"Decomposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strengthening food of either kind. Since it cannot become a part of the body, it cannot consequently contribute to its cohesive, organic strength, or fixed power; and, since it comes out of the body just as it went in, it cannot, by its decomposition, ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... phenomena it investigates have certain common characteristics; and we are apt to infer that any process observed in some of these phenomena, if depending on those common characteristics, will be found in others. For example, the decomposition, or radio-activity, of certain elements prepares one to believe that all elements may exhibit it. Where the properties of an object are known to be closely interdependent, as in the organisation of plants, animals and societies, we are especially justified in inferring ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... remarque que cette metamorphose semble s'operer, comme celle des cailloux d'origine calcaire en forme approchans la spherique, il faut encore y a jouter, que j'ai lieu de croire, qu'elle se fasse aussi du dedans en dehors, tout, comme la decomposition se ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... particular manifestation, a portion of Force which already existed in other forms. It is known that the source from which this portion of Force is derived, is chiefly, or entirely, the force evolved in the processes of chemical composition and decomposition which constitute the body of nutrition: the force so liberated becomes a fund upon which every muscular and every nervous action, as of a train of thought, is a draft. It is in this sense only that, according to the best lights of science, volition is an originating cause. Volition, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... to certify the death informally, for the purpose of facilitating the funeral arrangements. But he was absolutely forbidden to give his written authority for the burial, before the expiration of three nights from the time of the death; and he was further bound to certify that the signs of decomposition had actually begun to show themselves. Have these multiplied precautions, patiently applied in many German cities, through a long lapse of years, ever yet detected a case in which Death has failed ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... unredeemed, death with no very positive suggestion, with no hint of heroism, none of heroic action, little even of heroic passion; just death, helpless, hopeless, pointing to nothing but decomposition, decay, disappearance, aneantissement, reduction of the fair frame of life to nothingness. That is the peculiar horror of this war. Were the picture, as it well might be, even more hideous, and did it suggest something more definite, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... and trade been so free between the West of Europe and the West of Asia. A Phrygian merchant (according to the inscription on his tomb) made seventy-two journeys to Rome in the course of his business-life. The decomposition of nationalities, and the destruction of civic exclusiveness, led naturally to the formation of voluntary associations of all kinds, from religious sects to trade unions; sometimes a single association combined ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... breeds creatures for its own devouring. At one end of this row of viands was a large game pie with a triangular gap in the pastry; at the other, on two oval dishes, lay four cold partridges in various stages of decomposition. Behind them a silver basket of openwork design was occupied by three bunches of black, one bunch of white grapes, and a silver grape-cutter, which performed no function (it was so blunt), but had once belonged to a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the county are largely sedimentary, having been washed down from the mountains for ages, assisted by the decomposition of vegetable matter accumulated through centuries. In the valleys, where most of the farming is being done, these soils produce remarkable crops under the influence of the charming climate the ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... agreed, that the climate of the isthmus would be greatly improved by drainage, and clearing the country of the immense quantities of vegetable matter left rotting on the ground. The beds of seaweed, in a constant state of decomposition on the Pacific shore, create miasmata unquestionably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... it was it did actually serve the purpose of a safety valve, the owner being, in consequence of gross overfeeding and lack of natural exercise, afflicted with chronic flatulence, which manifested itself in frequent belchings forth through the mouth of the foul gases generated in the stomach by the decomposition of the foods with which it was generally loaded. But as the Rev. Mr Belcher had never been seen with his coat off, no one ever noticed the resemblance. It was not necessary for him to take his coat off: his part in life ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... possibilities of higher and still higher explosives for use in war, the neglect of the mechanical application of this class of substance being largely due to the fact, that chemists are not as a rule engineers, nor engineers chemists. But an easily portable substance, the decomposition of which would evolve energy, or—what is, from the practical point of view, much the same thing—an easily portable substance, which could be decomposed electrically by wind or water power, and which would then recombine and supply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... and Montenegro. Down to 1912 Turkey ruled over a large number of Serbs.] How did