"Decomposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this process of combination there is a production of heat; there is a production of light; there is an ascending column of hot gases generated; there are currents established in the surrounding air. Moreover the decomposition of one force into many forces does not end here: each of the several changes produced becomes the parent of further changes. The carbonic acid given off will by and by combine with some base; or under the influence of sunshine give up its carbon to the leaf of ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... an unsuspecting stranger, murder him first, then rob him of his valuables, his papers, his very identity, and leave him there to rot. The body was found in a disused barge which had been moored some time against the wall, at the foot of these steps. It was in the last stages of decomposition, and, of course, could not be identified; but the police would have it that it was the body ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... stamp of scientific rank. I not only, however, consider my own trifles unworthy of such a dignity, but am inclined to strip it from other productions which might appear to have a more appropriate claim to it. No doubt, the ductile inflections and wonderful facilities for decomposition and reconstruction make Greek an excellent vehicle of scientific precision, and the use of a dead language saves your nomenclature from being confounded with your common talk. The use of a Greek derivative gives notice that you are scientific. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... a smell of decomposition began to come from the coffin, growing gradually more marked, and by three o'clock it was quite unmistakable. In all the past history of our monastery, no such scandal could be recalled, and in no other circumstances could such a scandal ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... understanding his phrase 'as usual,' I inquired if the body had been buried with the face upwards, as in the ordinary way; to which he replied to my astonishment, in the affirmative, adding, that in the course of decomposition the face of every individual turns to the earth!! and that, in the experience of three-and-twenty years in his situation, he had never known more than one instance to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... which weighed about 2 cwt. each, were easily procurable, but had to be eaten immediately, as in less than a hour decomposition took place. Lastly, the fish caught upon this shore was so unwholesome, that even those who ate it in moderation became dangerously ill, and risked ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... childhood, and as the organ recedes and becomes more and more diminutive, the prepuce again, like in childhood, begins to tend to phimosis; the urine of the aged is also more irritating and prone to decomposition or putrefaction, and the constant state of moisture that the preputial canal of the aged is necessarily kept in, either by frequent urination or the incomplete emptying of the urethra that is peculiar to old ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... about her person, and from without its folds a few withered flowers had fallen. A strong aromatic odor, of a pungent nature, was diffused around; giving evidence that the art by which the ancient Egyptians endeavored to rescue their kindred from decomposition had been resorted to, to preserve the fleeting charms ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... increase at the outset in the proportion of this element. I might carry a fresh supply of oxygen, available at need, in some solid combination like chlorate of potash; but the electricity employed for the generation of the apergy might be also applied to the decomposition of carbonic acid and the restoration of its oxygen ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... sculptors of the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies' schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition of the bronze and the slight "debasement" of the art; and one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... burning hair—a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... so unpleasantly near. The heavy rain of the previous night, coming after a long period of drought, was probably the cause of these already-loosened stones starting upon their downward career. All these calcareous rocks are breaking up. The process of disintegration and decomposition is slow, but it is sure. Every frost does something to split them, and every shower of rain entering the crevices does something to rot them; so that even they cannot last. The Tarn is carrying them back to the sea, to be deposited again, but ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... discovered about six years ago in the laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, by Prof. Remsen and a student named Fahlberg, who has since taken out patents upon it. It is greatly superior to sugar, as it is free from fermentation and decomposition. A small quantity added to starch or glucose will make a compound equal to sugar in sweetness. It is a valuable antiseptic ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... neglected wharves around him harmonized with his own gloomy thoughts. Pursuing his walk along the side of the river, he was checked by a horrible smell, and looking downward, he perceived a carcass in the last stage of decomposition lying in the mud. It had been washed ashore by the tide, and a large bird of prey was contending for the possession of it with a legion of water-rats. Sickened by the sight, he turned up a narrow thoroughfare near Baynard's Castle, and crossing Thames-street, was about to ascend Addle-hill, when ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... form of Colic is a distension of the bowels with gas, resulting generally from the decomposition of undigested food in the bowels. It sometimes follows Spasmodic Colic, in which there is first spasms due to the irritations set up by the presence of undigested matter, and subsequently this food decomposes and forms gas. I may conclude that Flatulent or Wind Colic is usually ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... which had been originally built of wood, had severally disappeared. Some had been taken to pieces and removed to Halifax or St John; others had been converted into fuel, and the rest had fallen a prey to neglect and decomposition. The chimneys stood up erect, and marked the spot around which the social circle had assembled; and the blackened fireplaces, ranged one above another, bespoke the size of the tenement and the means of its owner. In some places ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... All of the above-mentioned organic acids form insoluble salts with lead acetate, and there will also be a tendency toward precipitation of certain of the components of caramel, the acidic polymerization products of acrolein, glycerol, etc., and of the proteins and their decomposition products. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... they began by demanding the abolition of royalty, "the greatest scourge," said the Revolutions de Paris, "which has ever dishonoured the human species." Marat seemed to have concentrated in himself all the evil passions which ferment in a society in a state of decomposition: he constituted himself the permanent representative of popular hate. By pretending this, he kept it up, writing all the while with bitterness and ferocity. He became a cynic in order the more intimately to ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... gunpowder or the fulminates of mercury, silver or gun-cotton be ignited in a vacuum by a galvanic battery, none of them will explode; if any gas be introduced so as to produce a gentle pressure during the decomposition, then a rapid evolution of gases will result; the results of decomposition in a vacuum differ from those under atmospheric pressure or when they are burnt in a pistol, musket, a cannon, or in a mine; ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... available, so that hydrogen had to be depended upon for the most part. But then another difficulty arose. This was the manufacture of the requisite gas. Various methods were tested, such as the electrolytic decomposition of water, the decomposition of sulphuric acid by means of iron, the reaction between slaked lime and zinc, and ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... after increased by the usual means. Knight's expeditious process consists in dusting fine iron filings on the wet graphite surface of the wax mould, and then pouring upon it a solution of sulphate of copper. Stirring with a brush expedites the contact, and a decomposition takes place; the acid leaves the copper and forms with the iron sulphate a solution which floats off, while the copper is freed and deposited in a pure metallic form upon the graphite. The black surface takes on a muddy tinge with marvelous rapidity. The electric-connection gripper ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... of these plants consist of very simple vegetable cells, enclosed in indestructible silex (as other Algae are in carbonate of lime), it is obvious that the death and decomposition of such multitudes must form sedimentary deposits, proportionate in their extent to the length and exposure of the coast against which they are washed, in thickness to the power of such agents as the winds, currents, and sea, which ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... some breakfast," said John, almost cheerfully; and accordingly they proceeded towards it. Suddenly John, who was ahead, started back with an exclamation of fear, and the horses began to snort, for there, stark and stiff in death, already swollen and discoloured by decomposition—as is sometimes the case with people killed by lightning—the rifles in their hands twisted and fused, their clothes cut and blown from their bandoliers—lay the two Boer murderers. It was a terrifying sight, and, taken in conjunction with their own remarkable ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... "Decomposition must of course have done its work, but still there must be a something to show that a corpse has so undergone the process common to all nature. Double the lapse of time surely could not obliterate all traces of that ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... water of high floods in extensive lakes during the existence of which the deposits formed the surface of the present plains. Loose red sand also constantly forms low hills on the borders of these plains; and it seems to have been derived from the decomposition of the sandstone, and may be a diluvial or lacustrine deposit. Blue clay appears in the lowest parts of the basin, and forms the level parts of the plain, with concretions of marl in thin layers. This has every appearance of a mud deposit; but its depth is greater ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... deep, and of a rich vegetable texture. "If in moderate condition by the manuring of the previous crop, it will be better than applying manure at sowing. Should it be necessary to do so, let the manure be in the most thorough state of decomposition; or, if otherwise, incorporate it with the soil, as far from the surface as possible. The Parsnip will grow in a stronger soil than the Carrot; and succeeds comparatively well when grown in sand, or even in ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... swollen, that it was horrible to behold; from its nose a bloody matter escaped, the mouth gaped hideously, and the tongue was so monstrously enlarged that it filled the whole cavity; to this frightful appearance was added a decomposition so great that, although at the pope's funeral it is customary to kiss the hand which bore the Fisherman's ring, not one approached to offer this mark of respect and religious reverence to the representative of God ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... as the poet of a decadent epoch, an epoch in which art had arrived at the over-ripened maturity of an aging civilization; a glowing, savorous, fragrant over-ripeness, that is already softening into decomposition. And to be the fitting poet of such an epoch, he modeled his style on that of the poets of the Latin decadence; for, as he expressed it for himself and for the modern school of "decadents" in French poetry ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... germs which have adhered to their sticky feet where they have previously dined." Declare war upon the "fly who won't wipe his feet" by keeping the garbage in a covered galvanized-iron pail and dispose of it before decomposition takes place. Wash and dry the pail after emptying. If the camp is located near a farm, give the garbage to the farmer. It is the natural food of swine or poultry. Where this is not possible, the garbage should be buried ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... of death, closed the windows, and renewed the candles. On entering now he was quite composed, evidently accustomed already to regard the corpse as though it had been there for a month. He even went the length of declaring that, as yet, there was not any signs of decomposition, making this remark just at the moment when he and his wife were about to sit down at table. "Pshaw!" she responded, "she is now in wood; she will keep there ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... for great collisions of principles and aims; for the decomposition of elements which had been hitherto united; for sifting them out of their old combinations, and regrouping them according to their more natural affinities. It was a time for the formation and development of unexpected novelties in teaching and practical effort. There was a great historic ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... a few wreaths of smoke were visible in summer, caused probably by the decomposition of several coal seams on the upper side ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... with the times, and rot and stink with the times. In the economic and social world, as such, there is no activity except that sort of automatic activity that is called decay; the withering of the high Powers of freedom and their decomposition into the aboriginal soil of slavery. In that way the world stands much at the same stage as it did at the beginning of the Dark Ages. And the Church has the same task as it had at the beginning of the Dark Ages; to save all the light and liberty that can be saved, to resist the downward drag of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... some of these freedmen were physicians, and others musicians and silversmiths. The shops of the perfumers stood in a part of the Forum on the Via Sacra. Perfumes were much used at incinerations to disguise the smell of decomposition before the fires were kindled. The Christians opposed cremation and favoured earth burial, and in time the business of the perfume-sellers failed, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Atkinson has no doubt that the symptoms of the Northern Party were those of early scurvy. Conditions of