"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... internal protoplasm by the aid of an acid secretion. It breathes oxygen, and excretes carbonic acid and urea, through its whole body surface. Its mode of gaining the energy which it manifests is therefore apparently like our own, by combustion of food material. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... himself a goling, or fireplace of mud and stone, some three feet high and four or five long, by one and a half wide, with two, three, or more side ventilators and draught-holes. By this ingenious contrivance he manages to increase the combustion of the dried dung, the most trying fuel from which to get a flame. On the top of this stove a suitable place is made to fit the several raksangs, or large brass pots and bowls, in which the brick tea, having been duly pounded in a stone or wooden mortar, is boiled and ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... me Reardon trudges silently, his hat always flopped a little over his eyes, his head up. Sometimes I make him talk, and have pried out of him much of his family history. Beyond him Pickle goes on springs, cracking jokes like a little internal combustion engine. And David, now very tanned and wide awake, finishes our four. Without looking, we know the voice of each of our neighbors behind or in front, even so far as the witless stutterer some squads ahead, or the flat-voiced constant querist somewhere behind. ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... timber Land use: arable land 3%; permanent crops NEGL%; meadows and pastures 25%; forest and woodland 52%; other 20%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: cold, thin air of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion; overgrazing; soil erosion; desertification Note: landlocked; shares control of Lago Titicaca, world's highest navigable ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... research: the next step will be to group or class those agents which appear to have produced similar effects. It is remarkable, as Dr Davy observes, 'that most of the substances which, even in minute portions mixed with common air, prevent the slow combustion of phosphorus, as indicated by its shining in the dark, have the effect, on the insects on which they were tried, of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... from gas exhalations is another serious source of danger to books. In many well-lighted libraries, the heat itself from the numerous gas-burners is sufficient to injure them, and there is besides a sulphuric acid escaping from the coal-gas fluid, in combustion, which is most deleterious to bindings. The only remedy appears to be, where libraries are open evenings, to furnish them with electric lights. This improved mode of illumination is now so perfected, and so widely diffused, that it may be ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... compare it with The Lives of the Poets, as published under Mr. Cibber's name. What became of that manuscript I know not. I should have liked much to examine it. I suppose it was thrown into the fire in that impetuous combustion of papers, which Johnson I think rashly executed, when moribundus.' BOSWELL. Mr. Croker, quoting a letter by Griffiths the publisher, says:—'The question is now decided by this letter in opposition to Dr. Johnson's assertion.' Croker's Boswell, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... 1919, Jabez Burns & Sons, New York, patented their Jubilee roaster, an inner-heated machine in which the gas is burned inside a revolving cylinder in a combustion chamber protected from direct coffee contact. The heat is deflected downward and then passes upward ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... universally admitted of the cosmical process of these phenomena. "Falling stars," says Plutarch, in his life of Lysander,* are, according to the opinion of some physicists, not eruptions of the ethereal fire extinguished in the air immediately after its ignition, nor yet an inflammatory combustion of the air, which is dissolved in large quantities in the upper regions of space, but these meteors are rather a fall of celestial bodies, which, in consequence of a certain intermission in the rotatory force, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... unit is equipped with an induced draft fan, proper size vent must be provided to remove the gases of combustion. It is recommended that a 4" to 5" increaser be used for venting the 87CPO and 108CPO and a 4" to 6" increaser be used for the 128CPO. For abnormal runs (exceeding 10 ft.), ...
— Installation and Operation Instructions For Custom Mark III CP Series Oil Fired Unit • Anonymous
... Elias, when he intrenched the altar round with water: for that inflamable substance yields not easily unto water, but flames in the arms of its an- tagonist. And thus would he inveigle my belief to think the combustion of Sodom might be natural, and that there was an asphaltick and bituminous nature in that lake before the fire of Gomorrah. I know that manna is now plentifully gathered in Calabria; and Josephus tells me, in his days it was as plentiful in Arabia. The devil therefore made the query, "Where ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... principle is dynamic breathing, which is storing up the oxygen in sufficient quantities, to supply the tissues with sufficient fuel, for combustion. ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... (which, in order to secure the maximum of convenience and administrative efficiency, will probably control areas as large sometimes as half England), they will generate electricity by water power, by combustion, by wind or tide or whatever other natural force is available, and this electricity will be devoted, some of it to the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it, as a subsidy, to the World-State authority which controls the high roads, the great railways, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... with flame and light. Living things use enzymes to break complex organic molecules down into simpler ones like sugar (and others) and then enzymatically unite these with oxygen. But as gentle as enzymatic combustion may seem, it still is burning. Microbes can "burn" starches, cellulose, lignin, proteins, and fats, as ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... planet, and hurled at our feet as she sped by. An interesting discovery here results. Which is, that lightning, kept to itself, is quiescent; it is the assaulting contact of the thunderbolt that releases it from captivity, ignites its awful fires, and so produces an instantaneous combustion and explosion which spread disaster and desolation far and wide in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes! I wish,' whimpered ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... which I owe you an apology, kind and sympathetic reader. I should have told you that a heavy shower of rain had fallen but a few hours before the kindling of the death-pile, which, as needs must, had left the brush-wood in better condition for heavy smoking than for lively combustion. Had I mentioned this circumstance in its proper place, I should have spared your tender sensibilities somewhat by giving you something contingent to catch at as suggestive of possible ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... of St. Louis, committed an act of spontaneous combustion. When came the turn of the black satin and the bobbing curls to bend over the rail directly above him, he flung wide his arms, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... you cannot hide if you send up a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night—the most conspicuous of signals—every time you shoot. So the next step was the invention of a smokeless powder. In this the oxygen necessary for the combustion is already in such close combination with its fuel, the carbon and hydrogen, that no black particles of carbon can get away unburnt. In the old-fashioned gunpowder the oxygen necessary for the combustion of the carbon and sulfur was in a separate package, in the molecule of potassium nitrate, ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... calculated period of radium is 2,500 years, while that of polonium is only 202 days, and that of niton 5.6 days. These unquestioned facts, together with the enormous amount of heat evolved by the disintegration of these substances (that from radium being about 250,000 times the heat evolved by the combustion of carbon), have thrown a great deal of doubt upon the older estimates of the age of ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... a little hotly, "if Annette is a spitfire, Mrs. Larkins is a lot of combustion. I think of all the women I know, she has the greatest genius for aggravation. I used to board with her, but as I did not wish to be talked to death ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... Robert Mayer, a physician residing at Heilbronn, was the first to apply the new light to the investigation of what Sir John Herschel had termed the "great secret." He showed that if the sun were a body either simply cooling or in a state of combustion, it must long since have "gone out." Had an equal mass of coal been set alight four or five centuries after the building of the Pyramid of Cheops, and kept burning at such a rate as to supply solar light and heat during ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the courtyard. The woodwork was oaken and the walls were distempered a discreet and restful shade of blue. There were a central electric fitting and another for a reading-lamp, a fireplace of the latest slow-combustion pattern and a door communicating with ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... Theory of Toxemia. A healthy body struggles continually to purify itself of poisons that are inevitably produced while going about its business of digesting food, moving about, and repairing itself. The body is a marvelous creation, a carbon, oxygen combustion machine, constantly burning fuel, disposing of the waste products of combustion, and constantly rebuilding tissue by replacing worn out, dead cells with new, fresh ones. Every seven years virtually every cell in the body is replaced, some types of cells having a faster turnover rate ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... senates and parliaments, the larger portion of the speaking is necessarily unpremeditated; perhaps the most eloquent is always so; for it is elicited by the growing heat of debate; it is the spontaneous combustion of the mind in the conflict of opinion. Chatham's speeches were not written, nor Sheridan's, nor that of Ames on the British treaty. They were, so far as regards their language and ornaments, the effusions of the moment, and derived from their freshness a power, ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... seize the palace and raise the city against the ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only with their rapiers. As Bacon himself told the Queen, "if some base and cruel-minded persons had entered into such an action, it might have caused much blow and combustion; but it appeared well that they were such as knew not how to play the malefactors!" But it was sufficient to bring Essex within ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... fear and impudence and superstition, until they are weary. They long to be free. They are tired of the services— tired of the meaningless prayers—tired of hearing each other say, "Hear us, good Lord"—tired of the texts, tired of the sermons, tired of the lies about spontaneous combustion as a punishment for blasphemy, tired of the bells, and they long to hear the doxology of superstition. They long to have Common Sense lift its hands in ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cannot well believe the report, my dear sir. He was rather urgent, indeed, on the combustion of the heretic Michael ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... authors of note suppose language to have sprung up among men of itself, like spontaneous combustion in oiled cotton; and seem to think, that people of strong feelings and acute minds must necessarily or naturally utter their conceptions by words—and even by words both spoken and written. Frederick ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... predict, save that it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had a man been so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He was to be smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied combustion, and some disintegration and disappearance. They were waiting eagerly to settle the question by actual demonstration, and it was just at that moment that Duncan ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... linen rags, as our forefathers used to do. This will not flame, but merely smoulders until the breath blows it into a glow. The tinder is made by charring linen rags, that is, burning them to a crisp, but stopping the combustion before they are ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... grain every two hours at first, less frequently later, was the second mistake, for opium brings on general depression. It not only dulls sensation, but it inhibits combustion thereby lessening nerve supply, weakens the heart action, and masks the physiological as well as the pathological state. The disadvantages of such an influence should be apparent to even a medical novice. The influence of opium in inhibiting ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... existence of radium, of helium, of polonium, of argon; the different powers of Roentgen and Cathode and Bequerel rays. And as we may finally prove that there are different kinds and qualities of light, so we may find that combustion may have its own powers of differentiation; that there are qualities in some flames non-existent in others. It may be that some of the essential conditions of substance are continuous, even in the destruction of ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... the source of the sun's continuous heat. If it were combustion the Solar orb would have burnt itself out ages ago. All your theories to account for the continuity of solar radiation are in error. The release of Interatomic Energy in the sun at a definite rate is the reason why its heat never increases or diminishes though millions of years come ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... is the common cause of disease. They generally pay some attention to what they eat and drink, but seldom regard what goes into the lungs, though the latter often proves more fatal than the former. Air vitiated by the different processes of respiration, combustion, and putrefaction, or which is suffered to stagnate, is highly injurious to health, and productive of contagious disorders. Whatever greatly alters its degree of heat or cold, also renders it unwholesome. If too hot, it produces ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think—as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too—at last, I say, he began to think ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... unfortunately got damp, condescended, after being inserted bodily into the lantern, to go off. Presently, however, the wind got into the lantern, and the matches being by this time exhausted, and the starlights refusing to depart from their usual abhorrence for spontaneous combustion, the judicious Tom deemed it prudent to pronounce this part of the ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... that was by no means to the mind of those who started the project, and, moreover, might have given rise to some heartburning, I have not thought it desirable to meddle with the process of spontaneous combustion. So look out for a big bonfire somewhere in the middle of June! I have a hideous cold, and can only hope that the bracing air of Cambridge, where we go on Saturday, may ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the kitchen, Mrs. Sharpe found things in a lively state of preparation—coffee boiling, steak broiling, toast making, and muffins baking. Old Sally, in a state threatening spontaneous combustion, bent over the fire, and Mrs. Oleander, in ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... along the length of the power house structure. The location of each chimney in the center of the boiler house between sets of six boilers divides the coal bunker construction into separate pockets by which trouble from spontaneous combustion can be localized, and, as described later, the divided coal bunkers can provide for the storage of different grades of coal. The unit basis on which the economizer and flue system is constructed will allow making repairs to any one ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... made up of cotton waste, saturated with oil, and a focused idea causes spontaneous combustion. Let a fire occur in almost any New York State village, and the town turns wrecker, and loot looms large in the limited brain of the villager. Civilization is ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... during the time their army remained under Bonaparte in the Holy Land, constructed two very large ovens in the earth at Tiberias. Two years had elapsed at the time of our arrival since they had set fire to their granary; and it was considered as a miracle by the inhabitants that the combustion was not yet extinguished. We visited the place, and perceived, that whenever the ashes of the burnt corn were stirred, by thrusting a stick among them, sparks were even seen glowing throughout the heap; and a piece of wood left there ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... fuel, without which man must remain constantly in the savage state, wood is of inestimable value. In the process of combustion, the elements of the trees enter into new combinations, evolving both light and heat, which at once maintain life and render it a state of enjoyment and usefulness. For this purpose in Britain, we chiefly employ fossil fuel, stored ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... felicity of his work! How completely his mind must have been emancipated from the infirmities of his body! It is clearly not thus with me. My mind is like a flame that depends entirely upon the good combustion going on in the body. Hence, I can never write in the afternoon, because this combustion ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... depend somewhat on whom you were murdering?" inquired Mr. Tutt, finally succeeding in his attempt to make a damp stogy continue in a state of combustion. "If you murdered a tyrant wouldn't you ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the logging. Reader, did you ever log? It is precious work! Fancy yourself in a smock-frock, the best of all working dresses, having cut the huge trees into lengths of a few feet, rolling these lengths up into a pile, and ranging the branches and brush-wood for convenient combustion; then waiting for a favourable wind, setting fire to all your heaps, and burying yourself in grime and smoke; then rolling up these half-consumed enormous logs, till, after painful toil, you get them to burn ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Tyburn, November 3rd, 1726, for the murder of her husband. She was being strangled in the accustomed manner, but the fire scorching the hands of the executioner, he relaxed the rope before she had become unconscious, and in spite of the efforts at once made to hasten combustion, she suffered for a considerable ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... would ask if there was a school-teacher in the audience (there was always one there). He would rise, and I would ask him to verify my calculations. I would also have him ask me to spell words. He would give me such words as "combustion," "garbage disposal," "bonded indebtedness" and so on. I would spell the words and write them on the slate. He would then ask me questions in history, geography and political economy. Then the school-teacher would turn to ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... lamps or heaters, using coal oils, alcohol, or other explosive substances, of such a burner as will supply the vacuum made in the reservoir by the combustion with nitrogen gas, the burner being constructed as herein described, or in any other form substantially the same, and which ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... the effects of which he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids—more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of volcanoes been heated in its primitive position, and raised up, in a softened state, by the force of the elastic vapours, before these fluids communicated, by means of a crater, with the external air? What is the substance, which, for thousands of years, keeps up this combustion, sometimes so slow, and at other times so active? Does this unknown cause act at an immense depth; or does this chemical action take place in secondary ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... maintain these states of existence in bodies, may be produced in various ways. Our usual experience leads us to consider it as more generally arising from two causes, radiation from the sun, and the chemical action causing combustion. The former could never have produced the temperature known to exist at present upon the surface of the globe, for the earth radiates as well as the sun, and is constantly throwing off heat into the surrounding space. We know that these two actions have for twenty ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... II. p. 675) says in a note: "Il resulte de l'ensemble de ce passage que les matieres designees par Marco Polo sous le nom de 'espodie' (spodium) etaient des scories metalliques; en general, le mot spodium designe les residus de la combustion des matieres vegetales ou des ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... compositions to be corrected. "Change" was the subject of the first one I picked up, and I read the opening paragraph aloud: "The seasons change from one to the other without fuss or feather and obey the laws of nature. All mens change from one thing to other by spontaneous combustion and obey the universal laws ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... composition of lucifer-matches is by no means the most important use of this element. The luminous appearance which some putrefying substances, particularly fish, present at night, is due to the slow combustion of phosphorus which takes place as this element escapes into the air ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... object, in the instance of a light placed as a beacon to warn mariners of their proximity to a dangerous coast, is to obtain the greatest possible intensity and amount of penetrating power. A naked or simple light is therefore seldom, if ever employed; but whether it proceed from the combustion of oil or gas, it is equally necessary that it should be combined with some arrangement of optical apparatus, in order that the rays emitted may be collected, and projected in such a direction as to ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the house had been set on fire," Archie continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It must have been either that or spontaneous combustion ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... so arranged that the combustion of the gases started in the furnace may be completed before the ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... buzzing with the name of Champdivers; a day or two more and the mail will have carried it everywhere: so wonderful a machine is this of ours for disseminating intelligence! Think of it! When my father was born——but that is another story. To return: we had here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of—your cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man whose wants were rather extensive and urgent, the "business" did not seem a very promising one. He glanced up at the houses as he sauntered along, appearing almost to expect that some of them would undergo spontaneous combustion for his special accommodation. Occasionally he paused and gazed at a particular house with rapt intensity, as if he hoped the light which flashed from his own eyes would set it on fire; but the houses being all regular bricks refused to flare up at ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... The record would have been out of place, and out of time. It would have been unintelligible also. But what I knew would be inexpedient in the page of Revelation, I have given you abundantly in the page of Nature. I have spared your globe from combustion, which would have effaced those footprints,—in order that the characters might be plainly decipherable to the end of Time.... O fools and blind, to have occupied a world so brimful of wonders for wellnigh 6000 years, and only now to have ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... ensues in every direction. All hands, so to speak, are strained to extra duty to discharge the noxious accumulation. The lungs labor to discharge the load thrown back upon them, with hastened respiration, increased combustion, and feverish heat. The pores of the mucous membrane in the nose, throat, alimentary canal, or bronchial passages, are forced by an aggravated discharge (or catarrh), and this congestive and inflammatory ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... be fed from a tank to the carburetor or mixer by metal tubes securely connected so as to reduce the possibility of leaks to a minimum: The exhaust from the engine shall be conducted by means of metal pipes into the return air current, so that the fumes of combustion will not enter the workings of the mine where the men are required to work, or be conducted in an upcast shaft or slope not used as a means of ingress or egress, or through metal pipes to the surface: At no time shall there be more than five gallons of ...
— Mining Laws of Ohio, 1921 • Anonymous
... meaning of this? what a disorder! what a quarrel! what a racket! what a row! what a noise! what a dispute! what a combustion! What is the matter, gentlemen? what is the matter? what is the matter? Come, come, is there no way of making you agree, let me be your pacificator; suffer me to ...
— The Jealousy of le Barbouille - (La Jalousie du Barbouille) • Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere
... Pickwick and Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Mantalini and Steerforth and David Copperfield and Barkis; and terrible figures: Fagan and Bill Sykes and Uriah Heap and Squeers and Mr. Murdstone and that fearful man who drank so much that he died of spontaneous combustion; and pathetic figures: Sidney Carton and Little Nell and Oliver Twist and Nancy and Dora and Little Dorritt ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... amount of nitrogen is estimated by the combustion of 1 gramme with soda-lime in an iron tube, collection of the ammonia in a standard solution of sulphuric acid, and determination of the residual free acid by an equivalent solution of caustic potash and a few drops of tincture of cochineal as ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... the Universal Mind must, by its very universality, be purely subjective, and what is the law of a part must also be the law of the whole: the qualities of fire are the same whether the centres of combustion be great or small, and therefore we may well conclude these lectures by considering what will be the result if we apply what we have learnt regarding the individual subjective mind to the ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... cigarettes; he could make a cigarette with one hand, and not another man in the Five Towns, it was said, could do that. His slender convex silver cigarette-case invariably contained the only cigarettes worthy of the palate of a connoisseur, as his pipes were invariably the only pipes fit for the combustion of truly high-class tobacco. Old women, especially charwomen, adored him, and even municipal seigniors admitted that Harry was a smart-looking youth. Fatherless, he was the heir to a tolerable fortune, the bulk of which, during his mother's life, he could ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... died," it was agreed to nemine contradicente, and gave universal satisfaction. But the extraordinary circumstance was spread everywhere, with all due amplifications, and thousands flocked to the wharfinger's yard to witness the effects of spontaneous combustion. The proprietor immediately perceived that he could avail himself of the public curiosity to my advantage. A plate, with some silver and gold, was placed at the foot of my poor mother's flock mattress, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... what he is doing or "is about" when he has to do with them; he can intend consequences instead of just letting them happen—all synonymous ways of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame has gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... not perceive it? And yet by reason of these fooleries they not only set slight by others, but each different order, men otherwise professing apostolical charity, despise one another, and for the different wearing of a habit, or that 'tis of darker color, they put all things in combustion. And among these there are some so rigidly religious that their upper garment is haircloth, their inner of the finest linen; and, on the contrary, others wear linen without and hair next their skins. Others, again, are as afraid to touch ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... followed, because she liked the occupation and motion. But to be quiet the whole evening, that was a trial! After the tea-things were cleared away, she would sit awhile by the stove, imagining all sorts of excitements in the combustion within; but she could not keep still long without letting a clatter of shovel and tongs, or some vigorous blows of the poker, show what a glorious drum she thought the stove would make. Or if Aunt Martha suggested her unloved and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... nitrous acid." And thus the discussion proceeded, to be answered most intelligently, in 1797, by Adet,[5] whose arguments are familiar to all chemists and need not therefore be here repeated. Of more interest was the publication of two lectures on Combustion by Maclean of Princeton. They filled a pamphlet of 71 pages. It appeared in 1797, and was, in brief, a refutation of Priestley's presentations, and was heartily welcomed as evidence of the "growing taste in America for this kind of inquiry." Among other things Maclean said of the various ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... falling in dew and rain becomes acidulated with carbonic acid, CO{2} (carbon dioxide), from the combustion and decay of organic matter, vegetation, and other sources, and this moisture is capable of dissolving certain calcareous substances, which it takes deep into the earth, till the time comes when it enters perhaps a division-plane in some rock, ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... cold, thin air of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion, as well as to physical activity by those unaccustomed to it from birth; flooding in ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the perished leaves ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... keep the sensitized tissue in a moist and warm atmosphere, for in less than ten hours it becomes insoluble even in complete darkness. It should neither be kept in the air contaminated with gaseous reductive matters, such as the products of the combustion of coal gas and petroleum, sulphydric or sulphurous emanations from any source, the fumes of turpentine oil, etc., which, by reducing the chromic salt, cause the insolubilization of gelatine, prevent the print to adhere on the support or the clearing of the image, which may even ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... and Unbelievers, threatening to strip us bare! 'The world,' says he, 'as it needs must, is under a process of devastation and waste, which, whether by silent assiduous corrosion, or open quicker combustion, as the case chances, will effectually enough annihilate the past Forms of Society; replace them with what it may. For the present, it is contemplated that when man's whole Spiritual Interests are once divested, these innumerable stript-off ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... had done not a little to bring about these fancies, and they continued in secret to do more. Madame du Maine, it may be recollected, had said that she would throw the whole country into combustion, in order not to lose her husband's prerogative. She was as good as her word. Encouraged doubtless by the support they received from this precious pair, the Parliament continued on its mad career of impudent presumption, pride, and arrogance. It assembled on the 22nd ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... through the room, and were broken to pieces. The particulars of this commotion were as curious as the loss and damage occasioned in this extraordinary manner were alarming and intolerable. Amidst this combustion, a young woman, Mrs. Golding's maid, named Anne Robinson, was walking backwards and forwards, nor could she be prevailed on to sit down for a moment excepting while the family were at prayers, during which ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... "The combustion of the hydrogen and of the oxygen at the point of the cylinder produces solely the vapor or steam of water. I have, therefore, provided the lower part of the cylindrical iron box with a scape-pipe, with ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... proposed, in 1878, to make the bottom plate of glass instead of metal, and provided ingenious arrangements for charging the lamp chamber with an atmosphere of pure nitrogen gas which does not support combustion. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of the blowpipe is to introduce a fine current of air into the flame of a candle or lamp, by which a higher degree of heat is induced, and consequently combustion is ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... smiled. "But I can. This is the best evidence yet of the truth of your story. Superficially, atomic power would seem to preclude the use of coal and oil. However, quite apart from the energy gained by their combustion they remain, and always will remain, the basic raw material for all organic chemistry. Plastics, dyes, pharmaceuticals, solvents. Industry could not exist without them, even in an atomic age. Still, if coal and oil are the low price ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... the fact that the I.W.W. had, about eight months before, gathered several hundred into an industrial union. Yet it does not appear that this union started the strike. It was a case of spontaneous combustion. No sooner had it begun, however, than Joseph J. Ettor, an I.W.W. organizer, hastened to take charge, and succeeded so well that within a few weeks he claimed 7000 members in his union. Ettor proved ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... she heard they had espied land, and went out upon the deck; but she soon came in again to me. "Oh, madam!" says she, "there's the land indeed to be seen. It looks like a ridge of clouds, and may be all a cloud for aught I know; but if it be land, 'tis a great way off, and the sea is in such a combustion, we shall all perish before we can reach it. 'Tis the dreadfullest sight to look at the waves that ever was seen. Why, they are as high as mountains; we shall certainly be all swallowed up, for all the land ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... MAPLE-BLUNDELL, "don't talk to me about your troubles. As far as I know this is the only carpet in the world valued at L1000; it is certainly the only one that ever went off by spontaneous combustion; and I had this particular carpet in charge, at the very moment when it was ready to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... The conduit that runs to the top debouches in the cylinder, C, at the lower limit of the surface rubbed by the piston. The air that traverses this conduit is distributed through the annular space between the piston and cylinder. The hot gas derived from combustion can therefore never introduce itself into this annular space, and consequently cannot come into contact with the rubbing surfaces of the cylinder ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... similar to slow combustion; the oxygenous part of the atmosphere is received through the moist membranes, which line the air-cells of the lungs, and uniting with the inflammable part of the blood generates an acid, probably ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the poor, "two Knights to one Horse," as their Seal bore; and they at last took FIRE on very opposite accounts. "To carouse like a Templar:" that had become a proverb among men; that was the way to produce combustion, "spontaneous" or other! Whereas their fellow Hospitallers of St. John, chancing upon new work (Anti-Turk garrison-duty, so we may call it, successively in Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta, for a series of ages), and doing it well, managed to escape the like. As did the Teutsch Order ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... and the rest, who should have been reserve, and at a General's disposal, we see what they are doing! In vain, or nearly so, is Friedrich's tactic or manoeuvring talent; what now is there to manoeuvre? All is now gone up into one combustion. To fan the fire, to be here, there, fanning the fire where need shows: this is now Friedrich's function; "everywhere in the hottest of the fight," that is all we at present know of him, invisible to us otherwise. This death-wrestle lasted perhaps four hours; till seven or towards ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the Indians had calculated its thickness, so that the wet grass might be dried by the fire and become kindled about the time when it should touch the island. But the grass had been soaked in the water, and this had retarded its combustion; besides the large branches had not had time to inflame; it was only the smaller boughs and the leaves that were burning. This had not escaped the quick eye of the Canadian, who, advancing with a long stick in his hand, resolved to push ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... calcined bones. The remains were frequently left where they were, and the funeral pile became their tomb. They were, however, often collected and disposed of in a manner which varied with their more or less complete combustion. Bodies insufficiently burnt were interred in graves, or in public chapels; while the ashes of those fully cremated, together with the scraps of bones and the debris of the offerings, were placed in long urns. The heat had contorted the weapons and half melted the vessels of copper; and the deceased ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... you Protestants. One is, that ye yield unto us. To that you say you cannot. The second is, that we yield unto you; but that we will not do. The third is, that the one party, by force, should be compelled to yield to the other; but thereupon a great combustion and tumult might be raised. Therefore the fourth way or means were to be applauded and used, namely, that now being here assembled together, the one party should strive to thrust out the other, and that party ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... Professor. "It means 'Cheating-fire.' Sometimes this gas, rising to the top of the water in bubbles, takes fire (by what they call spontaneous combustion, or by mixing with some other gas, or in some other way), and then, as one bubble after another takes fire and goes flickering along, it looks as if some one were walking through the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... at New Scotland Yard, bending over a sheet of foolscap upon which were arranged some burned fragments from poor Cadby's grate, for so hurriedly had the girl done her work that combustion had not ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... grates to thaw. That simple act put the clerks in a market-day mood and gave the office a market-day "atmosphere." Then things went spinningly. The bank and the staff became a machine and the parts thereof, as if incited to action by the combustion of certain gas-mixtures in the place. Especially the teller's head took on the character of a metallic organism: he could almost hear the wheels buzzing. Occasionally a cog somewhere grated, as, for instance, ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... way. Their conversation will be cigarettes, "sag-paste," drinks, women. References to the scientific marvels around them will be casual and sketchy. How many million words of an average car owner's conversation would you have to report to give a visitor from 1700 an idea of internal combustion engines? The author, if skillful, can convey that information in other ways. Yet a lot of stories printed have long, stilted conversations in which the author thinks he is conveying in an entertaining way his foundation situation. Personally, I like a lot of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... to account for the fact. Mayer, of Germany, suggested that the heat is partly maintained by the falling into the sun of meteors, which, like comets, pursue a path through the heavens, and are subject to the attractive influence of the sun. In the combustion of these meteorites, or meteors, he contended there were the means by which the light and heat of the sun might be maintained. Whatever theory, however, may be suggested as to the maintenance and the source of the continuity of the sun's heat, I do not think it has ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... Bunsen burner, as shown in Fig. 1, is attached to any gas bracket with a rubber tube, but the flame is blue, instead of yellow, as the burner introduces air at its base, which mixes with the gas and so produces an almost perfect combustion, instead of the partial combustion which results in the ordinary yellow flame. All gas stoves have Bunsen ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... explode and sweep the crowd with resistless fire. Usually the fuse was timed to explode on the morning of the third day. Sometimes, when sermons of extraordinary power had followed each other in rapid succession, the fire broke out by a sort of spontaneous combustion on the night of the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... from age to age, and imagination can hardly even impose a limit to the magnificence of the works they can accomplish. Our argument from heat is founded on a very simple matter. It is quite obvious that a heated body tends to grow cold. I am not now speaking of fires or of actual combustion whereby heat is produced; I am speaking merely of such heat as would be possessed by a red-hot poker after being taken from the fire, or by an iron casting after the metal has been run into the mould. In such cases as this the general law holds good, that the heated ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... were reasons which caused a slight difference. The wick always burnt at a uniform rate; the trouble was with the string. Sometimes it was slow in catching. Sometimes the pressure of the string partly extinguished the wick and made combustion slower as it neared the point of contact. Once I tied the string so tight that the wick went out altogether just before reaching the string. But I had taken measures to overcome these little irregularities, and to make sure ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Scripture, fire stands for a symbol of destroying power. But that is a less frequent use than that in which it stands as a symbol of life. In a very real sense life is warmth and death is cold. Is not respiration a kind of combustion? Do not physiologists tell us that? Is not the centre of the system and the father of all physical life that great blazing sun which radiates heat? And is not this promise, 'I will send fire on the earth,' the assurance that into the midst of our death there shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... succession, showy, ambitious, and malignant, followed; each with some vivid literary contribution, some powerful and popular work, a new despotic of combustion in that mighty mine on which stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, who dazzled the whole multitude of the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... persistent odor you smelled at Fortescue's and also here. It's a very good poison—if you are not particular about being discovered. A pound of ordinary smoking tobacco contains from a half to an ounce of it. It is almost entirely consumed by combustion; otherwise a pipeful would be fatal. Of course they may have thought that investigators would believe that their victims were inveterate smokers. But even the worst tobacco fiend wouldn't show traces of the weed to ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of Vision not commensurate with Range of Radiation The Ultra-violet Rays Fluorescence The rendering of invisible Rays visible Vision not the only Sense appealed to by the Solar and Electric Beam Heat of Beam Combustion by Total Beam at the Foci of Mirrors and Lenses Combustion through Ice-lens Ignition of Diamond Search for the Rays here effective Sir William Herschel's Discovery of dark Solar Rays Invisible Rays the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... so unreal; a mincing doll; she will and she will not; there is no counting on her, by God! And hitherto I have had my own way without, and keep the lover in reserve. And I say, Anna,' he added with severity, 'you must break yourself of this new fit, my girl; there must be no combustion. I keep the creature under the belief that I adore her; and if she caught a breath of you and me, she is such a fool, prude, and dog in the manger, that she ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'the destruction of the atmospheric air,' as Dr. Lardner termed it. Elaborate calculations were made by that gentleman to prove that the provision of ventilating shafts would be altogether insufficient to prevent the dangers arising from the combustion of coke, producing carbonic acid gas, which in large quantities was fatal to life. He showed, for instance, that in the proposed Box tunnel, on the Great Western Railway, the passage of 100 tons would deposit ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... down the dead vegetation alone; their usual burden of sediment would also be deposited at their mouths, and thus dead plants, sand, and clay would be mixed up together in one black shaly or sandy mass, a mixture which would be useless for purposes of combustion. The only theory which explained all the recognised phenomena of the coal-measures was that the plants forming the coal actually grew where the coal was formed, and where, indeed, we now find it. When the plants and trees died, their remains ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... consciousness, the fact now in dispute appears to some persons self-evident. But in matters of such high abstraction as this, even the evidence of self-evidence must not be relied upon too implicitly. To the country boor it appears self-evident that wood is annihilated by combustion; and even to the mind of the greatest philosophers of antiquity it seemed impossible to doubt that the sun moved over a stationary earth. Much more, therefore, may our broad distinction between "cogitative and incogitative ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... instance mentioned for illustrating the change of corporal particles is certainly a very happy one. The flame of a burning lamp, though perfectly steady (as in a breezeless spot), is really the result of the successive combustion of particles of oil and the successive extinguishment of such combustion Both this and the previous verse have been rendered inaccurately ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... intemperate man, a few years since, whose breath caught fire by coming in contact with a lighted candle, and he was consumed. At the time, I disbelieved the story, but my reading has since furnished me with well authenticated cases of a combustion of the human body from the use of ardent spirits. Trotter mentions ten such cases, and relates them at length. They are attended with all the proof we require to believe any event. They are attested by living witnesses, examined by learned men, and published in the journals of the day without ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... and still we kept on wondering if we were forgotten. We sat by the fires in "stoves, hot, combustion slow," and we told the tale of the two highly placed War Office officials who were discussing the war years after it had finished. One had asked the other how the Sportsman's Battalion had shaped in "the Great Adventure," and then would come the climax. "Good God!" the other would say, "I've forgotten ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... and think, that every stirring of corruption in the soul, argueth its dominion and prevailing power. Corruption may stir and make a great deal ado, where it cannot get leave to reign; and be as a violent and cruel invader, seeking the throne, putting the whole kingdom in a combustion, who is resisted with ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... What had they meant? By the internal combustion which had so suddenly lighted up the dark corners of his being, he saw with almost clairvoyant distinctness how it must have been. He saw her growing older, as he had grown older, but in the dull apathy of monotony. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... of coal is thrown on the fire, we say that it will radiate into the room a certain quantity of heat. This heat, in the popular conception, is supposed to reside in the coal and to be set free during the process of combustion. In reality, however, the heat energy is only in part contained in the coal. It is contained just as truly in the coal's Environment—that is to say, in the oxygen of the air. The atoms of carbon which compose the coal have ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This last is the point where old age starts from. The great fact of physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the fire is the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... reading and re-reading them. That is the kind of thing that hurts when one is in love. But I have undergone other tortures. When I think that it was I—" he paused, he was suffocating—"I who was destined to furnish combustion for your flames, to warm that frozen lover, to send him to you, ardent and rejuvenated! Ah! he made away with the pearls, I tell you. It was of no use for me to say no, he always wanted more. At last I went mad. 'You want to ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Compost it with leaves, sod, earth, muck, anything that will keep it from burning up with its own heat. If you can obtain no such ingredients, have it turned over and exposed to the air so often that it will decay without passing through a process approaching combustion. When it has become so thoroughly decomposed as to resemble a fine black powder, you have a fertilizer superior to any high-priced patent compound that can be bought. Further on I will show how it can be used both in this ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... Aristotle for its ventilation, Erasistratus for the filling of the arteries with spirits. All these opinions are discussed and commented upon by Galen, who determines the purposes of respiration to be (1) to preserve the animal heat; (2) to evacuate from the blood the products of combustion. ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... any rate it was done, I think, on the 6th October, 1850, from Assistance Harbour. Two birds, duly freighted with intelligence, and notes from the married men, were put in a basket, which was attached to a balloon in such a manner, that, after combustion of a certain quantity of match, the carrier-pigeons would be launched into the air to commence their flight. The idea being that they would fetch some of the whaling vessels about the mouth of Hudson's ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... all sorts and kinds of tips for murderers, including lists of poisons both vegetable and mineral, a liberal choice of weapons of every description, and the best means of disposing of the corpus delecti afterwards, either by submersion, combustion, dissection, or inhumation. The whole twelve volumes is a little library of itself, and a man who reads it patiently through to the end will easily persuade himself that he is a born murderer. I recommend the matter to ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... subject to combustion on which American companies will not take a risk. Among these may be classed kerosene and turpentine stills, sulphur and powder mills, and the buildings in which these products ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... foods, are not so completely burned up in the body. The ashes which result from their combustion are not simple substances like the water and CO{2} of the carbohydrates. This protein ash is represented by a number of complicated substances, some of which are solid (protein clinkers), which accumulate in the body ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... of temperature; heating &c v.; calefaction^, tepefaction^, torrefaction^; melting, fusion; liquefaction &c 335; burning &c v.; ambustion^, combustion; incension^, accension^; concremation^, cremation; scorification^; cautery, cauterization; ustulation^, calcination; cracking, refining; incineration, cineration^; carbonization; cupellation [Chem]. ignition, inflammation, adustion^, flagration^; deflagration, conflagration; empyrosis^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... our host, an elderly gentleman of fortune. "If we had such impure gas as is found in many of the villages and small cities not so very far West, I'd never light a burner in my library again. As it is, I do so very rarely. The products of gas combustion act on the bindings until firm calf drops in pieces, and even law-sheep loses its coherency, as the argument of the opposing counsel does when your own lawyer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... in spite of his master, and curses in the very dialect of his calling. His labour is mere blustering and fury, and his speech like that of sailors in a storm, a thousand businesses at once; yet, in all this tumult, he does not love combustion, but will be the first man that shall go and quench it. He is never a good Christian till a hissing pot of ale has slacked him, like water cast on a firebrand, and for that time he is tame and dispossessed. His cunning is not small in architecture, for he builds strange fabrics in paste, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... great men or great matters, do work great and important effects: whereof we see a notable example in Tacitus of two stage players, Percennius and Vibulenus, who by their faculty of playing put the Pannonian armies into an extreme tumult and combustion. For there arising a mutiny amongst them upon the death of Augustus Caesar, Blaesus the lieutenant had committed some of the mutineers, which were suddenly rescued; whereupon Vibulenus got to be heard speak, which he did in this manner:- ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... of a chemical compound into its elements by a sufficiently high degree of heat. All compounds are susceptible of dissociation, so that it follows that combustion is impossible at ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... which takes place when moist vegetable substances are exposed to oxygen is that of slow combustion ('eremacausis'), the oxygen uniting with the wood and liberating a volume of carbonic acid equal to itself, and another portion combining with the hydrogen of the wood to form water. Decomposition takes place on contact with a body already undergoing ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... but acting really as a cooling, instead of a heating, cause, added to so great a waste of mechanical power in condensing it, amounting, in fact, to four-fifths of the whole, clearly shews the defects of the present method, and the want of some better mode of exciting combustion on a large scale. The following suggestions are thrown out as likely to lead to valuable results, even though they should prove ineffectual for their ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... particular, to the East Lothian coal-miners. The carbonaceous disease described, was stated to be caused by the inhalation of substances floating in the atmosphere of the coal-pit, such as the products of the combustion of gunpowder, the smoke from the miner's lamp, and the other foreign matters with which the air of the mines is heavily charged, in consequence of their defective ventilation. In the mines in which gunpowder is used, the disease is most severe in its character, and most ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is that it ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... so much attention at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The No. 0 Florence stove will sustain the weight of one hundred and fifty pounds, and is one of the few absolutely safe oil stoves, with perfect combustion, and no unpleasant odor or gas. This statement presupposes that the wicks are wiped along the burnt edges after being used, and that a certain degree of cleanliness is observed in the care of the oil cistern. I do not stand alone in my appreciation of this faithful ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... method of heating the air by allowing it to pass over a pipe or flue through which the products of combustion from a coke or coal fire are proceeding under the floor of the drying chamber to a small shaft, has been superseded by steam heat. The air is either drawn or forced by means of quickly revolving fans through a cylinder placed in a horizontal ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... probably, soon engender war. Nor could it either theoretically or practically have been otherwise, for the relations between the two countries had reached a point where they generated a friction which caused incandescence automatically. And, moreover, the inflammable material fit for combustion was, especially in Germany, present in quantity. From the time of Fichte and Scharnhorst downward to the end of the century, the whole nation had learned, as a sort of gospel, that the German education ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... charcoal, no soot, to trouble you; no ashes, no wood, to soil your apartments. By night, as well as by day, you can have a fire in your room, without a servant being obliged to look after it. Nothing in the thermolampes, not even the smallest portion of inflammable air, can escape combustion; while in our chimnies, torrents evaporate, and even carry off with them the greater ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... distance, and some of us are able to transport things with our minds over a distance. We do not need your rich terrestrial air, because we take oxygen directly from the soil and store it in our bodies for combustion purposes. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... this combustion, we are in perils by land and water. It has rained for this month without intermission; there is sea between me and Richmond, and Sunday was se'nnight I was hurried down to Isleworth in the ferry-boat by the violence of the current, and had great difficulty to get to shore. Our roads ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... find time to practise. Even the two upper stories were comparatively safe; for they were composed of blocks so solid as to require time to heat them, and they were consequently as little liable to combustion as wood well could be. But the roof, like all of that, and indeed, like most of the present day in America, was composed of short inflammable shingles of pine. The superior height of the tower was some little protection, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... who live habitually in a gray gloom. The English, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the momentary gleams of their summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry to the seaside with red, perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing midleg deep in pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows would deem little ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... demand in Paris, and in many other towns, for lighting wide public thoroughfares, squares, and large open spaces. If, however, it is desired to obtain a flame with a much higher temperature, it is necessary to resort to a special arrangement for heating the air intended for combustion with the gas. The principle of heating the air by means of waste heat escaping with the products of the waste gas—the regenerative principle—was adopted by Mr. F. Siemens, and applied not only to gas burners, but to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... thus forced to demolish before they can reconstruct, deny most emphatically (a) that the sun is in combustion, in any ordinary sense of the word; or (b) that he is incandescent, or even burning, though he is glowing; or (c) that his luminosity has already begun to weaken and his power of combustion may be exhausted within a given and conceivable time; or even (d) that his chemical and physical constitution ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... facts of constant decomposition and renewal in the vegetable and animal worlds. But the phenomenon which stands out as the chiefest determinant of his thought is one which is always bound to act as a powerful stimulant on a thoughtful mind—that of combustion. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Dolores," of September the 16th, 1810; of the revolution begun thirty years ago, by the curate of the village of Dolores in the province of Gunanajuato. "It is very easy," says Zavala, it is about the most sensible remark, "to put a country into combustion, when it possesses the elements of discord; but the difficulties of its re- ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... has brought you here, I stand obliged to fortune, or to fear: Weak women should, in danger, herd like deer. But say, from whence this new combustion springs? Are there yet ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... types of lamps used in domestic lighting present several imperfections, and daily experience shows too often how difficult it is, even with the most careful and best studied models, to have a perfect combustion of the usual ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... been staying, but some were much larger, and seemed to be places of business. One of these latter was a concrete structure with wide doors at the front; inside, he could see men working on the internal-combustion vehicles which seemed to be in almost universal use. Hradzka decided to ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... the tens of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, and it may amount to hundreds of thousands; it has, indeed, been reckoned as high as a million degrees. This vast discharge is not due to any kind of burning action—i.e., to the combustion of substances, as in a fire. It must be produced by the gradual falling in of the materials, due to the gravitation of the mass toward its centre, each particle converting its energy of position into heat, as does the meteorite when it ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... and hams, previous to being sent to market, is drying. This is effected by hanging the flitches and hams for 2 or 3 weeks in a room heated by stoves, or in a smoke-house, in which they are exposed for the same length of time to the smoke arising from the slow combustion of the sawdust of oak or other hard wood. The latter mode of completing the curing process has some advantages over the other, as by it the meat is subject to the action of creosote, a volatile oil produced by ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... point of union, which this body would have constituted. Not having this, they acted without concert, and were are length subdued separately. This conflagration was quenched in blood; two hundred thousand souls, on both sides, having perished; but the remaining matter is very capable of combustion. I have this information from a person who was on the spot at the time, and whose good faith, understanding, and means of information leave no doubt of the facts. He observed, however, that the numbers above supposed to have perished ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... analogy between an animal and a steam-engine. Food is the fuel that makes the animal engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does in the artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an engine; a free draught of open air is also required in order to produce combustion. Just in like manner the food we eat cannot be utilised to drive our muscles and other organs unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air to burn it slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... smoky chimney is cured, and that the room is always at a really comfortable temperature, with a smaller consumption of coal than before. The whole of the radiation is into the room, with perfect slow combustion." ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... 161:6 has created states of mind which have been able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; 161:9 while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... will speak mine after a few more applications of the thought exchanger. I am speaking with a vile accent, of course, but that is merely because my vocal organs are not accustomed to making vowel sounds. Our power is obtained by the combustion of gases in highly efficient turbines. It is transmitted and used as direct current, our generator and motors being so constructed that they can produce no etheric disturbances capable of penetrating the shielding walls of our city. The city was built close ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... Melting Point of Fat, Testing Machines.—VII., Lubricating Greases. Rosin Oil, Anthracene Oil, Making Greases, Testing and Analysis of Greases.—VIII., Lubrication. Friction and Lubrication, Lubricant, Lubrication of Ordinary Machinery, Spontaneous Combustion of Oils, Stainless Oils, Lubrication of Engine Cylinders, Cylinder Oils.—Appendices. A. Table of Baume's Hydrometer—B. Table of Thermometric Degrees—C. Table of Specific ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of the sempiternal Tartarus.' ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... fluid ounce of each is the product of thousands of tons of water. The potential energy is all there. A current releases it; the energy components reunite to give matter again—hydrogen and oxygen gas. Combustion adds to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... repairs being required in the main light-room. This is situated over the store-room just referred to, and is surrounded by a balcony and a circular stone parapet. The original lantern, or light-room, was constructed for the combustion of oak wood, exposed in a kind of chauffer raised six feet above the floor. The room was not glazed, so that the smoke was carried out sideways in the direction of the wind. The roof was furnished with a sort of chimney in the shape of a spire, ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless, slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all round it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed ministering spirit with the vessel of oil may keep it bright in spite of the stream of cold water on the other side doing its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... at the Red One convinced Alwin that his reputation did not belie him. It was not alone his floating hair and his long beard that were fiery; his whole person looked capable of instantaneous combustion. His choleric blue eyes, now twinkling with good humor, a spark could kindle into a blaze. A breath could fan the ruddy spots on his cheeks ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... for owning that charming truth, and submitting to the conscious triumph? Give her her part of vanity, of youth, of desire to rule and be admired. Meanwhile Mr. Clive's drawings have been crackling in the fireplace at her feet, and the last spark of that combustion ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... greatest preventable waste of coal in a boiler plant is directly due to excess air. Excess air simply means the amount of air which gets into the furnace and boiler which is not needed for completing the combustion of the coal. Very often twice as much air is admitted to the boiler setting as is required. This extra or excess air is heated and carries heat out through the chimney instead of heating the water in the boiler to make steam. There are two ways in which this excess air gets into ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm
... cellars of Greenwich Village; in the saloons of ships. But the Club would give a false impression of its mind and heart if it allowed any one to suppose that Food is the chief object of its quest. It is true that Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle for units of nourishing combustion; but on those occasions when the Club feels most truly Itself it rises above ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... zenith with such fierce and direct radiation that the wayfarer needed not to observe the shadows to note its exact position in the heavens. Singly among the broken blocks, and in banks along the ledges, the cactus had burst under the heat, as it were, into the spontaneous combustion of flowery flame. To the traveler passing beside them their red blooms blazed with the irritating superfluity of a torch-light ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller |
