloric, or matter of heat, generated in the process of combustion, considerably facilitates the strength of the powder, in consequence of producing the expansion ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... sea sick ... emetics ... exhaustion ... stimulants ... hard drinking ... spontaneous combustion ... ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... a kind of doggerel Inferno, which went through nine editions, and "was the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... remained there reading every night after the house quieted down after dinner, until it was time to lock up for the night; and several times Mr. Evans stopped and looked in at him where he sat in the bad combustion of the gas that was taking the country tan out of his cheeks. One night when he came in late, and Lemuel put his book down to take him up in the elevator, he said, "Don't disturb yourself; I'm going to walk up," but he lingered at the door looking in with the queer smile that always roused the ladies' ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... harbour, sheltered deep From access of the winds, but looming vast With awful ravage, AEtna's neighbouring steep Thundered aloud, and, dark with clouds, upcast Smoke and red cinders in a whirlwind's blast. Live balls of flame, with showers of sparks, upflew And licked the stars, and in combustion massed, Torn rocks, her ragged entrails, molten new, The rumbling mount belched forth ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... moment. Lord Dunmore, obeying a general order issued by the ministry to all the provincial governors, had seized upon the military munitions of the province. Here was a similar measure to that of Gage. The cry went forth that the subjugation of the colonies was to be attempted. All Virginia was in combustion. The standard of liberty was reared in every county; there was a general cry to arms. Washington was looked to, from various quarters, to take command. His old comrade in arms, Hugh Mercer, was about marching down to Williamsburg ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... word, and never looked at it so as to compare it with The Lives of the Poets, as published under Mr. Cibber's name. What became of that manuscript I know not. I should have liked much to examine it. I suppose it was thrown into the fire in that impetuous combustion of papers, which Johnson I think rashly executed, when moribundus.' BOSWELL. Mr. Croker, quoting a letter by Griffiths the publisher, says:—'The question is now decided by this letter in opposition to Dr. Johnson's assertion.' Croker's Boswell, p. 818. The evidence of such an infamous ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... compound that the most delicate thermometer cannot detect a variation. It is undiscoverable by our senses and yet it proves its existence beyond question by its work. Heat which is obtained by the combustion of coal or wood, lies also in water, to be drawn forth and utilised in steam. It is apparently a mere question of temperature. The heat lies latent and dead until we raise the temperature of the water to 212 deg., and it is turned ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... having been skilfully performed, the process of combustion may be commenced. For this purpose, a smaller woody paralleloped—the extremities of which have been previously dipped in sulphur in a state of liquefaction—must be ignited and applied to the laminated lignin, or waste paper, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... dreaded the danger of disturbance. His fears were shared even by those counsellors, such as Clifford and Arlington, who were his jealous opponents; and it was only too evident how many sources of combustion went to feed the flame of discontent. The Presbyterians, however little in sympathy with the aims of the wilder sectaries, were bitterly disappointed at the ecclesiastical settlement, and deemed that their Royalist leanings had been rewarded by the basest ingratitude. The burden of taxation ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... much pretended earnestness, flew from window to window, to trace footsteps upon the turf which he knew had not printed it: yet, never inattentive to his own interest, when he perceived in the midst of the combustion he had raised, that Lady Margaret was incensed at the noise it produced, he artfully gave over his search, and seating himself in a chair next to her, eagerly offered to assist her with cakes, chocolate, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... against the ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only with their rapiers. As Bacon himself told the Queen, "if some base and cruel-minded persons had entered into such an action, it might have caused much blow and combustion; but it appeared well that they were such as knew not how to play the malefactors!" But it was sufficient to bring Essex within ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... anything that will keep it from burning up with its own heat. If you can obtain no such ingredients, have it turned over and exposed to the air so often that it will decay without passing through a process approaching combustion. When it has become so thoroughly decomposed as to resemble a fine black powder, you have a fertilizer superior to any high-priced patent compound that can be bought. Further on I will show how it can be used both in this state and also ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... silk on which he tried a new varnish composed of linseed oil and india-rubber, and, dressing several gores with this, he rolled them up and left them through a night in a drying loft, with the result that the next day they were disintegrated and on the point of bursting into flame by spontaneous combustion. Fresh silk and other varnish were then tried, but with indifferent success. Next he endeavoured to dispense with sewing, and united the gores of yet another balloon by the mere adhesiveness of the varnish and application of a hot iron. This led ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... appliances, within the means of the average farmer, the generation of electricity, with its unique conveniences, becomes automatic, provided some dependable source of power is to be had—such as a water wheel, gasoline (or other form of internal combustion) engine, or the ordinary windmill. The water wheel is the ideal prime mover for the dynamo in isolated plants. Since water-power is running to waste on tens of thousands of our farms throughout the country, several ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... a limit to the magnificence of the works they can accomplish. Our argument from heat is founded on a very simple matter. It is quite obvious that a heated body tends to grow cold. I am not now speaking of fires or of actual combustion whereby heat is produced; I am speaking merely of such heat as would be possessed by a red-hot poker after being taken from the fire, or by an iron casting after the metal has been run into the mould. ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... balloon for a part of the journey. At any rate it was done, I think, on the 6th October, 1850, from Assistance Harbour. Two birds, duly freighted with intelligence, and notes from the married men, were put in a basket, which was attached to a balloon in such a manner, that, after combustion of a certain quantity of match, the carrier-pigeons would be launched into the air to commence their flight. The idea being that they would fetch some of the whaling vessels about the mouth of Hudson's Straits; at least so I heard. The wind was then blowing fresh from the north-west, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... guest whose appearance had caused this combustion, plucked the roaring ostler from above Mrs. Dods, and pushing him away with a hearty slap on the shoulder, proceeded to raise and encourage the fallen landlady, enquiring, at the same time, "What, in the devil's name, was the cause ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... legislation cannot undermine the derogations granted to Spain and Portugal until 31 December 1999 under the Council Directive of 24 November 1988 on the limitation of emissions of certain pollutants into the air from large combustion plants. DECLARATION ON THE EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT FUND The Conference agrees that the European Development Fund will continue to be financed by national contributions in accordance with the current provisions. DECLARATION ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... how it comes about: In proportion as the blood loses its oxygen, it picks up in exchange the carbonic acid produced by combustion, so that it is quite loaded with it by the time it returns to the lungs. There it takes in a fresh supply of oxygen, and discharges at the same time its overplus of carbonic acid, which is driven out of the body by the contractions ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket you—you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would." ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... were belching out fire and smoke, and the firemen standing in front of them, like so many gladiators, tugged away with devil's-claw and slice-bar, inducing by their exertions more and more intense combustion and heat. The noise of the cracking, roaring fires, escaping steam, and the loud and labored pulsations of the engines, together with the roar of battle above and the thud and vibration of the huge masses of iron which were hurled against us produced a scene and sound to be compared ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... Christians censured a practice prevalent among the Romans, of decorating a corpse, previous to interment or combustion, with garlands and flowers. Their reprehension extended also to a periodical custom of placing the "first-fruits of Flora" on their graves and tombs. Thus Anchises, in Dryden's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... imagined when it is remembered that these flames were of all hues, from rich ruby-red, to the pale lurid light of burning sulphur. Fancy all the gems of Aladdin's Palace or Sinbad's Valley in fierce flashing combustion, immensely magnified, and you may form some faint idea of the scene in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... bottling it. This little performance was at times very telling in its effect—it spoke volumes: it told of a long training in self-repression which still did not come quite naturally: it told of inward combustion, of a tightly cornered but still independent mind. Ladies-in-waiting had seen the Princess run out of her mother's presence to tabber her feet on the inlaid floor of the corridor, thence to return smooth, sweet-tempered, and amiable; ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... luminosity, with its writhing serpents of flame, was followed in a second or two by a thousand points of light as the town took fire, followed, almost instantaneously, by a burst of light of every color in the spectrum, as a thousand substances leaped into combustion, and then, in ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... common bodies so designated (though the alchemists themselves seem often guilty of confusing them). "Mercury" is the metallic principle par excellence, conferring on metals their brightness and fusibility, and corresponding to the spirit or intelligence in man.(1) "Sulphur," the principle of combustion and colour, is the analogue of the soul. Many alchemists postulated two sulphurs in the metals, an inward and an outward.(1b) The outward sulphur was thought to be the chief cause of metallic impurity, and the reason why all (known) ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... eminent organ-builders, making a fortune by his "new movement;" having purchased and patented it: he has found a publisher for his church music, and sold his old opera. Captain de Camp has vanished in smoke—he has exploded of spontaneous combustion,—they find him all deceit, leaving a glass eye and a cork leg. Mr. Latimer gets the Colonial Bishopric of Bushantee, in New Zealand, and cuts Miss Jemima. Mr. Wellesley having gone to India for glory, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... boundary, masses of ponderable matter might be conceived to exist beyond it, but they could emit no light. Beyond the aether dark suns might burn; there, under proper conditions, combustion might be carried on; fuel might consume unseen, and metals be fused in invisible fires. A body, moreover, once heated there, would continue for ever heated; a sun or planet once molten, would continue ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... got such a start before we detected it was a mystery. With the shack walls already burning hot and the strong wind, it had been like spontaneous combustion. Ma Wagor was baking bread on an old oil stove. Perhaps a draft from the open window had fanned the fire. But the ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... significant fact is unnecessary. It contains a lesson and a warning which a fool need not err in reading and understanding. Oppression is a powder magazine exposed always to the danger of explosion from spontaneous combustion. Verbum ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... the bright red colour, and undergoes some new combinations in the glands or capillaries, in which the matter of heat is given out from the secreted fluids. This process therefore, as well as the process of respiration, has some analogy to combustion, as the vital air or oxygene seems to become united to some inflammable base, and the matter of heat escapes from the new ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... observe how indefinite was the proportion between the physical mass of any given author and the property of brilliant and long-continued combustion. For instance, there was not a quarto volume of the last century—nor, indeed, of the present—that could compete in that particular with a child's little gilt-covered book, containing Mother Goose's Melodies. The ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... removing the fouling, resulting from firing, to obtain a chemically clean surface, and in coating this surface with a film of oil to prevent rusting. The fouling which results from firing is of two kinds—one, the products of combustion of the powder; the other, cupro-nickel scraped off (under the abrading action of irregularities or grit in the bore). Powder fouling, because of its acid reaction, is highly corrosive; that is, it will induce rust and must be removed. Metal fouling ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be done, someone must come and do it—do it, perhaps, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley |
