"Decompose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... white mass, which readily absorbs moisture and dissolves. It will not volatilize at a low red heat, nor will it decompose. Exposed to a strong heat, it is decomposed, yielding oxygen, and passing ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... FERMENTATIVE ENERGY, may be estimated more correctly by the quantity of sugar decomposed by the unit-weight of yeast in unit-time; moreover, since our experiments show that yeast is very vigorous when it has a sufficient supply of oxygen, and that, in such a case, it can decompose much sugar in a little time, M. Schutzenberger concludes that it must then have great power as a ferment, even greater than when it performs its functions without the aid of air, since under this condition it decomposes sugar very slowly. In short, he is disposed ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... did Newton decompose a white beam into its constituent colours, but conversely by interposing a second prism with its angle turned upwards, he reunited the different colours, and thus reproduced the original beam of white light. In several other ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... steady habits, greedily swallow some new kind of cordial and then suddenly fall to the ground, foam at the mouth, act deliriously and writhe in convulsions, we at once surmise that this agreeable beverage contained some dangerous substance; but a delicate analysis is necessary to detect and decompose the poison. The philosophy of the eighteenth century contained poison, and of a kind as potent as it was peculiar; for, not only is it a long historic elaboration, the final and condensed essence of the tendency of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dissolved according to the tension of the carbonic acid; that is, by an increased quantity its tension increases, and more would pass in solution in the form of bicarbonates. On the other hand, by diminishing the quantity of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, some of the bicarbonates would decompose and carbonic acid ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... named from Epsom. Couldst thou Potassa be, I Aqua-fortis, Our happy union should that compound form, Nitrate of Potash—otherwise Saltpetre. And thus our several natures sweetly blent, We'd live and love together, until death Should decompose the fleshly tertium quid, Leaving our souls to all eternity Amalgamated. Sweet, thy name is Briggs And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we Agree to form a Johnsonate ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... green coffee there is no definite compound "caffetannic acid," and there is even less likelihood of its being present in roasted coffee. The conditions, high heat and oxidation, to which coffee is subjected in roasting would suffice to decompose this hypothetical acid if ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... and useless gas in an arrangement like this is the nitrogen of the air, which being in large quantities does act as a serious diluent. To diminish the proportion of nitrogen, steam is often injected as well as air. The glowing coke can decompose the steam, forming carbonic oxide and hydrogen, both combustible. But of course no extra energy can be gained by the use of steam in this way; all the energy must come from the coke, the steam being already a perfectly burned product; the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... which he had been elaborately discussing, and of which a specimen, "very curious and perfect indeed," happened to exist about a hundred yards distant from the spot where this interruption took place. But were I compelled to decompose the motives of my worthy friend (for such was the gentleman in the sober suit, with powdered wig and slouched hat), I should say, that, although he certainly would not in any case have suffered the ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... that substances confined too long in receptacles decompose and generate pathogenic poisons, that is, poisons productive of disease; and that the intestinal reservoirs are no exception to this law of putrefactive changes. How could we avoid drawing the inference, therefore, that disease-breeding germs, (generated in the organism and hence called "autogenetic"), ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... rush into rash and wicked suicide, that they may thus escape from the contradictions and complicated pangs of the finite. The rays of light from the everlasting sun of wisdom and love are indeed forever falling round us, but we no longer bear the prism of faith which would decompose them for us, giving them such direction as they fall upon the symbolic, the relative, that we might read in their three-fold splendor the symbolized, the Absolute. The human soul was created for the enjoyment of God, and, consequently, touches the infinite at every point, and the health ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... once recognized by Sir Humphry Davy, who began experimenting immediately in this new field. He constructed a series of batteries in various combinations, with which he attacked the "fixed alkalies," the composition of which was then unknown. Very shortly he was able to decompose potash into bright metallic globules, resembling quicksilver. This new substance he named "potassium." Then in rapid succession the elementary substances sodium, calcium, strontium, and magnesium ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... scatters them through space. This dispersion must be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.... Says Eliphas Levi: "Change attests movement, and movement only reveals life. The corpse would not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which compose it are ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... rotting vegetation, is quite unlike the peat of Europe, as the plants become so decayed as to leave no traces of organisation. Frequently the trees are overthrown, and numbers are found lying beneath the surface of the soil, where, covered with water, they never decompose. So completely preserved are they, that they are frequently sawn up into planks. In one part of the Dismal Swamp there is a lake seven miles in length, and more than five wide, with a forest growing on its banks. The water ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... and upon our dismounting he led us into a walled enclosure, and startled us with the information that we were in the execution grounds. He pointed out spots still damp with the blood of criminals, several jars containing the heads of victims, the protruding hair matted with the lime used to decompose the flesh more rapidly, and a rude cross still remaining upon which a woman had recently been crucified and cut to pieces while alive. Her crime was the gravest known to Chinese law: she had murdered ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... would joke about death? No, when you die, I'll follow your funeral and proclaim to all: "Behold, here is a man who has come to know the truth." Oh no, I'll rather hang you up as a banner of truth. And, the more your skin and flesh decompose and crumble, the more will the truth come out. It will be a most instructive object lesson, highly educative. Tony, why ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... this kind will run a small motor, operate a telegraph sounder, make a simple electro-magnet, or ring an electric bell; two cells will decompose water: three will heat a piece ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... verses! The very number our Milton had meted to him! Oh! these four verses! they are as fatal in their number as the date of Peele's letter proved to George Steevens! Something still escapes in the most ingenious fabrication which serves to decompose the materials. It is well our veracious historian dropped all mention of Guarini—else that would have given that coup de grace—a fatal anachronism! However, his invention supplied him with more originality than the adoption of this story and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... it only yields probabilities. Its end and result is to decompose documents into statements, each labelled with an estimate of its value—worthless statement, statement open to suspicion (strong or weak), statement probably (or, very probably) true, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... was perfectly useless. What caustic then should be applied? Certainly not that to which the surgeon usually has recourse—a liquid one. Certainly not one that speedily deliquesces; for they are both unmanageable, and, what is a more important consideration, they may hold in solution, and not decompose the poison, and thus inoculate the whole of the wound. The application which promises to be successful, is that of the 'lunar caustic'. It is perfectly manageable, and, being sharpened to a point, may be applied with certainty to every recess and ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... any case of dysuria during childhood. You will not infrequently discover a phimosis which interferes more or less with the discharge of urine and retains portions of the latter behind the foreskin, where it may decompose and give rise to an inflammatory condition of the prepuce, with painful dysuria.... This is also true of the occasional adhesion of the labia minora in little girls, like the similar adhesion of the foreskin in boys. It is almost constant in the first period of life, but ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the action and the characters are not something which you conceive apart from the words; you apprehend them from point to point in the words, and the words as expressions of them. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis decompose this unity, and attend to a substance more or less 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 ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... formed a rugged promontory which at this day appears as black, bare, and herbless as on the day when its fiery course was arrested by the boiling waters. And here I would remark, that the lavas of AEtna are very different from those of Vesuvius. The latter decompose in half a century, and become capable of cultivation; those of AEtna remain unchanged for centuries, as that of Monte Rosso testifies. It has now been exposed to the action of the weather nearly two hundred years, with the exception of the interstices where ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... impart a disagreeable flavor to food cooked in them, are not objectionable from a health standpoint, if kept clean and free from rust. Iron rust is the result of the combination of the iron with oxygen, for which it has so great an affinity that it will decompose water to get oxygen to unite with; hence it is that iron utensils rust so quickly when not carefully dried after using, or if left where they can collect moisture. This is the reason why a coating of tallow, which serves to exclude ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... decompose carbonic acid gas by light. A faint bluish cloud, due it may be, or it may not be, to the residue of some vapour previously employed, was formed in the experimental tube. On looking across this cloud through a Nicol's prism, the line of vision ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... dense growth of tropical vegetation and multitudinous animal life in the Northwest, the waters necessarily became heavily charged with the naturally resulting carbonic acid gas, and this, acting on the limestone rocks, would decompose them, leaving a residual clay and taking the chief portions of the mineral components in solution, to be afterwards deposited according to circumstances and conditions; and these are indicated by the various results found in Wind Cave, Crystal Cave, the Onyx Caves ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... They are vital by virtue of their tendency to resist the repose of inert matter; chemical activity disintegrates a stone or other metal, but the decay of organized matter is different in kind; living organisms decompose it and resolve it into ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... also, that she believed in a God, and that she hoped for compensation from him for the miseries she had endured. She had now begun to decompose, and to become, in turn, a plant. She who had blossomed in the sun was now to be eaten up by the cattle, carried away in herbs, and in the flesh of beasts, again to become human flesh. But that which is called the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... ink so made was found to precipitate only after a long exposure, it required no free acid to keep the precipitate in solution, and retained the indigo blue color for a long time; alkalis did not decompose the ink, and provided blacker and more permanent writing. Determination of the correct proportions of gallic acid and ferrous-sulphate was the subject of prolonged experiments conducted on similar lines to ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... do not decompose normal teeth by true electrolysis, but acids resulting from decomposition of food and fluids react upon the lime constituents of the ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of admiration. But there is another theory of the personal motive in these fine sayings and doings, which ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the recrements of animal and vegetable bodies, such as phosphoric, ammoniacal, marine salt, and others; these are washed from the earth by rains, and carried down our rivers into the sea; they seem all here to decompose each other except the marine salt, which has therefore from the beginning of the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... with avidity, and that the gold thus treated resisted amalgamation with mercury. Mr. Skey proved the act of absorption of sulphur by gold to be a chemical act, and that electricity was generated in sufficient quantity and intensity during the process to decompose metallic solutions. Sulphur in certain forms had long been known to exercise a prejudicial effect upon the amalgamation of gold, but this had always been attributed to the combination of the sulphur with the quicksilver ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... land and on sea It is indispensable. It is without equal, It is many-sided; It is not confined, It is incomparable; It comes from four quarters; It is noxious, it is beneficial; It is yonder, it is here; It will decompose, But it will not repair the injury; It will not suffer for its doings, Seeing it is blameless. One Being has prepared it, Out of all creatures, By a tremendous blast, To wreak vengeance On ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the ordinary consumer for himself. A generator which is perfectly satisfactory in general behaviour, and which evolves a sufficient proportion of the possible total make of gas to be economical, does not of necessity decompose the carbide quantitatively; nor is it constructed in a fashion to render an exact measurement of the gas liberated at standard temperature and pressure easy to obtain. For obvious reasons the careful ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached[598] or not, whether he held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed to ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Salt. Wert thou Magnesia Instead we'd form that's named from Epsom. Couldst thou Potassa be, I Aqua-fortis, Our happy union should that compound form, Nitrate of Potash—otherwise Saltpeter. And thus our several natures sweetly blent, We'd live and love together, until death Should decompose the fleshly TERTIUM QUID, Leaving our souls to all eternity Amalgamated. Sweet, thy name is Briggs And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs? We will. The day, the happy day, is nigh, When Johnson shall with ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... state rather, of a fungus or mould. There are many moulds which under certain conditions give rise to this torula condition, to a substance which is not distinguishable from yeast, and which has the same properties as yeast—that is to say, which is able to decompose sugar in the curious way that we shall consider by-and-by. So that the yeast plant is a plant belonging to a group of the Fungi, multiplying and growing and living in this very remarkable manner in the sugary fluid which is, so to speak, the nidus ...
— Yeast • Thomas H. Huxley
... Edison electrolytic meter is that which exemplifies the power of electricity to decompose a chemical substance. In other words it is a deposition bath, consisting of a glass cell in which two plates of chemically pure zinc are dipped in a solution of zinc sulphate. When the lights or motors ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... is placed in the boiler, A, and the quantity of acid necessary to decompose it is added. The mass is afterward mixed with care by means of the stirrer, and the distillation may then proceed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... capacity to produce leaves and flowers and fruits and roots and bark. From the grass and water that is taken by a cow are produced milk and butter, substances whose nature is different from that of the producing causes. Substances of different kinds when allowed to decompose in water for some time produce spirituous liquors whose nature is quite different from that of those substances that produce them. After the same manner, from the vital seed is produced the body and its attributes, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... (azoimides, azides or hydrazoates). All the salts are explosive and readily interact with the alkyl iodides. In its properties it shows some analogy to the halogen acids, since it forms difficultly soluble lead, silver and mercurous salts. The metallic salts all crystallize in the anhydrous condition and decompose on heating, leaving a residue of the pure metal. The acid is a "weak" acid, being ionized only to a very slight extent in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Balthazar. "You alone could I forgive for that terrible disappointment. I was about to decompose nitrogen. Go ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... them. No man takes others by the throat when his whole strength is given to a struggle with Nature. Besides, in our science results are perceivable; we can measure effects and predict them; whereas all things are uncertain and vacillating in the struggles of men and their selfish interests. We decompose the diamond in our crucibles, and we shall make diamonds, we shall make gold! We shall impel vessels (as they have at Barcelona) with fire and a little water! We test the wind, and we shall make wind; we shall make light; ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the bottom before the mouth opens. In other species, the orifice is so completely overarched as essentially to prevent the access of water from without. In these tubes, mainly in the water, flies and other insects accumulate, perish, and decompose. Flies thrown into the open-mouthed tube of the yellow Sarracenia, even when free from water, are unable to get out—one hardly sees why, except that they cannot fly directly upward; and microscopic chevaux-de-frise ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray |
