"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... issue is as to whether or not such an activity is of consequence to the individual. The active principle of tobacco is nicotin, besides which it contains an aromatic camphor-like substance, cellulose, resins, sugar, etc. Other products developed during combustion are carbon monoxid gas, a minute amount of prussic acid and in some varieties a considerable amount of furfurol, a poison. From any one cigar or cigaret but little nicotin is absorbed, else the user would be poisoned. It is generally considered that the best tobacco comes from Cuba, and in the ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... God that is more Godlike than righteousness and love? And is there any difference in essence between a man's righteousness and God's;—between a man's love and God's? The same gases make combustion in the sun and on the earth, and the spectroscope tells you that it is so. The same radiant brightness that flames burning in the love, and flashes white in the purity of God, even that may be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been made smoke may be seen. Usually before one hundred strokes a larger volume of smoke tells that the dry dust constantly falling on the pile has grown more and more charred until finally a tiny friction-fired particle falls, carrying combustion to the already ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish superstition," but ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... N. increase of temperature; heating &c v.; calefaction^, tepefaction^, torrefaction^; melting, fusion; liquefaction &c 335; burning &c v.; ambustion^, combustion; incension^, accension^; concremation^, cremation; scorification^; cautery, cauterization; ustulation^, calcination; cracking, refining; incineration, cineration^; carbonization; cupellation [Chem]. ignition, inflammation, adustion^, flagration^; deflagration, conflagration; empyrosis^, incendiarism; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dynamic breathing, which is storing up the oxygen in sufficient quantities, to supply the tissues with sufficient fuel, for combustion. ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... would like them to. The progressive stereotype, powerful to incite work, almost completely obliterates the attempt to decide what work and why that work. Laissez-faire, a blessed release from stupid officialdom, assumes that men will move by spontaneous combustion towards a pre-established harmony. Collectivism, an antidote to ruthless selfishness, seems, in the Marxian mind, to suppose an economic determinism towards efficiency and wisdom on the part of socialist officials. Strong government, imperialism at home and abroad, at its ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Christians censured a practice prevalent among the Romans, of decorating a corpse, previous to interment or combustion, with garlands and flowers. Their reprehension extended also to a periodical custom of placing the "first-fruits of Flora" on their graves and tombs. Thus Anchises, in Dryden's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... and Man proposed, in 1878, to make the bottom plate of glass instead of metal, and provided ingenious arrangements for charging the lamp chamber with an atmosphere of pure nitrogen gas which does not support combustion. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... you that a heavy shower of rain had fallen but a few hours before the kindling of the death-pile, which, as needs must, had left the brush-wood in better condition for heavy smoking than for lively combustion. Had I mentioned this circumstance in its proper place, I should have spared your tender sensibilities somewhat by giving you something contingent to catch at as suggestive of ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... salvation both of Church and commonweal, then all his prowess was in vain. Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of formulae have been published for the manufacture of pastils; nine-tenths of them contain some woods or bark, or aromatic seeds. Now, when such substances are burned, the chemist knows that if the ligneous fibre contained in them undergoes combustion—the slow combustion—materials are produced which have far from a pleasant odor; in fact, the smell of burning wood predominates over the volatilized aromatic ingredients; it is for this reason alone that charcoal is used in lieu ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... solar energy while in a state of extreme attenuation; and that the vapours so dissociated are drawn towards the sun in consequence of solar rotation, are flashed into flame in the photosphere, and rendered back into space in the condition of products of combustion. With respect to the influence of the sun's light on geology, Dr. Siemens says: "The effect of this continuous outpour of solar materials could not be without very important influences as regards the geological conditions of our earth. Geologists have long ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... different properties. Some gases will extinguish a flame; some will cause the flame to burn brilliantly, but will not burn themselves; and some will take fire and burn themselves, though extinguishing the flame which has ignited them. We say the first are non-combustible, and will not support combustion; the second are supporters of combustion, the third are combustible gases. Of course these are, as the lawyers say, only ex parte statements of the truth; still they are usually accepted. Oxygen gas will ignite a red-hot match, but hydrogen ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... groaned Birnier, sotto voce, and he abandoned the effort to explain combustion. "Thus is it then with these that ye call ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... Combustion was lip-close when the cigar-end was thrown away. The reader of this story may be able to understand a thing its writer can only record without understanding—the fact that this gentleman felt grateful to the fine moonlight ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... or more superposed pipes provided with radiators. A gas burner is placed at the entrance of either the upper or lower pipe, according to circumstances. The products of combustion are discharged through a pipe of small diameter, which may be readily inserted into an already existing chimney or be hidden behind the wainscoting. The heat furnished by the gas flame is so well absorbed by radiation ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think—as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... some strata of the shale, that it is burnt as fuel in the adjoining cottages; the same bituminous shale is used as fuel in the village of Kimmeridge, and is there called Kimmeridge coal."* Wingen, the aboriginal name, is derived from fire. The combustion extends over a space of no great extent (see Plate 5) near the summit of a group of hills, forming part of a low chain which divides the valley of Kingdon Ponds from that of Page's River. Thin blue smoke ascends from rents and cracks, the breadth ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... vessel's carrying space, compact tanks above the furnaces hold all the liquid fuel. Pipes convey it automatically, much or little, as easily as regulating a water-tap, to the fire-boxes. Jets of steam scatter it broadcast throughout the box in the form of spray, and insures its spontaneous combustion into flame. A peep in these furnaces displays a mass of flame filling an iron box in which no fuel is to be seen. A slight twist of a brass cock increases or diminishes this flame at once. A couple of men in clean linen uniforms manage the whole business. We both concluded that it was far ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... to lamps or heaters, using coal oils, alcohol, or other explosive substances, of such a burner as will supply the vacuum made in the reservoir by the combustion with nitrogen gas, the burner being constructed as herein described, or in any other form substantially the same, and which will produce the ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... fatuus." When Mr. Young was called from his bed to pray, he, too, confoundedly astonished and at a loss for any sort of explanation, confessed that he had never seen anything like it in the sky or anywhere else in such cold wet weather, but that it was probably some sort of spontaneous combustion "that the white man called St. Elmo's fire, or Will-of-the-wisp." These explanations, though not convincingly clear, perhaps served to veil their own astonishment and in some measure to diminish the superstitious ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat of a century ago. The beams were caught in the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light and heat day by day through many years was thus heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a time long past are making you comfortable in the wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite glows in your grate, you feel the veritable ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... storms in one tea pot he would live longer. "Easy does it" is a phrase plucked from the plebeian lexicon of life, which we recommend for his consideration. If he doesn't attend to it we shall have a case of spontaneous combustion to record; and we want to avoid that if possible. There is not a more sincere man, not a man more anxious to do good in Preston than Mr. Lee, only he piles Ossa upon Olympus too stiffly, and that was a job which the gods couldn't ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... the slow carbonizing of organic material on steam-pipes? It is but recently that the hair-felt covering on the steam end of a Worthington pumping-engine, within ten miles of us, not only burnt itself but destroyed some thousands of dollars worth of walnut lagging. Cases of the combustion of these organic coverings are numerous and ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... condescended, after being inserted bodily into the lantern, to go off. Presently, however, the wind got into the lantern, and the matches being by this time exhausted, and the starlights refusing to depart from their usual abhorrence for spontaneous combustion, the judicious Tom deemed it prudent to pronounce this part of the entertainment ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... eyes became bright, his whole frame trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation. The rapid and vigorous conversion of his soul to intellect can only be compared with the instantaneous ignition and combustion, which dazzle the sight, when a bundle of dry reeds, or other light inflammable substance, is thrown upon a fire already rich ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... cut in. "You have the counter proposition of an indefinite mechanical grind in my department—which is largely experimental. If you take to it at all I guarantee that in six months you will know more about the internal combustion motor and automobile design in general than any two salesmen on my father's staff. And that," he added, with a boyish grimace at his father, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... guilty of confusing them). "Mercury" is the metallic principle par excellence, conferring on metals their brightness and fusibility, and corresponding to the spirit or intelligence in man.(1) "Sulphur," the principle of combustion and colour, is the analogue of the soul. Many alchemists postulated two sulphurs in the metals, an inward and an outward.(1b) The outward sulphur was thought to be the chief cause of metallic impurity, and the reason why all (known) metals, save gold and silver, were acted on by fire. The inward ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... headlong, flaming from the aetherial sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains, and penal fire; Who durst defy th'Omnipotent to arms. Nine times the space that ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... observer can, by attentively watching the heavens, perceive a few of those objects which become visible for a moment as a streak of light and then vanish. They are the result of the combustion of small meteoric masses having a celestial origin, and travelling with cosmical velocity, and which, in their headlong flight, become so heated by contact with the Earth's atmosphere that they are converted into glowing vapour. This vapour when it cools condenses ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... kitchen tent, where the men have supped, and send M'Barak with an invitation to the headman and his sons. The blessed one makes his way to the headman's hut, while Salam clears up the debris of the meal, and the Maalem, conscious that no more work will be expected of him, devotes his leisure to the combustion of hemp, openly and unashamed. With many compliments the headman arrives, and I stand up to greet and bid him welcome—an effort that makes heavy call upon my scanty store of Arabic. The visitors remove their slippers and sit at ease, while Salam makes a savoury ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... sea. Wherever man moves, his fire, his food, the materials of his dwellings, the soil he disturbs, all add their volatile parts to the atmosphere. Vegetation, death, and decay pour into it copiously substances foreign to the composition of pure air. The combustion of one ton of coal adds at least sixteen tons of impurity to the atmosphere; and when we estimate on the daily consumption of coal the addition from this source alone, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... know that it is in the nature of a heap of couch-grass, when kindled in calm weather, to smoulder for many days, and even weeks, until the whole mass is reduced to a powdery charcoal ash, displaying the while scarcely a sign of combustion beyond the volcano-like smoke from its summit; but the continuance of this quiet process is throughout its length at the mercy of one particular whim of Nature: that is, a sudden breeze, by which the heap is liable to ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Golding, an elderly lady, seemed suddenly to become animated, shifted their places, flew through the room, and were broken to pieces. The particulars of this commotion were as curious as the loss and damage occasioned in this extraordinary manner were alarming and intolerable. Amidst this combustion, a young woman, Mrs. Golding's maid, named Anne Robinson, was walking backwards and forwards, nor could she be prevailed on to sit down for a moment excepting while the family were at prayers, during which time no disturbance happened. This Anne Robinson had been but a few days in the old lady's ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... decomposing the light of any heavenly body to which the instrument is directed, presents a spectrum, or long bar of color. Crossing this are narrow, dark and bright lines produced by the gases of metals in combustion, whereby the celestial orb's light is generated. From these dark and bright lines, therefore, we ascertain all that is worth knowing about the composition of the sun ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Riley, in his report to the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists for the year 1913, stated that the method giving the most uniform results was that of ashing the beer with an excess of standard calcium acetate, and that while the moist combustion method in the hands of those familiar with it gave satisfactory results, the various collaborators working with the method did not get as uniform results as with the method of ashing with calcium acetate. J. Assoc. Off. Agr. Chemists ...
— A Study Of American Beers and Ales • L.M. Tolman
... formation of gases or airs, the agency of caloric, or matter of heat, generated in the process of combustion, considerably facilitates the strength of the powder, in consequence of producing the ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... of light and fire even to the present time. The origin of fire as represented in any of the myths of the superstitious beings of early ages is as suitable as any other, inasmuch as definite knowledge is unavailable. Active volcanoes, spontaneous combustion, friction, accidental focusing of the sun's image, and other means may have introduced primitive beings to fire. A study of savage tribes of the present age combined with a survey of past history of mythology, of material relics, and of the absence of lamps or other lighting utensils ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... watch in its own fob. Milton's was of the former kind, and accordingly the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in his verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they are often unconsciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin and combustion hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause; Philistia is the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Milton would have done if ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... France was in such furious combustion, and was so ill prepared to resist a foreign enemy, Henry, having collected some treasure and levied an army, landed in Normandy at the head of twenty-five thousand men; and met with no considerable opposition from any quarter. He made himself master of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... intemperate man, a few years since, whose breath caught fire by coming in contact with a lighted candle, and he was consumed. At the time, I disbelieved the story, but my reading has since furnished me with well authenticated cases of a combustion of the human body from the use of ardent spirits. Trotter mentions ten such cases, and relates them at length. They are attended with all the proof we require to believe any event. They are attested by living witnesses, examined ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen and seventy-nine of nitrogen in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... of the dirigible, soars and floats could be deduced by men of natural powers of observation and little science from the action of clouds and smoke, the airplane, the Winged Victory of our day, waited upon two things—the scientific analysis of the anatomy of bird wings and the internal combustion engine. ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... tested. On one occasion, during a scientific lecture, the experimental illustrations of which were on a large and imposing scale, the learned professor on the platform had the misfortune to crack an immense glass jar, in which he was exhibiting the brilliant combustion of phosphorus in oxygen gas. The white fumes of phosphorous acid floated out into the air, and began to diffuse themselves through the hall towards the ventilation outlets at the sides and rear. To one who knew the irritating nature of ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... of force, matter that can be metamorphosed is necessary. The engine may be perfect, the water may be in the boiler, but unless there be force in the form of heat there will be no steam; and there will be no heat unless there be fuel in a state of combustion. ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... has already reached us (from Santo Domingo); the revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe will be upon us, and happy if we make timely provision to give it an easy passage over our land. From the present state of things in Europe and America, the day which begins our combustion must be near at hand; and only a single spark is wanting to make that day to-morrow. If we had begun sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier operation to clear ourselves, but every day's delay lessens the time we may take ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... friends. Personally I am rather of your mind about the "dozen or score" of the faithful. But as that was by no means to the mind of those who started the project, and, moreover, might have given rise to some heartburning, I have not thought it desirable to meddle with the process of spontaneous combustion. So look out for a big bonfire somewhere in the middle of June! I have a hideous cold, and can only hope that the bracing air of Cambridge, where we go on ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... envelop to his nose, he distinguished the faint fragrance of pressed flowers. It was perhaps a blessing in disguise that the duty of sorting the outgoing mail did not fall to his lot. One added bit of information would have resulted in spontaneous combustion. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... friction soon brings about combustion for the larger reed is heated to such a point that the tow ignites. Leaves and dry grasses are thrown on and the Elder ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn. One by starvation, with phthisis Joe. One by chagrin Richard. One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook. One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover. One by remorse Lady Dedlock. One by insanity Miss Flite. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and not another man in the Five Towns, it was said, could do that. His slender convex silver cigarette-case invariably contained the only cigarettes worthy of the palate of a connoisseur, as his pipes were invariably the only pipes fit for the combustion of truly high-class tobacco. Old women, especially charwomen, adored him, and even municipal seigniors admitted that Harry was a smart-looking youth. Fatherless, he was the heir to a tolerable ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... a kind of doggerel Inferno, which went through nine editions, and "was the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are an unmistakable vigor of imagination ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... has been unruly: where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death; And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion, and confused events, New hatched to ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... somewhat on whom you were murdering?" inquired Mr. Tutt, finally succeeding in his attempt to make a damp stogy continue in a state of combustion. "If you murdered a tyrant wouldn't you be ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... practically constitutes a miniature conical roof suspended over the fireplace and depending upon the walls of the room for support. On account of the careful and economical use of fuel by these people the light and inflammable material of which the chimney is constructed does not involve the danger of combustion that would be expected. The perfect feasibility of such use of wood is well illustrated in some of the old log-cabin chimneys in the Southern States, where, however, the arrangement of the pieces is horizontal, not vertical. These ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... fooleries they not only set slight by others, but each different order, men otherwise professing apostolical charity, despise one another, and for the different wearing of a habit, or that 'tis of darker color, they put all things in combustion. And among these there are some so rigidly religious that their upper garment is haircloth, their inner of the finest linen; and, on the contrary, others wear linen without and hair next their skins. Others, again, are as afraid to touch money as poison, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... arcade in Kingdom-come, where the night-porter has to wear wet petticoats, like a Highland chief, to make short work of the sparks flying about, otherwise this world and many another would not have to wait long for combustion.