temperature in the igloo allowed of decomposition occurring in seal meat. Fresh seal meat brought in from outside reduced the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... of civilised life; this may be right or wrong physically, as the nerves become more delicate and sensitive, which may affect the brain more or less directly. There can be no doubt that it affects the stomach. Certain civilised persons prefer game in a state approaching to decomposition; I have seen savages who enjoy flesh when actually putrid, and above all horrors, fish when stinking! Such food would disgust the civilised man who prefers his game "high," and would perhaps kill other civilised people whose palates and stomachs have been ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakspeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Already had decomposition commenced its repulsive work in the form of the little son, and he was laid away, while the coffin returned for the other dear one, who was to moulder with him in ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... present structure of our planet, and the strata which now compose our continents have been once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the waste of preexisting continents. The same forces are still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechanical violence, even the hardest rocks, and transporting the materials to the sea, where they are spread out and form strata analogous to those of more ancient date. Although loosely deposited along the bottom of the ocean, they became afterwards altered and consolidated by volcanic ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... me for de grave; but as my limbs did not stiffen, Mada Malachi sent for a doctor who placed a glass before my face, an' moisture gathered on it. He tole 'em it was not entirely cole over de heart, an' da mus'n't bury me until decomposition took place, cuze it might be a trance. An' da kep' me in de kitchen wid Aunt Milla, de cook, to watch me. It 'peared like I's goin' down into a horrible place of awful soun's an' rattlin' of chains; ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... circumstances permit, it is the ideal method of treatment. The cause of death in the case of intestinal obstruction is usually due to the blood being poisoned by the absorption of the products of decomposition of the fluid contents of the bowel above the obstruction. It is now the custom, therefore, for the surgeon to complete his operation for the relief of obstruction by drawing out a loop of the distended bowel, incising and evacuating it, and then carefully suturing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... there entered her. These have died in the arms of their families, without a single communication of the disease. It is certainly, therefore, an epidemic, not a contagious disease; and calls on the chemists for some mode of purifying the vessel by a decomposition of its atmosphere, if ventilation be found insufficient. In the long scale of bilious fevers, graduated by many shades, this is probably the last and most mortal term. It seizes the native of the place equally with strangers. It has not been long known in any part of the United States. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... is the telltale of conditions. If a man's tongue is coated with detritus—which, anglicized, is nothing more than the products of decomposition, a coating formed by over-stimulation of the glands lying at the base of the tongue—and this has been previously superinduced by a disordered stomach, we know that the cause is indigestion. If the follicles in the back ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... is, however, difficult for the observer to admit that a small quantity of the thin yellow envelope can, by a simple mingling with the crumb of the loaf, color it brown, and it is still more difficult to admit that the actual presence of these envelopes can without decomposition render bread doughy, badly raised, sticky, and incapable of swelling in water. On the other hand, although some distinguished chemists deny or exalt the nutritive properties of bran, agriculturists, taking practical observation as proof, attribute to that portion of the grain a physiological ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... Plaza Toro, he "likes an interment" and rarely misses a last rite. A keen fisherman, he had little difficulty in extracting an exhibit for the Court's inspection, which he unhesitatingly pronounced to be a diamond ring in an advanced state of decomposition. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... water in the soil, or by the too tardy percolation of rain-water, may be determined by observation. How stagnant water injures plants, is not, as has been suggested, easily understood in all its relations. It doubtless retards the decomposition of the substances which supply their nutriment, and it reduces the temperature of the soil. It has been suggested, that it prevents or checks perspiration and introsusception, and it excludes the air which is essential to the vegetation of most plants. Whatever ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... of Alcohol. The ceaseless action of minute forms of plant life, in bringing about the decomposition of the elaborated products of organized plant or animal structures, will be described in more ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... The decomposition of animal and of some vegetable bodies in the soil causes the production of one constituent of saltpetre, while the earth and the animal remains supply the other. Evaporation of pure water from the surface of the earth causes the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... continue moist for a long time after similar land by its side, but which has not been manured, is dried up. Hard coarse soils dry up very quickly, while soft, mellow, and friable ones will endure a long drought. The gases and moisture generated by the decomposition of manures produce this mellow state. Hence the necessity of having that decomposition take place under the soil, or of plowing ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... years had elapsed since the interment, the body of the general had undergone little change, his features being nearly perfect and easily recognized, while that of Lieut.-Colonel M'Donell was in a complete mass of decomposition. One of his regimental companions, Colonel Fitzgibbon, in transmitting a detail of the ceremonies of the day, thus pathetically expressed himself: "Nothing, certainly, could exceed the interest manifested ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... appeared in the field as a rival of COAL gas. In 1815, Mr. John Taylor had obtained a patent for an apparatus for the decomposition of oil and other animal substances; but the circumstance which more particularly attracted the public attention to be directed to oil gas was the erection of the patent apparatus at Apothecary's Hall, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... perceived the insufficiency of the common argument which attempts to prove that the soul—it being granted that it is a simple being—cannot perish by dissolution or decomposition; he saw it is not impossible for it to cease to be by extinction, or disappearance. He endeavoured to prove in his Phaedo, that the soul cannot be annihilated, by showing that a simple being cannot cease to exist. Inasmuch as, he said, a simple existence cannot diminish, nor ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... special type and construction of its parents, works and undergoes a constant waste, and that waste is made good by nutriment derived from the inorganic world; the waste given off in this way being directly added to the inorganic world; and eventually the animal itself dies, and, by the process of decomposition, its whole body is returned to those conditions of inorganic matter ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... containing the phosphate of magnesia there is instantly formed the ammonio-magnesium phosphate, which is as promptly deposited in the solid form. The common source of ammonia in such cases is from decomposition of the urea in fermenting urine. In order to produce this a ferment is necessary, however, and therefore, as an additional prerequisite, the presence of bacteria, or fungi, in the urine is essential. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... fancy. If we consider that, with sick as with well, every thought decomposes some nervous matter,—that decomposition as well as re-composition of nervous matter is always going on, and more quickly with the sick than with the well,—that, to obtrude abruptly another thought upon the brain while it is in the act of destroying nervous ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... falling-star is hailed with loud shouts and waving of fire-brands, to drive off the yumburbar, an evil spirit which is the cause of all deaths and other calamities, and feeds on the entrails of the newly dead. When decomposition has gone on sufficiently far, the bones are carefully removed, painted red, wrapped up in bark, and carried about with the tribe for some time; after which they are finally deposited, either in a hollow tree or a shallow grave, over which a low mound of earth and stones ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... emphasized its previous findings, particularly this one: "Filter bags should be kept in cold water when not in use. Drying causes decomposition. Keeps sweet if kept wet. Use muslin for filter bag and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... dirt from the wood-pile, shavings—any thing that will rot away, should go into the compost heap. These should be saved, under cover if possible, in a compact heap and kept moist (never soaked) to help decomposition. To start the heap, gather up every available substance and make it into a pile with a few wheelbarrows full, or half a cartload, of fresh horse manure, treading the whole down firmly. Fermentation and decomposition will be quickly started. The heap should occasionally ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... serve the purpose of a safety valve, the owner being, in consequence of gross overfeeding and lack of natural exercise, afflicted with chronic flatulence, which manifested itself in frequent belchings forth through the mouth of the foul gases generated in the stomach by the decomposition of the foods with which it was generally loaded. But as the Rev. Mr Belcher had never been seen with his coat off, no one ever noticed the resemblance. It was not necessary for him to take his coat off: his part in life was not to help to produce, but to help to devour the produce of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... after three—yes, long after—that witnesses of consequence came up for examination. Dr. Brick had got the floor and was pleading post-mortem at once. In this climate and under such conditions decomposition would be so rapid, said he, that "by tomorrow his own mother couldn't recognize him." But the provost-marshal drawled that he didn't see that further mutilation would promote the possibility of recognition, and Brick was ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... soon prepared a meal, and the rest of the day was spent in preparing the deer meat to keep in store; the effect of the hot sun being wonderful, the heat drying up the juices and checking the decomposition that might have been expected to succeed its exposure. But it in no case improved the appearance ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... Nothing requires more care and attention. To begin with, the aspect of the vine garden influences the quality of the wine immensely. Then there is the soil. The best is the plastic clay (nyirok), which appears to be the product of the direct chemical decomposition of volcanic rock. This clay absorbs water but very slowly, and is, in short, the most favourable to the growth of the vine. As the vines are mostly on the steep hillsides, low walls are built to prevent the earth from being washed away. In the early spring one of the first things ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... soils fitted to yield the largest returns to labour; yet for this reason are they inaccessible. Their character exhibits itself in the enormous trees with which they are covered, and in their power of retaining the water necessary to aid the process of decomposition, but the poor settler wants the power either to clear them of their timber, or to drain them of the superfluous moisture. He begins on the hillside, but by degrees he obtains better machinery of cultivation, and with ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... war, the neglect of the mechanical application of this class of substance being largely due to the fact, that chemists are not as a rule engineers, nor engineers chemists. But an easily portable substance, the decomposition of which would evolve energy, or—what is, from the practical point of view, much the same thing—an easily portable substance, which could be decomposed electrically by wind or water power, and which would then recombine and supply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a piston, or ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... then, and even until 1539, the incorruptible body, but the entire skeleton of the Saint; the bottom of the grave being perfectly dry, free from offensive smell, and without the slightest symptom that a human body had ever undergone decomposition within its walls. The skeleton was found swathed in five silk robes of emblematical embroidery, the ornamental parts laid with gold leaf, and these again covered with a robe of linen. Beside the skeleton were also deposited several gold and silver insignia, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... the limestone? But the limestone contains very little silica, and is apparently of normal composition quite up to the vein. From the trap? This is compact, sonorous basalt, apparently unchanged; and that could not have supplied the silica without complete decomposition. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... was that grease to the expired light, so was the thing that sat there in human form to the Noah Skinner they had come to seek. Dead this many a day of charcoal fumes, but preserved from decomposition by those very fumes, sat Noah Skinner, dried into bones and leather waiting for them with his own Hard Cash, and with theirs; for, creeping awestruck round that mummified figure seated dead on his pool of sovereigns, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... per ton does not bring the phosphoric acid content up as high relatively as in most commercial fertilizers, but it helps. The total amount in the eight tons manure may be sufficient, and the greater part of the total has sufficiently immediate availability, while the manure must undergo decomposition, and some of the nitrogen and potash does not become available ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... is cultivated in some parts of this country. It is usually sown in March, and is fit to harvest in October. It is then pulled up and immersed in water; when the woody parts of the stalks separating from the bark, which sloughs off and undergoes a decomposition by which the fibres are divided, it is then combed (hackled), dried, and reduced to different fineness of texture, and spun for various purposes. It requires good land, and the seed is usually two bushels and a ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... air to allow the vapour to pass off. All decaying leaves, flower-stalks, &c., to be carefully picked off. All weeds, moss on the surface of pots, or anything else that would tend to cause dampness, mildew, or decomposition, to be cleared away. Pinch off the tops of any of the half-hardy plants that are ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... be dried to prevent decomposition, which takes place very rapidly after they have thawed out. . . ." The oven should be heated as for baking bread. Then, when it has reached the necessary temperature, which is easily recognized, the potatoes are put in, cutting up the largest. They are ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... little grass to sustain the life of a moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... diseases likely to attack plants in the house: fungus and mildew. The first seems to be a sort of decomposition of the leaf, leaving a black, powdery residue. It is combated by spraying with bordeaux. Bordeaux can now be had in paste or powder form, which for small quantities is much better than to try to ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... trees may be growing so far apart that their trunks will be covered with suckers as far down as the ground, or there may be large, open gaps with no trees at all. Here the sun, striking with full force, may be drying up the soil and preventing the decomposition of the leaves. Grass soon starts to grow in these open spaces and the whole character of the woodland changes as shown ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... particularly in old, ill-equipped hospitals, that many surgeons feared to operate, and the general mortality in all surgical cases was very high. Believing that it was from outside that the germs came which caused the decomposition of wounds, just as from the atmosphere the sugar solution got the germs which caused the fermentation, a young surgeon in Glasgow, Joseph Lister, applied the principles of Pasteur's experiments to their treatment. From Lister's original paper(*) I ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... sorts and sizes, from the gay budgerow, to the wretched and more than half rotten dhingy. The scene has, however, its drawbacks. The stranger is shocked and disgusted at the sight of some half-dozen dead bodies floating down the river, in all stages of decomposition, some with a vulture perched on them, gorging himself as he floats down the stream on his hideous raft. Government has placed people above the town, for the express purpose of sinking dead bodies and similar nuisances; but they have not succeeded in effecting their object ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... as it is shattered by frost, and carried down by torrents, of course forms itself into irregular flattish masses. The splintery edges of these are in some degree worn off by the action of water; and, slight decomposition taking place on the surface of the clay-slate, furnishes an aluminous soil, which is immediately taken advantage of by innumerable lichens, which change the dark gray of the original substance into an infinite variety of pale and warm colors. These stones, thus shaped to his hand, are ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of the art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for criticism to the powers regulating that branch of human activity, let things take their course; though he saw very well where that course was ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... to the sloth and debauchery of their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival, Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious history, a buffet for both the founder ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... baggy, buttonless trousers, cracked and laceless boots, and shapeless bowlers, too weak from want of food and rest even to think of work, almost incapable, indeed, of thought at all—breathing corpses, nothing more, with premature signs of decomposition in their filthy smell. And the women—the women were, if possible, ranker—feebly pulsating, feebly throbbing, foully stinking, rotten, living deaths. No amount of soap, food, or warmth could reclaim them now. Nature's implacable law—the survival ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... sufficient method in its madness to cause it to gain the suffrages of a large number of people. It was affirmed that those who had examined into the matter had found that the bodies of suicides were mysteriously preserved from decomposition until the day arrived on which they would naturally—that is, according to God's decree—have died. About the year 1834, I was taking a walk along the banks of the canal north of Glasgow, and sat down beside a group of well-dressed men, who were conversing on general ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... appearances follow naturally from the situation of this place, which is a summit, and does not allow of such a collection of water as might travel or transport the loose gravel, although it has been sufficient for carrying away the sand. This decomposition of the sand stone we shall find also explained from what follows of the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... contain the least. Thus, according to Orfila, Havana tobacco yields two per cent of the alkaloid, and Virginia nearly seven per cent. In the rankest varieties it rarely exceeds eight parts to the hundred. The same toxicologist says that it has the remarkable property of resisting decomposition in the decaying tissues of the body, and he detected it in the bodies of animals destroyed by it, several months after their death. In this particular it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... appearance of walls of Trapp, but already, in a great degree, changed into tuf, is arid and covered with briars. The soil of the Mamelles, like almost all that of the middle of the Peninsula, which appears to lie upon argillaceous lava, in a state of decomposition, is much better. There are even to be found, here and there, some spots that are very fertile; this is the arable land of the inhabitants. Towards the south, all resumes more or less, the appearance ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... Peru and Bolivia. The fresh leaves contain 0.003 to 0.006 per cent of cocaine, which percentage decreases considerably if the leaves are stored any length of time before being worked up. On the other hand, the alkaloid can be transported and kept without decomposition. This circumstance caused the author to devise a simple process for the manufacture of crude cocaine on the spot, neither Peru nor Bolivia being suitable countries for complicated chemical operations. After ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... we found him sitting on a block facing the sun, lying against his shield, which was supported by the side of the house. The body was in a terrible state of decomposition. It was swollen to three times its living girth. Great blisters had collected under the epidermis, which broke from time to time, a brownish red fluid escaping. The spear wound in his neck was plugged by a wooden ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... Continent. I have frequently sunk up to my knees in a bed of leaves when walking through its woods; and, often when I placed my foot on what appeared externally to be the solid trunk of a tree, I have found it yield to the pressure, in consequence of its decomposition into absolute rottenness. But such is not the case in New South Wales. There, no such accumulations of vegetable matter are to be met with; but where the loftiest tree of the forest falls to the ground, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... previously mentioned (see Frying and Digestion), when fats are heated to a high temperature, they decompose. The products of this decomposition are less readily digested than is fat before it is decomposed. Hence in fried foods, the fat is made somewhat indigestible. Thus it is much better to spread uncooked fat over hot potatoes than to combine the two foods ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... does not move. Then the priest looks at this inert and deformed corpse. He notices the fetid odor that arises from it, the odor of the slow but sure decomposition, and he has a sort of sudden revelation. The scepticism which, for a long time, has been brooding in his heart suddenly is transformed into absolute negation, and addressing himself to Him in whom he ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... on at this time on a very small scale, the power at disposal being very limited in amount. Yet the elements of success appeared to be so great, and the decomposition of the raw material was so complete, that the process was very soon prosecuted ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... able chemist as well as an ingenious physiologist, knew how to obtain this gas in great quantity and of good quality, not by using manganate of soda, according to the method of M. Tessie du Motay, but by the direct decomposition of slightly acidulated water, by means of a battery made of new elements, invented by himself. Thus there were no costly materials, no platinum, no retorts, no combustibles, no delicate machinery to produce the two gases separately. An ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... The road over these mountains is much frequented; we met continually long files of mules and oxen; it is the great road leading from the capital to La Victoria, and the valleys of Aragua. This road is cut out of a talcose gneiss* in a state of decomposition. (* The direction of the strata of gneiss varies; it is either hor. 3.4, dipping to the north-west or hor. 8.2, dipping to the south-east.) A clayey soil mixed with spangles of mica covered the rock, to the depth ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... life. Happy would be the prospects of mankind if this were so. A time such as M. Comte reckoned upon may come; unless something stops the progress of human improvement, it is sure to come: but after an unknown duration of hard thought and violent controversy. The period of decomposition, which has lasted, on his own computation, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the present, is not yet terminated: the shell of the old edifice will remain standing until there is another ready ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... a kind of ETHEREAL OIL, produced by the Decomposition of the Vinous Spirit by Means of the Vitriolic Acid, and differs essentially both from Vinous Spirits and Essential Oils in several Respects, tho' it agrees with them in some, as will appear hereafter: But as the Vinous Spirit may be decomposed by means of all the three Mineral Acids, ...
— An Account of the Extraordinary Medicinal Fluid, called Aether. • Matthew Turner
... pioneers were subject in early life to malarial influences, the effect of which remained with them all their days. Hewing out their plantations in the primeval woods amid the undisturbed shadow of centuries, breaking a soil thick with ages of vegetable decomposition, sleeping in half- faced camps, where the heavy air of the rank woods was in their lungs all night, or in the fouler atmosphere of overcrowded cabins, they were especially subject to miasmatic fevers. Many died, and of those who survived, a great number, after they ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... that are susceptible, by the unlawful processes of fermentation and effervescence, of transformation into alcoholic liquid. Science tells us that this abominable form of activity to which Nature is privy is in reality a form of decomposition or putrefaction; but willful men will hardly be restrained by science in their ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... of Aquatania, about Labden, is entirely owing to their being water-drinkers: a man might as well drink of the river Styx as the river Thames, 'Stygio monstrum conforme paludi,' a monstrous drink, thickened by the decomposition of dead Christians and dead brutes, and purified by the odoriferous introduction of gas water and puddle water, joined to a pleasant and healthy amalgamation of all the impurities of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... is a carcass that is rotting away and disintegrating; and you, faithful handful, who have partially apprehended the meaning of My mission, and have caught something of the spirit of My life, you are to be rubbed into that rotting mass to sweeten it, to arrest decomposition, to stay corruption, to give flavour to its insipidity, and to save it from falling to pieces of its own wickedness. Ye are the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... forgotten Vallandigham's visit to Fulton county, Illinois, during the autumn of 1864, and its consequences? This county was the stamping ground of the leaders of the treasonable organization, which has been dissected, and whose head and heart are now in a state of decomposition. In that county Assistant Provost Marshal Phelps was shot, there too enrolling officer Criss was shot; in that county is Lewiston, where resides S. Corning Judd, Esq., the Grand Commander of the Sons of Liberty in the State of Illinois. C.L. Vallandigham was the Supreme Commander ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... The turtle being killed, the carapace is removed and placed over a gentle fire, and then the plates are eased off with a knife. But that method is not generally approved. Professional tortoiseshell-getters either trust to the heat of the sun or bury the shell in clean sand, and when decomposition sets in, the valuable plates are detached freely. Exposure to fire deteriorates the quality of the product unless ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... for, though spiritual bodies, be their activity magnetic or any other, could of course pass the absolute cold and void of space without being affected, no mortal body could; and that in the same manner Elijah's body dissolved into air without the usual intervention of decomposition; for we know that, though matter can easily change its form, it can ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... is this: the hydrogen atom has been split, resolved into components, not of electrons and the proton centers, but held at some halfway point of decomposition. Matter composed only of neutrons would be heavy beyond belief. This fits the theory in that respect. But the point is this: When these solids are formed—they are dense—they represent in a cubic centimeter possibly a cubic mile of hydrogen gas under normal pressure. That's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... thousand loose substances always floating about in the vicinity of a coast and thrown upon the rocks or shore with every wave that breaks against them. Add to this the presence of a lime-cement in the water, resulting from the decomposition of some of these materials, and we have all that is needed to make a very compact deposit and fertile soil, on which a vegetation may spring up, whenever seeds floating from the shore or dropped by birds in their flight take root on the newly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... of getting rid of the vast number of dead animals; burial was impossible, and the low state of the river prevented them from sending them down stream for several days; all they could do was to drag them to leeward of their camp. Meanwhile decomposition set in, and the absolute need of clean air caused a serious rebellion in the camp, most of the 4,000 men demanding that surrender should be made at once. When on Sunday, the 25th, the flood brought down past our lines an unending series of dead animals that cannot have been ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... up and down the sides of the body. Along these vertical tubes run the rows of little locomotive oars, or combs, as they have been called, from which these animals derive their name of Ctenophorae. The rapid motion of these flappers causes the decomposition of the rays of light along the surface of the body, producing the most striking prismatic effect; and it is no exaggeration to say that no jewel is brighter than these Ctenophorae as they move ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the phenomena it investigates have certain common characteristics; and we are apt to infer that any process observed in some of these phenomena, if depending on those common characteristics, will be found in others. For example, the decomposition, or radio-activity, of certain elements prepares one to believe that all elements may exhibit it. Where the properties of an object are known to be closely interdependent, as in the organisation of plants, animals and societies, we ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Trois Pistoles. To render the analogy more complete, in the valley of the outlet of the Little Lake (Temiscouata) was found a vein of metalliferous quartz charged with peroxide of iron, evidently arising from the decomposition of pyrites, being in fact the same as the matrix of the gold which has been traced in the talcose slate formation from Georgia to Vermont; and on the western shore of the Temiscouata Lake, about a mile to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... be accounted for, by the principles we have laid down; the decomposition of oxygen in ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... exhaustive; the diagnosis seemed ominous to the morbid patient; the whole process was a revelation to him of organs and functions and laws of eating and drinking unheard in his years of study. "Chronic intestinal indigestion with food decomposition and auto-intoxication, augmented by nicotine," the doctor said. There had been a distinct lessening of efficiency in his law-school work. Study for the first time in his life required wearying effort. He did not feel himself, he was facing his first ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... isolated, and a form more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not in the poem, which is poetic experience. And if you want to have the poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two products of decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into poetic experience. And then what you have again is no aggregate of factors, it is a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form than you can separate living blood and the life in the blood. This unity has, if you ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... live again, was a question of faith and not of understanding. I left faith to religion, and banished it from philosophy. How define with a precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy what was to live again? The body? We know that the body rests in its grave till by the process of decomposition its elemental parts enter into other forms of matter. The mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the bodily organization as the music of the harpsichord is the result of the instrumental mechanism. The mind shared the decrepitude of the body in extreme ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... civilization," said the man of learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. "The vigor of a nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude; then as aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition of the primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in remote ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both sword and censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff and the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... eliminate toxin from the blood. All so-called diseases are crises of toxemia." John H. Tilden, M.D., Toxemia Explained. [2] Toxins are divided into two groups; namely exogenous, those formed in the alimentary canal from fermentation and decomposition following imperfect or faulty digestion. If the fermentation is of vegetables or fruit, the toxins are irritating, stimulating and enervating, but not so dangerous or destructive to organic life as putrefaction, which is a fermentation set up in nitrogenous matter—protein-bearing foods, but ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... Black Powder, by Professor Vivian Lewes 40. Marshall's Apparatus for Moisture in Cordite 41. Lunge's Nitrometer 42. Modified do. 43. Horn's Nitrometer 44. Schultze-Tieman Apparatus for Determination of Nitrogen in Gun-Cotton 45. Decomposition Flask for Schultze-Tieman Method 46. Abel's Heat Test Apparatus 47. Apparatus for Separation of Nitro-Glycerine from Dynamite 48. Test Tube arranged for Heat Test 49. Page's Regulator 50. Do. showing Bye-Pass and Cut-off Arrangement ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... sonorous cow-bell of the Alps, heard among the precipices above our heads and below us, told us we were not in a desart." "The ruins of the mineral world, apparently so durable, and yet in a state of incessant decomposition, form a striking contrast with the perennial youth of the vegetable world; each individual plant, so frail and perishable, while the species is eternal in the existing economy of nature. Imperceptible forests of timber scarcely tinge their inert masses of gneiss and granite, into which they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... made in the cases of those creatures in which matter has completely overcome its rival, mind. So soon as the will is entirely extinct, the being ceases to live; or it is no longer an animal. It falls and reverts altogether to the element of matter. The processes of decomposition and incorporation are longer, or shorter, according to circumstances; and these fossil remains of which your writers say so much, are merely cases that have met with accidental obstacles to their final decomposition. As respects our two species, a very cursory examination of their qualities ought ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the composition already accomplished, and be compelled to start with it as a given fact—a fact as incapable of scientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on the other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-day experience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing through these processes in our bodies; and by the same processes we prepare much of our food before consuming ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... natural as it otherwise would have been. Last evening the body was placed in an erect position, in order to allow the injected fluid to settle in the veins and arteries, so as to give to the face a more natural appearance. The swelling has entirely disappeared from the neck and face, and the decomposition which had set in had been checked. The remains will not be enshrouded until this morning, when they will be placed in the coffin, enclosed in a white merino robe with a satin collar, satin cord about the waist, and a black ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... colic and may be the actual cause. A daily movement of the bowel does not necessarily mean that the bowels are emptying themselves satisfactorily. Despite the daily movement, there may be considerable fecal matter left in the bowel which undergoes decomposition. This results in the evolution of large quantities of gas and severe attacks of colic. Indigestion is very often caused by conditions which effect the stability of the child's nervous organism; such conditions are fright, anger, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... leaped forward under a terrific acceleration, and then, as the four relays cut out again, the acceleration was gone. The screen regained life as Arcot opened the shutters. Before them, still directly in their path, was the huge Thessian ship. But now its screen was down, the relux iridescent in decomposition. It was falling, helplessly falling to the rocky plateau seven miles below. Its rays reached out even yet—and again the Ancient Mariner staggered under the terrific pull of some acceleration. The Thessian ship lurched upward, and a terrific concussion ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... weeping for their lost friends and relatives, and many unable to recognize the recovered bodies on account of their having been burned beyond recognition by the fire caused by the upsetting of petroleum lamps. For the first two days the bodies were buried in the usual manner, but on the third decomposition had set in to such an extent that it was found necessary to burn them. An eye-witness exclaims: "Of all that I have seen in what was the rich, the beautiful, the flourishing city of Cua, now a cemetery, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... structure, resemble the lacteals. They exist in great numbers in the skin and mucous membranes, particularly those of the lungs. Though no lymphatics have been traced to the brain, it is presumed that they exist there, as this part of the body is not exempt from the composition and decomposition, which are perpetual in the body. These vessels are extremely minute at their origin, so that in many parts of the system they cannot be detected without the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... common, may be combined together straight away. This is very important for triple staining, which can only be attained by mixing together two simple neutral mixtures, each consisting of two components. A chemical decomposition need not be feared. We thus get mixtures containing three and more colours. Theoretically there are two possibilities ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... animal, not only to study its organism, but also to investigate how it has built up its form. But precisely in this work my organ for beauty has become blunt rather than keen. I tell you that the beginning of things is not more attractive to contemplate than their death and decomposition." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... caution is necessary in all such appendages. The earth must be thoroughly underdrained to prevent the vapors of stagnant water, and have a large admixture of broken charcoal to obviate the consequences of vegetable decomposition. Great care must be taken that there be no leaves left to fall and decay on the ground, since vegetable exhalations poison the air. With these precautions such a plot will soften and purify the air of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... gummy juice was necessary. This Guapo soon prepared from the large leaves of a tree called the "kiracaguero," and poured it into the infusion; and then the curare turned from its yellow colour to black, and was ready for use. The change of colour was produced by the decomposition of a hydruret of carbon; the hydrogen was burned, and the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Flanders. The three buildings that constituted the house, barn, and cowbyre were arranged in a hollow square around a brick courtyard, the centre of which was graced by a large pile of manure in an advanced stage of decomposition. Outside the square of buildings was a moat full of green slime and mosquito larvae. Here the men washed, and here, too, our buckets were filled each morning for the "lick and a promise" that served as ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... amongst the ignorant that rock grows—grows from the outside—but the rock here, a specimen of which I hold in my hand, is now in the process of decomposition; to be plain it is 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 ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... no longer an insulated and anomalous affection of certain salts of silver or gold, but one which, doubtless, in a greater or less degree, pervades all nature, and connects itself intimately with the mechanism by which chemical combination and decomposition is operated. The general instability of organic combinations might lead us to expect the occurrence of numerous and remarkable cases of this affection among bodies of that class, but among metallic and other elements inorganically ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... little danger; but in the extracting of the food, no matter how carefully performed, some small portion is liable to drop into the abdominal cavity; and this, in consequence of its indigested condition, resists absorption or expulsion, undergoes an irritating decomposition, and may very probably originate some serious inflammatory disorder. Any animal which has suffered a very bad case of impaction of the paunch, ought, immediately after complete restoration to health, ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... meats are borax and boric acid. These chemicals not only arrest decay, but partially restore to old and bad meat the appearance of freshness; in this way unscrupulous dealers are able to sell to the public in one form or other meats which may have undergone partial decomposition; sausage frequently contains partially decomposed meat, restored as ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... own demise. The Scoliae of my experiments are not novices, far from it: they are the descendants of carvers that have practised their art since Scoliae first came into the world; nevertheless they all perish from the decomposition of the rations supplied, when I try to feed them on Ephippigers paralysed by the Sphex. Very expert in the method of attacking the Cetonia, they do not know how to set about the business of discreetly consuming a species of game new to them. All that escapes them is a ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... have the remains placed in the coffin at once, as decomposition would begin very rapidly, and at 8.30 in the evening the men came to screw it down. An unsuccessful photograph of Oscar was taken by Maurice Gilbert at my request, the flashlight did not work properly. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris |
