"Decomposed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attains full size and lustre. If the oyster be not secured then, it soon dies and we lose our pearl. Consider the number of these jewels which fade away to their original elements in the depths of ocean: for one we get, a million decomposed. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... shadow, which is nearer the actual truth of nature. In trying to raise the pitch of light he has not been quite so successful, though accomplishing something. His method is to use pure prismatic colors on the principle that color is light in a decomposed form, and that its proper juxtaposition on canvas will recompose into pure light again. Hence the use of light shadows and bright colors. The aim of these modern men is chiefly to gain the effect of light and air. They do not apparently care for ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... astonished Europe what is that but the ignited flame of a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen projected against a small piece of lime? What was harmless as water, becomes the most destructive of all known objects when decomposed and mixed ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... agitated legs; he let go my shoulder and reached after something in the air; his body trembled tensely like a released harp-string; and while I looked down, the spectral horror in him broke through his glassy gaze. Instantly his face of an old soldier, with its noble and calm outlines, became decomposed before my eyes by the corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable caution and of desperate fear. He restrained a cry—"Ssh! what are they doing now down there?" he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... ferocious warrior of another age came for refuge or lighted fires on their signal mounds to warn their people of an approaching enemy. Here are forest trees growing upon their sides said to be six hundred years old and rising from the decomposed remains of others perhaps just as old. How long these forts were used before the forests again reclothed them we have no means of knowing. We cannot but wonder over the fate of this forgotten race. What starving sieges, deeds of noble daring and brave sorties ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... based on the power of clay, and the decomposed organic matter found in the soil, to absorb and retain all offensive odors and all fertilizing matters; and it consists, essentially, of a mechanical contrivance (attached to the ordinary seat) for measuring out and discharging into the vault or pan below a sufficient quantity of sifted ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... spirit of animation. This immaterial agent is supposed to exist in or with matter, but to be quite distinct from it, and to be equally capable of existence, after the matter, which now possesses it, is decomposed. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... agreeable in the world except to those who lived there, and they, I do suppose, snuff up the breeze as if it was loaded with wealth and smelt of the Gold Coast. But this was nothing (although I don't think I can ever eat dum fish again as long as I live) to the effluvia arising from decomposed heaps of sea-wood, which had been gathered for manure, and was in the act of removal to the fields. No words can describe this, and I leave it to your imagination, Squire, to form an idea of a new perfume ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... only the most memorable and the most suggestively pathetic incident, but also that which, more than any other, coloured—or (more truly, I should say) shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed—the great ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... range was considerably lower than that on the other, the highest part of our track being, according to Mr. Kennedy's barometrical observations, upwards of two thousand feet above the level of the sea. The soil was a strong loam of a dark colour, owing to the admixture of a great deal of decomposed vegetable matter; rock projected in many places, and in those parts where the rocks were near the surface, Callitris (cypress pine) grew. In the deeper soil were large trees of the genera Castanospermum, Lophostemon, and Cedrela, mingled with Achras australis, Calamus ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... special siphon or by means of some other mechanical process. When boilers are free from fur, and where it is intended to keep them free from such, a continuous current may be set up, by means of which the sedimentary salts may be decomposed, and a precipitate produced in a pulverized form, which can ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors? Man's whole life and environment have been laid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragment or fibre of his Soul, Body, and Possessions, but has been probed, dissected, distilled, desiccated, and scientifically decomposed: our spiritual Faculties, of which it appears there are not a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards: every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... close by; and while the party was surveying the land they came suddenly upon two dead bodies lying by the river-side, one with a rope round its neck and the other with a rope round its feet. The bodies were too much decomposed to be recognisable; nevertheless to the party rambling about in the sunshine and stillness of that green place the discovery was a very gruesome one. They may have thought much, but they said little. They returned to the ship, and resumed their search ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... 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, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... analysis. The sage may announce that gratified vanity is thine aim and end; but the lover glances with contempt at his cold-blooded philosophy. Nature assures him thou art a beautiful and sublime emotion; and, he answers, canst thou deprive the sun of its heat because its ray may be decomposed; or does the diamond blaze with less splendour because ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... and more or less pliant, according to the quality of the leaf by which they have been nourished, the whole of them remaining beneath. This envelope, on which they bestow such a texture, consistency, and lustre, that it cannot be decomposed by any practicable expedient, having been finished, they all of them unite, and ranging themselves in vertical and even files, form in the centre a perfect square. Being thus disposed, each of them makes its cocoon, or pod, of a coarse and short ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... nest sometimes quite eight inches thick—we find live inhabitants only in a thin outer layer. All the remainder, the catacombs of past generations, is but a horrible heap of dead, shrivelled, ruined, decomposed things. Into this sub-stratum of the ancient city the unreleased Bees, the untransformed larvae fall as dust; here the honey-stores of old go sour, here the uneaten provisions are reduced ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... analyze, disembody, dissolve; resolve into its elements, separate into its elements; electrolyze[Chem]; dissect, decentralize, break up; disperse &c. 73; unravel &c. (unroll) 313; crumble into dust. Adj. decomposed &c. v.; catalytic, analytical; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rotting—in an advanced stage of decomposition—so much so that you are not able to identify it with any geological period or formation, even as you may not be able to identify any other extremely decomposed body." ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... used to mingle with the people in human form, without harming them, but the thoughtless act of a mourner started him on the evil course he has since pursued. In those times, it is said, the corpse was kept in the dwelling seven days; and, as the body decomposed, the liquid which came from it was caught in dishes, and was placed in the grave. On the occasion referred to, he was handed a cup of the "lard" to drink. He immediately acquired a great liking for this disgusting dish, and ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... been drinking till he was in that state in which a good-natured fellow's mind if decomposed would be found to be all "Yes," and "Dine with me to-morrow," so ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... size; the trees seemed to be perfectly healthy. The early bearing habit gave us a great deal of encouragement. Then we sampled these nuts, and the quality was not good. While the nuts were green and in storage the nuts decomposed in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... government, but occasional attempts are made to smuggle them through, and it is not a very easy matter to detect them, not even by the smell of the corpses, which can be no worse than that of the living pilgrims. Even at best these parties of pilgrims are a miserable, half-decomposed lot, with bundles of filthy rags. When anybody dies on the road, attempts—generally successful—are invariably made to bring the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... chemical army. But it is a law in chemistry, that the more complex a substance becomes, the less stable is its constitution, or the sooner is it affected by disturbing influences. Hence organic substances are more readily decomposed than inorganic. How striking, for instance, are the changes easily wrought in a few grains of barley! They contain a kind of starch or fecula; this starch, in the process of malting, becomes converted into a kind of sugar; and from this malt-sugar or transformed starch, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... slain were left unburied. Slowly the flesh disappeared from the bones, either devoured by wild beasts or decomposed by the action of the atmosphere. The field, as now visited, presented an appalling aspect. ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... native rage that first impell'd The insulted colons to the battling field; When first their high-soul'd sentiment of right And full-vein'd vigor nerved their arm to fight. For stript of health, benumb'd thy vital flood, Thy muscles lax'd and decomposed thy blood, What is thy courage, man? a foodless flame, A light unseen, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... statement of the case possible, but it will give the general idea underlying our next chapters. We shall consider how the food enters the body and is taken up into the system, how it is conveyed to the muscles in the limbs, to the nerve centres, and to wherever work is done, to be there decomposed and partially oxydised, and finally how the products of its activity— the katastases, of which the three principal are carbon dioxide, water, and urea— are removed from ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... nitrous air; when the product of the union of the oxide of mercury and the nitric acid deprived of part of its oxygen was heated, more nitrous air was given off, and oxide of mercury remained, and was decomposed, at a higher ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... circumstance, that charms made of the same substance were found in the subterranean chambers under the pyramids of Sakhara in Upper Egypt. The cause of the fetid effluvia emitted from this rock, when partially decomposed by means of friction, is now known to be connected with the presence of sulphuretted hydrogen. All bituminous limestone, however, does not possess this property. It is not uncommon in the calcareous beds called in England black marble, but it is by no ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... sight of this coarse plank, the lightning from heaven flashed before the eyes of Gutenberg. He looked at the plank, and, in his imagination, analyzed it, decomposed it, put it together again, changed it, divided it, readjusted it, reversed it, smeared it with ink, placed the parchment on it, and pressed it with a screw. The sacristan, wondering at his long silence, was unwittingly present at this development of an idea over which his visitor had brooded in vain ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves. It is the spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty. When they are slain, the house is stained with blood. Rua's dead fisherman was decomposed; so—and horribly—was his arboreal demon. The spirit, then, is a thing material; and it is by the material ensigns of corruption that he is distinguished from the living man. This opinion is widespread, adds a gross terror to the more ugly Polynesian tales, and sometimes defaces ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... makes them up into its own substance. The animal eats the plant and appropriates the nutritious portions to its own sustenance, rejects and gets rid of the useless matters; and, finally, the animal itself dies, and its whole body is decomposed and returned into the inorganic world. There is thus a constant circulation from one to the other, a continual formation of organic life from inorganic matters, and as constant a return of the matter of living bodies to the inorganic world; so that the materials ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... caverns and breathing places of earth, may fill her stony veins with corruption, so that not only herbage may no longer flourish, the trees may rot, and the rivers run with gall—but the everlasting mountains be decomposed, and the mighty deep putrify, and the genial atmosphere which clips the globe, lose all powers of generation and sustenance. Do this, sad visaged power, while I write, while ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... in their maturity be perfectly disinterested.' James Mill declares that the analysis does not affect the reality of the sentiments analysed. Gratitude remains gratitude, and generosity generosity, just as a white ray remains white after Newton had decomposed it into rays of different colours.[608] Here once more we have the great principle of indissoluble association ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... sleeping town. Its silence, as of a paralyzed ants' nest, makes the head swim. All its lethargies mingle their nightmares, its slumbers are a crowd, and from its human bodies lying prone there arises a vapour of dreams. Sleep has gloomy associates beyond this life: the decomposed thoughts of the sleepers float above them in a mist which is both of death and of life, and combine with the possible, which has also, perhaps, the power of thought, as it floats in space. Hence arise entanglements. Dreams, those clouds, interpose their folds and their transparencies ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... existence, how trifling would be its value! how inadequate as a medium of exchange for the other productions of nature, or of art! If all the diamonds and other precious stones which have been collected from the decomposed rocks (for hard as they once were, like all sublunary matter, they too yield to time) why, if all were remaining on the earth, the frolic gambols of the May-day sweep would shake about those gems, which now are to be found in profusion only ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the battery or cell was discovered, it was noted that when a current was formed in the cell, the electrolyte was charged and gases evolved from it. A similar action takes place when a current of electricity passes through a liquid, with the result that the liquid is decomposed—that is, the liquid is broken up into its original compounds. Thus, water is composed of two parts, by bulk, of hydrogen and of oxygen, so that if two electrodes are placed in water, and a current is sent through the electrodes in either ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... the inclination of the plane in which the wings beat; in the role of each of the two alternating (and in an inverse sense) movements that the wings execute; as also in the facility with which the air is decomposed during these different movements. As the wings of a fly are adorned with a brilliant array of colors, we can follow the trajectory or figure that each wing writes in the air. It is of the form of a figure of eight (Fig. 9), first discovered ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to us, but not destroyed. When, however, due allowance is made for this loss, the results produced are always in exact proportion to the amount of force originally set free. Thus, if we employ it to decompose water, the amount of water decomposed always bears an exact proportion to the amount of metal which has been oxidized in ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... avaricious of oxygen that it decomposed the water to get it. Indeed, it was a case of mutual affection. The oxygen preferred the company of potassium to that of the hydrogen in the water, and went to it even at the risk ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... of the neutral salts containing a volatile acid be present, they will become decomposed. For instance, the red nitrous acid water of the nitrates will indicate the decomposition of the salt, especially if it be the ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... he killed himself. Two months later, a half decomposed body was found in the forest of Saint Germain, which people declared to be ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... summer came, the huge profits of the manufacturers literally melted away, for the beautiful garments decomposed in the heat; and loads of them, melting and running together, were being returned to the factory. And they filled Roxbury with such noisome odors that they had to be taken out at dead of night and ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... legends essentially of the same kind, though with some varieties of detail, have sprung up in many different quarters, and how they have migrated and interacted on each other. Biblical criticism has at the same time decomposed and analysed the Jewish writings, assigning to them dates and degrees of authority very different from those recognised by the Church. It has certainly not impaired their significance as records ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... support in earlier stages of the world's history. Religion itself is a thing apart from these ephemeral forms in which it has been made to take shape. It is the great sun of reality, whose pure and authentic radiance has been decomposed in the spectrum of the human brain, each man seizing on an individual ray of broken light and making that the sum and substance ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... and chlorides (under the combined influence of heat and water) in chamber (C), which I call for the nonce the chemical laboratory. Not alone will all earthy and alkaline, but even metallic compounds, like iron pyrites, therein contained, be rapidly decomposed on the advent of the superheated water. And from their gaseous elements being held in a confined space, they will acquire an enormous explosive power. Consequently, there is no difficulty in understanding ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the hills of Wingen present a variety of rocks, within a small space. In the adjacent gullies to the south of the hill, we find clay of a grey mottled appearance, and shale containing apparently a small quantity of decomposed vegetable matter; and near the fissure then on fire, occurred a coarse sandstone with an argillaceous basis. To the north-west, in a hollow containing water which drains from beneath the part ignited, is a coarse sandstone, in some places highly charged with decomposed ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... economy. The reader will be pleased with some remarks on the subject in Robison's Account of Black's Lectures. The air in the vessel, then, it will be readily imagined will contain it, and hence, as it is known that it is gradually decomposed by iron, the rust that was observed. The process of corroding the iron, &c. as it is commonly called, would be much accelerated by moisture, as the muriatic acid acts most powerfully on bodies capable of decomposing water; and it is ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... most complex phrase; into words, each proposition; into simple words, words the most complex: and when he distinguishes perfectly words derived from primitives; figurative words from proper ones; and when, after having thus decomposed the longest discourse, he recomposes it; when, in short, the deaf and dumb man expresses all his ideas, all his thoughts, and all his affections; when he answers, like men the best-informed, all questions put ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... day, a revolution took place in that excitable, extreme character, which knew no middle course, in that heart in which the most violent passions were constantly clashing. Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and she persuaded herself that he had killed her. She looked ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... called in the Brazil; and it is the same mineral which I found so general throughout the gold and silver fields of neglected Midian. It is found striating white sandstone about Takwa and other places in the interior. The surface-stone is decomposed by the oxide of iron, and thus the precious dust with its ingrained gold is dissolved and separated from it. At a greater depth the itabirite will be found solid; and the occurrence of these oldest crystalline formations in large layers is ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... been formed to dig there, but they have always suffered so terribly from fever that they have had to relinquish the attempt. The natives suffer as well as the whites. I believe that the formation is granite, the surface of which is much decomposed; and it is always found here that the turning up of ground that has not been disturbed for many years is extremely unhealthy, and decomposing granite possesses some element particularly obnoxious to health. The ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... fire, suggests that it may be one of the igneous veins, thrown westward by the great volcanic region, El-Harrah. In parts it is a conglomerate, where a quantity of quartz takes the place of chalk and gypsum. Other deposits are iron-stained and have the appearance of the decomposed iron pyrites which abounds in this neighbourhood. Usually the yield is the normal brimstone-yellow, yet some of the beds are deep red, as if coloured by ochre or oxide of iron: this variety is very common ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... insulating substances, and then removing only so much matter as to expose the point, or a section of the wires, and by passing electricity through two such wires, the guarded points of which were immersed in water, Wollaston found that the water could be decomposed even by the current from the machine, without sparks, and that two streams of gas arose from the points, exactly resembling, in appearance, those produced by voltaic electricity, and, like the latter, ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... longing for his own kind arose in him—the call of humanity. It was irresistible. What could he do? Was it not in vain? Humanity had long since disappeared from the earth—millions of years ago. He wondered what lay beyond the pales of death—the real death, where the body decomposed and wasted away to return to the dust of the earth and assume ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... heavy rain has washed the surface clean from all impurities and left it bright and fresh. We may see it when the heat and other disintegrating influences have acted upon the ice to a certain superficial depth, so that its surface is covered with a decomposed crust of broken, snowy ice, so permeated with air that it has a dead-white color, like pounded ice or glass. Those who see the glacier in this state miss the blue tint so often described as characteristic of its appearance in its lower portion, and as giving such a peculiar beauty to its caverns ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... corpse, deserted by thought, is cold and decays, 429:12 but it never suffers. Science declares that man is sub- ject to Mind. Mortal mind affirms that mind is subordinate to the body, that the body is 429:15 dying, that it must be buried and decomposed into dust; but mortal mind's affirmation is not true. Mortals waken from the dream of death with bodies un- 429:18 seen by those who think that they ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... this perspirable matter as it rises from their fine vessels, (perhaps much finer than the pores of animal skins,) is divided into inconcievable tenuity; and when acted upon by the Sun's light appears to be decomposed; the hydrogene becomes a part of the vegetable, composing oils or resins; and the Oxygene combined with light or calorique ascends, producing the pure part of the atmosphere or vital air. Hence during ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... was of a brownish black color, fusible in heat and readily soluble, with a yellow brown color in water. The dark brown substance readily dissolved in ammonia, alcohol, dilute acid, hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, and decomposed in nitric acid, but did not dissolve in benzine or fat oil. After several days' rain during the summer, a quantity of the water was caught, evaporated, and the residue dried. Its characteristics were similar to those above mentioned. By an experiment instituted in water under ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... the people think for a time that he had been spirited away, but later on a fetid odor was noticeable near the grove, and some shepherds, upon investigation, found the body of the old man in a badly decomposed condition hanging from the limb of a baliti tree. When alive the old man had terrorized many by his deep and resonant voice, his sunken eyes and his silent laugh, but now that he was dead, and a suicide at that, the mere mention of his name gave ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... little; they, in fact, stared a great deal—not as Europeans stare, with a restless and puzzled expression of countenance, but with features all fixed and rigid, and with still, glassy eyes. Before they had time to get decomposed from their state of petrifaction I had remounted my dromedary, and was darting ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... and putrefying mass, the carcasses of about twenty bullocks, part of her deck—load of cattle, rotted into one hideous lump, with the individual bodies of the poor brutes almost obliterated and undistinguishable, while streams of decomposed animal matter were ever and anon flowing down to leeward, although as often washed away by the hissing waters. But how shall I describe the scene of horror that presented itself in the after part of the vessel, under ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... find in the study of the human body thus analysed from head to foot in its innumerable ways of expression. Hence, the eloquent secrets of pantomime, those imperceptible movements of great actors which produce such powerful impressions, are decomposed and subjected to laws whose evidence and simplicity are a ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... might not be so easy to penetrate the wilderness again. Unfortunately, he had neither pick, pan, nor shovel with him, but a very cursory displacement of the soil around the spring and at the outcrop with his hands showed him the usual red soil and decomposed quartz which constituted an "indication." Yet none knew better than himself how disappointing and illusive its results often were, and he regretted that he had not a pan to enable him to test the soil by washing it at the spring. If there were only a miner's cabin ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... here,' said Mr Dennis, pulling out a mouldy pocket-handkerchief, which looked like a decomposed halter, and wiping his forehead ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... there a considerable time, for, notwithstanding the antiseptic properties of that sort of soil, mixed with the decayed bark and fibre of trees, a portion of the flesh of the hand was decomposed, and the naked bone disclosed. On the ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Carhaix, "don't say that. On earth all is dead and decomposed. But in heaven! Ah, I admit that the Paraclete is keeping us waiting. But the texts announcing his coming are inspired. The future is certain. There will be light," and with bowed head ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... flesh remains on the bones; but when it has mouldered away, they conclude that the man himself has departed.[269] The Matacos Indians of the Gran Chaco in Argentina believe that the soul of a dead man does not pass down into the nether world until his body is decomposed or burnt. Further, the Alfoors of Central Celebes suppose that the spirits of the departed cannot enter the spirit-land until all the flesh has been removed from their bones; for until that has been done, the gods (lamoa) in the other world could not bear the stench of the corpse. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. Without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... symbols in concrete, in philosophy, by means of symbols in abstracto; the former constructs its object in sensuous intuition, while the object of the latter is given to it, and that as a confused concept to be decomposed. Mathematics, therefore, may well begin with definitions, since the conception which is to be explained is first brought into being through the definition, while philosophy must begin by seeking her conceptions. In ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to hold these materials together, and beams of wood ("bond timbers") were laid lengthwise here and there in the wall to give additional strength. Where columns were needed, they were in every case of wood, and consequently have long since decomposed and disappeared. Considerable remains, however, were found of the decorations of the interior. Thus there are bits of what must once have been a beautiful frieze of alabaster, inlaid with pieces of blue glass. A restored piece of this, sufficient ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... been about to take it off him when they were interrupted. From the appearance of the body, he had, we conjectured, been dead two or three days, perhaps longer, for, as it lay in the shade, it was not so decomposed as ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... it will be recollected, consists of carbon and oxygen, while it supplies only carbon to the plant. It is therefore necessary that it be divided, or decomposed, and that the carbon be retained while the oxygen is sent off again into the atmosphere, to reperform its office of uniting with carbon. This decomposition takes place in the green parts of plants and only under the influence of daylight. It is not necessary that ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... have also abundance of very fine indigo. This is made of a certain herb which is gathered, and [after the roots have been removed] is put into great vessels upon which they pour water and then leave it till the whole of the plant is decomposed. They then put this liquid in the sun, which is tremendously hot there, so that it boils and coagulates, and becomes such as we see it. [They then divide it into pieces of four ounces each, and in that form ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... which gave materials for thought on God and Nature to so many generations. He familiarized the theological world still further with the doctrine of secondary creation, giving such examples of it as that "bees are generated from decomposed veal, beetles from horseflesh, grasshoppers from mules, scorpions from crabs," and, in order to give still stronger force to the idea of such transformations, he dwells on the biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar, which appears to have taken strong ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... compound of nitrogen and oxygen, can be produced by sending a current of electric sparks through a mixture of its constituents, but in this way it can be obtained only in extremely small quantity. It is much more abundantly produced when organic matters are decomposed with free access of air, in which case the greater proportion of their nitrogen combines with the atmospheric oxygen. This process, which is known by the name of nitrification, is greatly promoted by the presence of lime or some ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... wisest professor of geology and expert of mines cannot explain it. This, I say, is the gold and silver from ornaments employed in temples of the idols of ancient races, who lived unthinkable thousands of years ago. The very stones of their temples have crumbled and been decomposed, but the precious metal has been formed into nuggets, according to the natural laws of molecular attraction, and under the impulse of gravity and in obedience to the laws of ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... all the material of which the globes belonging to our solar system—all the planets and comets—consist, at the beginning of all things was decomposed into its primary elements, and filled the whole space of the universe in which the bodies formed out of it now revolve. This state of nature, when viewed in and by itself without any reference to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack measure, harmony, and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up into outer and inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has decomposed the human unity, in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more profoundly and more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this powerful leaven. She has not yet conquered the true humanity; she is still living under the antinomy of sin and grace, of here ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Harl lay in a crumpled heap. But the clothes were sagging down. The flesh inside them was melting.... I saw the white face suddenly leprous; putrescent.... All in this moment, within the clothes, the body swiftly, decomposed. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... follows:—It was for the purpose of hiding and protecting it from an enemy who would have destroyed it, had it been discovered. It must have been carefully laid down, and as carefully covered with boughs and twigs of trees which prevented it from being discovered. Traces of this new decomposed vegetable covering can be seen on every side of the trench, and it is quite evident this vegetable matter originally extended across and above ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... friable, and easily decomposed; and I am inclined to think this formation is the source from which was derived the great deposite of sand and gravel which forms the surface rock of the prairie country west of ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... I'm all in bits inside," droned one who sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; "yet up to last week I was young and I was clean. They've changed me. Now, I've got nothing but a dirty old decomposed ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... which have an open tube for conveying fluids away, as the liver and kidneys, it is thrown out or eliminated, and in this way a portion of it is ultimately removed from the body. The rest passing round and round with the circulation, is probably decomposed and carried off in new forms ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... of science in which general views will undoubtedly take the place of merely special; where new forces will be discovered and new substances will be made known, and where those which are now considered as simple will be decomposed. I would, therefore, venture to hope that an attempt to delineate nature in all its vivid animation and exalted grandeur, and to trace the 'stable' amid the vacillating, ever-recurring alternation of physical metamorphoses, will not be wholly disregarded even ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... reason for the presence of such a cataract, we should remember that the entire region for miles was once a geyser basin. The river was then near the surface; and has been cutting down the walls of the canon ever since. The volcanic soil, decomposed by heat, could not resist the constant action of the water. Only a granite bluff at the upper end of the canon has held firm; and over that the baffled stream now leaps to wreak its vengeance on the weaker ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... The comparative rapidity or slowness with which bones are decomposed and disappear in different soils, is sometimes a question of importance to the antiquary. We all know that they preserve for many long centuries in dry soils and dry positions. In moist ground, such as that on which the Cat-stane stands, they melt away far more ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the fetus protruded from the wound. A butcher enlarged the wound and, fixing his finger under the jaw of the fetus, extracted the head. On looking into the abdomen he perceived a black object, whereupon he introduced his hand and extracted piecemeal an entire fetal skeleton and some decomposed animal-matter. The abdomen was bound up, and in six weeks the woman was enabled to superintend her domestic affairs; excepting a ventral hernia she had no bad after-results. Kimura, quoted by Whitney, speaks of a case of extrauterine pregnancy ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... apply the manure in its fresh condition to coarse feeding crops like corn, and then follow the corn by a more delicate rooted crop which requires the manure to be in a more decomposed condition than is necessary for the corn. In this case the corn is satisfied and the remaining manure is in proper condition for the following ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... upon which the Chaldaean cities were built, far from, preserving the dead body, rapidly decomposed it under the influence of heat and moisture: vaults constructed in it would soon be invaded by water in spite of masonry; paintings and sculpture would soon be eaten away by nitre, and the funereal furniture and the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... minerals, and quartz, become changed to clay, mixed with quartz or sand, calcite or dolomite, and iron oxide, together with residual particles of the original feldspars and ferro-magnesian minerals which have only partly decomposed. In terms of elements or chemical composition, water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, all common constituents of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, have been added; and certain substances such as soda, potassa, lime, magnesia, and silica have in part been carried away by circulating waters, ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... I should not be surprised if he was mad! He talked away tremendously quickly, and used all kinds of new words invented to suit his discovery, and I got quite exhausted trying to understand him; all I could really make out was that he professed to have decomposed hydrogen, and evolved a lighter element from it, and that his new force has something to do with vibration; that he multiplies vibrations almost infinitely, and can distinguish divisions of tones in an unusual ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... presence of phosphorus, as in the cases of phosphate of lime and of ammonia. Hence we may infer that Drosera cannot obtain phosphorus from the phosphate of potash. This is remarkable, as I hear from Dr. Burdon Sanderson that phosphate of potash is certainly decomposed within the bodies of animals. Most of the salts of soda act very rapidly; the iodide acting slowest. The oxalate, nitrate, and citrate seem to have a special tendency to cause the blade of the leaf to be inflected. The ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... old stump or tree may be seen crumbling away under the influence of fungi and here the children may be shown the effects of tree diseases both as destroyers of life and as up-builders, because fungi turn to dust the living trees and build up others by furnishing them with the decomposed wood matter. ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... soda. When dissolved, pour the gold solution into the hyposulphite by small quantities, shaking well after each addition. The soda solution must not be poured into the gold, as the gold would be immediately decomposed, and the solution turn black, ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... held possession of us. One would have said that his immaterial essence, liberated, free, all-powerful and dominating, was flitting around us. And sometimes, too, the dreadful smell of the decomposed body came towards us and penetrated us, sickening ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... has been known that Water is not a simple element, but a COMPOUND, and capable of being decomposed, much light has been thrown upon many operations of nature which formerly were wrapped up in obscurity. In vegetation, for instance, it has been rendered extremely probable, that water acts a much ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... organic solvents. However, the fact that a small percentage can be extracted from the green bean in this manner indicates that some of the caffein content exists therein in a free state. This acid compound of caffein will be largely decomposed during the process of torrefaction, so that in roasted coffee a larger percentage will be present in the free state. Microscopical examination of the roasted bean lends verisimilitude to ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the lower workings proved too much for my eager curiosity. We waited two days and still there was no evidence of life below. I knew there had been ample time for the gas from our bombs to have been dissipated, as it was decomposed by contact with moisture. A light was lowered, but ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... writers; but though some valuable literary remains of Grecian and Roman antiquity have been more or less completely restored, the greater part remain yet untouched, no effectual means having been discovered by which the manuscripts could be unrolled and deciphered, owing to their charred and decomposed state. ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... response of a rod or cone to light is probably a purely chemical reaction. Dr. Ladd-Franklin, carrying out her theory, supposes that a light-sensitive "mother substance" in the rods and cones is decomposed by the action of light, and gives off cleavage products which arouse the vital activity of the rods and cones, and thus start nerve currents ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... session of 1803, that strange diversity of opinions, into which the two leading parties were decomposed by the resignation of Mr. Pitt, had given way to new varieties, both of cohesion and separation, quite as little to be expected from the natural affinities of the ingredients concerned in them. Mr. Pitt, upon perceiving, in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... reversible reactions are made possible by enzymes. In the presence of diastase, glucose yields glycogen and water, which, reacting together in the opposite direction, yield glucose again. In the presence of emulsin, amygdalin is decomposed into glucose, hydrocyanic acid and benzoic aldehyde, and reformed from them. Similarly in the presence of lipase, esters are reformed from alcohols and fatty ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... generator. (Consult any Chemistry text-book.) Make the gas and burn it at the end of a tube, holding a dry, cold tumbler inverted over the flame. Note that water is formed. Conclude what water consists of, namely, oxygen and hydrogen. Water may be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen, hence a use of hydrogen may be shown by attaching a clay pipe to the generator and filling soap bubbles with the gas. When freed ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... spurred, he scrambled into the hammock with undignified haste. His handsome face had turned yellow with the strain of weighty cares. The ridge of his shapely nose had grown sharp; the audacious nostrils appeared mean and pinched. The velvety, caressing glance of his fine eyes seemed dead, and even decomposed; for these almond-shaped, languishing orbs had become inappropriately bloodshot with much sinister sleeplessness. He addressed the surprised envoy of Senor Fuentes in a deadened, exhausted voice. It came ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... east. Generally the rocks are granitic, consisting of syenite and gneiss, with micacious schist in the lower valleys. Occasionally, dikes of basalt break through the surface, which is generally much denuded, and the rocks are weather-worn and decomposed. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... later a body, headless, was found in the river, but it was so decomposed that the Coroner, Dr. Revell, finding no trace of foul play, ordered it buried. It might have been a drowning. Later still, a skull was found near by with a hole in the centre, batting in one ear and a dent ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... caused the woman to be arrested, and afterwards he confessed to the marechale, that perhaps it was better the conspiracy should be allowed time to ripen into maturity. Daring this time the liquid contained in the four bottles was being decomposed: M. Quesnay, first physician, Messrs. Thiebault and Varennes, visiting physicians, M. de la Martiniere, counsellor of state, surgeon to his majesty, as well as Messrs. Ducor and Prost, apothecaries to his majesty, had been collected together for this purpose by the ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... sixteenth centuries was generated in the early mediaeval revival. The seeds may, indeed, have come down from antiquity, but they remained for nearly a thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former vegetation, and it was not till that vegetation had completely decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it. Manufacture and commerce reappeared: ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... with the squaws, and Dick added, "The whole outfit is camping on a canyon the other side of the range. Old Rabbit Tail told me this morning when he brought down the wood. It's there they find the rock they make these ollas of. It's a kind of decomposed granite. They pulverize it with their metates, add boiling water and get a very fair clay. Qui-tha is up there with them and his strong ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... quickly. Mamma is delighted to see you!" His mental picture was decomposed by the repeated waving of the famous shawl, which only came into view as Berenice turned. Hubert regretted that she had not worn it—the peacocks could have been exchanged for its vivid note of scarlet. Pretending not to have heard her ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... within a few feet of his own door, in the little courtyard that surrounds each dwelling. Funeral dances are then kept up in memory of the dead for several weeks; at the expiration of which time, the body being sufficiently decomposed, is exhumed. The bones are cleaned, and are deposited in an earthenware jar, and carried to a spot near the town which is regarded as the cemetery. I observed that they were not particular in regarding the spot as sacred, as signs of nuisances were present even upon the bones, that in civilized ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... product which then condenses with the amine; and by the action of nitrosamines on primary amines. They are crystalline solids, usually of a yellow colour, which do not unite with acids; they are readily converted into amino-azo compounds (see above) and are decomposed by the concentrated halogen acids, yielding haloid benzenes, nitrogen and an amine. Acid anhydrides replace the imino-hydrogen atom by acidyl radicals, and boiling with water converts them into phenols. They combine with phenyl isocyanate to form urea derivatives (H. Goldschmidt, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... oysters from the fishing banks in the Gulf, and pile them on the shore in great heaps. Here they lie till they are rotted; and the stench that arises is enough to turn any inexperienced stomach. When the substance of the oyster is quite decomposed, the shells are opened, and the mass of matter they contain is thrown into tubs, and washed with water. It is necessary to pass the pulp very carefully through the fingers, for fear that some of the pearls ...
— Harper's Young People, July 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... length the country opened into slight undulations, well clothed with grass, and good for travelling over, the soil being full of the same hard rock found on the rising grounds nearest to the Darling, in the lowest parts of that river explored formerly by me. The red earth seemed to be but the decomposed matrix of that rock, as the water-worn pebbles of quartz so thickly set therein, here covered the ground in some places so thickly as to resemble snow. Much Anthistiria and other good grasses grew on those plains. I was, indeed, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... a great change occurred in the country, and on passing through a thicket, we found a great wall of rock (decomposed granite) barring further progress. Following along the wall we came upon a gap, and, entering, reached a nice little plain of saltbush, surrounded by rocks and cliffs. This remarkable gap in the apparently ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... with water the chromate passes into solution, the ferric hydroxide remains undissolved, and the excess of peroxide is decomposed with the evolution of oxygen. The subsequent boiling insures the complete decomposition of the peroxide. Unless this is complete, hydrogen peroxide is formed when the solution is acidified, and this reacts with the bichromate, reducing it ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... all the complex forms of matter in Nature into a number of simple substances, which are called elements. Of these elements about seventy are at present known, some of which, however, are very rare. An element therefore is a simple substance which cannot be decomposed by any known force or process, as heat ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... roof rises highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed, as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as a sea-stack, skirted with algae, the breakers on this shore must have dashed ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and aggravates it in every individual; the whole mass of vital air is then quickly poisoned by a few; the most vigorous frames are smitten with the contagion; all the channels in which the functions of life should go on are destroyed; all the juices of the system are decomposed; and, seized with a similar feverous delirium, the sound spiritual life and productions of whole ages and nations are involved in irremediable ruin. Hence your antipathy to the church, to every institution which is intended for the communication of religion, is always more prominent than ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... in making water-gas—preferably platinum heated by electricity—apply an apergetic shock, and the oxygen and hydrogen will separate like oil and water, the oxygen being so much the heavier. Lead them in different directions as fast as the water is decomposed—since otherwise they would reunite—and your supply of power will ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... publication of your Transactions been more frequent, I should with much pleasure have submitted to the Society a full account of these and other experiments which appear to me to prove, that metals are compound substances, and that water has not yet been decomposed by any process that we are acquainted with. Still, however, I would not be very positive, as the contrary is maintained by almost all the chemists of ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... Massingham in Norfolk, who has discovered that the acid taste of this water is not the necessary consequence of its impregnation with nitrous air, but is the effect of the acid vapour, into which part of this air is resolved, when it is decomposed by a mixture with common air. This, it will be seen, exactly agrees with my own observation on the constitution of nitrous air, in the second part of this work. A more particular account of Mr. Bewley's observation will be given in ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... that flames were seen to issue forth, which, from a surface of more than a mile square, cast up fragments of burning rock to a prodigious height. The two small rivers were swallowed up, and their decomposed waters added fuel to the flames, which burned for many months with a fierceness ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Bleaching by agents produced or made available by the direct action of electricity. Thus if a current under proper conditions is sent through a solution of common salt (sodium chloride), the electrodes being close together, the salt is decomposed, chlorine going to one pole and sodium hydrate to the other. The two substances react upon each other and combine, forming sodium hypochlorite, which bleaches the tissue ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... with some sand, and a clay subsoil. Bottom lands have the usual deposits of muck and partially decomposed vegetable matter. The damp, rich soil, of course, suits strawberries and blackberries; though the latter grow wild to such perfection, and in such abundance, as to do away with cultivation almost entirely. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... here, as well as in all other caves we examined, were built entirely of a powdery substance, the decomposed material of the cave itself. Great quantities of it were found on the floors of caves which had not been occupied by man. It is not of a sandy nature, and its colour is light brown, sometimes almost grey, or even ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... evening he had spent in the mess-room, and the hopeful conversation concerning the settlement soon to be made near the sturdy little post. Now all that remained were great heaps of ashes and half-burned logs, gaunt chimneys, and a score of bodies, stripped, mutilated, and decomposed beyond recognition. The presence of these, and the fact that all of them were scalped, showed the destruction of the post to be the work of savages and not the voluntary act of its garrison; otherwise Donald might ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... dangerous in respect of spontaneous inflammability, or objectionable in a manner to be explained later on, when consumed; and (2) that it is capable of evolving a fixed minimum quantity of acetylene when decomposed by water. Such determination, however, cannot be carried out by the ordinary consumer for himself. A generator which is perfectly satisfactory in general behaviour, and which evolves a sufficient proportion ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... lacking; it made clumsy returns to Ciceronian magniloquence, but had not yet acquired that special flavor which in the fourth century, and particularly during the centuries following, the odor of Christianity would give the pagan tongue, decomposed like old venison, crumbling at the same time that the old world civilization collapsed, and the Empires, putrefied by the sanies of the centuries, succumbed to the thrusts of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... abortive attempt would be injurious to him. The reconstruction of the fossil remains of the old Peel party is a hopeless task. No human power can now reanimate it with the breath of life; it is decomposed into atoms and will be remembered only as a happy ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... containing air, and consisting only of a distended skin, insipid, and tasteless. By-and-bye a greenish mould is developed on the surface of the blighted fruit; then the surface becomes black and shrivelled, and at the expiration of a month from the time of flowering the whole are rotten and decomposed. The flower appears about the beginning of June, and before August there is hardly a plum to be seen. It is curious that where two flower-stalks arise from one point of the branch, one will often go on to ripen in the normal way, ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... forward and without another word the two began to scan the walls, the floors, the heaps of rotted rock, the loose and tumbled boulders, not yet decomposed, that lined the cut on ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... necessary step to the vaster conviction that the many are One, that life is unity, that there is no finite, but only infinite. Until that blind pride which imagines Self unique shall have been broken down, and the feeling of self and of selfishness shall have been utterly decomposed, the knowledge of the Ego as infinite,—as the very Cosmos,—never can ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... parts of oxygen, while in the peroxide the proportions are 1 of hydrogen to 16 of oxygen. These proportions are by weight, and are expressed by the chemical formulae for water H{2}O, and for hydrogen peroxide H{2}O{2}. Water, as is well known, is a very stable body, and although it can be decomposed, yet it requires some considerable power to effect it. Now the extra quantity of oxygen which may be considered to have been introduced into water to convert it into peroxide has also introduced an element of instability, the extra quantity of oxygen being ever ready ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... has a vertical glass tube (E) through it, which extends down to the bottom of the jar, the electrolyte therein being a weak solution of sulphuric acid. When a current passes through the wires (D), the solution is partially decomposed—that is, converted into gas, which passes up into the vacant space (F) above the liquid, and, as it cannot escape, it presses the liquid downwardly, and causes the latter to flow upwardly into the tube (E). It is then an easy matter, after the current is on for a certain time, to determine its ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... flowing coulees of lava, which, in their liquid state, filled hollows, but afterwards became of a harder texture, as they dried and crystallized, than the higher rocks around them; the consequence of which is that the latter has been decomposed and washed away, while the basalt has been left to form the highest elevations. My opinion is that these steps, or stairs, at one time formed the beds of the ocean, or of great lakes, and that the substance of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... a dead body, which continues to live in the grave, which it leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished, and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... And by way of obstructing the one, which might possibly be evolved from the statement above, let me add, that the offensiveness of sea-water left standing, may arise in no small degree from the presence of decomposed animal matter. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... miles at a course of S. 35 degrees W., we passed through a dreadful country, composed of dense scrub and heavy sandy ridges, with some salt water channels and beds of small dry lakes at intervals. In many cases the margins bounding these were composed of a kind of decomposed lime, very light and loose, which yielded to the slightest pressure; in this our horses and drays sank deep, throwing out as they went, clouds of fine white dust on every side around them. This, added to the very fatiguing ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Incidentally it may be noted that Edison in experimenting with the Reis transmitter recognized at once the defect caused by the make-and-break action, and sought to keep the gap closed by the use, first, of one drop of water, and later of several drops. But the water decomposed, and the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... year the soil becomes poorer and poorer, because nitrogen, the chief fertilizing ingredient of the soil, is given off in the smoke, and only the mineral elements go back to the soil in the ashes. And, what is more injurious, the humus—i. e., the decomposed vegetable matter in the top soil—is destroyed. In burning brush after logging all the fertilizing and humus-forming leaves and twigs are destroyed just when most needed, for another good crop or leaves cannot be ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... still held possession of us. One would have said that his immaterial essence, liberated, free, all-powerful and dominating, was flitting around us. And sometimes, too, the dreadful odor of the decomposed body came toward us and penetrated ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... has no destructive effect on it; the most delicate, lightest, and most ornamental sculptures executed in it remain uninjured, while the hardest granites, erected at the same time, are friable and decomposed. The Kersanton stone cuts glass ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... Leblanc process consists in the following operations: Salt is decomposed and boiled down with sulphuric acid. Sulphate of sodium is formed, and a large amount of hydrochloric acid is given off. This is condensed, and is utilized in the manufacture of the bleaching powder mentioned above. The sulphate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... faculties are decomposed and pass away. Reason the attribute of which man pretends to be the exclusive possessor, first deserts him. He then loses the power of combining his judgment, and soon after that of comparing, assembling, combining, and joining together ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... be the "One Religion," as a recent Bampton Lecturer termed it, too often forgets that his system is a recomposition of rays of a religious light which was decomposed in the prismatic minds of earlier men. And further, with a change of metaphor, if Christianity has flourished and fructified through eighteen centuries, it must not be denied that it is a graft upon an old stock which through ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... there is no pigment in an argentic print, nothing but the silver reduced by the developer after the action of light; and that has been shown by, I think, Captain Abney, to be of a very stable and not easily decomposed nature; while if the pictures are passed through a solution of alum after washing and fixing, the gelatine also is so acted upon as to be rendered in a great degree impervious to the action of damp, and the pictures are then somewhat similar to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various |