it come about that this evolution of twelve centuries, beginning with primeval unity and passing through a political, economic, and social decomposition of a most bewildering character, has once more arrived at national unity and is even now demanding the last step—political amalgamation? Is it a doctrine or a dream or is it ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... disprove my theory.... My assertion was simply, that air (i.e., dephlogisticated air, or oxygen, which was also commonly called vital air, pure air, or simple air) was water deprived of its phlogiston, and united to heat, which I grounded on the decomposition of air by inflammation with inflammable air, the residuum, or product of which, is ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... a determinant of the n-th order, taking the decomposition to be 1 (n - 1), we fall back upon the equations given at the commencement, in order to show ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... structure, resemble the lacteals. They exist in great numbers in the skin and mucous membranes, particularly those of the lungs. Though no lymphatics have been traced to the brain, it is presumed that they exist there, as this part of the body is not exempt from the composition and decomposition, which are perpetual in the body. These vessels are extremely minute at their origin, so that in many parts of the system they cannot be detected without the aid ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... although the bluffs present the appearance of sterility, is covered with a strong soil, which is continually renovated by the spontaneous decomposition of calcareous rock. The common growth of trees on the island are the sugar-maple, beech, birch, white and yellow pine, white and red spruce, balsam fir, white cedar, iron wood, and the poplar; the trees ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... Versailles nor St. Germain has any lasting work been done. The germs of decomposition and death lie in this peace. The paroxysms that shattered Europe are not yet over; as, after a terrible earthquake, the subterraneous rumblings may still be heard. Again and again we shall see the earth open, now here, now there, and shoot up flames into the heavens; again and again there will be ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be present at the interminable funeral of an old banker; they played a military march with violin and violoncello accompaniments, with trumpets and timbrels, a heroic and worldly march to celebrate the departure and the decomposition of a financier!... It is too absurd." And listening no more to the music in St. Sulpice, Durtal transferred himself in thought to the Madeleine, and went off at full speed ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... is seen reaching down to the sea; but, in all other parts, it is covered by streams of trachitic lava, by more recent tufas, or by a deposit of marly appearance, which is regarded by Fuchs as resulting from the decomposition of ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... yellowish fog had come down, the dreaded igniis fatui. Unless one kept moving, decomposition of the blood set in, essential salts within the body were dissolved and cellular activity ceased. Latham grinned wryly. He doubted if it could touch him! There was too much tsith within his alchemy. Nevertheless he moved and worked ceaselessly. He could see that caricature ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... life which is a mere drapery of civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of nature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, the casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true decadent, an "instrument of decomposition," the slayer of art, the father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes pathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist dialectic drives the music ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and magnetic, yet these come under the head of mechanical attraction, as producing motion; we may therefore lay it down as a law, that when dead, or inanimate bodies act upon each other, no other than mechanical, or chemical effects are produced; that is, either motion, or the decomposition, and new combination of their parts. If one ball strike another, it communicates to it a certain quantity of motion, this is called mechanical action; and if a quantity of salt, or sugar, be put into water, the particles of the salt or sugar will separate from each other, and join themselves ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... and Sciences; and in the numerous list of his writings one comes upon such oddly assorted subjects as an account of a tornado in Wethersfield, a cure for cancer, upon white-washing, the mental arithmetic of a negro, on winds, upon female education, on the decomposition of white-lead paint, a dissertation on the supposed change in the temperature of winter, upon names of streets in New York, on yellow fever, on the age of literary men, and one article with the suggestive title "Number of Deaths in the Episcopal Church in New York in each Month for Ten Years." He ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... of death had intervened, until it was quite certain beyond question that in that climate decomposition would be well advanced. Utter human impotence and impossibility was in its last degree. Man stands utterly powerless, utterly helpless in the presence of death. It is not the last degree of improbability. There is no improbability. It's an ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... a moot question), we can conceive them as analogous to such forces as heat, electricity, or chemical affinity, with which we are already acquainted. We can thus clearly conceive of the transition from dead matter to living matter. A complex mass which suffers decomposition or decay is dead, but if this mass has the power of attracting to itself, from the surrounding medium, matter like that of which it is composed, we have the first rudiment of vegetative life. If the mass can do this ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... through which it has for some years been passing underwent an unprecedented change the extent and intensity of which are as yet but imperfectly realized. Its more striking characteristics were determined by the gradual decomposition of empires and kingdoms, the twilight of their gods, the drying up of their sources of spiritual energy, and the psychic derangement of communities and individuals by a long and fearful war. Political principles, respect for authority and tradition, esteem for high moral worth, to say nothing ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... falling-star is hailed with loud shouts and waving of fire-brands, to drive off the yumburbar, an evil spirit which is the cause of all deaths and other calamities, and feeds on the entrails of the newly dead. When decomposition has gone on sufficiently far, the bones are carefully removed, painted red, wrapped up in bark, and carried about with the tribe for some time; after which they are finally deposited, either in a hollow tree or a shallow grave, over which a low ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... insulated and anomalous affection of certain salts of silver or gold, but one which, doubtless, in a greater or less degree, pervades all nature, and connects itself intimately with the mechanism by which chemical combination and decomposition is operated. The general instability of organic combinations might lead us to expect the occurrence of numerous and remarkable cases of this affection among bodies of that class, but among metallic ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... and competent, this skilful Jack, leading her down in the illumined, dewy woods, talking on and on, talking—the fool—for so, with a bitter smile, her inner commentary dubbed him—of Manet, of Monet, of Whistler, of the decomposition of light, the vibration ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... scientific rank. I not only, however, consider my own trifles unworthy of such a dignity, but am inclined to strip it from other productions which might appear to have a more appropriate claim to it. No doubt, the ductile inflections and wonderful facilities for decomposition and reconstruction make Greek an excellent vehicle of scientific precision, and the use of a dead language saves your nomenclature from being confounded with your common talk. The use of a Greek derivative ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... this old building, whose site is arbitrary, whose architecture is incoherent, and whose inconveniences are obvious. . . . The majority of young people, above all those who have their way to make, are more or less Jacobin on leaving college. . . . Jacobinism is born of social decomposition just as mushrooms are born of a fermenting soil. Consider the authentic monuments of its thought—the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... is old, thoroughly rotted cow-manure. On no account should fresh manure be used. Make use, if possible, of that which is black from decomposition, and will crumble readily under the application of the hoe, or iron rake. One-third in bulk of this material is not too much. Bulbs are great eaters, and unless they are well fed you cannot expect large crops of fine ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... one the remaining brutes stretched themselves upon the bubbling decomposition that covered the mass of bones upon the floor of their den, until but a single apt remained awake. This huge fellow roamed restlessly about, nosing among his companion and the abhorrent litter ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... democratic journals: they began by demanding the abolition of royalty, "the greatest scourge," said the Revolutions de Paris, "which has ever dishonoured the human species." Marat seemed to have concentrated in himself all the evil passions which ferment in a society in a state of decomposition: he constituted himself the permanent representative of popular hate. By pretending this, he kept it up, writing all the while with bitterness and ferocity. He became a cynic in order the more intimately to know ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... staring at it. That it was the head of a man, she could only guess from the matted crop of short red hair that fell in a disordered entanglement over the upper part of the forehead and ears. All else was lost in a loathsome, disgusting mass of detestable decomposition, too utterly vile and foul to describe. On the abnormal thing beginning to move forward, the spell that bound Mrs. Murphy to the floor was broken, and, with a cry of horror, she fled to the ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the jury, a crime characteristic, if I may so express myself, of the end of our century, bearing, as it were, all the specific features of the first symptoms of decomposition, to which those elements of our society, which are exposed, as it were, to the more scorching rays of that process, ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... builder—Life—"out with the old! in with the new!" and yet the conscious identity in health, typically unchanged and unchanging—causative, designed, scientific—yea verily! and purposive, human, intelligent, spiritual, divine, but a dead corpse, given over to decomposition the moment it is bereft of that something we feel, and know, and name—the Individual Intelligence—the Master Musician; or the staggering, drunk, crazy fiddler, with this Harp of a thousand strings, twanging perhaps in ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival, Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... determine the suitability of an explosive for work in material of any particular physical characteristics depend on the relationship of such properties as percussive force (or the initial blow produced by the products of the decomposition of the explosive at the moment of explosion), and the heaving force (or the continued pressure produced by the products of the decomposition, after the initial blow at the instant of detonation). ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... society, as well as the individuals who compose it. We cannot deny that the altruist, endowed with strong sentiments of sympathy and duty, is an excellent social worker, while the pure egoist constitutes an element of decomposition for society. It is, therefore, a social duty to proceed by the sexual route to a selection which will cause the first to multiply and eliminate the second as far as ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... wealthy residents, while the poor are thrown into shallow graves, often several bodies together in a long trench, negroes and whites, without a coffin of any sort. Upon them is thrown quicklime to promote rapid decomposition. The cremation which forms the mode of disposing of the bodies of the deceased as practiced in India is far ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... a little more learned, a little less abrupt, but none the less discouraging to the advocate of the development hypothesis. We can tell how the elements of high atomic weight, such as uranium and thorium, are constantly giving off particles and are thus by loss or decomposition being changed over into other elements, such as radium, niton, polonium and lead. But our new knowledge compels us ultimately to give the same answer as before, namely, that we still do not know how matter ever could have originated, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... became narrow and bounded by perpendicular walls of sandstone, composed of coarse grains of quartz, rising out of sandy slopes covered with Dogwood (Jacksonia) and spotted-gum. The rock is in a state of rapid decomposition, with deep holes and caves inhabited by rock-wallabies; and with abundance of nests of wasps, and wasp-like Hymenoptera, attached to their walls, or fixed in the interstices of the loose rock. Through a few gullies I succeeded ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... Chaucer's Reeve, in summer it must have been all 'yshadowed with greene trees,' the cedar, the cottonwood, the liveoak, fig, mulberry, and magnolia, growing in the sand or light soil accruing from vegetable decomposition; and as the evergreens predominated, its winter aspect was yet pleasant and rural, notwithstanding a certain air of dilapidation and decay, so common in Southern dwellings that the inhabitants seem to be unconscious of it. Adjacent, beyond the short ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... two valets, at the most, remained near the body. La Villiere, to his praise be it said, was the only courtier who, not having abandoned Monseigneur during life, did not abandon him after his death. He had some difficulty to find somebody to go in search of Capuchins to pray over the corpse. The decomposition became so rapid and so great, that the opening of the windows was not enough; the Capuchins, La Vrilliere, and the valets, were compelled to pass ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... labours that these organisms were rescued from the obscurity of scientific publications and made objects of general and crowning interest. It was Pasteur who first successfully combated the chemical theory of fermentation by showing that albuminous matter had no inherent tendency to decomposition. It was Pasteur who first clearly demonstrated that these little bodies, like all larger animals and plants, come into existence only by ordinary methods of reproduction, and not by any spontaneous generation, ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... Geyer found a trap-door leading down into a small cellar. In one corner of the cellar he saw that the earth had been recently dug up. With the help of the spade the loose earth was removed, and at a depth of some three feet, in a state of advanced decomposition, lay the remains of what appeared to be two children. A little toy wooden egg with a snake inside it, belonging to the Pitezel children, had been found by the tenant who had taken the house after Holmes; a later tenant had found stuffed into the chimney, but not burnt, some clothing that ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... since we passed down; there was, however, no water at all then at the pans. At the Tea-tree spring, a short distance up the creek, we found plenty of water in the sand, but it had a disagreeable taste, from the decomposition of leaves and the presence of mineral matter, probably iron. There seems to have been a fair share of rain along here, everything is so very fresh and green, and there is water in many of the channels we ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... miles an hour, and rushes noiselessly on its orbit a million and a half miles a day. Two storm-clouds encamped upon opposite hills on a sultry summer's evening, at the expense of no more electricity, according to Mr. Faraday, than is evolved in the decomposition of a single drop of water, will shake the surrounding atmosphere with their thunders, which, loudly as they rattle on the spot, will yet not be heard at the distance of twenty miles; while those tremendous ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... soon uncovered. It was the missing man. His face was not recognizable, as decomposition had begun, and the nose was broken and laid flat by a blow. But all the garments, even to the shirt with his name woven into it, were known to those who stood there. In one ear was a leaden ring, which, as we all knew, Niels Bruus had ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... be normal in quantity or more or less excessive, usually the latter. The condition may be local or general, commonly the former. It is closely allied to hyperidrosis, and may often be considered identical, the odor resulting from rapid decomposition of the sweat secretion. The decomposition and resulting odor have been thought due to ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... to produce it, another stage of fermentation will radically destroy it, and produce an acid. Thus, any of the vegetable substances, as corn or rye, subjected to a certain degree of heat and moisture, will soon suffer a decomposition, and a development of sugar, to a greater or less degree, will take place. If removed now from circumstances favorable to its farther fermentation, as is the case with dough for bread, etc., no appreciable quantity of alcohol is created. A further degree of fermentation, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... generalize, the powers acting in nature, as into intellectual, vital, chemical, mechanical; but it holds equally true of the degrees, or species of each of these genera relatively to each other: as in the decomposition of the alkalies by heat, or the galvanic spark. Like the combining power of Life, the copula here resists for awhile the attempts to dissolve it, and then yields, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... doorways, pieces of broken beams and door panels have been found. "The wood is not all in such condition as the incorruptible cedar of the gilded palm-trees, but wherever it certainly existed, traces of it may be pointed out. In advanced decomposition it is no more consistent than powder, it may be picked up and thrown aside, leaving a faithful cast of the beam or post to which it belonged ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... was held at the Vicar of Bray tap, Palace Yard; and the jury, considering the neighbourhood, was tolerably respectable. The remains of the deceased were in a dreadful state of decomposition; and although chloride of lime and other antiseptic fluids were plentifully scattered in the room, it was felt to be a service of danger to approach too closely to the defunct. Many members of Parliament were in attendance, and all of them, to a man, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... mean—things lying around among the stars a long time. Horrible disaster in the time of Julius Caesar; remains from it not reaching this earth till the time of the Bishop of Cloyne: we leave to later research the discussion of bacterial action and decomposition, and whether bacteria could survive in what we call space, of which we ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... and roots, green weeds, garbage, house slops, dish water, chip dirt from the wood-pile, shavings—any thing that will rot away, should go into the compost heap. These should be saved, under cover if possible, in a compact heap and kept moist (never soaked) to help decomposition. To start the heap, gather up every available substance and make it into a pile with a few wheelbarrows full, or half a cartload, of fresh horse manure, treading the whole down firmly. Fermentation and ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... burning hair—a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... administration was guaranteed. Caesar, too, whatever may have been his motive, showed favor to the Jews throughout his Empire. Mommsen thinks that he saw in them an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition, and to that intent gave them special privileges; but this seems a perverse reason to assign for the grant of the right to maintain in all its thoroughness their national life, and for their exemption from all Imperial or municipal burdens that would conflict with it. It is more ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... which had been originally built of wood, had severally disappeared. Some had been taken to pieces and removed to Halifax or St John; others had been converted into fuel, and the rest had fallen a prey to neglect and decomposition. The chimneys stood up erect, and marked the spot around which the social circle had assembled; and the blackened fireplaces, ranged one above another, bespoke the size of the tenement and the means of its owner. ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... molecules, is not less easily or unanswerably demonstrable. For if it were, as long as the particular molecular arrangement remained unaltered, life would necessarily be in attendance; an amputated joint would, until decomposition set in, be as much alive as the trunk from which it had been lopped, even as water poured from a jug into a glass is quite as much liquid as the water remaining in the jug. There would be no such thing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Italy, for a short season before the summer heats and drought, pours forth so profusely. The lake is evidently the crater of an old volcano: it lies in a perfect bowl of hills, and the perpetual escape of gas, bubbling up through the water, shows that the process of chemical decomposition in the earth below has not yet ceased. Close by, in the side of the circular hill that surrounds the lake, stands the famous Grotto del Cane, closed with a door to enable the keeper to get a little money from the foreigners who come to visit it. You may be ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... particles is in an impure state, and that the luminous appearance in all common cases is produced by the agitation of the fluid in contact with the atmosphere, I am inclined to consider that the phosphorescence is the result of the decomposition of the organic particles, by which process (one is tempted almost to call it a kind of respiration) the ocean ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... film is after increased by the usual means. Knight's expeditious process consists in dusting fine iron filings on the wet graphite surface of the wax mould, and then pouring upon it a solution of sulphate of copper. Stirring with a brush expedites the contact, and a decomposition takes place; the acid leaves the copper and forms with the iron sulphate a solution which floats off, while the copper is freed and deposited in a pure metallic form upon the graphite. The black surface takes on a muddy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... is that from which results the possibility of decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. For that we need a previous substitution of symbols for things. Nothing demonstrates this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe to Zeno of Elea. ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life, and life out of death,—that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and the citizen in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... influence of a powerful nature, especially in their physiological effects, even when diffused through the atmosphere in very minute quantities: also, that owing to the immense number of organic beings on the earth, their daily death and decomposition, an enormous amount of gases is produced similar to those which can be obtained by artificial means; and besides these, a quantity of gaseous or volatile products, 'whose chemical nature,' as the author observes, 'is as yet unknown, but of which we can easily admit that some, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... an illustration one morning of how far decomposition would progress in a man's body before he died. My chum and I found a treasure-trove in the streets, in the shape of the body of a man who died during the night. The value of this "find" was that if we took ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the boots, though from the decay of the sewing, they have fallen in pieces. About 2 ft. from the end of the coffin is a square hole through the bottom, with channels worked in the stone leading to it. This was probably a provision to carry off the fluids, which would be caused by the decomposition of the body. On the sides of the coffin could be traced the marks of the corpse when it was first deposited, from which it would appear that the deceased had been stout as well as short of stature. It is to be regretted that the inscription ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... cause. A daily movement of the bowel does not necessarily mean that the bowels are emptying themselves satisfactorily. Despite the daily movement, there may be considerable fecal matter left in the bowel which undergoes decomposition. This results in the evolution of large quantities of gas and severe attacks of colic. Indigestion is very often caused by conditions which effect the stability of the child's nervous organism; such conditions are fright, anger, fatigue, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... investigate how it has built up its form. But precisely in this work my organ for beauty has become blunt rather than keen. I tell you that the beginning of things is not more attractive to contemplate than their death and decomposition." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and Application of Weaves, and the Decomposition and Calculation of Broad and Narrow, Plain, Novelty ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... carcass that is rotting away and disintegrating; and you, faithful handful, who have partially apprehended the meaning of My mission, and have caught something of the spirit of My life, you are to be rubbed into that rotting mass to sweeten it, to arrest decomposition, to stay corruption, to give flavour to its insipidity, and to save it from falling to pieces of its own wickedness. Ye are the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and joy reigned at Naples, there were gruesome scenes within the volcanic zone. At Bosco Trecase soldiers carried on the work of exhumation, being able to work only an hour at a time on account of the advanced stage of decomposition of the bodies. Many of these were shapeless, unrecognizable masses of flesh and bones, while others were little disfigured. To lessen the danger of an epidemic the bodies were buried as ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... had partially reduced the mountain of wreckage, cremation fires yet burned continuously—fed not only by human bodies, but by thousands of carcasses of domestic animals. By that time, in the hot, moist atmosphere of the latitude, decomposition had so far advanced that the corpses—which at first were decently carried in carts or on stretchers, then shoveled upon boards or blankets—had finally to be scooped up with pitchforks, in the hands of negroes, kept at their awful task by the soldiers' bayonets. And ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... advantage of not causing dirt by the earth washing out of them when watered. The explanation of the practice seems to be this: that moss rammed into a pot, and subjected to continual watering, is soon brought into a state of decomposition, when it becomes a very pure vegetable mould; and it is well known that very pure vegetable mould is the most proper of all materials for the growth of almost all kinds of plants. The moss would also not retain more moisture than precisely the quantity best adapted to the absorbent ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... by experience and experiment, of the changes that inevitably occur in such perishable nutritive substances as water, milk, meats, vegetables, fruits, etc., if they be left uncared for; and he has been led thus to the inference of the law of decomposition—or putrefactive and fermentative changes. Idle substances, like idle minds, have decomposition and the devil for companions. Substances confined in containers open to the air—ponds, cesspools, etc.—are ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... black, so deformed and swollen, that it was horrible to behold; from its nose a bloody matter escaped, the mouth gaped hideously, and the tongue was so monstrously enlarged that it filled the whole cavity; to this frightful appearance was added a decomposition so great that, although at the pope's funeral it is customary to kiss the hand which bore the Fisherman's ring, not one approached to offer this mark of respect and religious reverence to the representative of God ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... tapping now produced no effect on the dropsy. As the visitor ascended the splendid, red-carpeted staircase, cumbered with statues, vases, and paintings, he was incommoded by a pestilential odour that assailed his nostrils. Death had begun the decomposition of the sick man's body even before it was a corpse. At the door of the chamber Hugo caught the sound of hoarse, stertorous breathing. He entered, and saw on the mahogany bed an almost unrecognizable form bolstered up on a mass of cushions. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... not move. Then the priest looks at this inert and deformed corpse. He notices the fetid odor that arises from it, the odor of the slow but sure decomposition, and he has a sort of sudden revelation. The scepticism which, for a long time, has been brooding in his heart suddenly is transformed into absolute negation, and addressing himself to Him in whom he had believed, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... according to the best received theories the mineral covering of the globe is never at absolute rest; the changes brought about by the chemical decomposition of its component parts, the agitation caused by great liquid torrents, and the magnetic currents, are continually tending to disturb it -even when living beings upon its surface may fancy that all is quiet below. A phenomenon of this kind would not have greatly alarmed ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... grey—the general tint of the lichens with which the bare stone is encrusted. With this blue or grey colour is frequently intermixed a red tinge, proceeding from the iron that interveins the stone, and impregnates the soil. The iron is the principle of decomposition in these rocks; and hence, when they become pulverized, the elementary particles crumbling down, overspread in many places the steep and almost precipitous sides of the mountains with an intermixture of colours, like the compound hues of a dove's neck. When in the heat ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... that of 698, was found to contain, not indeed, as had been averred then, and even until 1539, the incorruptible body, but the entire skeleton of the Saint; the bottom of the grave being perfectly dry, free from offensive smell, and without the slightest symptom that a human body had ever undergone decomposition within its walls. The skeleton was found swathed in five silk robes of emblematical embroidery, the ornamental parts laid with gold leaf, and these again covered with a robe of linen. Beside the skeleton were ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... his shiftiness, to lie the fact of his mortality and decomposition out of existence, he has satisfied his mania for survival by the invention of souls. And so behold him—spectacle of spectacles—a chatty little tradesman in an immemorial hat drifting good-naturedly through ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... advised me to have the remains placed in the coffin at once, as decomposition would begin very rapidly, and at 8.30 in the evening the men came to screw it down. An unsuccessful photograph of Oscar was taken by Maurice Gilbert at my request, the flashlight did not work properly. Henri Davray came just before they had put on the lid. He was very kind and nice. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... late, like a penultimate branching-out of the old classical trunk, or, better still, like one of those excrescences, those polypi, which decrepitude develops, and which are a sign of decomposition much more than a proof of life—there has appeared a strange school of dramatic poetry. This school seems to us to have had for its master and its fountain-head the poet who marks the transition from the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... blue" with pickaxes, piling it up on barrows, and carrying it off to the wide fields; where it is left exposed to the sun, and, during three months, to the rain. Having been thus subjected to a natural decomposition, it is the more readily brought by the pickaxe into smaller fragments before being sent to the mills, where it is crushed, pulverized, and finally washed to get at the stones. Nowhere in the world does the hidden wealth of the soil ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... indignant and then coldly despairing; at first she thought he was cruel; then she realized, with a softening to pity, that he was only mad. He won back the pity by telling her that his mouth and throat were now in an advanced state of decomposition, having been dead many months; maggots were crawling over them, choking him. The overwhelming beastliness of this suggestion was almost more than she could bear until she realized that it must be even more overwhelming for him. By chance she hit upon the sort ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... P.! we shall see no typical characters, none of those new creations of whom people talk so much. The life of the people is undergoing a process of development and—throughout the whole mass—of decomposition and recomposition: it needs helpers, not leaders, and only at the end of this period will important, original figures appear. I have just said that you will not see them. You are still young. You will live to see the day: as for me, that is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... rock, and are not features assumed in the petrifaction of any organic body. Further peculiarities of the Onondaga gypsum are very noticeable in the block, and among them is the peculiar style of decomposition by which the whole lower part of the figure is affected, as also one side of its head. Here the soluble earths, with any portions of carbonate of lime, have been dissolved away, and the pure granular sulphate (snowy gypsum) remains, standing up with ragged, uneven, cavernous surfaces, ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... In that climate decomposition follows death so rapidly that, almost before the human form is cold, it is necessary to commit it to the grave. We agreed, therefore, that early next morning we would all go and pay the last respects to the late unfortunate ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... its infallible index finger pointing to tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles of all sorts congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no purpose. He is everlastingly ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage went through the farce of growth—that farce old and screaming, whose trite end is decomposition. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... trifles they were not in want of, into the road: which not only made it rank and sloppy, but untidy too, on account of the cabbage-leaves. The refuse was not wholly vegetable either, for I myself saw a shoe, a doubled-up saucepan, a black bonnet, and an umbrella, in various stages of decomposition, as I was looking out for ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... of metaphysics; but there was sufficient method in its madness to cause it to gain the suffrages of a large number of people. It was affirmed that those who had examined into the matter had found that the bodies of suicides were mysteriously preserved from decomposition until the day arrived on which they would naturally—that is, according to God's decree—have died. About the year 1834, I was taking a walk along the banks of the canal north of Glasgow, and sat down beside a group of well-dressed men, who were conversing on general topics, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... to wilderness. This was the summer residence of Madame Bonaparte and her family. Almost enclosed by the wild olive, the cactus, the clematis, and the almond-tree, is a very singular and isolated granite rock, called Napoleon's grotto, which seems to have resisted the decomposition which has taken place around. The remains of a small summer-house are visible beneath the rock, the entrance to which is nearly closed by a luxuriant fig-tree. This was Bonaparte's frequent retreat, when the vacations of the school at which he studied permitted him to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... of Dagara's death and burial, when it transpired that the old king's body, after the fashion of his predecessors, was sewn up in a cow-skin, and placed in a boat floating on the lake, where it remained for three days, until decomposition set in and maggots were engendered, of which three were taken into the palace and given in charge to the heir-elect; but instead of remaining as they were, one worm was transformed into a lion, another into a leopard, and ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... of the biotite has a green coloration from decomposition and is surrounded by strong ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... the decomposition of the sulphate with baryta water, is a greyish-white deliquescent solid, which melts at a red heat and absorbs carbon dioxide rapidly. It readily dissolves in water, with evolution of much heat. Caesium chloride, CsCl, is obtained by the direct action of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... substances of ever-increasing minuteness, are capable of dissolution, until the highest cause (Brahman) is reached. Earth—which is, in comparison with a binary compound, the grossest thing of all—undergoes decomposition; so do the substances following next which belong to the same class as earth; so does the binary compound; and so does, finally, the atom which (although the minutest thing of all) still belongs to the same general class (i.e. matter) with earth, &c. The objection (which the Vai/s/eshika ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... Abbe as having grown over the spot where the hospital stood is there yet, a majestic tree. The selection of a site for the little cemetery is most judicious, several little streams from the heights in the rear filter through the ground, producing a moisture calculated to prevent decomposition and explanatory of the singular appearance of the bodies disinterred there in 1855. Every visitor will be struck with the beauty, healthiness and shelter which this sequestered nook at Sillery presents for a settlement, and with ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine |