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stars," says Plutarch, in his life of Lysander,* are, according to the opinion of some physicists, not eruptions of the ethereal fire extinguished in the air immediately after its ignition, nor yet an inflammatory combustion of the air, which is dissolved in large quantities in the upper regions of space, but these meteors are rather a fall of celestial bodies, which, in consequence of a certain intermission in the rotatory force, and by the impulse of some irregular ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... six minutes, but the fire did blaze up royally in the end. You see, it wasn't a slow-combustion-grate, and it burned too much fuel, and flared away the coal, and did all sorts of comfortable, uneconomical things. So did Jane, who had put in a whole bundle ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the utmost exertions of the body and mind together but barely suffice in so many cases, in some hardly do suffice, for the mere protraction of life; comfortable life being altogether out of the question. The course of the administration of the civilized states, and the recent dire combustion into which they have almost unanimously rushed, as in emulation which of them should with the least reserve, and with the most desperate rapidity, annihilate the resources that should have been for the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... were rather extensive and urgent, the "business" did not seem a very promising one. He glanced up at the houses as he sauntered along, appearing almost to expect that some of them would undergo spontaneous combustion for his special accommodation. Occasionally he paused and gazed at a particular house with rapt intensity, as if he hoped the light which flashed from his own eyes would set it on fire; but the houses being all regular bricks refused ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... given to gush. Isabelle will tell you it is not good form. So we keep our emotions hermetically sealed and stowed away under decorous lock and key, polite society having found them inconvenient things to handle, partaking of the nature of nitroglycerine, you know, and liable to spontaneous combustion." ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... himself daily for the volunteer cuisine of the American River. Often has he laughed over haughty Valois' iron-clad bread, his own flinty beans, the slabs of pork, cooked as a burnt offering by slow combustion. Only one audacious Yankee in the camp ever attempted a pie. That was a day of crucial experiment, a time of bright hopes, a ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... perpetually in each of us, similar to that by which coals are burnt in the fire, oil in a lamp, wax in a candle, and the earth itself in a volcano. To keep each of those fires alight, oxygen is needed; and the products of combustion, as they are called, are more or less the same in each case—carbonic ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the earth cannot increase of itself, and is gradually becoming exhausted. On the other hand, within living memory, new sources of fuel, such as petroleum, have been made available, and old varieties of fuel have been used to better advantage, as witness the internal-combustion engine driven by smoke from sawdust. Moreover, in the ocean tides is a vast energy that one day may ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... combinations, which, if wasted, could not be resupplied,—at least by any process which the great Master from whom I received them placed within reach of my knowledge. In this they resemble the diamond; when the chemist has found that the diamond affords no other substance by its combustion than pure carbonic-acid gas, and that the only chemical difference between the costliest diamond and a lump of pure charcoal is a proportion of hydrogen less than 1/100000 part of the weight of the substance, can the chemist make you ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... place, the flame itself is produced by blazing alcohol. This produces a blaze, and a hot one, too, but there is no smoke. In other words, the combustion is almost perfect, there being no residue of carbon to remain hot after ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... from the Valley of Chamouni is considered, and with justice, as the most toilsome feat that a strong man can execute in two days. The combustion of two pounds of coal would place ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... mightily press the church and kingdom of Scotland at this time. It is no small comfort unto them, that they have not been idle, and at ease, but have used all good and lawful means of supplications, declarations and remonstrances to his majesty, for quenching the combustion in this kingdom: and after all these, that they sent commissioners to his majesty, humbly to mediate for a reconcilement and pacification. But the offer of their humble service was rejected from no other reason, but that they had no warrant nor capacity for such a mediation; and that the intermixture ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... as to compare it with The Lives of the Poets, as published under Mr. Cibber's name. What became of that manuscript I know not. I should have liked much to examine it. I suppose it was thrown into the fire in that impetuous combustion of papers, which Johnson I think rashly executed, when moribundus.' BOSWELL. Mr. Croker, quoting a letter by Griffiths the publisher, says:—'The question is now decided by this letter in opposition to Dr. Johnson's assertion.' Croker's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the energy locked up in a compressed spring or elevated weight. The gun projects the bullet because of the sudden chemical union of carbon with saltpeter and sulphur. The steam engine takes its energy from the steam secured by combustion of coal or ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... second, that it did not require to have the end cut off—which might have led to a discovery of the poison. The plan also shows a certain knowledge of chemistry; the poison was not intended merely to be dissolved in the moisture of the mouth. The idea evidently was that the steam generated by the combustion of the leaf at the distal end, would condense in the cooler part of the cigar and dissolve the poison, and the solution would then be drawn into the mouth. Then the nature of the poison and certain similarities ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... state. This heat is so thoroughly merged in the compound that the most delicate thermometer cannot detect a variation. It is undiscoverable by our senses and yet it proves its existence beyond question by its work. Heat which is obtained by the combustion of coal or wood, lies also in water, to be drawn forth and utilised in steam. It is apparently a mere question of temperature. The heat lies latent and dead until we raise the temperature of the water to 212 deg., ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... St. Louis, committed an act of spontaneous combustion. When came the turn of the black satin and the bobbing curls to bend over the rail directly above him, he flung wide his arms, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... Instead of varnishing the paper to prevent the escape of the gas, and supposing, erroneously, that the fault lay in the latter, they sought about for a new gas more suitable to the paper. This they found, as they supposed, in the gas which resulted from the combustion of wet straw and wool, which had an upward tendency, they thought, on account of its electrical properties, which caused it to be repelled from the ground. It is scarcely necessary now to point out that the true ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... be surprised if the house had been set on fire," Archie continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It must have been either that or spontaneous combustion in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... scope of this book to deal with the science of nutrition; but a few general principles may be given which concern the effect upon the system of the different classes of food. Animal food requires a considerable quantity of oxygen for its complete combustion. Meat in general has a more stimulating effect upon the system and is more strengthening than vegetable food. There is, however, a tendency to eat too much meat, and when its effects are not counter-balanced ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... named the Correlation, Conservation, Persistence, or Limitation of Force, as applied to the human body and the human mind. We cannot create force anywhere; we merely appropriate existing force. The heat of our fires has been derived from the solar fire. We cannot lift a weight in the hand without the combustion of a certain amount of food; we cannot think a thought without a similar demand; and the force that goes in one way is unavailable in any other way. While we are expending ourselves largely in any single function—in muscular exercise, in ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... authors of note suppose language to have sprung up among men of itself, like spontaneous combustion in oiled cotton; and seem to think, that people of strong feelings and acute minds must necessarily or naturally utter their conceptions by words—and even by words both spoken and written. Frederick Von Schlegel, admitting ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light, endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton's emanation theory and the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks the defenders of phlogiston as well ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... nemine contradicente, and gave universal satisfaction. But the extraordinary circumstance was spread everywhere, with all due amplifications, and thousands flocked to the wharfinger's yard to witness the effects of spontaneous combustion. The proprietor immediately perceived that he could avail himself of the public curiosity to my advantage. A plate, with some silver and gold, was placed at the foot of my poor mother's flock mattress, with, "For the benefit ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... It is useless to begin the evening story with a mere announcement of the fire, for that is no longer news, and the rewrite man must find a new beginning to attract the attention of his readers. Perhaps in looking over the morning story, he finds that the fire was the result of spontaneous combustion in the grain stored in the elevator. In the morning story this fact was rather insignificant in the face of the huge loss, and most readers passed over it hastily. The rewrite man, however, who has no later facts at his command, may seize it as a new feature. ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... preserves vegetable bodies so long from dissolution in water, is what may be called the inflammable or phlogistic composition of those bodies. This composition is quickly resolved in combustion; but it is no less surely resolved by the influences of the sun and atmosphere, only in a slower manner. Therefore, to place the permanency of this earth, or any of its surface, upon a substance which in that situation necessarily decays, is to ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... a gentleman—a generous soul,' says he, quite overcome; and, grasping my hand, sobs out, 'I'll promise'. 'Done, along with you, drysalter,' says I, 'you're a trump;' and we shook hands till he got so red in the face, I began to be afraid of spontaneous combustion. 'There's nothing like striking when the iron's hot,' thinks I; so I made him sit down there and then, and we wrote a letter together to old Coleman, telling him the resolution we had come to, and saying, if he chose to bring an action ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... this technology revolution is in the information and information management areas- which, in the U.S., are heavily commercially oriented. Future military application may well be analogous to the impact of the internal combustion engine and wireless radio on land, sea, and air forces in the 1920s and 1930s. The size of this technological lead between ourselves and the rest of the world, especially in the base for new information ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... a tool which is very useful, particularly for grinding and truing up the cylinders of internal combustion engines, as well as for all kinds of bores of refractory material which cannot be handled with the cutting tool of ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... into other substances, but they will inevitably do so eventually. They're doing with more or less of a rush what all the elements are doing at their leisure. A single ounce of uranium contains about the same amount of energy that could be produced by the combustion of ten tons of coal—but it won't let the energy go. Instead it holds on to it, and the energy leaks slowly, almost imperceptibly, away, like water from a big reservoir tapped only by a tiny pipe. 'Atomic energy' Rutherford calls it. Every element, every substance, has its ready ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... tinted note with lines to "Myrtle awaking," or to "Myrtle retiring," (one string of verses a little too Musidora-ish, and which soon found itself in the condition of a cinder, perhaps reduced to that state by spontaneous combustion,) or to "The Flower of the Tropics," or to the "Nymph of the River-side," or other poetical alias, such as bards affect in their sieges of ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "The combustion of the hydrogen and of the oxygen at the point of the cylinder produces solely the vapor or steam of water. I have, therefore, provided the lower part of the cylindrical iron box with a scape-pipe, with a valve operating ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... taken now to prolong the "life" of the big guns by using non-corrosive material for the charges. The United States has adopted a pure gun-cotton smokeless powder in which the temperature of combustion is not only lower than that of nitro-glycerine, but even lower than that of ordinary gunpowder. With the use of this there has been a very material decrease in the corrosion of the big guns. The former smokeless powder, containing a large percentage of nitro-glycerine such as "cordite," ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... motor-car, or sold one, or exchanged a small one for a larger one, or had an accident, or was gloriously fined in some distant part of the country for illegal driving. Nearly all of them had spacious detached houses, with gardens and gardeners, and patent slow-combustion grates, and porcelain bathrooms comprising every appliance for luxurious splashing. And, with the exception of one son who had been assisted to Valparaiso in order that he might there seek death in the tankard without outraging the family, they ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... digests them in the internal protoplasm by the aid of an acid secretion. It breathes oxygen, and excretes carbonic acid and urea, through its whole body surface. Its mode of gaining the energy which it manifests is therefore apparently like our own, by combustion of food material. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... internal combustion engines, gasoline (petrol) motors have more of a position in experimental than in systematic mining, for their application to winding and pumping and drilling is fraught with many losses. The engine must ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... providence in this haste; for, ere I was half-way down the stair, the floor fell with a thud like thunder; and such a combustion of soot, stour, and sparks arose, as was never seen or heard tell of in the memory of man since the day that Samson pulled over the pillars in the house of Dagon, and smoored all the mocking Philistines as flat as flounders. For the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... a state of what he calls "combustion," under the tyranny of Ratcliffe. Emboldened by Smith's return, the colonists deposed the hated governor, and formally elected Smith Governor of Virginia. The winter closed in upon an "affrighted" population. Storehouses ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... substance reported by Capt. Callam to have fallen upon his vessel, near Java, "offered complete resemblance to the residue resulting from combustion of a steel wire in a flask of oxygen." (Zurcher, Meteors, p. 239.) Nature, Nov. 21, 1878, publishes a notice that, according to the Yuma Sentinel, a meteorite that "resembles steel" had been found in the Mohave Desert. In Nature, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... will burn; oxygen will support combustion; yet carbon dioxid (CO2), which is made of both these elements, will neither ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... of vapour is another fertile source of moving power; but even in this case it cannot be maintained that power is created. Water is converted into elastic vapour by the combustion of fuel. The chemical changes which thus take place are constantly increasing the atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid and other gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... greatest preventable waste of coal in a boiler plant is directly due to excess air. Excess air simply means the amount of air which gets into the furnace and boiler which is not needed for completing the combustion of the coal. Very often twice as much air is admitted to the boiler setting as is required. This extra or excess air is heated and carries heat out through the chimney instead of heating the water in the boiler to make steam. There are two ways in which this excess ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm
... out that respiration is in all animals, in the end, the same process. The one-celled animal and the muscle-cell respire in the same way, and with the same results—oxidation, combustion, and resulting waste products. In the animal of complicated structure special mechanisms are necessary that the essential oxygen be brought to the blood and the useless carbon dioxide removed. The respiratory organs or tract include the mouth, nose, larynx, trachea, bronchial tubes, and ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... and Figure 317 is an end view of the boiler and setting at the furnace end. The boiler is supported on each side by channel iron columns, these being riveted to the boiler shell angle pieces which rest upon the columns. The heat and products of combustion pass from the furnace along the bottom of the boiler, and at the end pass into and through the tubes and thence over the top of the boiler to the chimney flue. There is shown in the bridge wall an opening, and its service is to admit air to the ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... the stage in which the fuel-made steam worked machinery, which, in its turn, worked propellers; and passing into the stage in which the latent forces of the fuel itself are brought to bear more directly on propellers, that is to say, into the stage of internal combustion engines and the turbine-driven screw. The hull has changed more and more in its proportions between length and breadth since the supplanting of wood by steel. {154} Instead of a length equal at most to five beams there are lengths of more than ten beams now. This means a radical ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... molecules, or the smallest mechanically separable compounds of these atoms, are arranged and related according to the laws of physics, so as to permit or produce the play of certain forces which are always the result of atomic or molecular combination. Every motive or thought demands the combustion of a certain amount of material which has been already assimilated in the microscopic cellular laboratories of our body. Every vital activity is manifested at least through chemical and physical forces. And the elements of the fuel for ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... really be simulated only by some substance that could be introduced into the best possible of gasoline mixtures, to increase its combustibility by a hundred per cent or more. For that is what thyroid will do to our food. Nor has it only this destructive or combustion side. Withal there is at the same time a constructive action, for the process frees energy to be used for heat, motion or other need. The thyroid, therefore, in addition to its role as an accelerator, acts, too, as the efficient lubricator for energy transformations. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "It means 'Cheating-fire.' Sometimes this gas, rising to the top of the water in bubbles, takes fire (by what they call spontaneous combustion, or by mixing with some other gas, or in some other way), and then, as one bubble after another takes fire and goes flickering along, it looks as if some one were walking through the woods with ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... incensed by this interference with the prerogative of the Crown; while all ardent patriots were influenced by the unwarranted and unsolicited interference of a foreign potentate. Every element of combustion being present, meetings were held everywhere, inflammatory speeches were made on every public occasion, and patriotic resolutions were passed. Pulpit and platform rang with repeated cries of "No Popery," and echoed at the Lord Mayor's banquet, at the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... was extinguished after sufficient air had been breathed into the jar. Clearly, then, he argued, air once breathed is not suitable for respiration, unless much diluted with pure air. He argued from this that if a candle using oxygen for combustion could not burn in expired air, therefore an individual using oxygen for the renewal of the blood could not be properly supplied in a room partially saturated with the expired ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... between the skin and the muscles. Its use seems to be, to form a cushion around the body for its protection; to furnish nutriment for the system when food cannot be taken; to supply the carbon and hydrogen necessary to sustain the generation of heat, when these articles of combustion are not otherwise furnished. The med'ul-la-ry substance, (marrow,) in the cavities of the long bones, is very much ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... the Holy Land, constructed two very large ovens in the earth at Tiberias. Two years had elapsed at the time of our arrival since they had set fire to their granary; and it was considered as a miracle by the inhabitants that the combustion was not yet extinguished. We visited the place, and perceived, that whenever the ashes of the burnt corn were stirred, by thrusting a stick among them, sparks were even seen glowing throughout the heap; and a piece of wood left there ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... enriched, so as to give an increased luminosity to the flame, I wish now to discuss the methods by which the gas can be burnt, in order to yield the greatest amount of light, and also the compounds which are produced during combustion. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... is 30 to 35 per cent nickel, are used for valve seats, valve heads, and valve stems, as the alloy is a poor conductor of heat and is particularly free from any tendency towards corrosion or pitting from the action of waste gases of the internal-combustion engine. ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... to some while giving healthy exercise to others. The continual use of one set of faculties by an ambitious worker will soon bring him to grief. No set of brain cells can possibly set free more brain force in the combustion of thought than is stored up in them. The tired brain must have rest, or nervous exhaustion, brain fever, or even softening of the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... design or chance has brought you here, I stand obliged to fortune, or to fear: Weak women should, in danger, herd like deer. But say, from whence this new combustion springs? Are there yet more Morats? ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... table-cloth wet, seven of the goblets entirely empty, the eighth half emptied, and not one of them thrown over, or in the slightest manner displaced. The whole house was filled with what seemed, to the sight and smell, to be smoke; but no combustion, scorch, discoloration, or the least indication of heat, could be found on any of the objects struck. The building, in its thirteen rooms, from the garret to the ground-floor, had been flooded with lightning; but, with all its ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... it been a tiger instead of a dove, would have done the same no doubt at that moment; the dove was saved, and the heron killed. If Helen was pleased, so was not the chief falconer, nor any of the falconers, the whole German council in combustion! and Horace Churchill deeming it "Rather extraordinary that any gentleman should so interfere with ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... measures had been taken the moment the fire was discovered, it might have been extinguished, and if not, its progress might have been retarded. The ship had a large quantity of coals among her cargo, and there is no doubt it originated in it by spontaneous combustion. Some said it had been smouldering away ever since we left Liverpool. What would have been our sensations had we known that we had a volcano on board? When some of the passengers saw that the object of ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... reminded—it was not sufficient to renew the exhausted oxygen; the complete purification of the air required the absorption of the carbonic acid, exhaled from the lungs. For nearly 12 hours the atmosphere had been gradually becoming more and more charged with this deleterious gas, produced from the combustion of the blood by the inspired oxygen. The Captain soon saw this, by noticing with what difficulty Diana was panting. She even appeared to be smothering, for the carbonic acid—as in the famous Grotto del Cane on the banks ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... not so satisfactory, because the volatile constituents of such coals contain large and varying percentages of non-combustible hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Also such coals contain larger and more variable amounts of moisture, which is inert to combustion and requires heat for its evaporation. Two coals of the lower ranks with the same fuel ratio may have very different fuel qualities and different commercial uses, because of their different amounts of ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... is quickly compressed, enough heat is evolved to produce combustion. 2. Unless your thought packs easily and neatly in verse, always use prose. (Unless if not.) 3. If ever you saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you have an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. 4. Were it not for the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the harbors and the rivers of ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... scientific or literary, will not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature; the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications as the greatest teacher of young men ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... and left untenanted by fiends. The scenery of the moon, without atmosphere and without life, must be of this sort; and such, rolling round in space, may be some planet that has survived its own combustion. When the clouds, which almost always hang about the Val del Bove, are tumbling at their awful play around its precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of distant sea and happier hills that should be visible, the horror of this view is aggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... course of the Templars, and their sad end. They began poorest of the poor, "two Knights to one Horse," as their Seal bore; and they at last took FIRE on very opposite accounts. "To carouse like a Templar:" that had become a proverb among men; that was the way to produce combustion, "spontaneous" or other! Whereas their fellow Hospitallers of St. John, chancing upon new work (Anti-Turk garrison-duty, so we may call it, successively in Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta, for a series of ages), and doing it well, managed to escape the like. As did ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... had caused this combustion, plucked the roaring ostler from above Mrs. Dods, and pushing him away with a hearty slap on the shoulder, proceeded to raise and encourage the fallen landlady, enquiring, at the same time, "What, in the devil's name, was the cause of all this ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... is this stream of bad language from the Exhaust Pipe, accompanied by gouts of smoke and vapour? The engine, now revolving at no more than one-tenth its normal speed, has upset the proportion of petrol to air, and combustion is taking place intermittently or in the Exhaust Pipe, where it has no business to be. "Crash, Bang, Rattle——!——!——!" and worse than that, yells the Exhaust, and the Aeroplane, who is a gentleman and not a box kite,[13] remonstrates with the severity of a Senior ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... of combustion Explosive limits Range of explosibility Solubility in liquids Toxicity Endothermic nature Polymerisation Heats of formation and combustion Colour of flame Radiant efficiency Chemical properties ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... been established as a fundamental principle in human physiology that food is fuel. Life is a combustion process. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Small as the proportion of oxygen seems, an increase of but one-fifth more would be destruction. It is the life-giver, but undiluted would be the life-destroyer; and the three-fifths of nitrogen act as its diluent. No other element possesses the same power. Fires and light-giving combustion could not exist an instant without oxygen. Its office seems that of universal destruction. By its action decay begins in meat or vegetables and fruits; and it is for this reason, that, to preserve them, all oxygen must be driven out by bringing them to the boiling point, and ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... was passed in different occupations. The fire was kept up with great care. Particularly was the fuel heaped on for the night; and Tartlet, nevertheless, arose on many occasions to sweep the ashes together and provoke a more active combustion. Having done this, he would go to bed again, to get up as soon as the fire burnt low, and thus he occupied himself till the day broke. The night passed without incident, the cracklings of the fire and the crow of the cock awoke Godfrey and his companion, who ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... adversaries with their hellish prongs and forks and launching vainly their missiles of hell-fire, are hurled back by an invisible power and gradually driven off the stage, plunging in hideous ruin and combustion down headlong into ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... gores with this, he rolled them up and left them through a night in a drying loft, with the result that the next day they were disintegrated and on the point of bursting into flame by spontaneous combustion. Fresh silk and other varnish were then tried, but with indifferent success. Next he endeavoured to dispense with sewing, and united the gores of yet another balloon by the mere adhesiveness of the varnish and application of a hot iron. This led to a gaping ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... requires no preparation. Still others use tinder made by burning linen rags, as our forefathers used to do. This will not flame, but merely smoulders until the breath blows it into a glow. The tinder is made by charring linen rags, that is, burning them to a crisp, but stopping the combustion before they are reduced ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... small army of the United States was placed under his command. It was generally understood to be the desire of the Administration that hostilities should begin without orders, by a species of spontaneous combustion; but the coolness and prudence of General Taylor made futile any such hopes, if they were entertained, and it required a positive order to induce him, in March, 1846, to advance towards the Rio Grande and to cross the disputed territory. He arrived at a point ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... removing the products of combustion, also serve to provide the fire with the air requisite for burning the fuel. The hot air in the shaft, being lighter than the cold air outside it, tends to rise, and as it does so air flows in at the bottom to take its place. An ascending ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of heat. Yet it is not supposed that this force is a material thing which can be confined by bounds, as used to be thought of latent heat when that important phenomenon was first discovered. What is meant is that when the coal does at last, by combustion, generate a quantity of heat (transformable like all other heat into mechanical momentum, and the other forms of force), this extrication of heat is the re-appearance of a force derived from the sun's rays, expended myriads of ages ago in the vegetation of the organic substances ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... is a chemical process, it is the action of fire on inflammable substances and is the union of the oxygen in the air with the carbon in the fuel; this is called rapid combustion. Slow combustion is the decaying of wood or ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... scourges which Heaven in its fury could have sent upon earth. One fanatical or deceitful priest who has the ear of a credulous and powerful prince, suffices to put a State into disorder and the universe into combustion. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... prejudice is a wholesome one; for we all know that most of the elements forming common illuminating gas are worthless except to convey the very small amount of light-giving material, and that these elements in combustion vitiate the air and give off deleterious products which corrode, tarnish and destroy. Now though Buddhist doctrine may have been the light of India, yet to reach the Northern and Eastern nations of Asia it had, apparently, to be adulterated for conveyance, as much as is ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... and Bothwell. Shakespeare and Bacon. Correct transliteration of Greek; pronunciation of Latin. Sunday opening of museums; of theatres. The English Sunday; Bank Holiday. Darwinism. Is there spontaneous creation? or spontaneous combustion? The germ theory; Pasteur's cures; Mattei's cures; Virchow's cell theory. Unity of Homer; of the Bible. Dickens v. Thackeray. Shall we ever fly? or steer balloons? The credit system; the discount system. Impressionism, decadence, Japanese art, the plein air school. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... impression that Fothergil's fears are exaggerated; but they are very real to him. He visualizes his own soul as a fugitive climbing higher and higher, running faster and faster, to escape this Beast. Perhaps Fothergil secretly hopes that the speed of his gong will induce combustion, and he will leap from the topmost hills of Art, flaming, directly into the heavens, there to burn and shine immortality, an authentic star. Well, well, we all have our little plane, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... in his mind agreed with both. "I wonder how it happened?" piped up another artist, anxious to remove a false impression of callousness. Ishmael explained that spontaneous combustion was probably the cause of the fire, and a farmer standing near volunteered his opinion that Angwin had packed his hay damp. Everyone stood a while longer, staring; the glow had gone from the smouldering ricks, and the excitement of the event began to die in the minds of the onlookers. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and water be mixed together, these bodies thus capacitated to act on each other, are heated by degrees, and ultimately produce a violent combustion. If flour be wetted with water, and the mixture closed up, it will be found, after some lapse of time, (by the aid of a microscope) to have produced organized beings that enjoy life, of which the water ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... is the source of the sun's continuous heat. If it were combustion the Solar orb would have burnt itself out ages ago. All your theories to account for the continuity of solar radiation are in error. The release of Interatomic Energy in the sun at a definite rate is the reason why its heat never increases or diminishes though millions ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... workers were unorganized except for the fact that the I.W.W. had, about eight months before, gathered several hundred into an industrial union. Yet it does not appear that this union started the strike. It was a case of spontaneous combustion. No sooner had it begun, however, than Joseph J. Ettor, an I.W.W. organizer, hastened to take charge, and succeeded so well that within a few weeks he claimed 7000 members in his union. Ettor proved a crafty, resourceful general, quick in ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... furnaces were belching out fire and smoke, and the firemen standing in front of them, like so many gladiators, tugged away with devil's-claw and slice-bar, inducing by their exertions more and more intense combustion and heat. The noise of the cracking, roaring fires, escaping steam, and the loud and labored pulsations of the engines, together with the roar of battle above and the thud and vibration of the huge masses of iron which were ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... perpetually casting nutriment into the gulf he had opened in himself? Like some beings who dwell in the grosser world, might not he die of inanition for want of feeding abnormal and disappointed cravings? Was not this a sort of debauchery of the intellect which might lead to spontaneous combustion, like that of bodies ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... it came to be crooked; and is told that there is a thing in the world (with which his temperament has hitherto left him unacquainted)—a thing called fire. He points out, very kindly and clearly, how silly it is of people, if they want a straight poker, to put it into a chemical combustion which will very probably heat and warp it. "Let us abolish fire," he says, "and then we shall have perfectly straight pokers. Why should you want a fire at all?" They explain to him that a creature called Man wants a fire, because he has no fur or feathers. He gazes dreamily at the embers for ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... slow combustion; the oxygenous part of the atmosphere is received through the moist membranes, which line the air-cells of the lungs, and uniting with the inflammable part of the blood generates an acid, probably the phosphoric acid; a portion of carbonic acid is likewise ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin |
