"Alkali" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cheapest method of decomposing nitro-glycerin. Perhaps the calcium sulphide of tank-waste, obtainable from the alkali works, might answer ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... yet recalcitrant, every man stood—or fell—by force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled for fortune, for competence—or for existence. It was a case of the survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature—the burning alkali desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,—all men were free and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... lead solutions give loose peroxide along with much spongy metallic lead. Free alkali decreases the separation of peroxide; feebly alkaline solutions, concentrated and dilute, yield relatively much peroxide along with metallic lead, while strongly alkaline solutions ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... is recommended by the Board of Agriculture: "To prepare caustic alkali wash, first dissolve 1 lb. of commercial caustic soda in water, then 1 lb. of crude potash (potashes or pearl ash of oilmen) in water. When both have been dissolved, mix the two well together, then add 3/4 lb. of soft soap or ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... exercised everywhere. A committee of public safety was established and immediately the prisons of Caracas and Puerto Cabello were filled with men, many of whom died of suffocation. Into a dungeon in Puerto Cabello, a Spaniard threw five flasks of alkali, thus causing the death by asphyxiation of all the prisoners ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... from one or two experiments only. I doubt the possibility of making silicate of soda by merely mixing lime, sand, and salt together, as my chemical friends tell me this cannot be accomplished unless the silex and the alkali are fused together. If a soluble silicate of soda can be made in the way you mention, it will be a great saving of expense. Has it been tried? You have no doubt seen a report of the enormous crop of wheat grown in a field in Norfolk last year (90 bushels ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... that during previous months, thanks to the efficiency of the Committee of Twenty-one, great quantities of liquid chlorine had been manufactured at Niagara Falls, where the Niagara Alkali Company, the National Electrolytic Company, the Oldburg Electro-Chemical Company, the Castner Electrolytic Alkali Company, the Hooker Electro-Chemical Company and several others, working night and day ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... mistaken. The horsemen had halted! Out there on the glaring, alkali-arid plateau, they were standing as still as so many statues. Looking toward the canyon mouth which had swallowed their quarry, they certainly were, but they were halted as completely ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... extending over more than 200 square miles. It was brought to England at less than half the freight of the East India saltpetre (nitrate of potassa); and as, in the chemical manufacture neither the potash nor the soda were required, but only the nitric acid, in combination with the alkali, the soda-saltpetre of South America soon supplanted the potash-nitre of the East. The manufacture of sulphuric acid received a new impulse; its price was much diminished without injury to the manufacturer; and, with the exception of fluctuations caused by the impediments thrown in the ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... the green and troubled rivers, twisting their way lower and lower to the common plains, each larger stream calling to all his brooks to follow him as down they go headforemost to the sea. Even the hopeless stretches of alkali and sand, sinks of lost streams, in the southeastern counties, are redeemed by the delectable mountains that on all sides shut them in. Everywhere the landscape swims in crystalline ether, while over all broods the warm California sun. Here, if anywhere, life is worth living, full and ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... in their own nature inconsistent he has failed, as every one else must have failed. We cannot identify ourselves with the characters, as in a good play. We cannot identify ourselves with the poet, as in a good ode. The conflicting ingredients, like an acid and an alkali mixed, neutralise each other. We are by no means insensible to the merits of this celebrated piece, to the severe dignity of the style, the graceful and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, or the wild and barbaric melody which gives so striking an effect to the choral passages. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is narrow and quite shoal, the channel not being more than eighteen inches deep. The bottom is composed of gravel, but having been solidified by the alkali, is like a solid rock. The channel runs in every direction and is at times diverted by great sandbars strewn with the most beautiful agates, on which no human foot had ever trod before Paul ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... the joiner, the stone-mason, the ship-builder, and the smith are made, are chemical inventions; even the press, to the influence of which I am disposed to attribute as much as you can do, could not have existed in any state of perfection without a metallic alloy; the combining of alkali and sand, and certain clays and flints together to form glass and porcelain is a chemical process; the colours which the artist employs to frame resemblances of natural objects, or to create combinations ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... plants to burn for ashes (whence the lye is to be made by pouring hot water on them), it must be recollected that all plants are not equally efficacious: those that contain the most alkali (either potash or soda) are the best. On this account, the stalks of succulent plants, as reeds, maize, broom, heath, and furze, are very much better than the wood of any trees; and twigs are better than timber. Pine and fir-trees are ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... and others which I propose to recite in this part; it occurred to me, that, by a process similar to that by which this acid air is expelled from the spirit of salt, an alkaline air might be expelled from substances containing volatile alkali. ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... the vessel in which the water is boiled, and in time they become very thickly coated. Permanent hardness is caused by other compounds of lime that are not precipitated by boiling the water. The only way in which to soften such water is to add to it an alkali, such as borax, washing soda, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... perfectly beautiful women who are wont to kindle great passions. Before a truly passionate feeling can exist, something is necessary that is perhaps best expressed by a metaphor in chemistry—namely, the two persons must neutralise each other, like acid and alkali to a neutral salt. Before this can be done the following conditions are essential. In the first place, all sexuality is one-sided. This one-sidedness is more definitely expressed and exists in a higher degree in one person than in another; so ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a woman who sent to the refinery for a pail of alkali to clean her floor. The man thought he'd get benzine instead; and just as he got into the house, the fire from his pipe dropped into it, and the whole shanty was in a blaze before the poor woman knew what had happened. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... These terraces covered an area of about three acres, and looked like a series of cataracts changed into stone, each edge being fringed with a festoon of delicate stalactites. The water contained about eighty-five per cent. of silica, with one or two per cent of iron alumina, and a little alkali. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... has been sold in England so high as 80l. a ton, and as low as 6l.; at the present time, (December, 1833) it is worth 9l. 10s. a ton. The depreciation is caused chiefly by kelp, and other substitutes found in the British alkali, a French chemical discovery, manufactured from sea salt, from which, the other ingredients are detached, by combination with sulphur, and acids subjected to heat. The imports of barilla from the Canary Islands to this country are about 3,500 ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... and the light was so intense that the station agent usually wore blue glasses. Behind the station there was a water course, which roared in flood time, and a basin in the soft white rock where a pool of alkali water flashed in the sun like a mirror. The agent looked almost as sick as his chickens, and Mrs. Kronborg at once invited him to lunch with her party. He had, he confessed, a distaste for his own cooking, and lived mainly on soda crackers and canned beef. He laughed apologetically ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... by the stage thunderin' in—leathers creakin', chains jinglin', bosses a lather of sweat an' alkali dust, Monte cocked up on the box as austere as a treeful of owls. He's for openin' the door, but Peets is thar before him. Let it get dealt down to showin' attentions to a lady, an' the briskest sport'll have to move some ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... devised fabrications, every wind freighted for her with phantasmal rumors, no ray of direct daylight visiting the poor Sovereign Woman; who is lazy, not malignant if she could avoid it: mainly a mass of esurient oil, with alkali on the back of alkali poured in, at this rate, for ten years past; till, by pouring and by stirring, they get her to the state of SOAP and froth! Is it so wonderful that she does, by degrees, rise into eminent suspicion, anger, fear, violence and vehemence against her bad ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... foretel, for example, the respective effects which a tale of distress will have upon a cold-hearted miser, and a man of active benevolence, with the same confidence with which we can predict the different actions of an acid upon an alkali and upon a metal;—and there are individuals in regard to whose integrity and veracity, in any situation in which they can be placed, we have a confidence similar to that with which we rely on the ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... able to curl up cosily in a corner and go to sleep, with a silk travelling hat or a long veil on one's head, and the stiff bonnet or big hat with showy plumes nicely covered in its long purse-like bag, and hanging on a hook above. The sand and alkali ruin everything, and are apt to inflame the eyes and nose. I find a hamper with strap indispensable on the train; it will hold as much as a small trunk, yet ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... and carefully neutralize the filtrate with very dilute hydrochloric or acetic acid, equal to a precipitate of alkali-albumen. Filter off the precipitate, and on testing the filtrate, peptones are found. The intermediate bodies, the albumoses, are not nearly so readily obtained from pancreatic as ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... longer as capital; is no longer capable of rendering service to production, or at least not the same service, nor to the same sort of production. Such, for example, is the portion of capital which consists of materials. The tallow and alkali of which soap is made, once used in the manufacture, are destroyed as alkali and tallow. In the same division must be placed the portion of capital which is paid as the wages, or consumed as the subsistence, of laborers. That part of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... & sunny snow going fast. Fixed up tent & cleaned up generally. Alkali flat a lake, can't cross till it dries. Stock some scattered, brought ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... wanting this land. Down yonder, far away to the scorching South, at the edge of the level alkali lands, in a tule swamp, where the Indians taken from the mountains were penned up and dying like sheep in a corral, was a bold, enterprising Indian Agent who was gathering in, under orders of his Government, all the Indians of Northern California. He could appoint a hundred deputies, and authorize ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... Bul. Soc. Chim. de Bel., xix., August 1905, contends that experience does not warrant the assumption that free acid is a source of danger in nitro-glycerine or nitro-cellulose; free alkali, he ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... Experiment.—I mixed 2 ounces of caustic ley, which was prepared from alkali of tartar and unslaked lime and did not precipitate lime water, with half an ounce of the preceding solution of sulphur which likewise did not precipitate lime water. This mixture had a yellow colour. I poured it into the same bottle, ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... was thinkin' of packin' 'em in from Gophertown, over yonder. She's about thirty miles from here, across the alkali. 'T aint a regular town, but they got grub. But if we got to comin' in regular, they'd smell gold quicker than bees findin' orange-blossoms. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... contriving a harmony between such a son and such a metier. The old man was left to recover from the sting inflicted by the Leppins, to study over the future of his youngest daughter, to keep a careful eye upon his business associates, and to combat—as one combats the alkali dust of the Plains—all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the stage when such elemental features as walls and roofs gave way to the minor considerations involved in the swinging ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... after the above remedies have operated, and the body may be sponged with the same. Water made very sweet with sugar, with aromatic spirits of ammonia added, may be drunk freely as a corrective. A solution of cholorate of potash, or of alkali, the latter weak, may be given to obviate the effect of the poison. If spasms ensue after evacuation, laudanum in considerable doses it necessary. If inflammation should occur, combat in the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... yet about your drivin'," his new friend flattered him. "They say there's no stops when you get the wheel cuddled up to your chest. No quittin' an' no passin' yuh by with a merry laugh an' a cloud of alkali dust. I guess it's right. I've been wantin' to ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... of these books was an adding of alkali to the acid of Mr. Frayling's disposition at the moment, and he went down to look for his wife while he was still effervescing. How did Evadne get them? he wanted to know. Mrs. Frayling could not conceive. She had ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... see white clouds of alkali dust ahead. By and by we came up with the dust-raisers. The children and I had got into the buckboard with Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and Miss Hull, so as to ride easier and be able to gossip, and we had driven ahead of the wagons, so as to avoid the ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... in this section we found alkali water near the road, some very strong and dangerous for man or beast to use. We traveled on up the Sweetwater for some time, and at last came to a place where the road left the river, and we had a long, hard hill to pull up. When we ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... requisite for growth does not concern us as there are no alkali lands in the counties near the Twin Cities, and the harmful minute animals that destroy the beneficial bacteria in the soil are as a ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... tone of colour is produced. The artist must be guided by these proof pieces in using his colours. The proper glass for receiving these colours should be uniform, colourless, and difficult of fusion. For this reason crown glass made with a little alkali or kelp is preferred. A design must be drawn upon paper and placed beneath the plate of glass. The upper side of the glass being sponged over with gum-water affords, when dry, a surface proper for receiving the colours, without the risk of their running irregularly, as they would be apt to do on ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... figure. His complexion was brick red. He had a thin, curling black beard and mustache. He was one of the men to whom alkali is a constant poison, and his lips were always cracked and bleeding. His voice was husky and disagreeable, his small eyes bespoke the brute in him, and yet he was not without certain qualities of leadership which seemed to appeal particularly ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... is completed, the water is let off from below, and pure water admitted from above under pressure, until the color begins to change; the fibre is then steeped for three or four hours in a weak solution of soda-ash; the alkali is washed out by the admission of pure water alternating with steam, and, if necessary to complete the bleaching, a weak solution of chlorine is applied. All this may be effected without removing the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... was his custom, and now he was setting forth to do the whole thing at a blow, entirely planless among the guns and rocking-horses that would presently surround him. As he reached the highway he heard himself familiarly addressed from a distance, and, turning, saw four sons of the alkali jogging into town from the plain. One who had shouted to him galloped out from the others, rounded the Capitol's enclosure, and, approaching with radiant countenance leaned to reach the hand of the Governor, and once again greeted him with a ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... and rode into his camp. He said you had quit him. I asked him if you come up here, but he only shook his head and handed me the usual 'Quien sabe?' He'll never git a sore throat from talkin' too much. Say, wait till I git some of this here alkali out of my ears and we'll go and eat and then have a smoke and talk it out. Gee! But I'm glad you ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Arizona or somewhere—somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man, had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached: the Miss Lutches had seen him in the flesh—as they had appeared ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... an alkaline substance called Morphia. The same drug contains a peculiar acid called the Meconic; and a vegetable alkali named Narcotine, to which unpleasant stimulating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... the tents, smoking thoughtfully. He paused when he came to the small buildings scattered about at quite a distance from the tents, then left the tracks and made his way through the deep alkali dust toward them. ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... headwaters of the Humboldt River, along which we traveled for three hundred miles, over an alkali and sandy soil until we came to a place where it disappeared. This was called the "Sink of the Humboldt." This valley is twenty miles wide by about three hundred long. During this part of our journey there was nothing of interest to note. The water of this river is ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... native in small quantities. It forms the chief surface deposit of the "alkali belt" in western United States, where it often forms incrustations from an inch to a foot in thickness. It was formerly obtained from sea-weeds, by leaching their ashes, as, by a like process, K2CO3 was obtained from ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... fusible if the base (soda, potash, or oxide of iron) be present in sufficient quantity, and if, in the case of the iron, it is present mainly as lower oxide (ferrous silicate). The addition of lime, oxide of iron, or alkali to silicate of alumina results in the formation of a double silicate of alumina and lime, or of alumina and iron, &c., all of which are easily fusible. Similarly, if to a silicate of lime we add oxide ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... pool, covered with a green scum nearly an inch in thickness. Warm, brackish, and fever-laden as that water was, I had never before tasted any thing half so sweet. Again, while crossing the Great Plains in 1860, I underwent a severe and prolonged thirst, only quenching it with the bitter alkali-water of the desert. On neither of these occasions were my sufferings half as great as in the advance to ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... "Pony Express," the most picturesque messenger-service that this country has ever seen. The route was from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, a distance of two thousand miles, across the Plains, over a dreary stretch of sagebrush and alkali desert, and through ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... "double-header" engines, rolled away in the dreary wake. East and west, north and south, far as the eye could reach, hemmed by low, dun-colored ridges or sharply outlined crests of remote mountain range, in lifeless desolation the landscape lay outspread to the view. Southward, streaked with white fringe of alkali, the flat monotone of sand and ashes blended with the flatter, flawless surface of a wide-spreading, ash-colored inland lake, its shores dotted at intervals with the bleaching bones of cattle and ridged with ancient wagon-tracks unwashed by not so ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... was enticingly warm, under the hot July sun, and we ventured in at the west end where a firmer lip of sand and alkali gave us footing. And I enjoyed the swim, although Dinky-Dunk made fun of my improvised bathing-suit. It seemed like old times, to bask lazily in the sun and float about on my back with my fingers linked under my head. My lord and master ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... revolution oriental, occidental pathos, bathos sacred, profane military, civil clergy, laity capital, labor ingress, egress element, compound horizontal, perpendicular competition, cooeperation predestination, freewill universal, particular extrinsic, intrinsic inflation, deflation dorsal, ventral acid, alkali synonym, antonym prologue, epilogue nadir, zenith amateur, connoisseur anterior, posterior stoic, epicure ordinal, cardinal centripetal, centrifugal stalagmite, stalactite orthodox, heterodox homogeneous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... figures. The tension would have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction, and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe. The writer met recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam. He had lost his reckoning, and did not know the day of the week or of the month. In all the vast territory, away up to the Utah line, over which he had wandered, he met human beings (excluding "Indians and others not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the coulee was merely a slight depression. Farther on it broadened and deepened. Down the middle of its length ran a sinuous grove of cottonwoods. On either side its flanks were bare, white with clay and alkali, rising to steep banks of yellow earth, bald and ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... each part of an organism contributes its constituent and effective molecules to the germ and sperm particles. Mr. Sorby made numerous investigations with relation to the number of molecules in the germinal matter of eggs, and the spermatic matter supplied by the male. Omitting the alkali, Mr. Sorby takes the formula, C{72}H{112}N{18}SO{22}, as representing the composition of albumen. In a 1/2000 of an ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... other, "when we had done the Warm Springs, one of the scientific gentlemen, who wanted to make soap cheap, I presume, suggested that the exploring party should proceed to the celebrated Alkali Desert in Idaho, which I ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Potassium to thine Oxygen. 'Tis little that the holy marriage vow Shall shortly make us one. That unity Is, after all, but metaphysical. Oh, would that I, my Mary, were an acid, A living acid; thou an alkali Endow'd with human sense, that, brought together, We both might coalesce into one salt, One homogeneous crystal. Oh, that thou Wert Carbon, and myself were Hydrogen; We would unite to form olefiant gas, Or common coal, or naphtha—would ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... never appear in their Chirurgery, when the Skin is once broke. The Fats of Animals are used by them, to render their Limbs pliable, and when wearied, to relieve the Joints, and this not often, because they approve of the Sweating-House (in such cases) above all things. {Make Bread, how. Alkali Salts.} The Salts they mix with their Bread and Soupe, to give them a Relish, are Alkalis, (viz.) Ashes, and calcined Bones of Deer, and other Animals. {No Sallads, Pepper, or Mustard.} Sallads, they never eat any; as for Pepper and Mustard, they reckon ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... of Dry-towns that lie in the bed of a long-dried ocean, is set at the center of a great alkali plain; a dusty, parched city bleached by a million years of sun. The houses are high, spreading buildings with many rooms and wide windows. The poorer sort were made of sun-dried brick, the more imposing being cut from the bleached salt stone of the cliffs ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Holingsworth, but one altogether of peculiar character and temperament—as unlike him who rode by my side as acid to alkali. The latter was a dashing, cheerful fellow, dressed in half-Mexican costume, who could ride a wild horse and throw the lazo with any vaquero in the crowd. He was a true Texan, almost by birth; had shared the fortunes of the young republic ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the tracks of the dog and burro to Bitter Seeps, a shallow spring of alkali, and there lost all track of them. The path up the cliffs to the Navajo ranges was bare, time-worn in solid rock, and showed only the imprint of age. Desertward the ridges of shale, the washes of copper earth, baked ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... Black, who suggested it to me. It is an alkaline salt, found in a mineral state, and described in the Philosophical Transactions, anno 1771. But to understand this specimen, something must be premised with regard to the nature of fossil alkali. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... staves of the dry pipe were great, the escaping air and water lifted the coating into bubbles. At some points where this lifting was great enough to rupture the asphalt, and the soil is heavily charged with alkali, some corrosion ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... desert," the immigrant told us sombrely. "There were long white fields of alkali and drifts of ashes across them so soft that the cattle sank way to their bellies. They moaned and bellowed! Lord, how they moaned! And the dust rose up so thick you couldn't breathe, and the sun beat down so fierce you felt it like something heavy on your head. And how ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... "any more than oil and water. Or alkali and acid. We'd make a mighty fizz. I'm in it for all I'm worth, Amabel. To ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... Lake City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... by large powerful mills constructed especially for the purpose. Logwood, when boiled in water, easily imparts its red colour. If a few drops of acetic acid (vinegar) is added, a bright red is produced; and when a little alum is added for a mordant, it forms red ink. If an alkali, such as soda or potash, is used instead of an acid, the colour changes to a dark blue or purple, and with a little management every shade of these colours can be obtained. Logwood put into polish or varnish also ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... the maritime border to see flocks of Arctic gulls circling around the low sand-hills, and sickle-bill curlews wheeling high in air above their broods. Before we get far into this region we shall notice that one of its most typical features is the alkali-pool. Every few miles we come to a shallow basin of stagnant water saturated with salts of soda and potash. Still another characteristic of the Plains is their tremendous rainless thunder-storms. If we are fortunate enough to encounter one of these, we shall witness in one hour more atmospheric ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... should not exceed that I have described. The color will be a bright crimson inclining to yellow. I have tried both potash and soda, pure, instead of water of ammonia, but after washing with some degree of care, a trace of the alkali still remained, and the peroxide was of an ochrey color, till overheated, and did not ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... smelting the iron is the ashes of the bark of the Kino tree. These ashes are as white as flour: they are not used in dying blue, and must therefore have something peculiar in them. I tasted them: they did not appear to me to have so much alkali as the mimosa ashes, but had an austere taste. The people told me, if I eat them, I would ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... men, couriers, bearing despatches from Commodore Stockton, the governor and commander-in-chief in California, to Sutter's Fort. Entering upon the broad plain, we passed, in about three miles, a small lake, the water of which was so much impregnated with alkali as to be undrinkable. The grass is brown and crisp, but the seed upon it is evidence that it had fully matured before the drought affected it. The plain is furrowed with numerous deep trails, made by the droves of wild horses, elk, deer, and antelope, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... was first decomposed by the electric current, there appeared not only oxygen and hydrogen, but also an acid and an alkali. These products were afterwards traced to impurities of the water and of the operator's hands. Mill observes that in any experiment the effect, or part of it, may be due, not to the supposed agent, but to the means ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... invisible in a cloud of its own dust as it lurched and rolled along the alkali flats down the valley, and Sancho, the ranch-keeper, could not make out whether any passengers were on top or not. He had brought a fine binocular to bear just as soon as the shrill voice of Pedro, a swarthy little scamp of a half-breed, announced the dust-cloud sailing over the clump of willows ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... new, uncommon weapons, Urinus spiritus of capons; Or mite-horn shavings, filings, scrapings, Distill'd per se; Sal-alkali o' midge-tail clippings, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... filter as before. Is this solution acid, alkaline or neutral? Are you quite certain of your result? Did you test the distilled water with litmus paper? And are you sure that your litmus does not contain excess of free acid or free alkali? ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... strip of meadow was haunted by him. There was the tree under which he had first placed him, and that was where he had seen him sitting up in his dripping but well-fitting clothes. In the rough garments he had worn and returned lingered a new scent of some delicate soap, overpowering the strong alkali flavor of his own. He was early by the river side, having a vague hope, he knew not why, that he should again see him and recognize him among the passengers. He was wading out among the reeds, in the faint light of the rising moon, recalling the exact spot where he had ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... lay across a low flat, glistening white with crystals of alkali; and as his car trundled on Wiley came to a strip of sand, piled up in the lee of a prostrate salt bush. Other bushes appeared, and more sand about them, and then a broad, smooth wave. It mounted up from the north, gently scalloped by the wind, and on the south ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... me free again; to bring me things to eat in jail, and picture papers, and tobacco—when she was living on bacon and potatoes, and drinking alkali water—working to pay for a lawyer to fight for me—to pay for ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... been preserved. On account of scarcity of water it is necessary for parties to carry a supply even when they expect to be in the vicinity of the Cheyenne River and probably ford the South fork, as these waters carry in solution a quantity of alkali that renders them unfit for drinking, although the effects would not be fatal but simply ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... seemed to me very much in the condition of that which Sir H. Davy solved so beautifully,—namely, whether voltaic electricity in all cases merely eliminated, or did not in some actually produce, the acid and alkali found after its action upon water. The same necessity that urged him to decide the doubtful point, which interfered with the extension of his views, and destroyed the strictness of his reasoning, has obliged me to ascertain ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... Spencer for studying nature unfits him for studying art. In his old age Huxley, the scientist, wrote an essay forty pages long to prove that man was more beautiful than woman. Imagine some Tyndall approaching the transfiguration of Raphael to scrape off the colors and test them with acid and alkali for finding out the proportion of blue and crimson and gold. These are the methods that would give the village paint-grinder precedency above ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... gives from three to five pounds of nitrate of lime to the bushel, requiring a large proportion of fixed alkali to produce the required crystalization, and when left in the Cave become re-impregnated in three years. When saltpetre bore a high price, immense quantities were manufactured at the Mammoth Cave, but the return of peace brought the saltpetre from the East Indies in competition ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... that family, and especially Mrs. Dixon. She seemed to make prairie-life so ugly and empty and hardening. Poor, dried-up, sad-eyed soul, she looked like a woman of sixty, and yet her husband said she was just thirty-seven. Their water is strong with alkali, and this and the prairie wind (combined with a something deep down in her own make-up) have made her like a vulture, lean and scrawny and dry. I stared at that hard line of jaw and cheekbone and wondered how long ago the soft curves were there, ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... my solemn word that in the ears of us of the white outfit, stationed three miles away, the yelps those two Negro troops of cavalry gave sounded like the carnival whooping of ten thousand devils. The Sioux weren't scared a little bit by the approaching clouds of alkali dust, but, all the same, when the two black troops were more than a quarter of a mile away the Indians broke and ran as if the old boy himself were after them, and it was then an easy matter to round them up and disarm them. The chiefs afterward confessed that they were scared ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... that one sentence admirably supplied the lack. "Yuh low-down skunk!" he cried, and struck him full upon the insulting, smiling mouth. "If I was as rotten-minded as you are, I'd go drown myself in the stalest alkali hole I could find. I dunno why I'm dirtying my hands on yuh—yuh ain't fit to be clubbed to death with a tent pole!" He was, however, using his hands freely and to very good purpose, probably feeling that, since the Pilgrim was much bigger than ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... line of battle. We approached the watering place, and when we arrived there, instead of finding a formidable enemy, we found a half a dozen of our own cavalry that had been scouting ahead of the command. We found the water strongly impregnated with alkali, but it served to assuage ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... to be axiomatic. If his life of isolation made him taciturn, it at the same time created a spirit of hospitality, primitive and hearty as that found in the mead-halls of Beowulf. He faced the wind and the rain, the snow of winter, the fearful dust-storms of alkali desert wastes, with the same uncomplaining quiet. Not all his work was on the ranch and the trail. To the cowboy, more than to the goldseekers, more than to Uncle Sam's soldiers, is due the conquest of the West. Along his winding cattle trails the Forty-Niners ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... taking his early coffee the next morning at the open window in Saragossa when Marcos, with the dust of travel across the Alkali desert still upon him, came ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... Man} The rivers sank beneath the desert sand, The tall pines dwarfed to sage-brush, and the grass Grew sparse and bitter in the alkali, But fared we always toward the setting sun. Our oxen famished till the last one died And our great wagons rested in the snow. We climbed the high Sierras and looked down From winter bleak upon the land we sought, A sunny land, a ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... decay externally, which, according to Berzelius ("Edin. New Phil. Journal," late number), is owing to the flints containing a small proportion of alkali; but, besides this external decay, the whole body is affected by exposure of a few years, so that they will not break ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... rapidly approached it. As he came nearer, he saw that the outfit was in the center of a field of alkali and making slow and painful progress. He did not see the beef herd. Plainly, something had happened ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... value of protective coatings, or of various mixes, to prevent deterioration by sea water, alkali, and ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... of Rhubarb.—It is some time since Mr. NANI, an Italian chemist, announced the discovery of a crystallizable vegetable alkali in rhubarb. Mr. CAVENTOU has repeated the experiments of Mr. N. and finds them, in many respects, inaccurate. Upon analysing the alcoholic extract of rhubarb, by the aid of alcohol and ether, employed separately and combined, Mr. C. obtained a fatty matter, containing a little ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... impurities, especially aldehyde. One cc. dissolved in 50 cc. of water and treated with a freshly prepared clear solution of phenylhydrazine acetate should give no appreciable precipitate. If it is not pure, it must first be treated with alkali ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... blossom shall go up as dust—' 'Awake, ye drunkards, and weep and howl, all ye drinkers of wine.' 'For while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.'—Dry? Good Lord! Ring up a can of suds, Grif. I've got ten miles of alkali desert ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... Oil.—The oil was found to contain free acid in small quantity, which was estimated by agitating a weighed quantity with alcohol, in which the free acid dissolves while the neutral fat does not, and titrating the alcoholic liquid with decinormal alkali, using solution of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... bunch of bawling calves. He was going to drift, for a change—but he didn't know where. It didn't much matter, so long as he got a change uh scenery. He just merely wanted to knock around and get the alkali dust out of his lungs and see something grow besides calves and cactus. His eyes plumb ached for sight of an apple tree with real, live apples on it—that weren't wrapped up in a ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... mauve, and Georgina paper) serve to determine whether a paper has been washed either by the help of chemical agents, acids incompletely removed, or the surplus of which has been saturated by an alkali, or by the help of alkaline substances. The change of the color to red indicates an acid substance; an alkali would turn the reddened litmus paper to blue, and the mauve ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... soda water, lemonade, &c., which are nearly all water, quench the thirst very well, it is true; but not quite so well as water alone would. The narcotic principle of the first two, the alcoholic principle of the fourth, and the mucilage, nutriment, acid, and alkali of the rest, are in the way; for thirst would be quenched still better without them, even when it is of ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... Station, and enter Idaho Territory. This is the Bitter Creek division of the Overland route, of which we had heard so many unfavorable stories. The division is really well managed by Mr. Stewart, though the country through which it stretches is the most wretched I ever saw. The water is liquid alkali, and the roads are soft sand. The snow is gone now, and the dust is thick and blinding. So drearily, wearily ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... country brought them to Prescott on the eve of the second day after leaving the Canyon. Here they decided to take a day's rest, as it was Sunday and the hotel was comfortable; but Monday morning they renewed their journey and headed southwesterly across the alkali plains—called "mesa"—for Parker, on the boundary line between Arizona ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... fond of soda powders will do well to inquire at the apothecaries for the suitable acid and alkali, and buy them by the ounce, or the pound, according to the size of their families. Experience soon teaches the right proportions; and, sweetened with a little sugar or lemon syrup, it is quite as good as what one gives five times as much for, done ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... daily teaching us new lessons in dietetics, some of which are of commanding importance. One of the most significant of these is the necessity for taking account of the nature of the ash left by a foodstuff in the body. There are basic or alkali-ash foods and acid-ash foods. Foods of the latter class when freely used cause acidosis. Meats are high up in the list of acid-ash foods. It is for this reason that such animals as the lion and flesh-eating ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... have been pawned in any Tia Juana loan office for twenty-five dollars and many a longing glance was cast on a magnificent bridle that would have cost any bricklayer a month's pay. Panchito, a splendid big chestnut with two white stockings and a blazed face, was gray with sweat and alkali dust and shod like a plow horse. He wore cactus burrs in his tail and mane and had evidently ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... place, the name "cocoa," which is strictly applicable only to the pure ground nib or its concentrated essence, is sometimes unjustifiably applied to preparations of cocoa with starch, alkali, sugar, etc., which it would be more correct to describe as "chocolate powder," chocolate being admittedly a confection of cocoa with ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... Texas and a mature gentleman named, from his complexion, "Beet" Collins, were the lucky victors. Texas immediately repaired to the general store, where he purchased a new scarlet bandanna for the occasion; also a cake of soap with which to rout the alkali dust that had filtered into every pore of his hands and face from a long ride across ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... calcination, detonation, effervescence, and saturation. Water and fire, salt and sugar, lime and vinegar, are not very difficult to be procured; and a wine-glass is to be found in every house. The difference between an acid and alkali should be early taught to children; many grown people begin to learn chemistry, without distinctly knowing what ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... importance to the manufacturer, as well as to the merchant. The quantity of Peruvian bark which is imported into Europe is very considerable; but chemistry has recently proved that a large portion of the bark itself is useless. The alkali Quinia which has been extracted from it, possesses all the properties for which the bark is valuable, and only forty ounces of this substance, when in combination with sulphuric acid, can be extracted from a hundred pounds of ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... having been caught in this fashion," Tom admitted to Mr. Ellsworth. "But I hadn't an idea that Paloma held any dynamite. I can't imagine how a frontier town on the alkali desert needs dynamite." ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... still remaining. It had shrunk by evaporation far away from its banks, and where the water once had been there was a dark incrustation of impurities. On the land side, all was a great white plain of glittering alkali without a sign of vegetation. I went on ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... imagine after all that nothing but accident or a sense of desperation might land and keep one at Las Palmas. I would as soon stay there for a long time as I would deliberately get out of a Union Pacific overland train at Laramie Junction and put down my stakes in that dusty and bedevilled sand and alkali hell. And yet there is the climate at Las Palmas. And out of it are ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Alkali Ike, an Arizona cow-boy, who just before the close of the play comes into the saloon and ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... been drinking alkali water all summer, and along about midnight they began to drop out until there was no one left to face the music except a little cattle salesman and myself. After all the others quit us, we went into a feed trough on a back street, and had a good supper. I had been drinking everything ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... we had been whipped with nettles. It was our intention now to leave the plains and to march along the edge of the foot-hills parallel with the main range, otherwise we should not have ventured thus to wash ourselves. In a region where alkali dust is in the air, washing is to be shunned; for each time that the skin is cleaned the new deposit of dust ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... hole rimmed by desert, a strange, hidden oasis, rendered fertile and green by some outburst of fresh water from the rocks. Emerging upon it in midst of the barren desolation through which they had been toiling for hours, blinded by alkali dust, jolted down that dangerous decline, it seemed like some beautiful dream, a fantasy ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... a moment. Thar's a clattering rush; an' then, pony a-muck with sweat an' alkali dust, Silver Phil shows in the portals of the Red Light. Thar's a flash an' a spit of white smoke as he fires his six-shooter straight ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the cow-boy, with his abnormal thirst for blood, originated. Where did this young Jesse James, with his gory record and his dauntless eye, come from? Was he born in a buffalo wallow at the foot of some rock-ribbed mountain, or did he first breathe the thin air along the brink of an alkali pond, where the horned toad and the centipede sang him to sleep, and the tarantula tickled him under the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... great estate of which he was the only heir. And even yet, in the midst of a luxury and a comfort which anticipated every want and gratified every taste, he often looked longingly back upon the life he had left, until his nose inhaled again the scent of the sage-brush and his eyes smarted with alkali dust. He regretted the desolate prairies, the wide reaches of barrenness accursed of the Creator, the wild chaos of the mountain canons, the horror of the Bad Lands, the tingling cold of winter in the Black Hills. But ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the main column a considerable distance, I deemed it prudent to call a halt until we could discover the direction taken by the principal body of the Indians. We soon learned that they had gone up the valley, and looking that way, we discovered a column of alkali dust approaching us, about a mile distant, interposing between my little detachment and the point where I knew General Rains intended to encamp for the night. After hastily consulting with Lieutenant Edward H. Day, of the Third United States Artillery, who was with me, we both concluded that ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... space, the silence, the arid stretches; she had made grimaces at the "cactuses" with their forbidding pricklers—though she could not help admiring them, they seemed to be the only growing thing in the country capable of defying the heat and the sun. Most of all she hated the alkali dust. All afternoon she had kept brushing it off her clothing and clearing it out of her throat, and only within the last half hour she had begun to realize that her efforts had been without result—it lay thick all ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... teeth and purifying the mouth should be free from all acids, and should be saponaceous or soapy, containing as one of the principal ingredients an alkali to neutralize the acids and destroy the animal and vegetable parasites which, as the microscope would show us, are in the secretions of ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... favorable. The Walnut Grove was a thickety covert on the north first bottom of the Cimarron, and possibly two miles wide by three long. Across the river, and extending several miles above and below this grove, was the salt plain—an alkali desert which no wild animal, ruminant or carnivorous, would attempt to cross, instinct having warned it of its danger. At the termination of the grove proper, down the river or to the eastward, was a sand dune bottom of several miles, covered by wild ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... distinct from the connoisseur of dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less—some say more—in winter than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead that it does not boast itself ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... imitate the works of man; for the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on the north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this forbidding residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and deserted, I remarked to my parents that some day it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alcoholized caustic soda; at the expiration of one hour the envelopes of the pericarp, and of the testa Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, should be separated by friction in a coarse cloth, having been reduced by the action of the alkali to a pulpy state; each berry should then be opened separately to remove the portion of the envelope held in the fold of the crease, and then all the berries divided in two are put into three parts of water charged with one-hundredth of caustic potash. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... still intense, and it never rains, so everything is parched to a crisp. The river is very low and the water so full of alkali that we are obliged to boil every drop before it is used for drinking or cooking, and even then it is so distasteful that we flavor it with sugar of lemons so we can drink it at all. Fresh lemons are unknown here, of course. The ice has given out, but we manage to cool the water a little ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... tired animal seemed suddenly to make up its mind. Ignoring the water, it came straight to Sandy, uttered a harsh whine, catching at the leather tassel on the cowman's worn leather chaparejos, tugging feebly. As Sandy stooped to pat its head, powdered with the alkali dust that covered its coat, the collie released its hold and collapsed on one side, panting, utterly exhausted, with glazing eyes ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Warm water internally. Clysters of warm water. Fomentation. Opium. Solution of fixed alkali supersaturated with carbonic acid. A bougie may be used to push back a stone into the bladder. See Class ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... MARKING LINEN.—Add Caustic Alkali to a saturated solution of Corpous Chloride until no further precipitate forms; allow the precipitate to settle, draw off the supernatant liquid with a siphon and dissolve the hydrated copper oxide in the smallest ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... pleasant. Either Alfred or Tom usually rode night-herd on the ponies—merely as a matter of precaution—and they felt just a trifle more shut off by themselves and alone than if they had ridden solitary over the limitless alkali of the Arizona plains. This feeling struck in the deeper because Tom had just entered one of his brooding spells. Tom and Alfred had been chums now for close on two years, so Alfred knew enough to leave him entirely alone until ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... Gradually rising, we reached the desert, where only cactus, sagebrush, and yucca grew. As far as we could see the still, gray desert lay brooding under the sun's white glare. Surely no living thing could exist in that alkali waste. But look! An ashen-colored lizard darts across the trail, a sage rabbit darts behind a yucca bush, and far overhead a tireless buzzard floats in circles. Is he keeping a death watch on the grizzled old "Desert Rat" we pass a little later? His face burned and seamed with ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... of this plant owe their properties to certain invariable active principles, which chemistry has enabled us to separate from those ingredients which are either inert or common to it and other forms of vegetation. They are two in number,—a volatile alkali, and a volatile oil, called nicotin and nicotianin, respectively. A third powerful constituent is developed by combustion, which is named ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... in an odd, mysterious manner; and, before all, I attempted to produce neutral salts in an unheard-of way. But what, for a long time, kept me busy most, was the so-called /Liquor Silicum/ (flint-juice), which is made by melting down pure quartz-flint with a proper proportion of alkali, whence results a transparent glass, which melts away on exposure to the air, and exhibits a beautiful clear fluidity. Whoever has once prepared this himself, and seen it with his own eyes, will not blame those who believe in a maiden earth, and in the possibility of producing further ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... of the 888-mile post beyond Omaha, but the 1,000-mile telegraph pole and tree glided away while I was catching the lights and shadows on a fearfully tumbled landscape. The alkali has poisoned enormous tracts, and the tufts of sagebrush have a huge and sinister monotony. Looking out early in the morning there was in our track a "gaunt grey wolf" with sharp ears, unabashed by the roar of the train. His species find occasional scraps along the track and do not fear the trains. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... I can't get over," responded the young lady addressed, "is that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers or what awfully dull people they must have been whose descriptions have so misled the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... would have welcomed it. But there was nothing. When the hard dusty gusts hit her, she found it absolutely necessary to shut her eyes. At intervals less windy she opened them, and rode on, peering through the yellow gloom for the cabin. Thus she got her eyes full of dust—an alkali dust that made them sting and smart. The fiercer puffs of wind carried pebbles large enough to hurt severely. Then the dust clogged her nose and sand got between her teeth. Added to these annoyances was a heat like a blast ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... potassic hydrate required to saponify one gramme or 15 grains of pure beeswax varies from 97 to 107 milligrammes. Other kinds of wax and its substitutes require in some cases more and in others less of the alkali. This method would, however, lead to very erroneous conclusions if applied to a mixture of which some of the constituents have higher saponification numbers than beeswax and others higher, as one error would ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... masculine cooks, I judge that the temptation to excessive indulgence in this beverage was not irresistible. Most of the water of the Plains, unlike that of the Great Basin, is pretty good; but as you near the Rocky Mountains, 'alkali' becomes a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... could cross that Valley without leaving his tracks, for there were alkali flats for miles; and when, in turn, Wunpost wished to cover his own trail, there was always the Devil's Playground. There, whenever the wind blew, the great sandhills were on the move, covering up ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks without form or color, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of great mirth to some of my fellow travellers, and I smile rather ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... wind. Wildfire favored the soft ground now. He had deviated from his straight course. And he was partial to washes and dips in the earth where water might have lodged. And he was not now scornful of a green-scummed water-hole with its white margin of alkali. That night Slone made camp with Wildfire in plain sight. The stallion stopped when his pursuers stopped. And he began to graze on the same stretch with Nagger. How ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... hoofs the white alkali crust which thinly covers the desert floor, crumbles and breaks. Gaunt cacti stretch their skinny branches across the trail, which winds among foothills and ravines, and the horned toads and the lizards, the only visible beings of the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... refused to bring in this bunch of stock except for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it made ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... hours and precipitating the resulting product with methyl alcohol; suitably purified, a light amorphous colourless substance was obtained which proved to be penta-(tricarbomethoxygalloyl) glucose. Careful saponification with excess alkali in acetone-aqueous solution at room temperature yielded a tannin very closely resembling tannin, identified as pentagalloyl glucose. It is doubtful, however, whether this substance is homogeneous, and it is probably a mixture of ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... marked by the Hayward patent (No. 40,407), granted in 1868, for "boiling waste rags of fibrous material and rubber in an acid or alkali, for the purpose of destroying the tenacity of the fibers of the rags, so that the rubber may be reground." But this process extended only to the weakening of the fibers, and not their complete destruction. A later patent, in the same year, provided for exposing the ground rubber waste to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... of nitre; and Hoffman, finding it composed of the magnesia united to an acid, obtained a separation of these, either by exposing the compound to a strong fire in which the acid was dissipated and the magnesia remained behind, or by the addition of an alkali which attracted the acid to itself: and this last method he recommends as the best. He likewise makes an inquiry into the nature and virtues of the powder thus prepared; and observes, that it is an absorbent earth which joins readily with all acids, and must necessarily destroy ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... was, livin' in the hole he'd dug where he'd staked his claim. But we knew he hadn't taken out any papers. He never thought anybody'd find him out there in that Hell-hole. It was Hell all right. Even now whenever I think of what Hell must be I think of what that gulch looked like. Just rocks and alkali dust and heat. ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... curtains. The walls were cracked and dingy. Durtal recoiled after a few steps. Gusts of humid, mouldy air and of that indescribable new-stove acridity poured out of the registers to mingle with an irritating odour of alkali, resin, and burnt herbs. He was choking, his ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... war, and occasionally they passed the charred ruin of a cabin and new graves. By and by they came to that deadly waste known as the Alkali Desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to reach water. All day and night they pushed through that choking, waterless ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine |
