"Alkali" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of Mr. Harte's demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the soil,—"Alkali Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono Jim;" fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each owned, or had owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again. They laid up on the worn benches of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck like beached vessels, and their ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... and the maid changed cars twice after leaving St. Louis and then staged it to Kiowa City, where, while waiting for "Pop" Henderson's coach to Fort Crockett, they dined with him on bacon, fried bread, and alkali water ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... open range, slept under the blinking stars, ridden forty miles a day in the face of dust and wind. She had taken two wonderful trips down into the desert—one trip to Chiricahua, and from there across the waste of sand and rock and alkali and cactus to the Mexican borderline; and the other through the Aravaipa Valley, with its deep, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less—some say more—in winter than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead that it does not boast ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... on the east and the high Sierra on the west. It is from ten to fifteen miles wide, that valley, with the Owens river running down the eastern side most of the way until it empties into Owens lake just above Keeler. The lake is salty, bitter, filled with alkali, boras and soda, and for nearly forty miles above its mouth the river itself is pretty brackish and alkaline. Away up the valley the river water is sweet but as it approaches the lake it gathers alkali and borax from the formation through which it flows. This renders it unfit ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... litmus paper," said Percy. "It is prepared by moistening specially prepared paper with a solution of a coloring matter called litmus, and the paper is then dried. This coloring matter has the property of turning blue in the presence of alkali and red in the presence of acid. The blue paper is prepared with a trace of alkali, and the red paper with a trace of acid. If more than a trace were present the litmus paper would not be sufficiently sensitive for ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... Barbee genially. 'Stack up alongside the bar and I'll buy! Moraga,' to the bartender, 'you know me. I got a real bad case of alkali throat. Roll up, boys!—Say, wait a minute. Moraga, meet my friend Longstreet.' Moraga showed many large white teeth in a friendly smile and gave into Longstreet's keeping a small, moist and very flabby hand. The other men, silently accepting the invitation, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... of experience in the hills, felt sure he could find his way back with less trouble by continuing as they were. The grass and the shrubs gradually disappeared as they walked, and soon he realized that they were on the edge of an alkali desert. Still he thought he could swing around into the valley from which they started, and they plunged steadily on, only to see in a few minutes that ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... solution. The liquid is poured into a glass cylinder to prevent solidification of the contents, and it is then placed for about one half hour in boiling water. With pure wax the solution remains clear white; when ceresine and paraffine are present, they will float on the surface of the alkali solution as an oily layer, and on cooling they will appear lighter in color than the saponified mass, and thus they may be quantitatively estimated. The author likewise gives a superficial method for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... to the sides of the vessel in which the water is boiled, and in time they become very thickly coated. Permanent hardness is caused by other compounds of lime that are not precipitated by boiling the water. The only way in which to soften such water is to add to it an alkali, such as borax, washing soda, or ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... mornings with a mind purged of worldly thoughts and commit to memory a "golden text" which they forget before another Sunday morning, should skip the rest of this chapter for the good of their morals. The rest is for you men who have kicked up alkali dust and afterwards washed out the memory in town; who have gone broke between starlight and sun; who know the ways of punchers the West over, and can at least sympathize with Irish in what he ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... reconcile things in their own nature inconsistent he has failed, as every one else must have failed. We cannot identify ourselves with the characters, as in a good play. We cannot identify ourselves with the poet, as in a good ode. The conflicting ingredients, like an acid and an alkali mixed, neutralize each other. We are by no means insensible to the merits of this celebrated piece, to the severe dignity of the style, the graceful and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... (1880) to the varying odors of women's armpits. "I have followed this fragrance in the country," he remarks, "behind a group of women gleaners under the bright sun. It was excessive and terrible; it stung your nostrils like an unstoppered bottle of alkali; it seized you, irritating your mucous membrane with a rough odor which had in it something of the relish of wild duck cooked with olives and the sharp odor of the shallot. On the whole, it was not a vile or repugnant ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is still intense, and it never rains, so everything is parched to a crisp. The river is very low and the water so full of alkali that we are obliged to boil every drop before it is used for drinking or cooking, and even then it is so distasteful that we flavor it with sugar of lemons so we can drink it at all. Fresh lemons are unknown here, of course. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... you,—alkali, rock, and sage; Sage-brush, rock, and alkali; ain't it a pretty page! Sun in the east at mornin', sun in the west at night, And the shadow of this 'yer station the on'y thing moves ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... of cotton) is dissolved in hot water with carbonate of soda crystals, or other alkali (1/4 weight of alum); work cotton in the solution, steep for several hours or overnight. Then well wash. Aluminium acetate solution as for silk (page 56) may be used. After drying, the cotton may be passed through a fixing solution of some alkali, for examples see page 50. Before mordanting ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... was it sensual; for besides That he was not an ancient debauchee, (Who like sour fruit, to stir their veins' salt tides, As acids rouse a dormant alkali,)[kf] Although ('t will happen as our planet guides) His youth was not the chastest that might be, There was the purest Platonism at bottom Of all his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... is ever "Fly not yet," will engage some sober friends to fight on his side, and at a certain hour to vote for "no more wine," and bravely demand "tea," and will select his company with as much care as a chemist composes a neutral salt, judiciously providing quite as large a proportion of alkali (tea men) as he has of acid (wine men.) To adjust the balance of power at the court of Bacchus, occasionally requires as much address as sagacious politicians say is sometimes requisite to direct the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... person; the young lady of the twentieth century has left all that far behind her," was Jess's Parthian shot, "for proof I refer you to our adventures on the Great Alkali." ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... In the alkali district on the Pecos River the dust raised at a round-up is so dense that the herd cannot even be seen at 200 yards distance. This dust is most irritating to the eyes; and many of the men, including myself, were sometimes ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... previous months, thanks to the efficiency of the Committee of Twenty-one, great quantities of liquid chlorine had been manufactured at Niagara Falls, where the Niagara Alkali Company, the National Electrolytic Company, the Oldburg Electro-Chemical Company, the Castner Electrolytic Alkali Company, the Hooker Electro-Chemical Company and several others, working night and day and using 60,000 horsepower from the Niagara power plants and immense quantities of salt from ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... man; for the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on the north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this forbidding residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and deserted, I remarked to my parents that some day it would certainly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is some time since Mr. NANI, an Italian chemist, announced the discovery of a crystallizable vegetable alkali in rhubarb. Mr. CAVENTOU has repeated the experiments of Mr. N. and finds them, in many respects, inaccurate. Upon analysing the alcoholic extract of rhubarb, by the aid of alcohol and ether, employed separately and combined, Mr. C. obtained a fatty matter, containing a little odoriferous volatile ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... of the saloon was partitioned off into a "Ladies' Room," whose door opened on the alkali flat behind. From thence came the monotonous drone of a murmured conversation. Cassidy tried ineffectually to follow it, but the droning of the voices and the steady hum of the flies around the beer lees on ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... busy working my booze hydraulic when I see an arid appearin' pilgrim 'longside lookin' thirsty as an alkali flat. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... quantity is made also at Grand Canary. The barilla of the Canary Islands has been sold in England so high as 80l. a ton, and as low as 6l.; at the present time, (December, 1833) it is worth 9l. 10s. a ton. The depreciation is caused chiefly by kelp, and other substitutes found in the British alkali, a French chemical discovery, manufactured from sea salt, from which, the other ingredients are detached, by combination with sulphur, and acids subjected to heat. The imports of barilla from the Canary Islands to this country ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... once in half a cupful of sweet milk in which a pinch of soda has been dissolved. If this is inconvenient, as it often is when one is a hotel guest and not a cottager, then use a good face cream. Strong soaps containing an excess of alkali are bad enough at any time, but during the hot weather they are particularly trying to almost any skin. Too much care cannot be taken to ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... of seaweed to spread over them, which was afterward burnt to make alkali, when we returned to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and toes cut off, as punishment for presuming to come to her without first purifying his fingers. Ever afterwards the unfortunate husband always washed his hands one hundred and twenty times with alkali, after dining off a garlic ragout, for, of course, he did not use a fork. But had he known Menander the Greek's receipt, he might have saved his digits. This was to roast beetroot on hot embers for the removal of the odour ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... mistaken. The horsemen had halted! Out there on the glaring, alkali-arid plateau, they were standing as still as so many statues. Looking toward the canyon mouth which had swallowed their quarry, they certainly were, but they were halted as completely as men ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... opportunity is afforded for the base and alien qualities to recognize each other, and clash or effervesce. Is one wise, aspiring, magnanimous? the other, foolish, vulgar, revengeful? The yoke, pulled contrary ways, must gall and irritate. Then the fellowship of husband and wife is like that of acid and alkali. But, if they are filled with consecrating tenderness, sweet patience, and earnest purposes, all possible motives urge them to adjust their characters and conduct to each other; to tune their intercourse by heavenly laws; to mingle their experience in ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... these books was an adding of alkali to the acid of Mr. Frayling's disposition at the moment, and he went down to look for his wife while he was still effervescing. How did Evadne get them? he wanted to know. Mrs. Frayling could not conceive. She had forgotten ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was in a slick alkali flat which was surfaced like steel, and no person in the party was quite hardy enough to claim an eyesight that could detect the track of a cushion on a veneer like that. The bereaved mother fell upon her knees ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a bleak and cheerless country, crossed by the ravines of a few sluggish creeks, the water of which was unpleasant to drink, and dotted at long intervals by ponds bitter with alkali. In places, stunted poplar bluffs cut against the sky, but, for the most part, there was only a rolling waste of dingy grass. The trail was heavy, the wheels sank deep in sand as they climbed a low rise, and, to make things worse, the rounded, white-edged clouds which had scudded across the ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... with the poor cooking. How often, in our stoppings, we have sat down to tables loaded with material, originally of the very best kind, which had been so spoiled in the treatment that there was really nothing to eat! Green biscuits with acrid spots of alkali; sour yeast-bread; meat slowly simmered in fat till it seemed like grease itself, and slowly congealing in cold grease; and, above all, that unpardonable enormity, strong butter! How often I have longed to show people what might have been done with the raw material out of which all ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... packin' 'em in from Gophertown, over yonder. She's about thirty miles from here, across the alkali. 'T aint a regular town, but they got grub. But if we got to comin' in regular, they'd smell gold quicker than bees findin' orange-blossoms. They got ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... advantageous proposal to Roy to travel West and operate for him a line of aeroplanes from some desert mines he had discovered on a trip which almost cost him his life. As autos could not cross the alkali, and transportation of the product by wagons would have been prohibitive in cost, as well as almost impossible to achieve, Mr. Bell had hit on the happy idea of conveying the precious product of his property ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... enables the planter to produce a drier bean, and one which has, when roasted, a finer flavour, colour, and aroma, than the unfermented. Fermentation is generally considered to produce so many desirable results that M. Perrot's suggestion[4] of removing the pulp by treatment with alkali, and thus avoiding fermentation, ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... unconsciousness, "she hadn't any trunks. I reckon she hadn't even an extra gown hanging up in the wagin, 'cept the petticoat ez she had wrapped around yer. It was about ez much ez we could do to skirmish round with Injins, alkali, and cold, and we sorter forgot to dress for dinner. She never thought, Rosey, that you and me would live to be inhabitin' a paliss of a real ship. Ef she had she would ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... And even yet, in the midst of a luxury and a comfort which anticipated every want and gratified every taste, he often looked longingly back upon the life he had left, until his nose inhaled again the scent of the sage-brush and his eyes smarted with alkali dust. He regretted the desolate prairies, the wide reaches of barrenness accursed of the Creator, the wild chaos of the mountain canons, the horror of the Bad Lands, the tingling cold of winter in the Black Hills. But the Republic holds so high the privilege of serving her that, for the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... decoction is rendered brighter, it is a mark of an acido-mucilaginous compound, which cannot be separated by acids. In this there are mostly commonly more earthy parts, which are soon made to appear by the addition of an alkali. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... of barbarian power, fury, and life, came pouring into all, and threatening to drown the world, like another flood, and sweep away the monuments, institutions, and ideas of all past time. The rolling in of those savage waves was like pouring rivers of acid into seas of alkali, and the waters of society rose and roared in foaming strife. Yet, black as was the sky, through all the dark ages, the light of the Lord shone above the darkness; and wild and terrible as was the war of waters, the Spirit of the Lord moved upon them, and brought to our times ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... decomposition. They are thus deprived of one of the four elements or principles of which they are all more or less composed. Every analysis of mineral waters in their perfect state has demonstrated that they possess a fixed air, a volatile alkali, a volatile vitriolic acid, and the phlogiston. If, therefore, either of these essential qualities is evaporated or corrupted, the water, being in a state of decomposition, must lose the ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... it is then termed chyle, which has been found to be composed of three distinct parts, a reddish-brown sediment at the bottom, a whey-colored fluid in the middle, and a creamy film at the top. Chyle is different from chyme in two respects: First, the alkali of the digestive fluids, poured into the duodenum, or upper part of the small intestine, neutralizes the acid of the chyme; secondly, both the bile and the pancreatic fluid seem to exert an influence over the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... less than a hundred miles below. Inviting, however, only in outline; in color it was a grayish buff, scorched and forbidding. The hills were yellower, and an alkali white ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... only one at the bar that showed any irritation or sadness. This railroad town was a bright, new thing for the horsemen of the trail—a very joyous thing. No funeral could check their hilarity; no whisky could daunt their throats, long seared with alkali. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... fading into ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last color forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren. Not a tuft of grass, not a stick of brushwood, not even a stone, but only the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... the remaining alkali of vegetable ashes. It is well known as a medicine, both in the form of calcined magnesia, and, when mixed with sulphuric acid, as ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... procured much soda, the glass at its point of contact with the wire seemed considerably corroded; and I was confirmed in my idea of referring the production of the alkali principally to this source, by finding that no fixed saline matter could be obtained by electrifying distilled water in a single agate cup from two points of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... curtains. The walls were cracked and dingy. Durtal recoiled after a few steps. Gusts of humid, mouldy air and of that indescribable new-stove acridity poured out of the registers to mingle with an irritating odour of alkali, resin, and burnt herbs. He was choking, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... public safety was established and immediately the prisons of Caracas and Puerto Cabello were filled with men, many of whom died of suffocation. Into a dungeon in Puerto Cabello, a Spaniard threw five flasks of alkali, thus causing the death by asphyxiation of all the ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... is seen in workers in cobalt mines and indigo works; green hair in copper smelters; deep red-brown hair in handlers of crude anilin; and the hair is dyed a purplish-brown whenever chrysarobin applications used on a scalp come in contact with an alkali, as when washed with soap. Among such cases in older literature Blanchard and Marcellus Donatus speak of green hair; Rosse saw two instances of the same, for one of which he could find no cause; the other patient worked in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the center of one of the most prosperous Stakes of the Church. It is beautifully located on a broad tableland, from which its Spanish name is derived, and is the center of one of the richest of farming communities. In general, the soil is of the best, without alkali, and its products cover almost anything that can be grown in the ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... "We had been drinking alkali water all summer, and along about midnight they began to drop out until there was no one left to face the music except a little cattle salesman and myself. After all the others quit us, we went into a feed trough on ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... throwing out great heat. Charcoal made from it is heavier than that made from any other wood, but it is not considered more valuable than that of birch or alder. The ashes of hickories abound in alkali, and are considered better for the purpose of making soap than any other of the native woods, being next to those of the ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... state. Instead, the committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn—clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at St. Jo—dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother: Somebody identified them, and the committee ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... wills of inflexible steel, to overcome such obstacles and dare such hardships. Yet there were compensations. Squaw Creek's clear, pellucid, snow-fed stream runs purling, babbling or roaring and foaming by to the right. These pioneers with their women and children had crossed the sandy, alkali and waterless deserts. For days and weeks they had not had water enough to keep their faces clean, to wash the sand from their eyes. Now, though they had come to a land of apparently unscalable mountains and impassable rock-barriers, they had grass ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... plains in that great ungeneraled army of fifteen or twenty thousand people that made the long and weary journey to the land of gold in 1849. She tells her children now of the strange, long days and months in the ox-team, passing through the heat and dust of alkali deserts, fording rivers, and toiling over steep mountains. She tells them how at night she often used to lie awake, curled up in her grey blanket, and hear the men talking together of the gold treasures ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to Benton, Heaven knows how and why, but we were a sorry-looking lot, though our scalps were intact. If in all that region there is a mountain that I have not climbed, a river that I have not swum, an alkali pool that I have not thrust my muzzle into, or an Indian that I have not shuddered to think about, I am ready to go back in a Pullman ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... oil was found to contain free acid in small quantity, which was estimated by agitating a weighed quantity with alcohol, in which the free acid dissolves while the neutral fat does not, and titrating the alcoholic liquid with decinormal alkali, using solution of phenol-phthalein as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... I know you have arsenic, Vitriol, sal-tartar, argaile, alkali, Cinoper: I know all.—This fellow, captain, Will come, in time, to be a great distiller, And give a say—I will not say directly, But ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... ultimately to penetrate to the Pacific coast, knowing that the real opportunity for the road lay in that direction. The Southwest was yet but sparsely settled; and no railroad which had as its objective the plains or alkali deserts of Arizona or New Mexico could thrive—at least it could not for decades to come. And yet in the early eighties the real objective of the Atchison system had not been determined. Having passed its original ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... shall go up as dust—' 'Awake, ye drunkards, and weep and howl, all ye drinkers of wine.' 'For while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.'—Dry? Good Lord! Ring up a can of suds, Grif. I've got ten miles of alkali desert down my throat!" ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... ridge was the high ground between Marco Valley and Hot Springs Valley. Soon the trail led down, and it was dusty. The rising sun killed the chill in the air, and by the time the hunters had reached level ground again it was hot. There was alkali dust to breathe, always an abomination. From above, Pan had espied a green spot fifteen miles or more down the valley. A number of dust devils were whirling ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... before my crowded banquet-table of misery, as I sat mopping my nose—which was getting most unmistakably rough with prairie-winds and alkali-water—and thinking what a fine mess I'd made of a promising young life, I fancied I heard an altogether too familiar C-sharp cry. So I got wearily up and went tiptoeing in to see if either Poppsy or ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... this wood-netting are never further than twenty or thirty miles apart Little hay swamps and sparkling lakelets, teeming with wild fowl, are always close at hand, and if the surface water in some of these has alkali, excellent water can always be had in others, and by the simple process of digging for it a short distance beneath the sod with a spade, the soil being so devoid of stones that it is not even necessary to use a pick. ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... common salt with Glauber's salts." "Many of the streams," the journal adds, "are so strongly impregnated with this substance that the water has an unpleasant taste and a purgative effect." This is nothing more than the so-called alkali which has since become known all over the farthest West. It abounds in the regions west of Salt Lake Valley, whitening vast areas like snow and poisoning the waters so that the traveller often sees the margins of the brown pools lined with skeletons and bodies of ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... him. There was the tree under which he had first placed him, and that was where he had seen him sitting up in his dripping but well-fitting clothes. In the rough garments he had worn and returned lingered a new scent of some delicate soap, overpowering the strong alkali flavor of his own. He was early by the river side, having a vague hope, he knew not why, that he should again see him and recognize him among the passengers. He was wading out among the reeds, in the faint light ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... rim of the crater formed a natural wall about the bowl, and protected the rich and fertile soil of the farm from the desert winds that covered other ranches with its fine alkali dust. The snows in winter, lodging in the crevices of the cliffs, slowly melted during the progress of summer, thus furnishing sufficient moisture for the vegetation growing in the "bowl"; and this provided splendid pasturage for the herds of cattle ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... left here we filled our canteens with water. Bridger told me that for the next fifty miles it was the poorest watered country in the United States. Said he: "There is plenty of water, but it is so full of alkali it is not fit to drink; it is dangerous for both men ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... by the stage thunderin' in—leathers creakin', chains jinglin', bosses a lather of sweat an' alkali dust, Monte cocked up on the box as austere as a treeful of owls. He's for openin' the door, but Peets is thar before him. Let it get dealt down to showin' attentions to a lady, an' the briskest sport'll have to move some sudden, or the Doc'll beat him to it. Which he certainly is the p'litest ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... construction of a railway between that place and Jayhawk, thirty miles distant. The route presented every inducement. There would be no grading required, and not a single curve would be necessary. As it lay through an uninhabited alkali flat, the right of way could be easily obtained. As neither terminus had other than pack-mule communication with civilization, the rolling stock and other material must necessarily be constructed ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... "paint the town red" did not commend itself as a spectacle to the householders who lived in the vicinity of Earl's Court, London, and Alkali Dick was haled before a respectable magistrate by a serious policeman, and fined as if he had been only a drunken coster. A later attempt at Paris to "incarnadine" the neighborhood of the Champs de Mars, and "round up" a number of boulevardiers, met with a more disastrous result,—the gleam ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... was not pleasant. Either Alfred or Tom usually rode night-herd on the ponies—merely as a matter of precaution—and they felt just a trifle more shut off by themselves and alone than if they had ridden solitary over the limitless alkali of the Arizona plains. This feeling struck in the deeper because Tom had just entered one of his brooding spells. Tom and Alfred had been chums now for close on two years, so Alfred knew enough to leave him entirely alone until he ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... of the Empire's overthrow, and did not propose to have him taken. Scouts, spies, the entire French secret service, delved, gestured, and sweated. But they laid bare next to nothing. At the Palacio Municipal a number of functionaries told of a peon in breech clout, a wretch coated with alkali dust till the muscles of his legs looked like grayish ropes, who had emerged from the cacti plain ten days before and come running into Chihuahua. The peon had made direct for the Palacio, where, in some way, he had contrived ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... between two simple bodies: I am Potassium to thine Oxygen. 'Tis little that the holy marriage vow Shall shortly make us one. That unity Is, after all, but metaphysical. Oh, would that I, my Mary, were an acid, A living acid; thou an alkali Endow'd with human sense, that, brought together, We both might coalesce into one salt, One homogeneous crystal. Oh, that thou Wert Carbon, and myself were Hydrogen; We would unite to form olefiant gas, Or common coal, or naphtha—would to heaven That I were Phosphorus, and thou wert Lime! ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Wolf rapidly approached it. As he came nearer, he saw that the outfit was in the center of a field of alkali and making slow and painful progress. He did not see the beef herd. Plainly, something had happened ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... pathos, bathos sacred, profane military, civil clergy, laity capital, labor ingress, egress element, compound horizontal, perpendicular competition, cooeperation predestination, freewill universal, particular extrinsic, intrinsic inflation, deflation dorsal, ventral acid, alkali synonym, antonym prologue, epilogue nadir, zenith amateur, connoisseur anterior, posterior stoic, epicure ordinal, cardinal centripetal, centrifugal stalagmite, stalactite orthodox, heterodox homogeneous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... hands with him in a sudden stress of emotion. "You'll do to take along, old alkali, you ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... alkali is one of the mildest, and for this reason is less harmful to the clothing. It is useful when an alkali is required to soften water for coloured clothes or woollens. It also has a tendency to keep white clothes a good colour. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education
... East and west, north and south, far as the eye could reach, hemmed by low, dun-colored ridges or sharply outlined crests of remote mountain range, in lifeless desolation the landscape lay outspread to the view. Southward, streaked with white fringe of alkali, the flat monotone of sand and ashes blended with the flatter, flawless surface of a wide-spreading, ash-colored inland lake, its shores dotted at intervals with the bleaching bones of cattle and ridged with ancient wagon-tracks unwashed ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... in the chain of Dry-towns that lie in the bed of a long-dried ocean, is set at the center of a great alkali plain; a dusty, parched city bleached by a million years of sun. The houses are high, spreading buildings with many rooms and wide windows. The poorer sort were made of sun-dried brick, the more imposing ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... a number of steps, the most thorough process being called the "madder bleach," in which the cloth is (1) wet out, (2) boiled with lime water, (3) rinsed, (4) treated with acid, (5) rinsed, (6) boiled with soap and alkali, (7) rinsed, (8) treated with bleaching powder solution, (9) rinsed, (10) treated with acid, (11) finally rinsed again. All this is done by machines and hundreds of yards go through the process at a time. The product ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... so much. How they lost themselves there, their efforts to extricate themselves from the desert maze, attended by a remarkable series of strange happenings, will be told in a following volume entitled, "THE PONY RIDER BOYS IN THE ALKALI." ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... quantities after meals, does not relieve the distress, one may rest assured that the fluid is an alkali and requires an acid treatment. Proceed, after eating, to squeeze ten drops of lemon-juice into a small quantity of water, and swallow it. The habit of daily life should be made to conform to the laws of health, or local treatment will ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... contagious domes over the dismantled settlements. Domestic animals of all kinds lay dead and dying in different parts of the country. Myriads of salmon, trout, bass, and other fish, which, poisoned by the alkali formed by the ashes precipitated into the river, now lay dead or floundering and gasping on the scorched shores and beaches, and the countless variety of wild fowl and reptiles shared ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... to curl up cosily in a corner and go to sleep, with a silk travelling hat or a long veil on one's head, and the stiff bonnet or big hat with showy plumes nicely covered in its long purse-like bag, and hanging on a hook above. The sand and alkali ruin everything, and are apt to inflame the eyes and nose. I find a hamper with strap indispensable on the train; it will hold as much as a small trunk, yet ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... of soaps has considerable influence in promoting and maintaining this desideratum. These should invariably be selected of the finest kinds, and used sparingly, and never with cold water, for the alkali which, more or less, mingles in the composition of all soaps has an undoubted tendency to irritate a delicate skin; warm water excites a gentle perspiration, thereby assisting the skin to throw off those natural secretions which, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... was left to recover from the sting inflicted by the Leppins, to study over the future of his youngest daughter, to keep a careful eye upon his business associates, and to combat—as one combats the alkali dust of the Plains—all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the stage when such elemental features as walls and roofs gave way to the minor considerations ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... new, uncommon weapons, Urinus spiritus of capons; Or mite-horn shavings, filings, scrapings, Distill'd per se; Sal-alkali o' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... his beard; "but Stutter come back thet way onct, from a hunt or something. He never said nothin' when he struck in, but yer could 'a' scraped alkali off him with a hoe, an' he drunk a whole bucket o' water without takin' breath. So I reckon it wa'n't ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... anything more to stir him to the fighting point, that one sentence admirably supplied the lack. "Yuh low-down skunk!" he cried, and struck him full upon the insulting, smiling mouth. "If I was as rotten-minded as you are, I'd go drown myself in the stalest alkali hole I could find. I dunno why I'm dirtying my hands on yuh—yuh ain't fit to be clubbed to death with a tent pole!" He was, however, using his hands freely and to very good purpose, probably feeling that, since the Pilgrim was ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... rode slowly into the desert. To his left, as he crossed the half-dry bed of the alkali stream, two Indian boys were skinning a rabbit alive and laughing at its agony. From afar back on the other side of the valley he heard the strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" played by the pride of ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... are widely scattered over the plains. The numerous lakelets abound with water fowl. Some of the pools contain alkali, but we experienced no inconvenience on the journey from scarcity of fresh water. The grass in many places is short and thin, but in the hollows feed for horses is easily obtained. Altogether, though the ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... and the Union Pacific Railways were united and the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard and San Francisco at the setting sun were brought into communication with each other by an iron way which has promoted our civilisation in a marked degree. A night ride over the Alkali Plains of Nevada, famous for their sage brush, was a novelty, and in the clear atmosphere they looked ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... food for a day or more, until game was procured. The poor cattle were also in a pitiable condition. Owing to the lateness of the season, the grass was exceedingly scanty and of a poor quality. Frequently the water was bad, and filled with alkali and other poisonous deposits. George Donner, Jacob Donner, Wolfinger, and others, lost cattle at various points along the Humboldt. Mr. Breen lost a fine mare. The Indians were constantly hovering around the ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... water, and filter as before. Is this solution acid, alkaline or neutral? Are you quite certain of your result? Did you test the distilled water with litmus paper? And are you sure that your litmus does not contain excess of free acid or free alkali? ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... a mineral as we have. It is a very complex silicate, containing aluminum, magnesium, sodium (or other alkali metal, as, for example, lithium), iron, boron, and hydrogen. As Ruskin says of it in his The Ethics of the Dust, when Mary asks "and what is it made of?" "A little of everything; there's always flint (silica) and clay (alumina) and magnesia in it and the black ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... dry as Texas had anticipated. Phantom Lake also was dry. Occasionally they crossed dry, ancient water courses made by the river when the land was being formed; sometimes there were glassy, hard, bare alkali flats; again the trail led through jungle-like patches of desert growth or twisted and wound between high hummocks. Always there was the wide, hot sky, the glaring flood of light unbroken by shadow masses to relieve the eye and ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... nothing but accident or a sense of desperation might land and keep one at Las Palmas. I would as soon stay there for a long time as I would deliberately get out of a Union Pacific overland train at Laramie Junction and put down my stakes in that dusty and bedevilled sand and alkali hell. And yet there is the climate at Las Palmas. And out of it are the sand-dunes ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Tester prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... for the night at Rexburgh, after forty long miles of alkali dust. The Mormon religion has sent a thin arm up into that country, and the keeper of the log building he called a hotel was of that faith. The history of our brief stay there belongs properly to the old torture ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... hike through the wilderness who that saw him staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun, stabbed by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in addition to his own load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing himself down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, praying for the arrival in camp with its paradise of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... this narrative without a further reference to the boy, Eugene Jones. During the first two weeks of the campaign my eyes became badly affected from the dust and glare of the sun, reflected from the white alkali plains on the head of Crooked River. At times I could scarcely bear the light, which seemed fairly to burn my eyeballs. From the first Eugene had attached himself to me. He would insist on taking care of my horse ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... the 888-mile post beyond Omaha, but the 1,000-mile telegraph pole and tree glided away while I was catching the lights and shadows on a fearfully tumbled landscape. The alkali has poisoned enormous tracts, and the tufts of sagebrush have a huge and sinister monotony. Looking out early in the morning there was in our track a "gaunt grey wolf" with sharp ears, unabashed by the roar of ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... solutions of carbonate of potash, of soda, or of magnesia when an acid has been swallowed, or vinegar diluted with water in the case of an alkali. When carbolic acid has been swallowed, a large quantity of olive oil should be administered. The stomach should be washed out with water, the tube being passed with the greatest gentleness to avoid perforating the softened oesophageal ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... a Europe that once seemed divided between tourists and hotel-keepers—outdash the most dashing war correspondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians are found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis with you as you do in a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... redundant acid in the juice of the cane, by a fit proportion of some alkaline ingredient to enable the sugar to crystallize: The ordinary temper, as it is called, for this purpose, in the West Indies, is lime, but any alkali will produce nearly the same effect. This subject will be fully elucidated in that part of our work which is peculiarly appropriated to the sugar ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... This is the Bitter Creek division of the Overland route, of which we had heard so many unfavorable stories. The division is really well managed by Mr. Stewart, though the country through which it stretches is the most wretched I ever saw. The water is liquid alkali, and the roads are soft sand. The snow is gone now, and the dust is thick and blinding. So drearily, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... takes an orange color, and is subsequently washed in a tank, a kilo. of caustic soda being added per 100 kilos. of jute; this amount of alkali is sufficient to dissolve the pigment, which colors the water flowing from the washer a deep brown. After washing, the jute can be completely bleached by the use of 5-7 kilos. of bleaching powder per 100 kilos. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... of soda powders will do well to inquire at the apothecaries for the suitable acid and alkali, and buy them by the ounce, or the pound, according to the size of their families. Experience soon teaches the right proportions; and, sweetened with a little sugar or lemon syrup, it is quite as good as what one gives five times as much for, done up in ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... where the initial pressure and leaking between the staves of the dry pipe were great, the escaping air and water lifted the coating into bubbles. At some points where this lifting was great enough to rupture the asphalt, and the soil is heavily charged with alkali, some corrosion has begun. ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... of Muspratt's Chemical Works at Newton, near Liverpool. Here he continued for four-and-a-half years, improving, of course, his acquaintance with the practical bearings of his favourite science, especially in regard to the manufacture of alkali and bleaching powder, the staple products of Muspratt's works. Mr. Young afterwards removed to Manchester, where he undertook a responsible position in Tennant's Chemical Works—a branch of Tennant's of Glasgow. This would be in the year 1843. While employed in Manchester he received from ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... by the Hayward patent (No. 40,407), granted in 1868, for "boiling waste rags of fibrous material and rubber in an acid or alkali, for the purpose of destroying the tenacity of the fibers of the rags, so that the rubber may be reground." But this process extended only to the weakening of the fibers, and not their complete destruction. A later patent, in the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... possibilities are simply infinitesimal, and whose developments will be revealed in glorious realization through the horoscope of the near future." This verbal architect builded wiser than he knew, for what more fitting word could the imagination suggest wherewith to crown the possibilities of alkali wastes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... is narrow and quite shoal, the channel not being more than eighteen inches deep. The bottom is composed of gravel, but having been solidified by the alkali, is like a solid rock. The channel runs in every direction and is at times diverted by great sandbars strewn with the most beautiful agates, on which no human foot had ever trod ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... double that of the zinc the battery will work without notable polarization, and almost until completely exhausted, even under the most unfavorable conditions. The transformation of the products, the change of the alkali into an alkaline salt of zinc, does not perceptibly vary the internal resistance. This great constancy is chiefly due to the progressive reduction of the depolarizing electrode to the state of very conductive metal, which augments its conductivity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... of feed for the stock was predicted, and, along much of the way, uncertainty as to water supply, other than that from the Humboldt River, which was, especially at that time of the year, so strongly impregnated with alkali as to ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... will be done in a fortnight, everybody tells you, and then everybody begins. Plumbers, masons, carpenters, plasterers, skimmers, bell-hangers, speaking-tube men, men who make furnace-pipe, paper-hangers, men who scrape off the old paper, and other men who take off the old paint with alkali, gas men, city-water men, and painters begin. To them are joined a considerable number of furnace-men's assistants, stovepipe-men's assistants, mason's assistants, and hodmen who assist the assistants of the masons, the furnace-men, and the pipe-men. For a day or two these all take ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... prove nothing, when it is so simple to have recourse to facts, which prove everything? Before declaring that the hunting insects' poison has preservative properties merely because of its acid qualities, it would have been well to enquire if the sting of a Bee, with its acid and its alkali, could not perchance produce the same effects as that of the paralyser, whose skill is categorically denied. The chemists never gave this a thought. Simplicity is not always welcome in our laboratories. It is my duty to repair that little omission. I propose to enquire if the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... foes—and the natural result. Then came our orders to hasten to the support of Crook, and so it happened that July found us marching for the storied range of the Big Horn, and the first week in August landed us, blistered and burned with sun-glare and stifling alkali-dust, in the welcoming ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... try the acid on a piece of similar leather or on a discarded book of the same color. If the leather is discolored after removing the black spot, one may apply, after taking out the traces of oxalic acid by some alkali, a coloring matter similar to the tint ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... and purifying the mouth should be free from all acids, and should be saponaceous or soapy, containing as one of the principal ingredients an alkali to neutralize the acids and destroy the animal and vegetable parasites which, as the microscope would show us, are in the secretions of almost every ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... confirmed from another which I have from Dr Black, who suggested it to me. It is an alkaline salt, found in a mineral state, and described in the Philosophical Transactions, anno 1771. But to understand this specimen, something must be premised with regard to the nature of fossil alkali. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... or wash your clothes in dirty water. Bathing in water containing much alkali (hard water) or fine sand or mud will make the skin smart or chafe easily and cause ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... constituent and effective molecules to the germ and sperm particles. Mr. Sorby made numerous investigations with relation to the number of molecules in the germinal matter of eggs, and the spermatic matter supplied by the male. Omitting the alkali, Mr. Sorby takes the formula, C{72}H{112}N{18}SO{22}, as representing the composition of albumen. In a 1/2000 of an inch cube, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... square miles. It was brought to England at less than half the freight of the East India saltpetre (nitrate of potassa); and as, in the chemical manufacture neither the potash nor the soda were required, but only the nitric acid, in combination with the alkali, the soda-saltpetre of South America soon supplanted the potash-nitre of the East. The manufacture of sulphuric acid received a new impulse; its price was much diminished without injury to the manufacturer; and, with the exception of fluctuations caused by the impediments ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... according to Berzelius ("Edin. New Phil. Journal," late number), is owing to the flints containing a small proportion of alkali; but, besides this external decay, the whole body is affected by exposure of a few years, so that they will not break with ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... knew all the time that whatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Humboldt desert one cloudless day: it was like getting on the roof of the world—the great domed roof with its eaves sloping away under the edges of heaven, and whereon there is nothing but a matting of sagebrush, looking like grayish moss, and a deep alkali dust as white ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... wanting this land. Down yonder, far away to the scorching South, at the edge of the level alkali lands, in a tule swamp, where the Indians taken from the mountains were penned up and dying like sheep in a corral, was a bold, enterprising Indian Agent who was gathering in, under orders of his Government, all the Indians ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... latest day, as was his custom, and now he was setting forth to do the whole thing at a blow, entirely planless among the guns and rocking-horses that would presently surround him. As he reached the highway he heard himself familiarly addressed from a distance, and, turning, saw four sons of the alkali jogging into town from the plain. One who had shouted to him galloped out from the others, rounded the Capitol's enclosure, and, approaching with radiant countenance leaned to reach the hand of ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister |
