"Bitumen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said by Hatchet to be formed chiefly from the resinous principles of plants,—this would account for its appearance when burnt, which is the same as that of burnt bitumen. But resinous principles are, even when they exist, of partial extent only in plants. In good coal the whole of the vegetable substance seems to be transformed, a supposition ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... increased after this, and so it went on till the 10th of May, 253, when S. Alfio was killed by having his tongue pulled out, S. Filiberto was burnt on a gridiron and S. Cirino was boiled in pitch and bitumen. ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... no less flourishing than agriculture; Italy at this period was rich in industries—silk, wool, hemp, fur, alum, sulphur, bitumen; those products which the Italian soil could not bring forth were imported, from the Black Sea, from Egypt, from Spain, from France, and often returned whence they came, their worth doubled by labour and fine workmanship. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Egypt, by the magnificence of their ruins. They are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be traced—mounds of stiff greyish clay, containing the remains of the vast structures that were built of bricks set in mortar or bitumen. Stone was not used as in Egypt. While the Egyptian temple was spread superficially over a large area, the Chaldaean temple strove to attain as high an elevation as possible. These "ziggurats" were composed of several immense cubes piled ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... except Noa and his family, who were saved by means of the ship, which, being lifted up by the waters, rested at last upon the top of the Gendyae or Mountain, on which, it is reported, there now remaineth some part, and that men take away the bitumen from it, and make use of it by way of charm or expiation, to avoid evil." A more general Assyrian tradition, somewhat different in its details, also survives.[25] The god Chronus, it was said, appeared ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... coke ovens," answered Mr. Emerson. "Do you see those long rows of bee-hives? Those are ovens in which soft coal is being burned so that a certain ingredient called bitumen may be driven off from it. What is left after that is done is a substance that looks somewhat like a dry, sponge if that were gray and hard. It burns with a very hot flame and is invaluable in the smelting of iron ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... member of the school. His style was sketchy, conscientious, and full of strength and decision. He worked in large lines, broad surfaces and masses of light or shade. His colour was good, running to purples, reds, and admirable greens, full of bitumen and ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... There was only one passenger, and that a baby boy. But the Mayflower that brought the Pilgrim Fathers to America carried not so precious a load. The boat was made of the broad leaves of papyrus tightened together by bitumen. Boats were sometimes made of that material, as we learn from Pliny, and Herodotus, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks, the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to grow longer, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,—a memorable morning in July, 1845,—black pots of bitumen were seen smoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization had arrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... they arrived at the wall of Media,[101] as it is called, and passed to the other side of it. This wall was built of burnt bricks, laid in bitumen; it was twenty feet in thickness, and a hundred in height, and the length of it was said to be twenty parasangs; and it was not far distant from Babylon. 13. Hence they proceeded, in two days' march, the distance of ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... cavern, whose entrance is very high and spacious. What is most remarkable in this place is that the stones of the mountain are of crystal, rubies, or other precious stones. Here is also a sort of fountain of pitch or bitumen, that runs into the sea, which the fish swallow, and evacuate soon afterward, turned into ambergris; and this the waves throw up on the beach in great quantities. Trees also grow here, most of which are of wood of aloes, equal in goodness to those ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... take green and mix it with bitumen and you will make the shadows darker. Then, for lighter [shades] green with yellow ochre, and for still lighter green with yellow, and for the high lights pure yellow; then mix green and turmeric together and glaze ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... of these ditches were lined with bricks too, which were made, like those of the walls, from the earth obtained from the excavations. They used for all this masonry a cement made from a species of bitumen, which was found in great quantities floating down one of the rivers which flowed into the Euphrates, in ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... ever notice that some pieces of coal are dull and smutty, while others are hard and bright? The dull coal is called bituminous, because it contains more bitumen or mineral pitch. This is often sold as "run-of-mine" coal,—that is, just as it comes from the mine, whether in big pieces or in little ones; but sometimes it is passed over screens, and in this process the dust ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... them, or from the different manner in which they receive the Sun's rays. Do you not see in our fires, that various kinds of wood produce different colors? Pines and firs give a flame mixed with thick smoke, and throw out little light. That which rises from sulphur and thick bitumen is bluish. Lighted straw gives out sparks of a reddish color. The large olive, laurel, ash of Parnassus, etc., trees which always retain their sap, throw a whitish light similar to that of a lamp. Thus, comets whose fires are formed of different materials, each take and preserve a color ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the town at large appeared to form an attractive sejour for persons of an irritable nostril. To go to Paris, however, was hardly more attractive than to remain at Havre, for Bernard had a lively vision of the heated bitumen and the glaring frontages of the French capital. But if a Norman town was close and dull, the Norman country was notoriously fresh and entertaining, and the next morning Bernard got into a caleche, with his luggage, and bade its proprietor drive him along the coast. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... seed of plants of the land, might take refuge and be rescued from destruction. Hasisadra awoke, and at once acted upon the warning. A strong decked ship was built, and her sides were paid, inside and out, with the mineral pitch, or bitumen, with which the country abounded; the vessel's seaworthiness was tested, the cargo was stowed away, and a ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... beneath the flood, with drenched fell, The ram, launched free, goes drifting down the tide. Else, having shorn, they smear their bodies o'er With acrid oil-lees, and mix silver-scum And native sulphur and Idaean pitch, Wax mollified with ointment, and therewith Sea-leek, strong hellebores, bitumen black. Yet ne'er doth kindlier fortune crown his toil, Than if with blade of iron a man dare lance The ulcer's mouth ope: for the taint is fed And quickened by confinement; while the swain His hand of healing from the ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... that evening, with my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately titillated my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the natron, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschistes, who cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess. It was a perfume at once sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand years had not been ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the little sailor hurried him along as fast as the nature of the ground would allow; and with the full intention of going right towards where they had left the others, at the end of the bitumen river, he went right in the opposite direction, and farther and farther into the wildest recesses of ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... the women have such nice ivory colouring with the faintest tint of pink, and such eyes, brown and dark, and kind, and such eye-lashes—it's easy colour to paint too in Henner's way, Prussian blue, bitumen and ochre and a breath of rose! Look at the bloom on their hair, blue as the light on raven's wing, and the flour on their faces, hanging thick on their black eyebrows. I think they must have a little of the Indian in them. There's a far-away kinship ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the slumbering Earthquake Lies pillowed on fire, And the lakes of bitumen 90 Rise boilingly higher; Where the roots of the Andes Strike deep in the earth, As their summits to heaven Shoot soaringly forth; I have quitted my birthplace, Thy bidding to bide— Thy spell hath subdued me, Thy will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Marquise." She is handsome, so the painters say; and, perhaps, they are not far from right, for she is handsome after the style of an old picture. Although young, she seems to be covered with yellow varnish, and to walk surrounded by a frame, with a background of bitumen. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... good horse. Even for a Spanish Mexican his face was dark. Swart it was, the cheeks hollow; a tiny, tight mustache with ends truculently pointed and erect helped out the belligerency of the tight-shut lips. The eyes were black as bitumen, and flashed ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... case of drawings in lines to be made into printing-blocks for letter-press printing, the operation is conducted in its first phase absolutely in the same manner as the foregoing, only, after exposure, instead of producing the image with a slightly alkaline powder, powdered bitumen is used, and the plate is slightly warmed, so that the powder may slightly fuse and adhere to the metal, but not enough to make the bichromated sugar become insoluble. The plate is then washed with water, and all the sugary coating removed, leaving the surface of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... light which appears to us more intense. In the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with different speed. Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts, the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black. ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... spread actual flame in these European parts, and first of them all except Jenkins's Ear) is out, fairly withdrawn; but the fire, you perceive, rages not the less. The fire will not quench itself, I doubt, till the bitumen, sulphur and other angry fuel have run much lower! Austria has fighting men in abundance, England behind it has guineas; Austria has got injuries, then successes:—there is in Austria withal a dumb pride, quite equal in pretensions to the vocal vanity of France, and far more stubborn ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Agane, am I. My mother was a princess; my father I knew not. My father's brother loved the mountain land. In the city of Azipiranu, which on the bank of the Euphrates lies, my mother, the princess, conceived me; in an inacessible spot she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket of rushes; with bitumen the door of my ark she closed. She launched me on the river, which drowned me not. The river bore me along; to Akki, the irrigator, it brought me. Akki, the irrigator, in the tenderness of his heart, lifted me up. Then Akki, the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... to us, "I scumbled in the background solid, using bitumen as an undertone, then I dragged over my high lights and painted my cool color right into it," it is as meaningless to most of us as if another bread-winner had said, "I use a Singer with a straight shuttle and No. 60 cotton." What we want to know is ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... pitch of a black or brownish-black colour, consisting chiefly of carbon; also a limestone impregnated with bitumen, and more or less in every quarter ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... "Ambar;" wherein I would derive "Ambrosia." Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a "substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen"(!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several pounds upon the Zanzibar Coast and is sold at a high price, being held a potent aphrodisiac. A small hollow is drilled in the bottom of the cup and the coffee is poured upon the bit of ambergris it contains; when ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... particularly described, which is a very conspicuous object even at a considerable distance, its greatest height above the plain being about seventy feet. It is built in a very rude fashion, of large bricks, cemented with bitumen, whence the name by which ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... to give a good representation according to the recognized rules of art of the baptism of Jesus Christ. He had just begun putting in the fishes swimming in the Jordan. Apollonius was mixing the cement with bitumen and chopped straw, pronouncing words of might known only to himself; while Bruno and Buffalmacco were picking the little cubes of stone to be used, and Tafi arranging them according to the sketch he had made on a slab of slate he held in his hand. But just ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... as well as the lake might be termed dead, as producing nothing having resemblance to vegetation, and even the very air was entirely devoid of its ordinary winged inhabitants, deterred probably by the odour of bitumen and sulphur which the burning sun exhaled from the waters of the lake in steaming clouds, frequently assuming the appearance of waterspouts. Masses of the slimy and sulphureous substance called naphtha, which floated idly on the sluggish and sullen waves, supplied those ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... any time an important avenue for commerce, and besides rafts, which could be floated down to a certain distance, the only means of communication ever used were wicker baskets coated within and without with bitumen, or some form of a primitive ferry for passing from ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... them so. Intervals between one age of authors and another lie unnoticed, as the flats and common lands of uncultured history. And yet, strange to say, when these authors are living amongst us, they occupy a very small portion of our thoughts, and fill up but desultory interstices in the bitumen and tufo wherefrom we build up the Babylon of our lives! So it is, and perhaps so it should be, whether it pleases the conceit of penmen or not. Life is meant to be active; and books, though they give ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... they were going away, he gave each of them a golden jewel, as each "appeared to him to deserve it." "This gold," says Dr. Chanca, "is made in very delicate sheets, like our gold leaf, because they use it for making masks and to plate upon bitumen. They also wear it on the head and for earrings and nose-rings, and therefore they beat it very thin as they only wear it for its beauty and not for ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... not answer. No sound but the rough wind without blowing the drifted snow and pebbles from the asphalt roof against the frosted panes, and the angry fire of bitumen within breaking into clefts of blue and scarlet flame, thrusting its jets of fierce light out from its cage: impatient, it may be, of this convict, this sickly, shrivelled bit of humanity standing there; wondering the nauseated life in his nostrils or soul claimed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... horseback, who is slaying the Dragon with his lance—a very spirited figure. This he executed in chiaroscuro, in oils, a method that he much delighted to use for all his works, sketching them in the manner of a cartoon, with ink or with bitumen, before colouring them; as may still be seen from many beginnings of pictures and panels, which he left unfinished on account of his death, and as may also be perceived from many drawings by his hand, executed in chiaroscuro, of which the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... times men were in the habit of cutting celts or hatchets in chalk, bitumen, and other fragile substances, which were certainly of no practical use. Thousands of similar objects in harder rock, but showing no sign of wear or tear, have also been found, and there is little doubt ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... have been not merely stimulated, but in many cases the business and sales have been directly increased and new arts established through the inventions of this one man—namely, iron, steel, brass, zinc, nickel, platinum ($5 per ounce in 1878, now $26 an ounce), rubber, oils, wax, bitumen, various chemical compounds, belting, boilers, injectors, structural steel, iron tubing, glass, silk, cotton, porcelain, fine woods, slate, marble, electrical measuring instruments, miscellaneous machinery, coal, wire, paper, building materials, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin |
