|
|
|
More "Combustible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was garrisoned by about twenty soldiers, who, as the gates were burst open, stood stoutly to the defence of their leader. A smart struggle ensued, in which some lives were lost, till at length Orgonez, provoked by the obstinate resistance, set fire to the combustible roof of the building. It was speedily in flames, and the burning rafters falling on the heads of the inmates, they forced their reluctant leader to an unconditional surrender. Scarcely had the Spaniards left the building, when the whole roof fell ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... and his own Soul, by all silent and articulate voices of this Universe, to do what in him lies towards relief of this poor blockhead-quack, and of a world that groans under him. Run swiftly; relieve him,—were it even by extinguishing him! For all things have grown so old, tinder-dry, combustible; and he is more ruinous than conflagration. Sweep him down, at least; keep him strictly within the hearth: he will then cease to be conflagration; he will then become useful, more or less, as ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... should say it was. I've been worried about having him sit near the gasoline tank, it brings his hair so close to a high combustible. But it has one advantage: if we don't get home before dark we shan't need to light up. Red's torch of a head will do the trick; we can come in by the ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... of large pieces of what is vulgarly called fox-fire,[A] made into the likeness of human eyes, some material being placed in its mouth, around which was a piece of the thinnest scarlet tiffany, in order to make it appear of a flame colour. They had also constructed a large combustible ball, of several thicknesses of paste-board, to which a match was placed. The image was to be conveyed into her room, and placed, in the dark, before her bed;—while in that position, the ball was to be rubbed over with phosphorus, the match set on fire, and rolled across her chamber, ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... Suppose that all the coal seams which underlie America were made to yield up their stores. Suppose that all the coal fields of England and Scotland, Australia, China, and elsewhere were compelled to contribute every combustible particle they contained. Suppose, in fact, that we extracted from this earth every ton of coal it possesses, in every island and in every continent. Suppose that this vast store of fuel, which is adequate to supply the wants of this earth for centuries, were ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... woods which neither burn nor float. Lignum-vitae, which is one of the heaviest woods known to science, and used extensively in the manufacture of mallets, etc., was displayed; also the San Juan wood, which has lately been discovered, and is found extensively on the coast. This wood is practically non-combustible, and is said to be the coming wood for car building, furniture, and interior finishing, being susceptible of a high polish. The mahogany, for which Honduras is noted, was shown in many varieties, as were rosewood, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... circumstances, the human body, though in general "highly difficult of combustion," may acquire increased combustible properties. But this is another question {392} from that of the possibility of its purely spontaneous combustion. (See Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence, pages 424-7. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... being very dry and rendered more combustible by wax and oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once. The flames roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison wall, and twining up its lofty front like burning serpents. At first they crowded round the blaze, and vented their exultation only in their looks; but when ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... frontier line a short distance from camp, and entered a dense jungle of thorny acacia, with long dry grass almost choking the trees. They were dry and stunted, and when we dropped a few lights amongst such combustible material, the fire was splendid beyond description. How the flames surged through the withered grass. We were forced to pause and admire the magnificent sight. The wall of flame tore along with inconceivable rapidity, and the blinding volumes of smoke obscured the country ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the Bober, or Bober and Queiss, into the Lausitz (to Gorlitz, Guben, where we have Magazines for him), comes upon it from the southeast,—nobody expecting any of them. Three simultaneous Armies hurled on the head of your Friedrich; combustible deluges flowing towards him, as from the ends of Germany; so opaque, silent, yet of fire wholly: will not that surprise him!' thinks Bruhl. These are the schemes of the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ravaging and burning the town, took up a position upon a hill opposite to the citadel, and there he had engines constructed to throw enormous arrows, on which tow that had been dipped in pitch was wound. This combustible envelopment of the arrows was set on fire before the weapon was discharged, and a shower of the burning missiles thus formed was directed toward the palisade. The wooden walls were soon set on fire by them, and totally consumed. The access to ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... to which I had come was indeed a novel sight. Its buildings average in height one-third of ours, although they occupy nearly as much ground space. They are composed almost totally of non-combustible materials. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... pile of readily combustible wood was prepared. The body was taken charge of by persons chosen to perform the last sacred rites, and firmly bound in skins or blankets, and then placed upon the funeral pyre, with all the personal effects of the deceased, together with numerous votive ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... knowledge, circumstances frequently occur, in which the ebullition of party spirit is, although temporary, subsiding after the cause that produced it has passed away, and leaving the kind peasant to the natural, affectionate, and generous impulses of his character. But poor Paddy, unfortunately, is as combustible a material in politics or religion as in fighting—thinking it his duty to take the weak side*, without any other consideration than because ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... of Verrio and the chisel of Gibbons. Meanwhile a great extent of building had been blown up; and it was hoped that by this expedient a stop had been put to the conflagration. But early in the morning a new fire broke out of the heaps of combustible matter which the gunpowder had scattered to right and left. The guard room was consumed. No trace was left of that celebrated gallery which had witnessed so many balls and pageants, in which so many maids of honour had listened ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... we don't run some risk of dying of hunger.' In point of fact, there seemed no possibility of making a fire. There was not a tree, not a shrub, not a root to be seen. As to argols, the rain had long since reduced that combustible of the desert to a liquid pulp. The pilgrims were about to partake of the primitive fare of meal steeped in cold water—a cheerless beverage to three men drenched to the skin—when at the critical juncture up came ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... as sulphur, nitre, etc., and those which do not. The metals were considered to be composed of sulphur and mercury. These substances are themselves compounds, but they act as elements in the composition of metals. Sulphur represented their combustible aspect, and also that which gave them their solid form; while mercury was that to which their weight and powers of becoming fluid ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... by some warm wish or other, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left—we find of a sudden that all our gay hopes are flown; and the only slender consolation that some friend can give us, is to point where they were once to be found. And lo! if we are not of that combustible race, who will rather beat their heads in spite, than wipe their brows with the curate, we look round and say, with the nauseated listlessness of the king of Israel, "All is vanity and vexation ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... kindle, or that it would be devoid of its usual virtue. So soon as any sparks were emitted by means of the violent friction, they applied a species of agaric which grows on old birch-trees, and is very combustible. This fire had the appearance of being immediately derived from heaven, and manifold were the virtues ascribed to it. They esteemed it a preservative against witchcraft, and a sovereign remedy against malignant diseases, both in the human species and in cattle; and by it the strongest poisons ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... brother, who had had no communion with him for years, and supposed him dead. He abjured his employers and resolved to abandon them; but before coming to England he decided to destroy all trace of his combustible inventions by dropping them into the neighbouring lake at night from a boat. You feel ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls' kitchen area. Whitehatted chef like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage a la duchesse de Parme. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you can know what you've eaten. Too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... education, proper in themselves to retard the first explosions of a combustible constitution, were strengthened, as I have already hinted, by the effect the first moments of sensuality produced in me, for notwithstanding the troublesome ebullition of my blood, I was satisfied with the species of voluptuousness I had already been acquainted ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... bitterly opposed railroads as impractical. Snow, it was said, would block them for weeks. If locomotives were used, the sparks would make it impossible to carry hay or other things combustible. The boilers would blow up as they did on steamboats. Canals were therefore safer and cheaper. Read McMaster's History of the People of the U. ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... bridge over the Tennessee with combustible material, and put it in condition to burn readily, in case we find it necessary to ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... for Thuriot; new deputation of citizens (it is the third and noisiest of all) penetrates that way into the outer court: soft speeches producing no clearance of these, De Launay gives fire; pulls up his drawbridge; a slight sputter—which has kindled the too combustible chaos; made it a roaring fire-chaos. Bursts forth insurrection at sight of its own blood, (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire,) into endless rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration. The Bastile ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... The famous Li Ling once baffled the leader of the Hsiung-nu in this way. The latter, taking advantage of a favorable wind, tried to set fire to the Chinese general's camp, but found that every scrap of combustible vegetation in the neighborhood had already been burnt down. On the other hand, Po-ts'ai, a general of the Yellow Turban rebels, was badly defeated in 184 A.D. through his neglect of this simple precaution. ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... out,' said her ladyship. 'It's a combustible material. I won't have her health injured. She shall go into the world more. She will be presented at Court, and if it's necessary to give her a dose or two to counteract her vanity, I don't object. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... painful matter, this endless self-scrutiny. We are all familiar with the addled ego of literature—the writer whom constant self-communion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain. And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up. The discipline of living is a ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... apprehensions of its being set on Fire by its own Velocity, for swiftness of Motion is allow'd by the Sages and so so's to produce Fire as in Wheels, Mills and several sorts of Mechanick Engines which are frequently Fir'd, and so in Thoughts, Brains, Assemblies, Consolidators, and all such combustible Things. ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... books, papers, and property, and dispersed the inmates; while the buildings were left standing, not from motives of respect, but because they would have been troublesome and laborious to pull down, and were not sufficiently combustible to burn. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... as the "Hint Club." Its purpose was to hint to such people that they had better look out. If they did not mend their ways, it was unnecessary to inform them more explicitly what they might expect. Houses were combustible then as now, and the use of firearms was well understood. In Georgia the legislature itself attempted coercion. Paper money was made a legal tender in spite of strong opposition, and a law was passed prohibiting any planter or merchant from exporting any produce without taking ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... quietly stopped in his palace. There was a short interval of truce, but it only served as a breath to fan the flames; the citizens besieged the cathedral precincts, and by the means probably of slings succeeded in hurling combustible materials into the buildings, with a result that the whole of the monastery and the cathedral itself was soon in flames. It seems to be an established fact that the prior had placed men in the tower to shoot at the citizens, and it is conjectured that they, and not ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... sort of place to catch fire, it would seem, either," Hewitt commented. "Old ploughs and such lumber are not very combustible." ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... as there were skeptics. There is, however, no reliable evidence to support the belief in the spontaneous combustion of the body. A few apochryphal cases only have been recorded. The opinion that the tissues of drunkards might be so saturated with alcohol as to render the body combustible is disproved by the simple experiment of placing flesh in spirits for a long time and then trying to burn it. Liebig and others found that flesh soaked in alcohol would burn only until the alcohol was consumed. That various ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... supposed to have the secret of a mysterious combustible known as "Greek Fire" which was unquenchable by water. I think that "Greek Fire" was nothing more or less than ordinary petroleum, which was practically unknown in Europe in 1866, though from personal experience I can say that it was well known ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... knowledge; and their optics extend not beyond the making of convex and concave lenses of rock crystal to assist the sight in magnifying, or throwing more rays upon, small objects and, by collecting to a focus the rays of the sun, to set fire to combustible substances. These lenses are cut with a saw and afterwards polished, the powder of crystal being used in both operations. To polish diamonds they make use of the powder of adamantine spar, or the corundum stone. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... I observed that he wore a very high hat and a very short sack coat; that his waistcoat was of a combustible plaid pattern with gaiters to match; that he had taken his fingers many times to the jeweler, but not once to the manicure; that he was beautifully jingled and alcoholically boastful of his native land and that—a crowning ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... to the flames. boil, digest, stew, cook, seethe, scald, parboil, simmer; do to rags. take fire, catch fire; blaze &c (flame) 382. Adj. heated &c v.; molten, sodden; rechauffe; heating &c v.; adust^. inflammable, combustible; diathermal^, diathermanous^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... credulity as serious research, and who has recommended himself wonderfully to the good graces of the ladies, by letting them into all the gallantries, amours, debaucheries, and other topics of scandal of the court of Flora, has fallen upon a theory worthy of his combustible imagination. According to his opinion, the huge mass of chaos took a sudden occasion to explode, like a barrel of gunpowder, and in that act exploded the sun—which, in its flight, by a similar convulsion, exploded the earth, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... felt quite at his ease so long as he remembered his vast distance from the mighty capital of Media, to the eastward of the Tigris. The scratch, however, inflamed, for his intemperance had saturated his system with combustible matter; the inflammation spread; the pulse ran high: and he began to feel twinges of alarm. At length mortification commenced: but still he trusted to the old prophecy about Ecbatana, when suddenly a horrid discovery was made—that the very Syrian village at his ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... together, and disciplined and organised the city. Individual and distorted passions kindled the mighty and virtuous love of the people for the triumph of democracy. It is thus that in a conflagration the most tainted substances oft light the fire; the combustible matter is foul, but the flames pure; the flame of the Revolution was liberty; the factious might dim, they could ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... denied, however, that this gaseous oxyd of carbon (CO) is inflammable ... and is essentially different from all other oxyds, none of which are combustible. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... a good lot o' combustible matter behind, however, if there's such a fire raging in it. Who may this ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... as like a torrent, which must and will flow; but the least thing imaginable will first of all give it either this or another direction, turn it into this or that channel: or like a fire—the nature of which, when in a heap of combustible matter, is to spread and lay waste all around; but any one of a thousand little accidents will occasion it to break out first either in this ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... by him at Edinburgh a great many years ago, where he mentions, 'those impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious authour.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, Lord Hailes has forgot. There is nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness. If Lord Hailes thinks there is, he must be more combustible ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Northern summer simply "intolerable," the tropics and their environs rather allure me. True, soldiers and old residents speak of places between which and the lower regions there is but a sheet of non-combustible tissue paper. Nevertheless, the writer who has lived in both places would rather, as a matter of choice, summer in the Tropics than ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... truth are to enjoy all the good things of this world, and must use their means to bring it about. Every thing that has the smell of woman will be destroyed. Woman is the capsheaf of the abomination of desolation-full of all deviltry. In a short time, the world will take fire and dissolve; it is combustible already. All women, not obedient, had better become so as soon as possible, and let the wicked spirit depart, and become temples of truth. Praying is all mocking. When you see any one wring the neck of a fowl, instead of cutting off its head, he has not got the Holy Ghost. ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... canister were sticking in handfuls in different parts of the vessel. Three dead bodies were found in her hold, but nothing having life was met with on board. There was a tar-bucket filled at hand, and this was placed beneath the hatch, covered with all the combustible materials that could be laid hold of, and set on fire. So active were the flames at that dry season that Raoul regretted he had not taken the precaution to awaken them after he had removed his own vessel; but ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... plant belongs. We are thus driven to conclude that in most {292} cases the conditions of life play a subordinate part in causing any particular modification; like that which a spark plays, when a mass of combustibles bursts into flame—the nature of the flame depending on the combustible matter, and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... his broiled bone, nothing on the face of the earth could prevent it but the want of anything to broil, or the immediate want of his teeth; and as his masticators were in order, and something in the house which could carry mustard and pepper, the invalid primed and loaded himself with as much combustible matter as exploded in a fever ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... old-fashioned breadth, depth, and spaciousness, far within which lay what seemed the butt of a good-sized oak-tree, with the moisture bubbling merrily out at both ends. It was now half an hour beyond dusk. The blaze from an armful of substantial sticks, rendered more combustible by brushwood and pine, flickered powerfully on the smoke-blackened walls, and so cheered our spirits that we cared not what inclemency might rage and roar on the other side of our illuminated windows. A yet sultrier ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ending in le commonly have the accent on the first syllable, as amicable, unless the second syllable have a vowel before two consonants, as combustible. ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... reduced to a further pre-existing cause, from which it follows of necessity. For instance, that some terrestrial body take fire in the higher regions of the air and fall to the earth, is caused by some heavenly power: again, that there be on the surface of the earth some combustible matter, is reducible to some heavenly principle. But that the burning body should alight on this matter and set fire to it, is not caused by a heavenly body, but is accidental. Consequently not all the effects of heavenly bodies result ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... action, and laid her alongside L'Orient. One particular only I shall add to the known account of the memorable engagement between these ships, and this I received from Sir Alexander Ball himself. He had previously made a combustible preparation, but which, from the nature of the engagement to be expected, he had purposed to reserve for the last emergency. But just at the time when, from several symptoms, he had every reason to believe that the enemy would soon ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... morning eight ships smeared all over the outside with pitch and rosin, their ordnance loaded with stones and bullets and filled with sulphur and other materials suddenly combustible glided out from among the English fleet and took their way silently toward the Spanish ships lying so serenely at anchor. The night was cloudy. The moon was late in its last quarter and did not rise till morning. The darkness favored their ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... constitutes the elementary tissues of vegetable? This substance is found quite pure in many bodies, especially in cotton, which is nothing more than the down of the seeds of the cotton plant. Now cotton, combined with cold nitric acid, become transformed into a substance eminently insoluble, combustible, and explosive. It was first discovered in 1832, by Braconnot, a French chemist, who called it xyloidine. In 1838 another Frenchman, Pelouze, investigated its different properties, and finally, in 1846, Schonbein, professor ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... of good will on the part of the mob to the undertaking; far from it, and they proceeded in the work con amore. They worked together with right good will, and the result was soon seen by the heaps of combustible materials that were collected in a short time from all ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... London an almost universal absence of wooden additions and outbuildings, and the New York ash barrel or box kept in the house is also unknown. The local authorities in London keep a strict watch over the manufacture or storage of combustible materials in populous parts of the city. Although overhead telegraph wires are multiplying to an alarming extent in London, their number is nothing to be compared to their bewildering multitude in New York, where their presence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... was now becoming exceedingly hot; and as, at this season of the year, the heat of the sun was so intense that every substance became a combustible, and a single spark, if exposed to the air, in a moment became a flame, much evil was to be dreaded from fire. On the east side of the town of Sydney, a fire, the effect of intoxication or carelessness, broke out among the convicts' houses, when three of them were ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... that the man must be very angry and that the sounds and flashes were the result of throwing or rolling heavy or combustible articles of furniture as he had so repeatedly known his mother and uncle to do. As such a view of life was all that he knew, it was not strange that he could make no ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... gave way, and plunged the victim into a depth of twenty feet. But the contriver was not satisfied with his attempt to break the bones of the unfortunate person whom he thus entrapped. He managed to have a small chamber filled with some combustible in the side of the pit, which was to be set on fire, and, on the return of the platform to its place, suffocate his detenu with smoke. Whether he had performed any previous atrocities in this way, or whether the present instance ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... its elements into two portions; one part is oxygenated at the expense of the other, so as to form carbonic acid; while the other part, being disoxygenated in favour of the latter, is converted into the combustible substance called alkohol; therefore, if it were possible to re-unite alkohol and carbonic acid together, we ought to ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Lelia Dante, for instance, who writes like a—like a—well, you know how she writes. She sticks to her mother's apron strings like a four-year-old child. They never are seen apart, I am told. Then there is Mrs. Helen Walker Wilbur, the poetess. We have a volume of her verse that is positively combustible from its own heat. The sheets had to be run off the press soaked in water to keep them from igniting. The room was full of steam all the time the work was going on. Warm! I should say so! Now, that woman is vain, and she dresses foolishly, ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... always eaten it dressed, it would be raw. It is remarkable that the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego produce fire from a spark by collision, and that the happier natives of this country, New Zealand and Otaheite, produce it by the attrition of one combustible substance against another: Is there not then some reason to suppose that these different operations correspond with the manner in which chance produced fire in the neighbourhood of the torrid and frigid zones? ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... table of nineteen instances, from the Dictionnaire de Medecine,—not, however, of spontaneous combustion exactly, but of something akin to it; namely, the rapid ignition of the human body (which per se is not combustible) by contact with flame, as a consequence of the saturation ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... the ceremony of cremating the dead is going on at all hours of the day and night. Seven corpses were brought in and placed upon the pyres, built up of unsawed cord wood in cob style, raised to the height of four feet, the fire being applied to a small handful of specially combustible material at the bottom. The whole was so prepared as to ignite rapidly, and in a very few moments after the torch was applied to it, the pile was wreathed in the devouring element. The atmosphere was impregnated with offensive odors, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... this danger. Her mother was one of those who throw out terrible possibilities, miserable probabilities, unfortunate chances of all kinds, as a rocket throws out sparks; but if the sparks light on some combustible matter, they smoulder first, and burst out into a frightful flame at last. Margaret was glad when, her filial duties gently and carefully performed, she could go down into the study. She wondered how her father and Higgins had ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... juiciness and nutritiousness are visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad in the portentous panoply of indigestion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... second mate's boat out of water again, showing that they over-drink their allowance. The captain spoke pretty sharply to them.' It is true: I have the remark in my old note-book; I got it of the third mate in the hospital at Honolulu. But there is not room for it here, and it is too combustible, anyway. Besides, the third mate admired it, and what he admired he was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... puzzle it out soon. Get your floating mines ready," ordered Captain Blaise. That was my work, and in anticipation of it I had knocked together two small rafts loaded with explosives and a large one with explosives and combustible stuff to burn brightly for half an hour ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... forthwith sent to Newgate, and there were other arrests, which did but inflame the smouldering rage of the mob. Some of the wealthier foreigners, taking warning by the signs of danger, left the City, for there could be no doubt that the whole of London and the suburbs were in a combustible condition of discontent, needing only a spark to set ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... duty it was to lower the flag of America, and substitute that of England in its place. On the approach, however, of an overwhelming army of the enemy in the autumn of the ensuing year it was abandoned by our troops, after having been dismantled and reduced, in its more combustible parts, to ashes. The Americans, who have erected new fortifications on the site of the old, still retain possession of a post to which they attach considerable importance, from the circumstance of its being a key to the more western ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... to each bring his own candle or small lantern, not for illumination but for safety. When the visitors have arrived on the lower platform, which is near the middle of the eastern side against the wall, the guide, who has not descended the steps, lights a basket of shavings or other quick combustible on the platform above. The effect is instantaneous and magical. Suddenly from an obscurity so profound that only the outline of the nearest columns can be faintly discerned by the flicker of a candle, the entire maze of columns flashes into being ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... "is obtained in perfect purity in different things, especially in cotton, which is nothing but the skin of the seeds of the cotton plant. Now cotton, combined with cold nitric acid, is transformed into a substance eminently insoluble, eminently combustible, eminently explosive. Some years ago, in 1832, a French chemist, Braconnot, discovered this substance, which he called xyloidine. In 1838, another Frenchman, Pelouze, studied its different properties; and lastly, in 1846, Schonbein, professor of chemistry at Basle, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... years 716-717 A.D. the city had to face a combined attack by a Moslem navy and army. The eastern emperor, Leo the Isaurian, conducted a heroic defense, using with much effectiveness the celebrated mixture known as "Greek fire." This combustible, probably composed of sulphur, naphtha, and quicklime, was poured or hurled on the enemy's ships in order to burn them. "Greek fire," the rigors of an uncommonly severe winter, and timely aid from the Bulgarians at ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... made him forget his wine and his cigar. He emptied the glass at a single draught, but it proved far more difficult to light the cigar. "Zounds! this is a non-combustible," he growled. "When I arrive at smoking ten sous cigars, I sha'n't come ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... ascribed to the mirrors of Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse. While incompetent to produce the faintest glimmer of light, or to affect the most delicate air-thermometer, they will inflame paper, burn up wood, and even ignite combustible metals. When they impinge upon a metal refractory enough to bear their shock without fusion, they can raise it to a heat so white and luminous as to yield, when analysed, all the colours of the spectrum. In this way the dark rays emitted by the incandescent carbons are ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... have been anticipated that beds of coal would, from their combustible nature, be affected in an extraordinary degree by the contact of melted rock. Accordingly, one of the greenstone dikes of Antrim, on passing through a bed of coal, reduces it to a cinder for the space of nine feet on each side. At Cockfield Fell, in the north ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... combustible is still so precious, that when gathered up, ground anew with paper and sawdust, and at length amalgamated with a mucilaginous water composed of soaked flax-seed, one finally obtains a kind of pulp that one tries vainly to make ignite, but which obstinately refuses to do so, though examples ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... as if to gather strength for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered, and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through the woods or over the lake. Here the fiery billow, as if governed ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Continentals had evidently left behind as being of a type too heavy to drag with them on their hasty march to Morristown. Beside the cannon Molly also saw a lighted fuse slowly burning down at one end. She had a temptation as she looked at the piece of rope soaked in some combustible, lying there ready to achieve its purpose. She stooped over Dilwyn again, then she rose and went to the cannon, fuse in hand. In a half-second the booming of the great gun shook the battle-field—Molly had touched it off, and at exactly the right moment, for even then the advance guard of ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... unmitigated villain!" So saying, the officer produced the small bottle which had been taken from the unfortunate traveller, and added: "You see this? You had it in your pocket. Now, don't attempt to deceive me, for I know very well what is the nature of the green liquid which it contains—it is a combustible fluid with which you wanted to set fire to ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... wit enough left to count the winnings of his wager. Young Lieutenant Blood stood up on his chair and bawled out some monstrous bad-writ verse to "a fair-dark lady"—whatever that meant—"who was as cold as ice and combustible as gunpowder." Healths were drunk to His Majesty King Charles, to His Royal Highness the Duke of York, to our councillors of the Company, to our governors of the fur-posts, and to the captains. Then the Duke of York himself lifted the cup to Pierre Radisson's honour; whereat the young courtiers ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... this substantial form is. Still we do not know what its capacities of physical action and passion may be. We shall find them out by observing it in relation to different 'natures'. It turns out to be combustible by fire, resistant to water, tractable to the carpenter's tools, intractable to his digestive organs, harmless to ostriches, nourishing to wood-beetles. Each of these capacities of the wood is distinct; we cannot relate them intelligibly to one another, nor ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to these two infernal machines, or "hell-burners," as they were called, a fleet of thirty-two smaller vessels was prepared. Covered with tar, turpentine, rosin, and filled with inflammable and combustible materials, these barks were to be sent from Antwerp down the river in detachments of eight every half hour with the ebb tide. The object was to clear the way, if possible, of the raft, and to occupy the attention of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... be well, before the subject of the church raised by Mr. Johnson is finally quitted, to acquaint the reader with its fate. In 1798, after having stood only five years, it was discovered one evening to be on fire, and, all efforts to save it proving useless, from the combustible nature of the materials, it was consumed in an hour. "This was a great loss," observes the historian of the colony, "for during the working days of the week the building was used as a school, in which from 150 to 200 children were educated, under the immediate inspection of Mr. ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... away to the westward they could see flames shooting from the windows of a warehouse. Its contents must have been highly combustible, for they were burning like chaff in a furnace draught. As they stood and watched the conflagration a second explosion occurred, and so close at hand that the ground seemed to rock beneath their feet. And with that Nanna's heart grew faint within her, for now she knew certainly that they were ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... of summer, and especially after the excessive dryness occasioned by the hot winds, the whole face of the country becomes, as it were, combustible, and bush-fires have at such times burst forth apparently spontaneously, and spread with great rapidity. The "Black Thursday" of the colony, some fifteen years since, when fire covered many hundreds of miles, is still remembered with horror; but, as settlement and cultivation have extended, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... well as men, which survive their martyrdom, and are not burnt, but crowned by the flames that encircle them. The Church of Rome has quickly felt there was nothing combustible but the paper. The truth flew upward like the angel from Manoah's sacrifice, untouched by the fire, and unsullied by the smoke, and found a safe refuge at the footstool ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... my settlement, about forty yards from the creek of St. John, till I could build my house, and lodging {19} for my people. As my hut was composed of very combustible materials, I caused a fire to be made at a distance, about half way from the creek, to avoid accidents: which occasioned an adventure, that put me in mind of the prejudices they have in Europe, from the relations that are commonly current. ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... fear," said my strange companion; "it is only imprudence that makes victims. Olivari, who perished at Orleans, ascended in a mongolfier made of paper; his car, suspended below the chafing-dish, and ballasted with combustible materials, became a prey to the flames! Olivari fell, and was killed. Mosment ascended at Lille, on a light platform; an oscillation made him lose his equilibrium. Mosment fell, and was killed. Bittorf, at Manheim, saw his paper balloon take fire ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... another peculiarity. Fish contains a large quantity of phosphorus and hydrogen, that is to say of the two most combustible things in nature. Fish therefore is a most heating diet. This might legitimate the praise once bestowed on certain religious orders, the regime of whom was directly opposed to the commonly esteemed ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... intermittent, isolated fires, which are extinguished or go out of themselves; but, a moment after, in the same place, or very near it, the sparks again appear. Their number, like their recurrence, shows the vastness, depth, and heat of the combustible matter, which is about to explode. In the four months, which precede the taking of the Bastille, over three hundred outbreaks may be counted in France. They take place from month to month and from week to week, in Poitou, Brittany, Touraine, Orleanais, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... [Sidenote: The 28 of Iuly.] and for that cause (according to her Maiesties prescription) he tooke forthwith eight of his woorst and basest ships which came next to hand, and disburthening them of all things which seemed to be of any value, filled them with gun-powder, pitch, brimstone, and with other combustible and firy matter; and charging all their ordinance with powder, bullets, and stones, he sent the sayd ships vpon the 28 of Iuly being Sunday, about two of the clocke after midnight, with the winde and tide against the Spanish fleet: which ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... was caught by a sudden flare of light a few miles across the plain. "Look over there—that ship is still flaming—reddish, but almost colorless. Looks like a gas flame, with a bit of calcium in it. Almost as if the air in the ship were combustible. If we should do any exploring in this baby, I suggest we use altitude suits—they can't do any harm in ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... lignite. The fuel ratio measures roughly the heat or calorific power of the coal, in other words, its fuel value. However, some bituminous coals have a higher calorific power than some anthracites, because a large part of their volatile matter is combustible and yields more heat than the corresponding weight of fixed carbon in the anthracite. The fuel ratio pretty well discriminates coals of the higher ranks, and gives a classification corresponding roughly with their commercial uses. For the ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... and its life was noisy enough for any man. There came a day when the neighboring mines shut down and the little smelter which furnished a livelihood for the honest members of the population went out of business; later the Apaches erased everything that was combustible from the landscape and the elements finished ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... mad, thin? He's a broth of a boy; and I'll tell ye. Shure he knows all about the red-coats, case he's an arthillery man himself, and that's the way he's found out his gran' combustible." ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... and on the spur of the moment, they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in God, this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted. You ask me if anything transpires here on the subject of South America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only. But this country probably will join the extinguishers. The want of facts worth communicating to you, has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, when ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... collecting the by-products; the interest on the first cost of the plant, which is considerable, and probably some outlay for repairs in excess of that in the case of ordinary ovens, has also to be charged. Mr. Jameson takes credit for the combustible gas, which is used up in the Carves ovens, but which remains over in his process, and is available, though not nearly all consumed, in raising steam for the various purposes of a colliery, including, no doubt, before long, the generation of electricity for its illumination. It ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... found evidence of a hasty flight of the Confederates. By a detour we came into a valley flanked to the east by Raccoon Mountain, and we visited a large saltpetre works at Nick-a-Jack Cave. These works we destroyed by breaking the large iron kettles and by burning all combustible structures. A portion of the detachment was sent under cover of the thick woods to the railroad east of Shellmound, a station near the river, where we expected to cut off a train of cars engaged in loading, for removal, supplies of provisions. The engineer, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... against each other as they fell, broke into countless fragments, emitting sparks of fire, which caught whatever was combustible within their reach; and along the plains beyond the city the darkness was now terribly relieved, for several houses, and even vineyards, had been set on flames; and at various intervals the fires rose sullenly and fiercely against the solid gloom. To add to this partial ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... of a three electrode vacuum tube exactly like the vacuum tube detector described in Chapter VIII and pictured in Fig. 38, except that instead of being filled with a non-combustible gas it is evacuated, that is, the air has been completely pumped out of it. The gas filled tube, however, can be used as an amplifier and either kind of tube can be used for either radio frequency or audio frequency amplification, though with the exhausted tube it is easier to obtain ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... on four little paperclips," he said, crawling from beneath her. "She's a wicker-willow lunch-basket below. She's a runnin' miracle. Have you had this combustible ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... most with those Passages in this Description which carry in them a greater Measure of Probability, and are such as might possibly have happened. Of this kind is his first mounting in the Smoke that rises from the Infernal Pit, his falling into a Cloud of Nitre, and the like combustible Materials, that by their Explosion still hurried him forward in his Voyage; his springing upward like a Pyramid of Fire, with his laborious Passage through that Confusion of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... chamber, between four bare walls—her utter destitution having, as we have already stated, driven her to the frightful alternative of denuding the very apartment which was destined to witness her death-agony of every combustible article that it contained, in order by such means to prepare the scanty meal that she could still command—and on a wretched bed which one of her own lackeys would, in her period of power, have disdained to occupy; childless, or worse than childless; homeless, hopeless, and heart-wrung, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... substances were heaped over them to a considerable height, and then Ghee, or melted preserved butter, poured on the top. Two bamboos were then put over them and held fast down, and fire put to the pile, which immediately blazed very fiercely, owing to the dry and combustible materials of which it was composed. No sooner was the fire kindled than all the people set up a great shout—Hurree-Bol, Hurree-Bol, which is a common shout of joy, and an invocation of Hurree, or Seeb. It was impossible ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... curling fronds; and where I do not cut, the foresters and miners will be preparing heaps to carry away for litter and bedding. By the end of July the forest beneath the oaks will be covered with a carpet of stuff as combustible as tinder. Let us but fire it at Newnham, Littledean, Blakeney, Coleford, and at Speech by the courthouse, and we shall lay tens of thousands of oaks in blackened ruin. Philip of Spain has but to scatter the present small navy of England, ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... too earnestly request your attention to the necessity of providing a more secure building for this Department. The danger of destruction to which its important books and papers are continually exposed, as well from the highly combustible character of the building occupied as from that of others in the vicinity, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... a smile of patronising pity on his face. It was the smile that touched to life the mass of combustible material that had been accumulating for the last hour in Cameron's soul. Instead of following the boy, he turned with a swift movement back to the manager's desk, laid his sheaf of letters down on Mr. Bates' papers, and, leaning over the ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp. Capt. Anthony could be kind, and, at times, he even showed an affectionate disposition. Could the reader have seen him gently leading me by the hand—as he sometimes did—patting me ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... arrived. And after groping some distance along the trench, he found the depth diminished, but the fire was not three hundred paces distant. His heart sank within him. But when on the eve of returning to his former position, with a resolution to remove as much of the combustible matter as possible, a gleam of joy spread over his features, as, casting a glance in a contrary direction from that they had recently pursued, he beheld the identical mound he had ascended before dark, and from which his unsteady and erratic riding ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... fatiloquent soothsayers, interpret all things to the best. Will you teach me, quoth Panurge, how to discern flies among milk, or show your father the way how to beget children? He is, by the virtue of God, an arrant heretic, a resolute, formal heretic; I say, a rooted, combustible heretic, one as fit to burn as the little wooden clock at Rochelle. His soul goeth to thirty thousand cartsful of devils. Would you know whither? Cocks-body, my friend, straight under Proserpina's close-stool, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and was observed at different extremities of the kingdom. The sound of an explosion was heard through Devon and Cornwall, and along the opposite coast of Bretagne. Halley conjectured this and similar displays to proceed from combustible vapors aggregated on the outskirts of the atmosphere, and suddenly set on fire by some unknown cause. But since his time, the fact has been established, of the actual fall of heavy bodies to the earth from ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... related that at the siege of Tyre, when a mole was being constructed to join that city to the continent, the inhabitants, having loaded a large ship heavily by the stern with sand and stones, for the purpose of raising her head out of the water, and having filled her with all sorts of combustible matter, they drove her violently with sails and oars against the mole, when they set fire to her, the seamen escaping in their boats. The mole being in a great measure built of wood, with wooden towers on it, was by this device utterly destroyed. Thus we see ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... five miles they had laid a blanket of non-combustible gases. For five minutes, perhaps, their course could be seen. And at the end of that time it was as it had been before, and the ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... completed. For the accomplishment of their purpose, they resolved to employ a fire-ship.[14383] Selecting one of the largest of their horse-transports, they stowed the hold with dry brushwood and other combustible materials; and erecting on the prow two masters, each with a projecting arm, attached to either a cauldron, filled with bitumen and sulphur, and with every sort of material apt to kindle and nourish flame. By loading the stern ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... prevent the ball from entering the piece; it is found, however, that the windage is still sufficient for loading with facility. These red-hot balls are principally used to fire wooden buildings, ships, and other combustible matter. They are therefore much used as a projectile for coast defence, and all fortifications on the seaboard should be provided with furnaces and grates, arranged so as to heat them with ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... Lord Lucas, Constable of it, upwards of twenty Thousand Barrels of Gun-powder, in that they call the White-Tower, when all at once the middle Flooring did not only give way, or shrink, but fell flat down upon other Barrels of Powder, together with many of the same combustible Matter which had been placed upon it. It was a Providence strangely neglected at that Time, and hardly thought of since; But let any considerate Man consult the Consequences, if it had taken fire; perhaps to ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... been left to continue, Barrent would have been burned to death, for the Arena was nearly filled with the highly combustible vines. But the flames were endangering the wooden walls of the Arena. The Tetrahyde guard detachment put the fire out in time to save ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... Seeing Pipa busy about the fountain, the women, thought Fra Pacifico, were safe; so Fra Pacifico strode off on his strong legs to see what could be done to quench the fire, and save, if possible, the more combustible villa. Surely the villa must be consumed! The smoke now darkened the heavens. The flames belted the thick tower-walls as with a burning girdle. Showers of sparks and flames rose out from each aperture with sudden bursts, revealing every detail on the gray old walls; moss ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... league from the town, which he observed, almost in a moment, to flash from one end of the dorf to the other, consuming all in its way,—and thus it was said to have been in these suburbs. The reason thereof is the combustible matter whereof their houses are built, being of fir timber and boards, which, especially being old, do suddenly take fire, and violently burn, hard to be quenched, few houses escaping, especially in the dorfs, where one is ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... other nations. A cloud has been for some time hanging over the European world. If it should break forth into a storm, who can insure us that in its progress a part of its fury would not be spent upon us? No reasonable man would hastily pronounce that we are entirely out of its reach. Or if the combustible materials that now seem to be collecting should be dissipated without coming to maturity, or if a flame should be kindled without extending to us, what security can we have that our tranquillity will long remain undisturbed from some other cause or from some other quarter? Let us recollect ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... of intercourse with Italy and Asia Minor. The constant readiness of these men moving to and fro to carry everywhere sparks from the scene of conflagration tended in a high degree to excite apprehension, especially at a time when so much combustible matter was everywhere accumulated ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... build large but low hearths on the ground of small wood, sticks, and other inflammable rubbish and refuse, on which they place the newly formed articles, and then set the floor on fire, until the whole is thoroughly burnt. Fragments of broken objects, etc., are not removed. The combustible material is thus reduced to ashes, and the broken pieces remain within them; their convex surfaces, of course, falling outwards, and thus resting on the floor. In this manner a thick layer of ashes and charcoal, with pottery, is easily formed. ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... under the waves like the coalfields at Newcastle. Here, dressed in diving suits, pick and mattock in hand, my men go out and dig this carbon fuel for which I don't need a single mine on land. When I burn this combustible to produce sodium, the smoke escaping from the mountain's crater gives it the appearance of a ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Bog and Pet withdrew, and had hardly reached the foot of the tower, when the musical thunder of the great bell announced the constantly reiterated story of a fire in the Seventh—that most combustible of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... gallery construction are likewise of ornate treatment. All exterior doors and trim are of metal and all interior carpenter work is done with Kalomein iron protection, so that the building, in its strictest sense, will contain no combustible material. ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... this ethereal explosion from that of most other bodies; and seems to have been the cause, which prevented the ingenious Dr. Franklin, and others since his time, from ascribing the powerful effects of the electric battery, and of lightning in bursting trees, inflaming combustible materials, and fusing metals, to chemical explosion; which it resembles in every other circumstance, but in the manner of the previous condensation of the materials, so as violently to attract each other, and suddenly set at liberty the heat and ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... quicker than that supplied by seed trees afterward. Nor is the system feasible where there is much fir or other species less fire-resisting than pine. It is dangerous in practice except where there is very little combustible matter on the ground and fire is generally easy of control, and exceedingly dangerous to advocate because serves as a pretext and example for indiscriminate carelessness with fire under all conditions. Finally, the alleged immunity of pine from injury by ground fires ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... adventurers to sweep as with the besom of destruction every object and monument of art which stood in their way. Cortez razed the walls of ancient Mexico to the ground as he entered it, and his zealous followers committed to the flames whatever was light and combustible. This spirit marked the entire conquest which was carried on under the triple mania of religious bigotry, the lust of gold, and the unchastened spirit of national robbery. We have to glean for facts among that which is left. It is still an interesting field, but it has ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... ratio than lignite. The fuel ratio measures roughly the heat or calorific power of the coal, in other words, its fuel value. However, some bituminous coals have a higher calorific power than some anthracites, because a large part of their volatile matter is combustible and yields more heat than the corresponding weight of fixed carbon in the anthracite. The fuel ratio pretty well discriminates coals of the higher ranks, and gives a classification corresponding roughly with their commercial uses. For ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... had been thought so necessary a measure by all the chieftains, that even Oubacha himself was the first to authorize the act by his own example. He seized a torch previously prepared with materials the most durable as well as combustible, and steadily applied it to the timbers of his own palace. Nothing was saved from the general wreck except the portable part of the domestic utensils, and that part of the woodwork which could ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... their place, they become thinner every year; and, as they diminish, they shade the grass less, which therefore grows more luxuriantly; and, where a strong wind carries a fire through dried grass and leaves, which cover the earth with combustible matter several feet deep, the volume of flame destroys all before it; the very animals cannot escape. We have seen it enwrap the forest upon which it was precipitated, and destroy whole acres of trees. After beginning;, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... which all the initiated allow are suddenly unfolded, descending like lightening by the inspiration of the spirit and illuminating the darkened soul, to these mysteries no man perhaps was ever a more sudden or a more combustible kind of convert than myself. I beamed with gospel light; it shone through me. I was the beacon of this latter age: a comet, sent to warn the wicked. I mean, I was all this in my own imagination, which swelled and mounted to ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... city to which I had come was indeed a novel sight. Its buildings average in height one-third of ours, although they occupy nearly as much ground space. They are composed almost totally of non-combustible materials. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... of barrels of petroleum had been stored up in vats, and when the combustible fluid was spouting from the wells at the rate of many hundred barrels per day. Before the present deep wells were bored, oil was not produced in sufficient quantities to cause such a conflagration, and there was never seen upon the creek a stratum of the fluid of such ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... of the heaviest woods known to science, and used extensively in the manufacture of mallets, etc., was displayed; also the San Juan wood, which has lately been discovered, and is found extensively on the coast. This wood is practically non-combustible, and is said to be the coming wood for car building, furniture, and interior finishing, being susceptible of a high polish. The mahogany, for which Honduras is noted, was shown in many varieties, as were rosewood, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... Arabs, enlisted in Singapore and taken to the scene of action by Mr. Fontaine. The "enemy" was seldom obvious, but during the war it inflicted a loss upon us of eight killed and twenty-three wounded. We took various stockades, shot from sixty to eighty Malays, burned a good deal of what was combustible, and gave stability to the shaky rule of the Datu Klana, Syed Abdulrahman. Of this prince, who owed his firm seat on the throne to British intervention, the Resident wrote in 1880:—"Loyal to his engagements, he had gained the good will of the British Government. Straightforward, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... names for the same things. But the possibility of a concurrent application of the two names, is a mere consequence of the conjunction between the two attributes, and was, in most cases, never thought of when the names were introduced and their signification fixed. That the diamond is combustible, was a proposition certainly not dreamed of when the words Diamond and Combustible first received their meaning; and could not have been discovered by the most ingenious and refined analysis of the signification ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... part, [Footnote 85: Although ash, water, and vitamines nourish the body, it is impossible to measure their nutritive value in terms of fuel value. Fuel value expresses the nutritive value only of the combustible foodstuffs,—carbohydrates, fats, and protein. However, according to Sherman, "the most conspicuous nutritive requirement is that of energy for the work of the body." Hence, the fuel value of a food is often spoken of as its nutritive ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... conflagration. Our situation was for some time extremely perilous. The vessel neared us more than once, and apparently threatened to involve us in one common destruction. The cargo, consisting of dry provisions, spirits, cotton goods, and other articles equally combustible, burned with great violence, while the fury of the destroying element, the amazing height of the flames, the continued storm, amidst the thick darkness of the night, rendered the scene appalling and terrible. About ten o'clock, the ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... mere separation of its elements into two portions; one part is oxygenated at the expense of the other, so as to form carbonic acid; while the other part, being disoxygenated in favour of the latter, is converted into the combustible substance called alkohol; therefore, if it were possible to re-unite alkohol and carbonic acid together, we ought to ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of Smithfield, to assert that their practice was wholly barbarous. In the present case a pyre, some twelve feet high, was built at the foot of a huge granite boulder, near the sea-coast: it was constructed of dry wood, and was drenched with combustible materials. Jean was bound firmly to a strong hurdle, made of birch stems and withies securely lashed together. Judith, Garthmund, and the principal elders, placed themselves under the venerable oak; the ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... plunged the victim into a depth of twenty feet. But the contriver was not satisfied with his attempt to break the bones of the unfortunate person whom he thus entrapped. He managed to have a small chamber filled with some combustible in the side of the pit, which was to be set on fire, and, on the return of the platform to its place, suffocate his detenu with smoke. Whether he had performed any previous atrocities in this way, or whether the present instance was the commencement of his profession of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... by Marsollier in his Histoire de l'Inquisition. First a good fire was started; then the victim was stretched out on the ground, his feet manacled, and turned toward the flame. Grease, fat, or some other combustible substance was rubbed upon them, so that they were horribly burned. From time to time a screen was placed between the victim's feet and the brazier, that the Inquisitor might have an ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... city. Individual and distorted passions kindled the mighty and virtuous love of the people for the triumph of democracy. It is thus that in a conflagration the most tainted substances oft light the fire; the combustible matter is foul, but the flames pure; the flame of the Revolution was liberty; the factious might dim, they could not stain, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... be vigilantly safe-guarded against the attacks of the enemy. Every precaution is taken to insure safety. All openings in the protective deck above are covered with heavy steel gratings to prevent fragments of shell or other combustible substances from getting through to the magazine or ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... that the root-house had been finished, as it formed a secure storehouse for their goods, and would also be made available as a hiding-place from the Indians, in time of need. The boys carefully scraped away all the combustible matter from its vicinity, and also from the house; but the rapid increase of the fire now warned them to hurry down to join Catharine and the young Mohawk, who had gone off to the lake shore, with such things as they ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... roses producing moss-roses—we clearly see that the nature of the conditions is of subordinate importance in comparison with the nature of the organism in determining each particular form of variation; perhaps of not more importance than the nature of the spark, by which a mass of combustible matter is ignited, has in determining the nature ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... been struck with the fact that certain substances, while differing widely, from one another in many respects, were alike in combustibility. From this he argued that all combustible substances must contain a common principle, and this principle he named phlogiston. This phlogiston he believed to be intimately associated in combination with other substances in nature, and in that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... at Charleston, known as the "Hint Club." Its purpose was to hint to such people that they had better look out. If they did not mend their ways, it was unnecessary to inform them more explicitly what they might expect. Houses were combustible then as now, and the use of firearms was well understood. In Georgia the legislature itself attempted coercion. Paper money was made a legal tender in spite of strong opposition, and a law was passed prohibiting any ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... types, from dusty lofts over stores, and ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and carefully planned for the purpose. They are more or less fire-proof, slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have devastated. But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Such a warehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with the private tenements on either hand duly numbered, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... summer, and especially after the excessive dryness occasioned by the hot winds, the whole face of the country becomes, as it were, combustible, and bush-fires have at such times burst forth apparently spontaneously, and spread with great rapidity. The "Black Thursday" of the colony, some fifteen years since, when fire covered many hundreds of miles, is still remembered with horror; but, as settlement and cultivation have extended, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... people throughout the world, and the pride and glory of American citizens. Every year since the adoption of the old Constitution, have discordant elements cropped out, and incidents transpired, which demonstrated to every rational mind, that as time rolled on, the accumulation of combustible elements would ultimately explode, and shake the civilized world ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... occasion, fastened upon the basis, which was of dry deal board, underneath; which suddenly conceiving flame, gave fire to the device of the masque, all of oiled paper, and dry fir, etc. And so, in a moment, disposed itself among the rest of that combustible matter that it was past any man's approach before it was almost discovered. Two hours begun ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... happy in his rationalistic explanations of the whole mass of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in which the lightning kindled the combustible materials of the cities, aided perhaps by an earthquake; but this shows a disposition to break away from the exact statements of the sacred books which would have been most severely condemned by the universal Church during at least eighteen hundred years of its history. Nor would the explanations ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... work to restore to some degree of comfort that most desolate of scenes, an abandoned camp. Unfortunately, on leaving the place, little thinking that they were so soon to return, they had burned everything combustible, and thus a strip of board or a piece of timber could hardly be found within the limits of the corps. Nevertheless, comfortable quarters were soon erected, and the routine of ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... do the same. This they all agreed to, and the papers having been drawn out in due form about midday, I sent down notice to the old lady, who seemed extremely pleased and thankful. The ceremonies of bathing were gone through before three, while the wood and other combustible materials for a strong fire were collected and put into the pit. After bathing she called for a pan (betel-leaf) and ate it, then rose up, and with one arm on the shoulder of her eldest son, and the other on that of her nephew, approached the fire. As she rose up fire ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... had rounded up all the firewood into one heap. Now, to this combustible material the fellow was bringing a side of bacon and a small bag of flour. These he dropped on the firewood, then went back for more of the ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... of her sister, Phillida built no castles. Millard's politeness to her had been very agreeable, but she knew that it was only politeness. Almost every man's and every woman's imagination is combustible on one side or another. Many young women are set a-dreaming by any hint of love or marriage. But Phillida had read only sober books—knowing little of romances, there was no stock of incendiary material in her memory. Her fancy ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... hut upon my settlement, about forty yards from the creek of St. John, till I could build my house, and lodging {19} for my people. As my hut was composed of very combustible materials, I caused a fire to be made at a distance, about half way from the creek, to avoid accidents: which occasioned an adventure, that put me in mind of the prejudices they have in Europe, from the relations ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... soon as they begin to look dangerous. Even the coffee-pot may be rigged with a wire handle by which to be hung. Wire and string are our special hobbies in camp. Fan a fire instead of blowing it. Your breath has lost most of its combustible gas. A tin or wooden plate makes a good fan. Put away dry kindling every night. You don't know what sort of weather it will ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... comes over you, and just as you feel inclined to send for the cat's-meat man down the next court to come and fetch you away to the Dogs' Home, in bounces your landlady, and with two or three "Well, I nevers!" and "There's an imperent 'ussey, for you!" nearly bursts the patent non-combustible bootlace you lent her last night to hang the brass locket round ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... Man, and Venus the Woman, which I speak more of, seeing I write of them. This Tincture is delivered in Verdigreece, and likewise it is found in Vitriol, as in a Mineral whereof a peculiar Book might be wrote. In all these things a combustible Sulphur is found, and yet a Sulphur which is incombustible, this is a strange thing, one is a white Sulphur, the other is red in the operative generation; but the true Sulphur is incombustible, ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... the bonfire no more—no, not at all; nor the fireworks neither—no, nothing of no kind of the sort." All this in his natural voice: then, swelling in dignity and in diction, "but, for the accumulated pile of combustibles, I say—for the combustible pile that you have accumulated, that you may not be deprived of the merit of doing a good action, the materials of which it is composed, that is to say, the logs of wood, and the bavins of furze, with the pole and tar-barrel, shall be sold, and the money ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... becoming exceedingly hot; and as, at this season of the year, the heat of the sun was so intense that every substance became a combustible, and a single spark, if exposed to the air, in a moment became a flame, much evil was to be dreaded from fire. On the east side of the town of Sydney, a fire, the effect of intoxication or carelessness, broke out among the convicts' ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... such ferocious nature gave rise to a train of gloomy apprehensions. There were many cabins and sheds about the camp constructed of branches of trees which had become dry and combustible, and fears were entertained that they might be set on fire by the mudexares, or Moorish vassals, who visited the army. Some even dreaded that attempts might be made to poison the wells and fountains. To quiet these dismal alarms all mudexares ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... for the crime of setting fire to the city, as for their hatred of human kind. They died in torments, and their torments were imbittered by insult and derision. Some were nailed on crosses; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts, and exposed to the fury of dogs; others again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse-race and honored with the presence ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the bridge is quickly thrown to the ground. Then the conqueror, being stayed in his course at the bridge, marcheth back towards the City again, and runs along with great noise and violence through Thames Street westward, where, having such combustible matter in its teeth, and such a fierce wind upon its back, it prevails with little resistance, unto the astonishment ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... The combustible balls are not yet come to hand. Five or six boxes of ammunition will be sent down to Tarrytown by water the first opportunity. 'Tis necessary that Dr Eustis, if not at the Plains, should be ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... fix our attention for a moment on the gunpowder which urges the cannon-ball. This is composed of combustible matter, which if burnt in the open air would yield a certain amount of heat. It will not yield this amount if it perform the work of urging a ball. The heat then generated by the gunpowder will fall short of that produced in the open air, by an ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the obscurer and more practical assertors of freedom. This was at no time more remarkable than in the present Session, during the discussion of those arbitrary measures, the Treason and Sedition Bills, when sparks were struck out, in the collision of the two principles, which the combustible state of public feeling at the moment rendered not a little perilous. On the motion that the House should resolve itself into a Committee upon the Treason Bill, Mr. Fox said, that "if Ministers were determined, by means of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... experiment clearly shows that temperature is a most important factor in the illuminating value of a flame, and this is still further shown by a study of the action of the diluents present in coal gas, the non-combustible ones being far more deleterious than the combustible, as they not only dilute, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... matter, this endless self-scrutiny. We are all familiar with the addled ego of literature—the writer whom constant self-communion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain. And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up. The discipline of living is a ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... my strange companion; "it is only imprudence that makes victims. Olivari, who perished at Orleans, ascended in a mongolfier made of paper; his car, suspended below the chafing-dish, and ballasted with combustible materials, became a prey to the flames! Olivari fell, and was killed. Mosment ascended at Lille, on a light platform; an oscillation made him lose his equilibrium. Mosment fell, and was killed. Bittorf, at Manheim, saw his paper balloon take fire ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... the vegetable world and from the earth the food and drink it requires for its sustenance and motion. It receives colloidal food for its muscles: combustible food for its motion; water for the solution of its various parts; salt for constructive and other physical purposes. These have all to be arranged in the body; and they are arranged by means of the membranous envelopes. Through these ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... Now, as in Napoleon's time, the effect of the guns is moral rather than material. About midday French's horse-artillery guns came into action from the north. Smoke and flames from the dongas told that some of our shells had fallen among the wagons and their combustible stores. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... equipoise, a monarchy and hierarchy break out of the confusion of ambitious struggles, and the foundation of both is secured by feudal tenures. This appears to be the origin of monarchial and priestly power, and the dawn of civilization. But such combustible materials cannot long be pent up; and getting vent in foreign wars and intestine insurrections, the people acquire some power in the tumult, which obliges their rulers to gloss over their oppression with a show ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Of subterranean wind transports a hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side Of thundering Aetna, whose combustible And fuell'd entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom, all involved With stench and smoke; such resting found the sole Of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... in Manila December 21, 1751, ordered the extermination of the Mahometans with fire and sword; the fitting out of Visayan corsairs, with authority to extinguish the foe, burn all that was combustible, destroy the crops, desolate their cultivated land, make captives, and recover christian slaves. One-fifth of the spoil (the Real quinto) was to belong to the King, and the natives were to be exempt from the payment of tribute whilst ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... bright, hard, glassy stem, the next thing is to develop a long, well-filled ear. To this end, available ammonia or nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, and magnesia are indispensable. Ammonia (spirits of hartshorn) is necessary to aid in forming the combustible part of the seed. The other ingredients named are required to assist in making the incombustible part of the grain. In 100 parts of the ash of wheat, there are the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... owned a large rambling Mansion. The pillars were rotten, the galleries tumbling down, the thatch dry and combustible, and there was only one door. Suddenly, one day, there was a smell of fire: the old man rushed out. To his horror he saw that the thatch was aflame, the rotten pillars were catching fire one by one, and the rafters were burning like tinder. But, inside, the children went on amusing themselves ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... storms he supposed that the man must be very angry and that the sounds and flashes were the result of throwing or rolling heavy or combustible articles of furniture as he had so repeatedly known his mother and uncle to do. As such a view of life was all that he knew, it was not strange that he could make no ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... murmurs, as if to gather strength for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered, and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through the ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... across the street. The fire had spread with astonishing rapidity. Some combustible material in the second story had exploded with great force, and this had seemed to scatter the fire. The entire second story was on fire now, as well as ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... when a flame is smoking badly, distinct traces of carbon monoxide are being produced, but when an acetylene flame burns properly the products are as harmless as those of coal gas, and, light for light, less in amount. Mixed with air, like every other combustible gas, acetylene forms an explosive mixture. F. Clowes has shown that it has a wider range of explosive proportions when mixed with air than any of the other combustible gases, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... objectionable to Mr. Grimshaw; they attracted numbers of profligate people to Haworth, and brought a match to the combustible materials of the place, only too ready to blaze out into wickedness. The story is, that he tried all means of persuasion, and even intimidation, to have the races discontinued, but in vain. At length, in despair, he prayed with such fervour of earnestness ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... but during the years 716-717 A.D. the city had to face a combined attack by a Moslem navy and army. The eastern emperor, Leo the Isaurian, conducted a heroic defense, using with much effectiveness the celebrated mixture known as "Greek fire." This combustible, probably composed of sulphur, naphtha, and quicklime, was poured or hurled on the enemy's ships in order to burn them. "Greek fire," the rigors of an uncommonly severe winter, and timely aid from the Bulgarians at length compelled the Arabs to beat a retreat. Their failure to take Constantinople ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... burned. Animal bodies, full of moisture, glowed awhile and then remained charred wrecks. Wood and other easily combustible things burned to ashes. On the ground lay the bodies, amidst heaps of hot mud, heaps of gleaming ashes and piles of volcanic stones. That ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... on this substance, which is in the highest degree combustible? Where had this naphtha come from? Was it a natural phenomenon taking place on the surface of the Angara, or was it to serve as an engine of destruction, put in motion by the Tartars? Did they intend ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... already dark when he brought his ship into action, and laid her alongside L'Orient. One particular only I shall add to the known account of the memorable engagement between these ships, and this I received from Sir Alexander Ball himself. He had previously made a combustible preparation, but which, from the nature of the engagement to be expected, he had purposed to reserve for the last emergency. But just at the time when, from several symptoms, he had every reason to believe ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "American Natural Oil," and used for a liniment. The Indians had used it, and the world has a way of looking to aborigines for medicine, even if not for health. Spiritualistic mediums and doctors bank heavily on Indians. This natural oil was known to be combustible. Out of doors it helped the campfire. But if burned indoors it made a horrible smoke and a smell to conjure with. Up to that time whale-oil mostly had been used for illuminating and lubricating purposes. But whale-oil was getting too ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... yourself one other question, and that is, whether it is a wise thing to live upon a surface that may be shattered at any moment; whether that is true peace which needs but a touch to melt away; whether you are wise with all this combustible material deep down in your conscience, in paying no regard to it but living and frolicking, and feasting and trafficking, and lusting and sinning on the surface, like those light-hearted, light-headed fools that build their houses on the slopes of volcanoes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have the secret of a mysterious combustible known as "Greek Fire" which was unquenchable by water. I think that "Greek Fire" was nothing more or less than ordinary petroleum, which was practically unknown in Europe in 1866, though from personal experience I can say that it ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... is combustible everyone who has watched the fitting of a hot shoe knows. That it is a bad conductor of heat, the absence of bad ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... affirm, "there is the head of the table," and so he cares nothing about the nominal headship. He lives a free, busy life in the hill-country or near the sea, stalwart, swarthy, a lover of the open air, apt at work and sufficiently enterprising, self-respecting, "proud as Lucifer and combustible as his matches," in no case pinchingly poor, but rarely rich, and never in awe ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... shot, and had also a preparation sent, as they said, by the convention from Paris, which seems to have been of the nature of the Greek fire; for it became liquid when it was discharged, and water would not extinguish its flames. This combustible was concealed with great care in the captured ships; like the red-hot shot, it had been found useless in battle. Admiral Hotham's action saved Corsica for the time; but the victory had been incomplete, and the arrival at Toulon ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... portable outfits. Their use should not be tolerated when any other method is available, as the danger from accident alone should prohibit the practice except when properly installed and cared for away from other sources of combustible gases. ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... and her bonnet looking like an over-ripe fig, with a terrible cold that made her voice only a whisper, and sneezing herself almost to pieces, Mrs. Sparsit found Bounderby at his city hotel, exploded with the combustible information she carried and fainted quite away ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... three parts of this oxygen, with about one third of its weight of carbon, is converted into an elastic state, under the form of fixed air, that separates from the decomposing mass; a circumstance attending also on the combustion of coal and other combustible substances during their decomposition by that process, which supported in them by the external air of the atmosphere, where heat and light are both visible from the intensity and velocity of the combustion; and wholly invisible ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... sitting down, leaning his back against one of the bales. A short pipe was in his mouth, and he seemed to be enjoying his smoke. This was contrary to orders, for the cotton being combustible might easily catch fire; but this man, supposing that he would not be detected, indulged himself ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... would not waken the people faster than they could master them; but the fire began to waken them fast enough, and our fellows were glad to keep a little together in bodies; for the fire grew so raging, all the houses being made of light combustible stuff, that they could hardly bear the street between them, and their business was to follow the fire for the surer execution. As fast as the fire either forced the people out of those houses which were burning, or frighted them out of others, our people ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... higher. A bonfire is premeditated. You shall see anon, how the flames will rise. The preparations are completed; the fire is applied. Hear how it crackles and hisses! Slowly but spitefully it mounts from limb to limb, and from one combustible to another, until the whole welkin is a-blaze, and shaking as with thunder! It is a beautiful sight. The gush of unwonted radiance rolls in effulgent surges adown the vale. How the owl hoots with surprise at the interrupting light! Bird of wisdom, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we do. Not that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we already have so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for gratitude. Many people shut it out of their houses as if it were an enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of color, and plant trees to shut ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... (according to her Maiesties prescription) he tooke forthwith eight of his woorst and basest ships which came next to hand, and disburthening them of all things which seemed to be of any value, filled them with gun-powder, pitch, brimstone, and with other combustible and firy matter; and charging all their ordinance with powder, bullets, and stones, he sent the sayd ships vpon the 28 of Iuly being Sunday, about two of the clocke after midnight, with the winde and tide against the Spanish fleet: which when they had proceeded a good space, being ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... the masts and rigging were all enveloped in flame, a dense smoke was rising from the hold, indicating that the electric fluid, in its descent through the ship, had come in contact with something in the cargo that was highly combustible. Passengers and crew stood looking on with pale, horror-stricken faces. But the captain, a man of self-possession, aroused all from their lethargy by ordering, in a loud, clear voice, the masts and rigging to be cut away instantly. This order was obeyed. Over went, crashing and hissing, three ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... illusions favorable to the "darling" who deceived him. His most alluring illusion was a booby idea that his "pet" was an invalid, and she kept pouring oil on the joke to keep it burning, and pulled the wool down further and further so that hubby could not see the combustible fluid she was pouring into the flames. Her illness was one of those "to be continued" story kinds—better to-day, worse to-morrow—and she "took" to the blankets at the most annoying and inopportune moments; and every time she "took" an indisposition she expected hubby to pull down ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... others slain. The Moslem camp was captured, but proved a doubtful prize. The plains were barren and scorching, and the harassing assaults of the Egyptians, who poured "Greek fire" (missiles filled with combustible materials) on their foes, rendered the situation more intolerable still. Pestilence broke out, and the king himself fell dangerously ill. He then ordered a retreat to Damietta, whither the sick were to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... not plain and ordinary, and the smiles which were intended as innocent lures from snares, instead of into them, might make trouble for all concerned. Haldane was naturally combustible, to begin with, and was now at the most inflammable ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... removed from command, if the decrees of the Convention for prosecuting the war against the Vendee were to be carried out. One of those decrees ordered that "the forests shall be razed, the crops cut down, the cattle {191} seized. The Minister of War shall send combustible materials of all sorts to burn the woods, brush, and heath." That was the spirit now entering the Revolution, the fury of destruction, the dementia of suspicion, the reign ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... should be built so as to constitute a fire wall wherever it is practicable to do so. Such walls should project at least three feet above the roof, and should be capped by stone, terra cotta, or sheet metal. They must form a complete cut-off of all combustible material, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... dark and rainy day. Like ocean tides, the frantic mob rolled in from every direction. Their shouts and revels swelled upon the night air. The rain began to fall in torrents. They broke into the houses for shelter; insulted maids and matrons; tore down every thing combustible for their watch fires; massacred a few of the body-guard of the queen, and, with bacchanalian songs, roasted their horses for food. And thus passed the hours of this long and dreary night, in hideous outrages for which one can hardly find a parallel in the annals of New Zealand cannibalism. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... has laws of motion, that are adapted to itself, and constantly acts or moves according to these laws; at least when no superior cause interrupts its action. Thus, fire ceases to burn combustible matter, as soon as sufficient water is thrown into it, to arrest its progress. Thus, a sensible being ceases to seek pleasure, as soon as he fears that pain will ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... There was nothing easily combustible but the thatch on the roof; and that had been well soaked by the heavy rain which had now fallen incessantly for more than six hours. Burn the place ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... aeriform by appropriated degrees of heat. On the contrary, this elastic matter of heat, termed Calorique in the new nomenclature of the French Academicians, is liable to become consolidated itself in its combinations with some bodies, as perhaps in nitre, and probably in combustible bodies as sulphur and charcoal. See note on l. 232, of this Canto. Modern philosophers have not yet been able to decide whether light and heat be different fluids, or modifications of the same fluid, as they have many properties ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... city, as for their enmity to mankind. Their executions were so contrived, as to expose them to derision and contempt. Some were covered over with the skins of wild beasts, that they might be torn to pieces by dogs; some were crucified; while others, having been daubed over with combustible materials, were set up for lights in the night time, and thus burned to death. For these spectacles Nero gave his own gardens, and, at the same time, exhibited there the diversions of the circus; sometimes ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... constructed great engines, such as were used in those days, in the absence of cannon, for throwing rocks and heavy beams of wood, to batter the walls. These machines also threw a certain extraordinary combustible substance called Greek fire. It was this Greek fire that, in the end, turned the scale of victory, for it caught in the lower court of the castle, where it burned so furiously that it baffled all the efforts of the besieged to extinguish it, and at length they were compelled to surrender. ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... emitting a choking atmosphere of charcoal and sulphur. Piled around the walls were some fifty or a hundred small barrels with copper hoops, and branded on the heads with the word "powder." Unmindful of the odor and the rather combustible material around him, Captain Brand again resumed his work, and rolled a large number of the little barrels toward the doorway, near the merchandise already there, saying to ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... sent to Newgate, and there were other arrests, which did but inflame the smouldering rage of the mob. Some of the wealthier foreigners, taking warning by the signs of danger, left the City, for there could be no doubt that the whole of London and the suburbs were in a combustible condition of discontent, needing only a spark ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was a very combustible one, and in spite of the streams of water poured into the hold it was soon evident that the ship was doomed. Smoke began to ooze up between the planks everywhere, and the rising gale soon fanned the smouldering fire to flames that began to break out here and ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... was covered in, but not sufficiently completed to admit provisions. One hundred feet by twenty-five were the dimensions of this building, which was constructed with great strength; yet the mind was always pained when viewing its reedy combustible covering, remembering the livid flames that had been seen to shoot over every part of this cove: but no other materials could be found to answer the purpose of thatch, and every necessary precaution was taken to ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... Greco, a town almost totally destroyed by the eruption in 1794. The whole surface of the country for some distance is laid waste by the river of lava, which flowed in a stream or body, of twenty feet in depth, destroyed in its course vineyards, cottages, and everything combustible, consumed and nearly overwhelmed the town, and at last poured into the sea, where as it cooled, it formed a rugged termination or promontory of considerable height. The surface of this mass presented a rocky and sterile aspect, strongly opposed to the exuberance of vegetation ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... kolori. Color (complexion) vizagxokoloro. Colorless senkolora. Colt cxevalido. Column kolono. Comb kombi. Comb kombilo. Combat batalo. Combat batali. Combatant batalanto. Combine kombini. Combustible brulebla. Combustion brulado. Come veni. Come (after) postveni. Come (back) reveni. Comedian komedianto. Comedy komedio. Comely gracia, beleta. Comet kometo. Comfort komforti. Comfort komforto. Comic komika, ridinda. Coming veno. Comma komo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... came out, and closely examined their feet. They were cool, and showed no trace of scorching, nor were their anklets of dried tree-fern leaf burnt. This, Jonathan explained, is part of the miracle; for dried tree-fern is as combustible as tinder, and there were flames shooting out among the stones. Sceptics had affirmed that the skin of a Fijian's foot being a quarter of an inch thick, he would not feel a burn. Whether this be true or not of the ball and heel, the instep is covered with skin no thicker than our own, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... form of an altar—of unpolished pine, amidst whose interstices were placed preparations of combustible matter—stood the funeral pyre; and around it drooped the dark and gloomy cypresses so consecrated by song to ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... purposes, the slow burning of iron. It develops heat, and, if the heat be preserved, a high temperature may be thus attained. The destruction of the first Atlantic cable was probably due to heat developed in this way. Other metals are still more combustible than iron. You may ignite strips of zinc in a candle flame, and cause them to burn almost like strips of paper. But we must now expand our definition of combustion, and include under this term, not only combustion in air, but also combustion in liquids. Water, for example, contains ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... water out of the glass jar into the earthenware one. In one second follows a series of sharp reports from inside the jar, which seems suddenly to have become filled with highly combustible crackers. The Professor drops the jar as if he had burnt his fingers, and the cracking and popping go on inside. Ladies rise frightened. ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... foot to that of six. That is accounted the best which is nearest the surface. It appears to be a mass of black earth held together by vegetable fibres. I know not whether the earth be bituminous, or whether the fibres be not the only combustible part; which, by heating the interposed earth red hot, make a burning mass. The heat is not very strong nor lasting. The ashes are yellowish, and in a large quantity. When they dig peat, they cut it into square pieces, and pile it up to dry beside the house. In some places it has ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... a quantity of the seared grass, and heaped a dry couch upon which Ben laid his charge within the genial heat that came from the cedar tree. Then they gathered up all the combustible matter within reach, and began to kindle a fire so near to the place where she lay that its heat must help to drive back the chill of death if there was a spark of life yet ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... be perfectly transparent. A most convincing proof that glass transmits the rays of the sun without being heated by them is afforded by the burning lens, which by converging the rays to a focus will set combustible bodies on fire, without its ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... insurgents, and partly formed their medium of intercourse with Italy and Asia Minor. The constant readiness of these men moving to and fro to carry everywhere sparks from the scene of conflagration tended in a high degree to excite apprehension, especially at a time when so much combustible matter was everywhere ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... encased in gauze wire which, while it admits oxygen to feed the flame, prevents communication between the flame and any combustible or explosive gas outside. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... parts of the forest. The soil of the woodlands is everywhere green with the curling fronds; and where I do not cut, the foresters and miners will be preparing heaps to carry away for litter and bedding. By the end of July the forest beneath the oaks will be covered with a carpet of stuff as combustible as tinder. Let us but fire it at Newnham, Littledean, Blakeney, Coleford, and at Speech by the courthouse, and we shall lay tens of thousands of oaks in blackened ruin. Philip of Spain has but to scatter the present small navy of England, for no more ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... cases the conditions of life play a subordinate part in causing any particular modification; like that which a spark plays, when a mass of combustibles bursts into flame—the nature of the flame depending on the combustible matter, and not ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... pleasing Bengal lights, with which people amuse themselves, and then laughingly throw from the windows into the street. Collected together in the story below and on the ground floor, transported to shops, to warehouses and into business cabinets, they find combustible material, piles of wood a long time accumulated, and here do the flames enkindle. The conflagration seems to have already begun, for the chimneys roar and a ruddy light gleams through the windows; but "No," ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to the better unlocking of the Mineral, yet if you have not the leasure to make so long a Digestion, you may by incorporating with powder'd Antimony a convenient Quantity of Oyl of Vitriol, and committing them immediately to Distillation, obtain a little Sulphur like unto the common one, and more combustible than perhaps you will at first take notice of. For I have observ'd, that though (after its being first kindled) the Flame would sometimes go out too soon of its self, if the same Lump of Sulphur were held again to the Flame of a ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... astronomers. But the people, incited by the propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews, not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in the ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... will not leive of all this monastery Of you or these, of what's combustible, Naye of ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... say it has a somewhat pleasant odor; if you were to taste it, that it has a hot, biting taste, i.e., is pungent. If you put a lighted match to it you would notice that it burns easily, and with a flame, and may therefore be said to be combustible and inflammable. ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... remembered, however, that both in the ancient and the new idea the word 'element' was not intended to mean that which it means to us now, a fundamental unit of matter, but a general quality or property of matter. The three elements of Valentine were: (1) sulphur, or that which is combustible, which is changed or destroyed, or which at all events disappears during burning or combustion; (2) mercury, that which temporarily disappears during burning or combustion, which is dissociated in the burning from the body burnt, but ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... call myself the household god of a hundred families. Far be it from me, also, to hint, my respectable friends, at the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to keep you clean. Nor will I remind you how often, when the midnight bells make you tremble for your combustible town, you have fled to the town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and ready to drain my vital current in your behalf. Neither is it worth while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the physician whose simple ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cement-making materials, but, in larger ratio, to the fuel essential to rendering these substances available for materials of construction. Incidentally, investigations into the waste of structural materials have developed the fact that the destructive losses, due to fires in combustible buildings, amount to more than $200,000,000 per annum. A sum even greater than this is annually expended on fire protection. Inquiries looking to the reduction of fire losses are being conducted in order to ascertain the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... lantern, not for illumination but for safety. When the visitors have arrived on the lower platform, which is near the middle of the eastern side against the wall, the guide, who has not descended the steps, lights a basket of shavings or other quick combustible on the platform above. The effect is instantaneous and magical. Suddenly from an obscurity so profound that only the outline of the nearest columns can be faintly discerned by the flicker of a candle, the entire maze of columns flashes into being resplendent and white. The ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... wall. On some nights the full moonlight streamed in the three windows athwart the lamp-light. The room got hotter and closer. Ozias now and then, as he talked, motioned Jerome, who put another stick of wood in the stove. The whole atmosphere, spiritual and physical, seemed to grow combustible, and as if at any moment a word or a thought might cause a leap into flame. A spirit of anarchy and revolution was caged in that little close room, bound to a shoemaker's bench by the chain of labor for bread. The spirit was harmless enough, for its cage and its chain were ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a sigh, flutter my fan, and seem so agreeably confused—you have no notion, my dear, what fools men are. If you had not got the start of me, I would have had your little white-haired baronet in a week, and yet I don't take him to be made of very combustible materials; rather mild, composed, and pretty, I believe; but he has vanity, which is ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purpose of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound as ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... seems to have gradually led to the use of coke, brays or small coke, and peat. An abundance of coals existed in the neighbourhood: by rejecting those of inferior quality, and coking the others with great care, a combustible was obtained better fitted even than charcoal itself for the fusion of that particular kind of ore which is found in the coal-measures. Thus we find Darby's most favourite charge for his furnaces to have been five baskets of coke, two of brays, and one of peat; next followed the ore, and then the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... evidence suggested suspicion of incendiarism and suicide. The papers, the books, the oil betrayed themselves as combustible materials, carried into the place for a purpose. The medicine chest was known (by its use in cases of illness among the servants) to contain opium. Adjourned inquiry elicited that the laboratory was not insured, and that the ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... suitable to each. I say, it must be inferior, because nothing can be so hot, so tormenting, so intolerably insupportable, as the quickest apprehensions of, and the immediate sinking under, that guilt and indignation that is proportional to the offence. Should all the wood, and brimstone, and combustible matter on earth be gathered together for the tormenting of one body, yet that cannot yield that torment to that which the sense of guilt and burning-hot application of the indignation of God will do to the soul; yea, suppose the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... struck and lighted. The paper, after a few obstinate curlings, caught fire, and Frere, blowing the young flame with his breath, the bark began to burn. He piled upon the fire all that was combustible, the hides began to shrivel, and a great column of black smoke rose ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... this, or the other castles, made use of fire-balls, which they threw with their hands, designing to burn the doors of the castles. But the Spaniards from the walls let fall great quantities of stones, and earthen pots full of powder, and other combustible matter, which forced them to desist. Captain Morgan seeing this desperate defence made by the Spaniards, began to despair of success. Hereupon, many faint and calm meditations came into his mind; neither could he determine which way to turn ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... night was warm, for I happened to know that a good deal of the cargo which we were carrying was of a highly combustible character, such as furniture, pianos, Manchester goods, and the like, to say nothing of several cases of sporting ammunition. I knew that if once the fire happened to get a good hold upon such material as that the chances were all against ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... guess. But they went to work. There were three axes, two top-mauls, and several handspikes and pinch-bars aboard, and with these they attacked bulkheads and spare woodwork, and fed the fires with the fragments; for a glance down the hatches had shown them nothing more combustible and detachable in the cargo than a few layers of railroad iron, which covered and blocked the openings ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... may unite with oxygen, atom for atom, and form carbon monoxide (CO); or in the proportion of one atom of carbon to two of oxygen, and form carbon dioxide (CO2). The former gas is combustible—that is, will admit another atom of carbon to the molecule—but the latter is saturated with oxygen, and will not burn, or, to put it otherwise, is the product of perfect combustion. A properly designed furnace, supplied with ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... "Hint Club." Its purpose was to hint to such people that they had better look out. If they did not mend their ways, it was unnecessary to inform them more explicitly what they might expect. Houses were combustible then as now, and the use of firearms was well understood. In Georgia the legislature itself attempted coercion. Paper money was made a legal tender in spite of strong opposition, and a law was passed prohibiting any planter ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... 1832, there fell, in the fields of Kourianof, Russia, a combustible yellowish substance, covering, at least two inches thick, an area of 600 or 700 square feet. It was resinous and yellowish: so one inclines to the conventional explanation that it was pollen from pine trees—but, when torn, it ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... were repulsed, but during the years 716-717 A.D. the city had to face a combined attack by a Moslem navy and army. The eastern emperor, Leo the Isaurian, conducted a heroic defense, using with much effectiveness the celebrated mixture known as "Greek fire." This combustible, probably composed of sulphur, naphtha, and quicklime, was poured or hurled on the enemy's ships in order to burn them. "Greek fire," the rigors of an uncommonly severe winter, and timely aid from the Bulgarians at length compelled the Arabs to ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... clay, and cement-making materials, but, in larger ratio, to the fuel essential to rendering these substances available for materials of construction. Incidentally, investigations into the waste of structural materials have developed the fact that the destructive losses, due to fires in combustible buildings, amount to more than $200,000,000 per annum. A sum even greater than this is annually expended on fire protection. Inquiries looking to the reduction of fire losses are being conducted in order to ascertain the most suitable fire-resisting ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... flew to the rescue, and made a most enthusiastic attempt to check the fire; but the raging element was now past control. The flames spread through the combustible material which had been stored on the deck; and they were compelled to abandon the ill-starred steamer with the utmost precipitation, in order ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... to a fire is a far cry, but fire in the Philippines has such distinctive features that I cannot pass it without a word. The lack of all facilities for combating it makes it an ever present menace. The combustible materials of which houses are built, and their close crowding together, tend to spread it rapidly; while the thatched roofs make even the burning of an isolated house a danger ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... conquest, led the early Spanish adventurers to sweep as with the besom of destruction every object and monument of art which stood in their way. Cortez razed the walls of ancient Mexico to the ground as he entered it, and his zealous followers committed to the flames whatever was light and combustible. This spirit marked the entire conquest which was carried on under the triple mania of religious bigotry, the lust of gold, and the unchastened spirit of national robbery. We have to glean for facts among that which is left. It is still an interesting field, but it has ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... hot, so tormenting, so intolerably insupportable, as the quickest apprehensions of, and the immediate sinking under, that guilt and indignation that is proportional to the offence. Should all the wood, and brimstone, and combustible matter on earth be gathered together for the tormenting of one body, yet that cannot yield that torment to that which the sense of guilt and burning-hot application of the indignation of God will do to the soul; yea, suppose the fire wherewith the body is tormented in hell should be seven times ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... looking backward from the hardships of their march, had been thought so necessary a measure by all the chieftains, that even Oubacha himself was the first to authorize the act by his own example. He seized a torch previously prepared with materials the most durable as well as combustible, and steadily applied it to the timbers of his own palace. Nothing was saved from the general wreck except the portable part of the domestic utensils, and that part of the woodwork which could be applied to the manufacture of the long Tartar lances. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... high, the flame soon spread itself over the roof of the palace, and catching at every combustible in its way, the invaders became so terrified at the quick progress of fire which threatened to consume themselves as well as their plunder, that they quitted the spot with precipitation. Decrying the count and his soldiers at a short ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... during sufficient time to enable the chief defences to be blown up and the harbour fleet to be destroyed. If you will so far favour me, I should be gratified by having an opportunity of demonstrating to your strong mind, free from professional bias, the fact that combustible ships may be not only placed on a parity with stone forts fitted to fire red-hot shot, but secured from injury more effectually than if ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... Vance family having wreaked vengeance, the crowd piled all kinds of combustible stuff around the scaffold, poured oil on it and set it afire. The Negro rolled and tossed out of the mass, only to be pushed back by the people nearest him. He tossed out again, and was roped and pulled back. Hundreds of people turned away, but the vast crowd still looked calmly on. People were here ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... everything; an invention of incendiary firemen is quoted as an example of the diabolical genius which presided over the work of destruction; individuals wearing the fireman's uniform were seen to throw combustible liquids by means of pumps and pails on the burning houses, instead of ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... replace amadou, which he so unfortunately lacked, by another and analogous material. It was possible that some of the varieties of mushrooms which grew in the crevices of the old trees, after having been subjected to prolonged drying, might be transformed into a combustible substance. ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... avoided—we dashed on. Every now and then I looked back to observe the progress of the conflagration. Dark wreaths were rising higher and higher in the sky, and below them forked flames ever and anon darted up as the fire caught the more combustible vegetation. Borne by the wind, light powdery ashes fell around us, while we were sensible of a strong odour of burning, which made it appear as if the enemy was already close at our heels. The grass on every side was too tall ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... to continue, Barrent would have been burned to death, for the Arena was nearly filled with the highly combustible vines. But the flames were endangering the wooden walls of the Arena. The Tetrahyde guard detachment put the fire out in time to save both Barrent and ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... large barn, where we made good stowage until morning. In the night, we caught the owner coming about with a lantern to set fire to the barn, and we carried him down to a boat, and lashed him there until morning, letting the rain wash all the combustible matter out of him. That day we reached Oswego Falls, where a party of us were stationed some time, running boats over, and carrying stores ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... chamber window, he saw a great fire in a dorf about half a league from the town, which he observed, almost in a moment, to flash from one end of the dorf to the other, consuming all in its way,—and thus it was said to have been in these suburbs. The reason thereof is the combustible matter whereof their houses are built, being of fir timber and boards, which, especially being old, do suddenly take fire, and violently burn, hard to be quenched, few houses escaping, especially ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... a gun, because they would not waken the people faster than they could master them; but the fire began to waken them fast enough, and our fellows were glad to keep a little together in bodies; for the fire grew so raging, all the houses being made of light combustible stuff, that they could hardly bear the street between them, and their business was to follow the fire for the surer execution. As fast as the fire either forced the people out of those houses which were burning, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... startled hearers listened in silence; but soon the passions of that adventurous age rose responsive to his words. The combustible French nature burst into flame. The enthusiasm of the soldiers rose to such a pitch that Gourgues had much ado to make them wait till the moon was full before tempting the perils of the Bahama Channel. His time came at length. The moon rode high above the lonely sea, and, silvered in its light, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... little to hope for. While the masts and rigging were all enveloped in flame, a dense smoke was rising from the hold, indicating that the electric fluid, in its descent through the ship, had come in contact with something in the cargo that was highly combustible. Passengers and crew stood looking on with pale, horror-stricken faces. But the captain, a man of self-possession, aroused all from their lethargy by ordering, in a loud, clear voice, the masts and rigging to be cut away instantly. This order was obeyed. Over went, crashing ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... quelled, and if the prey already seized could not be wrenched from his grasp, they, at all events, killed him before he could destroy more. When he boldly and openly declared war, attacking the great combustible warehouses of Tooley Street, threatening a descent on the shipping, and almost setting the Thames on fire, they sent out the whole available army from every quarter of the metropolis with all their engines of war—manuals, steamers, and floating ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... meant. It was caused by the exploding of the strong iron-bound cask— burst open by the gas engendered by the fire within. Of course the spirit was now spilled over the floor of the store-room and everywhere on fire; so that every combustible article within reach—and of these there were many—would soon catch the flame. There were dry barrels of biscuits, and quantities of bacon, hams, with lard, oil, and butter. It was remembered that there was a barrel of pitch, too, close to where the brandy-cask had been kept. All these would catch ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... plain and ordinary, and the smiles which were intended as innocent lures from snares, instead of into them, might make trouble for all concerned. Haldane was naturally combustible, to begin with, and was now at the most inflammable period ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... was when thousands of barrels of petroleum had been stored up in vats, and when the combustible fluid was spouting from the wells at the rate of many hundred barrels per day. Before the present deep wells were bored, oil was not produced in sufficient quantities to cause such a conflagration, and there was never seen upon the creek a stratum of the fluid of such ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... that it continued blazing, after it reached the bottom. He then dropped in another piece upon it, which took fire. He then gathered some dry sticks, and put in; and, finding that the flame was increasing, he proceeded to gather all the dry and combustible matter, which he could find around, and put them in, so that in a short time he had a fine blaze, a foot above the top of the stump; and the inside of the stump itself seemed to ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... explained. The wild beasts, in ravaging the interior of Will Tree, had scattered the remains of the fire. The fire had spread to the things in the room. The flame had caught the bark, which had dried and become combustible. The gigantic ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... out-buildings, retreated. It was but for a short time, however; soon they appeared on the opposite side of the house, many of them carrying burning brands, which they threw under the fencing. This being of combustible materials, soon blazed up; and, sheltered by the intervening flames and smoke, the enemy opened a hot fire on us. Every now and then, however, a dark form was seen, and as surely a bullet searched it out. ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... the combustible accumulation he had been diligently heaping together and struck a spark which, seizing on the dry material, immediately kindled into ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... nineteen instances, from the Dictionnaire de Medecine,—not, however, of spontaneous combustion exactly, but of something akin to it; namely, the rapid ignition of the human body (which per se is not combustible) by contact with flame, as a consequence of the saturation of its ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... thought you did, by your taking fire so quickly. I am glad to hear you say you did not. How soon a little spark kindles into a flame; especially when it meets with such combustible spirits! ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... had, however, gathered together a goodly portion of combustible wood, and there was plenty more at hand, so that a roaring fire was soon casting its light away from the wood, which somewhat sheltered them behind; and as soon as some of the good-sized pieces of bush were well ablaze, Chicory began to send them flying in the directions where a low ominous growl ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... receives from the vegetable world and from the earth the food and drink it requires for its sustenance and motion. It receives colloidal food for its muscles: combustible food for its motion; water for the solution of its various parts; salt for constructive and other physical purposes. These have all to be arranged in the body; and they are arranged by means of ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... censorious, ceramics, cerebration, certitude, cessation, charlatan, chimerical, chronology, circuitous, circumlocution, citation, clandestine, clarify, clemency, coadjutor, coagulate, coalesce, coercion, cogency, cognizant, cohesion, coincidence, collusion, colossal, comatose, combustible, commendatory, commensurate, commiserate, communal, compatibility, compendium, complaisant, comport, composite, compulsive, compulsory, computation, concatenate, concentric, concessive, concomitant, condign, condiment, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... was that finally adopted by the board. It was that a certain kind of powder, known as 'B' powder, degenerates under heat, and becomes, in time, extremely combustible, so that it will sometimes explode apparently ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... wise men the ancient world did know, We scarce know seven who think themselves not so. When man learn'd undefiled religion, We were commanded to be all as one; Fiery disputes that union have calcined; Almost as many minds as men we find, And when that flame finds combustible earth, Thence fatuus fires, and meteors take their birth; 160 Legions of sects and insects come in throngs; To name them all would tire a hundred tongues. So were the Centaurs of Ixion's race, Who a bright cloud for Juno ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... to be reduced to a further pre-existing cause, from which it follows of necessity. For instance, that some terrestrial body take fire in the higher regions of the air and fall to the earth, is caused by some heavenly power: again, that there be on the surface of the earth some combustible matter, is reducible to some heavenly principle. But that the burning body should alight on this matter and set fire to it, is not caused by a heavenly body, but is accidental. Consequently not all the effects of heavenly bodies result ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... was greatly exercised over the awful loss of life at recent theater fires, especially the destruction of the Ringtheater in Vienna. When Mr. Cady planned the New York house, he set about making it as absolutely fireproof as such a structure can be. It was to be non-combustible from the bottom up. There was not a stud partition in it. The floors were all of iron beams and brick arches, the masonry being exposed in the corridors, passages and vestibules, but for comfort having a covering of wood in the audience room. The roof was of iron and masonry, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... came. Besides, supposing that we had even taken the Lower Town by escalade, we would not have been further advanced. The English, in half an hour afterwards, by burning it, by throwing down from the Upper Town upon the roofs of the houses fire pots, shells and other combustible matter, could have soon chased us out of it, or buried us under its ruins. This project, after having furnished for a long time matter for the daily conversations of Montrealers, was at last considered by M. de Levis, and classed as ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone
... lifted from the wire hooks as soon as they begin to look dangerous. Even the coffee-pot may be rigged with a wire handle by which to be hung. Wire and string are our special hobbies in camp. Fan a fire instead of blowing it. Your breath has lost most of its combustible gas. A tin or wooden plate makes a good fan. Put away dry kindling every night. You don't know what sort of ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... bonfire no more—no, not at all; nor the fireworks neither—no, nothing of no kind of the sort." All this in his natural voice: then, swelling in dignity and in diction, "but, for the accumulated pile of combustibles, I say—for the combustible pile that you have accumulated, that you may not be deprived of the merit of doing a good action, the materials of which it is composed, that is to say, the logs of wood, and the bavins of furze, with the pole and tar-barrel, shall be sold, and the money put in the poor-box next ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... a—like a—well, you know how she writes. She sticks to her mother's apron strings like a four-year-old child. They never are seen apart, I am told. Then there is Mrs. Helen Walker Wilbur, the poetess. We have a volume of her verse that is positively combustible from its own heat. The sheets had to be run off the press soaked in water to keep them from igniting. The room was full of steam all the time the work was going on. Warm! I should say so! Now, that woman is vain, and she ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... and the whole company were soon in the wildest excitement with the work of building up a funeral pile upon the spot. At first they brought fagots and threw upon the fire, then benches from the neighboring courts and porticoes, and then any thing combustible which came to hand. The honor done to the memory of a deceased hero was, in some sense, in proportion to the greatness of his funeral pile, and all the populace on this occasion began soon to seize ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... due entirely to scientific induction from some experiments made upon different specimens of dynamite, with a view to the determination of the effect on the explosive force of the various inert or at least slowly combustible substances with which nitro-glycerine is mixed to produce the dynamite of commerce. Of late, in place of the infusorial earth which formed the solid portion of Nobel's dynamite, such substances as sawdust, powdered bark, and even gunpowder, have been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... phlogiston; conflagration, holocaust, deflagration; flame, blaze; bonfire, balefire, feu de joie, beacon. Associated Words: pyrology, pyrography, pyromania, pyrophobia, incendiary, incendiarism, arson, lurid, Moloch, fuel, combustible, pyroleter, smolder, ignis fatuus, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... do not. The metals were considered to be composed of sulphur and mercury. These substances are themselves compounds, but they act as elements in the composition of metals. Sulphur represented their combustible aspect, and also that which gave them their solid form; while mercury was that to which their weight and powers of becoming ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... firmly in the soil, and bound together by thongs of bamboo. Cutting a passage through these, we entered the place, which contained perhaps a hundred houses, neatly built of wicker-work, and having their high conical roofs thatched with palmetto-leaves. Such edifices were in the highest degree combustible, and being set on fire, it was worth while for a lover of the picturesque to watch the flames, as they ran up the conical roofs, and meeting at the apex, whirled themselves fiercely ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... the "Irish Monthly," and who found the heat of a short Northern summer simply "intolerable," the tropics and their environs rather allure me. True, soldiers and old residents speak of places between which and the lower regions there is but a sheet of non-combustible tissue paper. Nevertheless, the writer who has lived in both places would rather, as a matter of choice, summer in the Tropics ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... conjuncti, inde animis, &c. But when as I say, nox, vinum, et adolescentia, youth, wine, and night, shall concur, nox amoris et quietis conscia, 'tis a wonder they be not all plunged over head and ears in love; for youth is benigna in amorem, et prona materies, a very combustible matter, naphtha itself, the fuel of love's fire, and most apt to kindle it. If there be seven servants in an ordinary house, you shall have three couple in some good liking at least, and amongst idle persons how should it be otherwise? ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of readily combustible wood was prepared. The body was taken charge of by persons chosen to perform the last sacred rites, and firmly bound in skins or blankets, and then placed upon the funeral pyre, with all the personal effects of the deceased, together with numerous votive offerings from friends ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... adding certain chips and a billet which I found in the cart, it having apparently been the habit of Slingsby to carry with him a small store of fuel. Having then struck a spark in a tinder-box and lighted a match, I set fire to the combustible heap, and was not slow in raising a cheerful blaze; I then drew my cart near the fire, and, seating myself on one of the shafts, hung over the warmth with feelings of intense pleasure and satisfaction. Having continued in this posture ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... a large rambling Mansion. The pillars were rotten, the galleries tumbling down, the thatch dry and combustible, and there was only one door. Suddenly, one day, there was a smell of fire: the old man rushed out. To his horror he saw that the thatch was aflame, the rotten pillars were catching fire one by ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... demonstrated that, as regards dynamic product, the gas motor preserves the advantage, although the relatively high price of the illuminating gas employed in the production of the motive power generally renders the use of this combustible more costly than steam, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... by all silent and articulate voices of this Universe, to do what in him lies towards relief of this poor blockhead-quack, and of a world that groans under him. Run swiftly; relieve him,—were it even by extinguishing him! For all things have grown so old, tinder-dry, combustible; and he is more ruinous than conflagration. Sweep him down, at least; keep him strictly within the hearth: he will then cease to be conflagration; he will then become useful, more or less, as culinary fire. Fire is the best of servants; but what a master! This ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... prove, in short, the truth of a hundred other laudations collected and printed by this modest author, we shall quote a few passages from his play, and illustrate his genius by pointing out their beauties—an office much needed, particularly by certain dullards, the magazine of whose souls are not combustible enough to take fire at the electric sparks shot forth up out of the depths ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... governor's power. The better to effectuate my design, I procured a Tartar's sheep-skin robe, a bonnet, with bow and arrows, and every one of us got the like habits, the first night we spent in mixing combustible matter with aqua vitae, gunpowder, &c. having a good quantity of tar in a little pot: next night we came up to the idol about eleven o'clock, the moon being up. We found none guarding it; but we perceived a light in the house, where we had seen the priests before. ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... and that, like a whirlwind, hath blown the withering leaves off the tree, hath driven us out of our own land, and scattered us among strangers. Sin and uncleanness and the filthiness of our righteousness prepared us for the storm, made us light matter that could resist no judgment, made us matter combustible, and then iniquities, and sin rising up to iniquities, coming to such a degree, hath accomplished the judgment, put fire among us, made us as ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the visitor had rounded up all the firewood into one heap. Now, to this combustible material the fellow was bringing a side of bacon and a small bag of flour. These he dropped on the firewood, then went back for more of the ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... concerted together, and disciplined and organised the city. Individual and distorted passions kindled the mighty and virtuous love of the people for the triumph of democracy. It is thus that in a conflagration the most tainted substances oft light the fire; the combustible matter is foul, but the flames pure; the flame of the Revolution was liberty; the factious might dim, they could ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... probable that when a flame is smoking badly, distinct traces of carbon monoxide are being produced, but when an acetylene flame burns properly the products are as harmless as those of coal gas, and, light for light, less in amount. Mixed with air, like every other combustible gas, acetylene forms an explosive mixture. F. Clowes has shown that it has a wider range of explosive proportions when mixed with air than any of the other combustible gases, the limiting ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... running, until it simply stopped for want of fuel." He paused while we listened intently, then resumed. "The gas-engine and gas- motor have brought with them another of those unanticipated menaces of which I spoke. Whenever the explosion of the combustible mixture is incomplete or of moderated intensity a gas of which little is known may ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... or calorific power of the coal, in other words, its fuel value. However, some bituminous coals have a higher calorific power than some anthracites, because a large part of their volatile matter is combustible and yields more heat than the corresponding weight of fixed carbon in the anthracite. The fuel ratio pretty well discriminates coals of the higher ranks, and gives a classification corresponding roughly with their commercial ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... ditch would be within arrow shot before noon of the next day, Marion and Lee determined to adopt this speedy mode of effecting their object. Orders were instantly issued to prepare bows and arrows, with missive combustible matter. This measure was reluctantly adopted; for the destruction of private property was repugnant to the principles which swayed the two commandants, and upon this occasion was peculiarly distressing. The devoted house was a large, pleasant edifice, intended for the summer residence ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... being set on Fire by its own Velocity, for swiftness of Motion is allow'd by the Sages and so so's to produce Fire as in Wheels, Mills and several sorts of Mechanick Engines which are frequently Fir'd, and so in Thoughts, Brains, Assemblies, Consolidators, and all such combustible Things. ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... illustrations of this number are lanterns and torch-bearers. The lanterns were in reality torch-bearers, as they were made for holding masses of combustible material which were held in ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... wide circle was traced by a small rod, tipped apparently with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a pale lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it, burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring, like that which, in ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Most combustible bodies are capable of being inflamed by electricity, but more especially if it be made to strike against them in the form of a spark or shock obtained by an interrupted circuit, as by the interposition of a stratum of air. In this way may ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... the decrees of the Convention for prosecuting the war against the Vendee were to be carried out. One of those decrees ordered that "the forests shall be razed, the crops cut down, the cattle {191} seized. The Minister of War shall send combustible materials of all sorts to burn the woods, brush, and heath." That was the spirit now entering the Revolution, the fury of destruction, the dementia of ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... most alluring illusion was a booby idea that his "pet" was an invalid, and she kept pouring oil on the joke to keep it burning, and pulled the wool down further and further so that hubby could not see the combustible fluid she was pouring into the flames. Her illness was one of those "to be continued" story kinds—better to-day, worse to-morrow—and she "took" to the blankets at the most annoying and inopportune moments; and every time she "took" an indisposition ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... in America has the same set routine of experience. It springs up on land selected and laid out by a real estate speculator. The flimsiest and most combustible of buildings are rushed up. When the town has about five thousand inhabitants and these fire-trap buildings are close enough to burn one another, a fire breaks out and sweeps the whole thing away, destroying human lives, valuable stock, and priceless records; after which ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... avoid a feeling of apprehension concerning a catastrophe, which sooner or later seems certain to happen, and which nothing short of a miracle appears to prevent from taking place every night; I mean the destruction of the whole by fire. All the houses are constructed of the most combustible materials, and the greater number belonging to the native quarter are thatched. Though contrary to law, many of the warehouses contain gunpowder, while the immense quantity of oil and spirits stored up in them would render a conflagration, once commenced, most fearful. ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... toward the economy of fuel in obtaining electrical energy directly from the consumption of coal. Indeed, it will be noted that the example of his handwriting shown in these volumes deals with the importance of obtaining available energy direct from the combustible without the enormous loss in the intervening stages that makes our best modern methods of steam generation and utilization so barbarously extravagant and wasteful. Several years ago, experimenting in this field, Edison devised and operated some ingenious pyromagnetic ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... inauspicious mutterings of a thunder-storm. That menacing sky and unsheltered country filled us with melancholy impressions. There were even some amongst us, who, enthusiastic as they had lately been, were terrified at what they conceived to be a fatal presage. To them it appeared that those combustible vapours were collecting over our heads, and that they would descend upon the territory we approached, in order to prevent us ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... a weak union of carbon with hydrogen are called hydrocarbons. They comprise nearly all the highly inflammable vegetable substances. Their being combustible means simply that they have a great disposition to resume their union with oxygen—combustion being nothing other than a more or less violent return of a substance to a union with oxygen or some other ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp. Capt. Anthony could be kind, and, at times, he even showed an affectionate disposition. Could the reader have seen him gently leading me by the hand—as he sometimes ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... walls of logs and clay are built to top of the fireplace proper, split some sticks and make them about one inch wide by one and one half inch thick, or use the round sticks in the form in which they grow, but peel off the bark to render them less combustible; then lay them up as shown by Fig. 261, log-cabin style. With the chimney we have four sides to the wall in place of three sides as in the fireplace. The logs of the fireplace, where they run next to the cabin, may have to be chinked up so as to keep them level, but the chimney should be built ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... fabulous. Tradition supports the narrative of Sacred Scripture so far as to teach that the channel of the Dead Sea was once a fertile valley, partly resting on a mass of subterranean water, and partly composed of a stratum of bitumen; and that a fire from heaven kindling these combustible materials, the rich soil sunk into the abyss beneath, and Sodom and Gomorrah were ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... prescription) he tooke forthwith eight of his woorst and basest ships which came next to hand, and disburthening them of all things which seemed to be of any value, filled them with gun-powder, pitch, brimstone, and with other combustible and firy matter; and charging all their ordinance with powder, bullets, and stones, he sent the sayd ships vpon the 28 of Iuly being Sunday, about two of the clocke after midnight, with the winde and tide against the Spanish fleet: which when they had ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... Being one day at sea, and a little flushed with drink; "Come," said he, "let us make a hell of our own, and try how long we can bear it." Accordingly he, with two or three others, went down into the hold, and closing up all the hatches, filled several pots full of brimstone, and other combustible matter; they then set it on fire, and so continued till they were almost suffocated, when some of the men cried out for air; at length he opened the hatches, not a little pleased that he had held out ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... danger Hutter had made ample provision, and the building itself, the bark roof excepted, was not very combustible. The floor was scuttled in several places, and buckets provided with ropes were in daily use, in readiness for any such emergency. One of the girls could easily extinguish any fire that might be lighted, provided it had not time to make much ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... glassy stem, the next thing is to develop a long, well-filled ear. To this end, available ammonia or nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, and magnesia are indispensable. Ammonia (spirits of hartshorn) is necessary to aid in forming the combustible part of the seed. The other ingredients named are required to assist in making the incombustible part of the grain. In 100 parts of the ash of wheat, there ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... was sufficiently unpromising. The fire had kindled in a heap of combustible trumpery brought there for the tableaux. It had got far beyond management before any one discovered it; and now was making fast work in that corner of the room and creeping with no slow progress along the cornices of the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... will be obtained by operations with metals, not by the action on metals of things of animal or vegetable origin. Each class of substances, they said, has a life, or spirit (an essential character, we might say) of its own. "The life of sulphur," Paracelsus said, "is a combustible, ill-smelling, fatness.... The life of gems and corals is mere colour.... The life of water is its flowing.... The life of fire is air." Grant an attraction of like to like, and the reason becomes apparent for such directions as these: "Nothing ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... which—running up from the centre of a four-sided roof rising in the form of a pyramid—was rapidly conducted by means of a large quantity of iron used for the security of the timbers, to the shingles and other combustible materials of three of the corners of the building, almost directly under the eave. There entirely inaccesible for some minutes to any efforts which could be made use of for the purpose of quenching it, and continually fed by the qualities ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... raft really floating on this substance, which is in the highest degree combustible? Where had this naphtha come from? Was it a natural phenomenon taking place on the surface of the Angara, or was it to serve as an engine of destruction, put in motion by the Tartars? Did they intend ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... ensuing night this curiously-constituted party laboured in their efforts to get the upper hand of the fire; but it had been allowed to obtain too firm a hold upon the ship before the alarm was given; much of the cargo was of a highly combustible nature, and though, by the zeal and energy with which all hands worked, they succeeded to some extent in retarding the progress of the flames, when day at length broke, it became apparent to all that the ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... one month longer with Mr. P. R., who had 3000 rails to split. He immediately consented. The spring was not far advanced enough yet for Andrew to begin clearing any land even supposing that he had made a purchase; as it is always necessary that the leaves should be out, in order that this additional combustible may serve to burn the ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... had strongly guarded. Hannibal resorted to his usual resource, cunning and stratagem, for means of escape. He collected a herd of oxen. He tied fagots across their horns, filling the fagots with pitch, so as to make them highly combustible. In the night on which he was going to attempt to pass the defile, he ordered his army to be ready to march through, and then had the oxen driven up the hills around on the further side of the Roman detachment which was guarding the pass. The fagots ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... mob rolled in from every direction. Their shouts and revels swelled upon the night air. The rain began to fall in torrents. They broke into the houses for shelter; insulted maids and matrons; tore down every thing combustible for their watch fires; massacred a few of the body-guard of the queen, and, with bacchanalian songs, roasted their horses for food. And thus passed the hours of this long and dreary night, in hideous outrages for which one can hardly find a parallel ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... impressions, without, perhaps, being so rash as to claim a knowledge of what this substantial form is. Still we do not know what its capacities of physical action and passion may be. We shall find them out by observing it in relation to different 'natures'. It turns out to be combustible by fire, resistant to water, tractable to the carpenter's tools, intractable to his digestive organs, harmless to ostriches, nourishing to wood-beetles. Each of these capacities of the wood is distinct; we cannot relate them intelligibly to one another, nor deduce them from ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... fifteen or twenty feet—perhaps higher. A bonfire is premeditated. You shall see anon, how the flames will rise. The preparations are completed; the fire is applied. Hear how it crackles and hisses! Slowly but spitefully it mounts from limb to limb, and from one combustible to another, until the whole welkin is a-blaze, and shaking as with thunder! It is a beautiful sight. The gush of unwonted radiance rolls in effulgent surges adown the vale. How the owl hoots with surprise at the interrupting light! Bird of wisdom, it is the Fourth! and you ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... make so long a Digestion, you may by incorporating with powder'd Antimony a convenient Quantity of Oyl of Vitriol, and committing them immediately to Distillation, obtain a little Sulphur like unto the common one, and more combustible than perhaps you will at first take notice of. For I have observ'd, that though (after its being first kindled) the Flame would sometimes go out too soon of its self, if the same Lump of Sulphur were held again to the Flame of a Candle, it would be rekindled and burn a pretty ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... now in a position to form the following picture of the processes which follow upon the ignition of a combustible gas-mixture contained in a long tube. First we have the condition of slow combustion; the heat is conveyed by conduction to the adjacent layers, and there follows a velocity of propagation of a few metres per second. But since the combustion is accompanied by a high increase of pressure, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... they have only to blow it on some inflammable substance until a blaze comes; but where was I to get the punk from? I had also heard that fire had been made with lenses of glass, which, being held up to the sun, concentrate the rays and make a great heat, sufficient to set wood and like combustible things on fire; but I had no lens. Of course, I have no need to tell you that I had no matches, such as ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... place, they become thinner every year; and, as they diminish, they shade the grass less, which therefore grows more luxuriantly; and, where a strong wind carries a fire through dried grass and leaves, which cover the earth with combustible matter several feet deep, the volume of flame destroys all before it; the very animals cannot escape. We have seen it enwrap the forest upon which it was precipitated, and destroy whole acres of trees. After beginning;, the circle widens every year, until the prairies expand boundless as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... shine; Take fire, and bear it to the darkest house, Betwixt King Arthur's court and Caucasus: If you depart, the flame shall still remain, 410 And the bright blaze enlighten all the plain: Nor, till the fuel perish, can decay, By nature form'd on things combustible to prey. Such is not man, who, mixing better seed With worse, begets a base degenerate breed: The bad corrupts the good, and leaves behind No trace of all the great begetter's mind. The father sinks ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... baptize with the Holy Ghost and fire," thus using a most powerful symbol to characterize the nature of the work of the Holy Ghost. Everyone is familiar with the action of fire; it burns everything combustible with which it comes ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... which neither burn nor float. Lignum-vitae, which is one of the heaviest woods known to science, and used extensively in the manufacture of mallets, etc., was displayed; also the San Juan wood, which has lately been discovered, and is found extensively on the coast. This wood is practically non-combustible, and is said to be the coming wood for car building, furniture, and interior finishing, being susceptible of a high polish. The mahogany, for which Honduras is noted, was shown in many varieties, as were rosewood, redwood, hard ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... of their lord. All of them attained to those regions of felicity which were his. The son of Pandu burnt the body of his uncle together with those four wives of his, using diverse kinds of scents and perfumed wood. As the funeral pyre blazed up, a loud sound was heard of the burning wood and other combustible materials, along with the clear chant of Samans and the wailing of the citizens and others who witnessed the rite. After it was all over, the boys of the Vrishni and Andhaka races, headed by Vajra, as also the ladies, offered oblations of water ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage. The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, and ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and carefully planned for the purpose. They are more or less fire-proof, slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have devastated. But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Such a warehouse is a city in itself, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... either that the fire would not kindle, or that it would be devoid of its usual virtue. So soon as any sparks were emitted by means of the violent friction, they applied a species of agaric which grows on old birch-trees, and is very combustible. This fire had the appearance of being immediately derived from heaven, and manifold were the virtues ascribed to it. They esteemed it a preservative against witch-craft, and a sovereign remedy against malignant diseases, both in the human species and in cattle; and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... smoke that marked its advance, and now dying away in hoarse murmurs, as if to gather strength for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered, and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... and Pet withdrew, and had hardly reached the foot of the tower, when the musical thunder of the great bell announced the constantly reiterated story of a fire in the Seventh—that most combustible of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... in use not only as beacons, but as common street-lights, before either oil or gas-lights were known. Some of these cressets were formed of a wreathed rope, smeared over with pitch, and placed in an elevated cage of iron, others contained combustible materials in a hollow pan. Occasionally these primitive street-lights were placed at the summit of a pole, from either side of which, projecting pieces of wood formed a ready mode of ascent to trim the light, and obviated the need of a ladder for ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... paved with flint pebbles taken from the Thames, divided into small streets and alleys, like the City, with a great number of buildings, houses, dwellings, and wooden huts jammed together, a pell-mell mixture of combustible matter, amidst which fire might take its pleasure, as 1666 had proved. Southwark was then pronounced Soudric, it is now pronounced Sousouorc, or near it; indeed, an excellent way of pronouncing English names is not to pronounce them. Thus, for ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... heat of summer, and especially after the excessive dryness occasioned by the hot winds, the whole face of the country becomes, as it were, combustible, and bush-fires have at such times burst forth apparently spontaneously, and spread with great rapidity. The "Black Thursday" of the colony, some fifteen years since, when fire covered many hundreds of miles, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... Queiss, into the Lausitz (to Gorlitz, Guben, where we have Magazines for him), comes upon it from the southeast,—nobody expecting any of them. Three simultaneous Armies hurled on the head of your Friedrich; combustible deluges flowing towards him, as from the ends of Germany; so opaque, silent, yet of fire wholly: will not that surprise him!' thinks Bruhl. These are the schemes of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... they over-drink their allowance. The captain spoke pretty sharply to them.' It is true: I have the remark in my old note-book; I got it of the third mate in the hospital at Honolulu. But there is not room for it here, and it is too combustible, anyway. Besides, the third mate admired it, and what he admired ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... over them to a considerable height, and then Ghee, or melted preserved butter, poured on the top. Two bamboos were then put over them and held fast down, and fire put to the pile, which immediately blazed very fiercely, owing to the dry and combustible materials of which it was composed. No sooner was the fire kindled than all the people set up a great shout—Hurree-Bol, Hurree-Bol, which is a common shout of joy, and an invocation of Hurree, or Seeb. It was impossible to have heard the woman had she groaned, or even cried aloud, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... the Esquimaux live and make themselves comfortable in huts of ice or snow, and with no other combustible but oil. ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... sister, Phillida built no castles. Millard's politeness to her had been very agreeable, but she knew that it was only politeness. Almost every man's and every woman's imagination is combustible on one side or another. Many young women are set a-dreaming by any hint of love or marriage. But Phillida had read only sober books—knowing little of romances, there was no stock of incendiary material in her memory. Her fancy was easily touched off on the side of her religious ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... a piece of paper and brings it near the flame of a candle; another child looks on. Both are completely absorbed by the objects, both are ignorant or oblivious of the relation between the combustible object and the flame: a relation which becomes apparent only when the paper is alight. What is called the thoughtlessness of childhood prevents their seeing this unapparent fact; it is a fact which has not been sufficiently impressed upon ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... few showers towards the close of that month, continues, with little interruption, throughout the full season. The immense mass of vegetation with which the fertile soil loads itself during the summer is suddenly withered, and the whole earth is covered with combustible materials. A single spark of fire falling anywhere upon these plains at such a time, instantly kindles a blaze that spreads on every side, and continues its destructive course as long as it finds fuel, these fires sweeping on with a ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... of the moment, they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in God, this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted. You ask me if anything transpires here on the subject of South America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only. But this country probably will join the extinguishers. The want of facts worth communicating to you, has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... they live without waste and without supply. You look as if you do not understand this. Yet your people have, as you well know, what they call incandescent lights everywhere. You would have said there can be no lamp without oil or gas, or other combustible substance, to feed it; and yet you see a filament which sheds a light like that of noon all around it, and does not waste at all. So the Lunites live by influx of divine energy, just as the incandescent ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... forth into a storm, who can insure us that in its progress a part of its fury would not be spent upon us? No reasonable man would hastily pronounce that we are entirely out of its reach. Or if the combustible materials that now seem to be collecting should be dissipated without coming to maturity, or if a flame should be kindled without extending to us, what security can we have that our tranquillity will long remain undisturbed from some other cause or from some ...
— The Federalist Papers
... reading in paper about "explosive buttons." Seems that combs, collars, cuffs, buttons and things made to imitate ivory and tortoiseshell are really highly combustible. Lady in West of England had her dress ignited by sudden explosion of a "fancy" button! In consequence, advise my wife "to use that new hairbrush I gave her very gingerly, or she'll be blown up." She wants to know "why I didn't find that out before buying ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... those Celestial Substances which he saw shining in the Firmament, and he was continually trying of its power, by throwing things into it, which he perceiv'd it operated upon and consum'd, sometimes sooner, sometimes slower, according as the Bodies which he put into it were more or less combustible. ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... the besiegers constructed great engines, such as were used in those days, in the absence of cannon, for throwing rocks and heavy beams of wood, to batter the walls. These machines also threw a certain extraordinary combustible substance called Greek fire. It was this Greek fire that, in the end, turned the scale of victory, for it caught in the lower court of the castle, where it burned so furiously that it baffled all ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... it all, but did not therefore draw back; and looking fearlessly at the pile heaped with all these combustible materials intended for his martyrdom, he did not any the more cease from his work. He resisted, and accepted ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and beside it was a wood pile that almost reached the coal shed. The coal shed extended over to the workshops, and if that once caught fire, the flames would soon fly over to the roof of the iron foundry. Everything combustible would burn, the walls would fall from the heat, and the machinery would be destroyed. "Will you or won't you?" demanded Father Bear. The boy knew that he ought to answer promptly that he would not, but he also knew ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the upper part of the pyre was ablaze, and the basin, with its crowds of splendidly attired and mounted officials, was brilliantly illuminated by the ruddy glare. I think the bier, and possibly the body also, must have been treated with some highly combustible preparation, for I noticed that the moment the flames reached them they seized upon them with avidity, so that within ten minutes of the first kindling the bier and the body were both enwrapped in a roaring volume of vivid flame, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... exclaimed a maiden who discharged a similar duty under cover of the dwellings. Then followed a discharge of muskets, all of which were levelled at the glancing light that was glaring in fearful proximity to the combustible materials which filled the most of the out-buildings. A savage yell, and the sudden extinguishment of the blazing knot, announced the fatal accuracy of ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Queen's Bastion was a large range of barracks built of wood by the New England troops after their capture of the fortress in 1745. So flimsy and combustible was it that the French writers call it a "house of cards" and "a paper of matches." Here were lodged the greater part of the garrison: but such was the danger of fire, that they were now ordered to leave it; and they accordingly lay in the streets or along ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... aspiration, the gallant Sovolofski pulled lustily, and then rubbed his fingers, with a little grimace, observing that crackers were sometimes dangerous, and that the present combustible was d'une force immense. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... side Of thundering AEtna, whose combustible And fuel'd entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... thus reduced to the mere separation of its elements into two portions; one part is oxygenated at the expense of the other, so as to form carbonic acid; while the other part, being disoxygenated in favour of the latter, is converted into the combustible substance called alkohol; therefore, if it were possible to re-unite alkohol and carbonic acid together, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... his ship into action, and laid her alongside L'Orient. One particular only I shall add to the known account of the memorable engagement between these ships, and this I received from Sir Alexander Ball himself. He had previously made a combustible preparation, but which, from the nature of the engagement to be expected, he had purposed to reserve for the last emergency. But just at the time when, from several symptoms, he had every reason to believe that the enemy would soon strike to him, one of the lieutenants, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... accidents, as being much sought after; at least, this is the case in many parts of Britain, where it supplies the place of wood for burning. This fossil body has the most distinguished character; for, being inflammable or combustible in its nature, there is no other species of stratum that may be ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the party. So soon as this precaution was observed, the old man approached the opposite margin of the grass, which still environed them in a tall and dangerous circle, and selecting a handful of the driest of the herbage he placed it over the pan of his rifle. The light combustible kindled at the flash. Then he placed the little flame in a bed of the standing fog, and withdrawing from the spot to the centre of the ring, he ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... their having to spend another winter upon Gallia, some means could not be devised by which the dreariness of a second residence in the recesses of the volcano might be escaped. Would not another exploring expedition possibly result in the discovery of a vein of coal or other combustible matter, which could be turned to account in warming some erection which they might hope to put up? A prolonged existence in their underground quarters was felt to be monotonous and depressing, and although it might be all very well ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... the basis, which was of dry deal board, underneath; which suddenly conceiving flame, gave fire to the device of the masque, all of oiled paper, and dry fir, etc. And so, in a moment, disposed itself among the rest of that combustible matter that it was past any man's approach before it was almost discovered. Two hours begun and ended ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... of a hundred families. Far be it from me, also, to hint, my respectable friends, at the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to keep you clean. Nor will I remind you how often, when the midnight bells make you tremble for your combustible town, you have fled to the town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and ready to drain my vital current in your behalf. Neither is it worth while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the physician whose simple rule of practice ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... kolonaro. Colony kolonio. Colossal kolosa. Color koloro. Color kolori. Color (complexion) vizagxokoloro. Colorless senkolora. Colt cxevalido. Column kolono. Comb kombi. Comb kombilo. Combat batalo. Combat batali. Combatant batalanto. Combine kombini. Combustible brulebla. Combustion brulado. Come veni. Come (after) postveni. Come (back) reveni. Comedian komedianto. Comedy komedio. Comely gracia, beleta. Comet kometo. Comfort komforti. Comfort komforto. Comic komika, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... assaulted, it provokes itself to anger in the understanding, which is effected by various reasonings. These reasonings are like pieces of wood, which the fire inflames, and which thence burn: they are therefore like so much fuel, or so many combustible matters which give occasion to that spiritual flame, which is ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... be prepared at one-fourth of the cost, and will be of greater service than a chaldron and a half of the latter. Coal dust worked up with horse dung, cow dung, saw dust, tanner's waste, or any other combustible matter that is not too expensive, will also be found a saving in the article of fuel. Nearly a third of the coals consumed in large towns and cities might be saved, if the coal ashes were preserved, instead of being thrown into the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... three fundamental substances or primitive essences, quicksilver, sulphur, and salt, by which, however, something more principiant is understood than the empirical substances bearing these names: mercurius means that which makes bodies liquid, sulfur, that which makes them combustible, sal, that which makes them fixed and rigid. From these are compounded the four elements, each of which is ruled by elemental spirits—earth by gnomes or pygmies, water by undines or nymphs, air by sylphs, fire by salamanders (cf. with this, and with Paracelsus's theory ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... for additional labor, including all the labor in collecting the by-products; the interest on the first cost of the plant, which is considerable, and probably some outlay for repairs in excess of that in the case of ordinary ovens, has also to be charged. Mr. Jameson takes credit for the combustible gas, which is used up in the Carves ovens, but which remains over in his process, and is available, though not nearly all consumed, in raising steam for the various purposes of a colliery, including, no doubt, before long, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... another, the thyroid may be compared to the accelerator of an automobile. That is a rough and superficial comparison because an accelerator lets in more of the fuel to be burned up, while the thyroid makes the fuel more combustible. It thus resembles more the primer, for a rich mixture of gasoline and air burns at a greater velocity than a poor one. But the action of thyroid could really be simulated only by some substance that could be introduced into the best possible of gasoline ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the apex of the flame. The action of the burning candle may be thus explained. The radiant heat from the flame melts the tallow or wax, which then passes up into the texture of the wick by capillary attraction until it reaches the glowing wick, where the heat decomposes the combustible matter into carbonated hydrogen (C^{4}H^{4}), and into ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... interests soon losing their equipoise, a monarchy and hierarchy break out of the confusion of ambitious struggles, and the foundation of both is secured by feudal tenures. This appears to be the origin of monarchial and priestly power, and the dawn of civilization. But such combustible materials cannot long be pent up; and getting vent in foreign wars and intestine insurrections, the people acquire some power in the tumult, which obliges their rulers to gloss over their oppression with a show of right. Thus, as wars, agriculture, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... is prepared—the chambers of the mine Are cramm'd with the combustible, which, harmless While yet unkindled, as the sable sand, Needs but a spark to change its nature so, That he who wakes it from its slumbrous mood, Dreads scarce the explosion less than he who knows That 'tis his towers which meet its ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Lunites do not breathe; they live without waste and without supply. You look as if you do not understand this. Yet your people have, as you well know, what they call incandescent lights everywhere. You would have said there can be no lamp without oil or gas, or other combustible substance, to feed it; and yet you see a filament which sheds a light like that of noon all around it, and does not waste at all. So the Lunites live by influx of divine energy, just as the incandescent lamp glows,—glows, and is not consumed; receiving its life, if we may call ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... considerable height, and then Ghee, or melted preserved butter, poured on the top. Two bamboos were then put over them and held fast down, and fire put to the pile, which immediately blazed very fiercely, owing to the dry and combustible materials of which it was composed. No sooner was the fire kindled than all the people set up a great shout—Hurree-Bol, Hurree-Bol, which is a common shout of joy, and an invocation of Hurree, or Seeb. It was impossible to have heard the woman had she groaned, or ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... is the mystery of fire. The oxidizing processes are identical, only one is a building up or integrating process, and the other is a pulling down or disintegrating process. More than that, we can evoke fire any time, by both mechanical and chemical means, from the combustible matter about us; but we cannot evoke life. The equivalents of life do not slumber in our tools as do the equivalents of fire. Hence life is the deeper mystery. The ancients thought of a spirit of fire as they did of a spirit of health and of disease, and of good ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... the buffo in his workshop. His two combustible Turkish pavilions were finished, ready to be fired by Ettorina, and he was full of his devils. I inquired why we were doing Guido Santo so soon; it was only a year since my last visit to Palermo, when I had witnessed his lamented end after a fortnight of starvation ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... received of the great wealth and respectability of his brother, who had had no communion with him for years, and supposed him dead. He abjured his employers and resolved to abandon them; but before coming to England he decided to destroy all trace of his combustible inventions by dropping them into the neighbouring lake at night from a boat. You feel the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... type too heavy to drag with them on their hasty march to Morristown. Beside the cannon Molly also saw a lighted fuse slowly burning down at one end. She had a temptation as she looked at the piece of rope soaked in some combustible, lying there ready to achieve its purpose. She stooped over Dilwyn again, then she rose and went to the cannon, fuse in hand. In a half-second the booming of the great gun shook the battle-field—Molly had touched it off, and at exactly the right moment, for even then ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... family having wreaked vengeance, the crowd piled all kinds of combustible stuff around the scaffold, poured oil on it and set it afire. The Negro rolled and tossed out of the mass, only to be pushed back by the people nearest him. He tossed out again, and was roped and pulled back. Hundreds of people turned away, but the vast crowd still looked ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... additions of fuel that the sun's heat had to be sustained. Suppose that all the coal seams which underlie America were made to yield up their stores. Suppose that all the coal fields of England and Scotland, Australia, China, and elsewhere were compelled to contribute every combustible particle they contained. Suppose, in fact, that we extracted from this earth every ton of coal it possesses, in every island and in every continent. Suppose that this vast store of fuel, which is adequate to ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... unhesitatingly; "to be quite candid with you, dear, I do not. Whatever may be the cargo that the schooner carries, it is evidently of a highly combustible character, and now seems to be fairly ignited. The fire gains ground even as we stand and gaze; and if the crew could not conquer it at the outset, they are not likely to do so now. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... unfavorable to the development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp. Capt. Anthony could be kind, and, at times, he even showed an affectionate disposition. Could the reader have seen him gently leading me by the hand—as he sometimes did—patting me on ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... clan are more obnoxious to vanity than others. And from vanity consequently flows that great sensibility of disrespect, that quick resentment, that tinder of the mind that kindles at every spark, and justly marks them out for the genus irritabile among mankind. And from this combustible temper, this serious anger for no very serious things, things looked on by most as foreign to the important points of life, as consequentially flows that inheritance of ridicule, which devolves on them, from generation to generation. As soon as they become authors, they become ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... next as the medium of buoyancy. This for the free and non-navigable balloon, though for the airship, carrying means of combustion, and in military work liable to ignition by explosives, the gas helium seems likely to replace hydrogen, being non-combustible. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... for critics, whose pious forefathers kindled the fires of Smithfield, to assert that their practice was wholly barbarous. In the present case a pyre, some twelve feet high, was built at the foot of a huge granite boulder, near the sea-coast: it was constructed of dry wood, and was drenched with combustible materials. Jean was bound firmly to a strong hurdle, made of birch stems and withies securely lashed together. Judith, Garthmund, and the principal elders, placed themselves under the venerable oak; the people stood at a respectful distance. Twelve stalwart warriors bore the litter ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... moment, they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in God, this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted. You ask me if anything transpires here on the subject of South America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only. But this country probably will join the extinguishers. The want of facts worth communicating to you, has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... let me ask one question," said Jill. "Would not the difference of cost between a house built in the ordinary combustible style and the same made fire-proof, or even 'slow-burning,' pay the cost of insurance at the usual rates many times over and ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... would have made your heart bleed to see him. Thrice did he go round the earth in every parallel of latitude; and at last, wearied and jaded out, back came he to Hecla in despair, and would have thrown himself into the volcano, if he had been made of combustible materials. Luckily at that time our sisters were engaged in settling the balance of Europe; and whilst they were looking over projects, and counter-projects, and ultimatums, and post ultimatums, the poor Devil, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... domestic fires a necessity, while in Great Britain especially the demand of the various industries which depend on wood as a material, or on mechanical power derived from heat, are very great. Coal and peat serve as a combustible instead of wood in them all, and England imports an immense quantity of timber from her foreign possessions. Fortunately, the character of soil, surface, and climate renders the forest of less importance as a geographical agent in these northern regions than in Spain and Portugal, where ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... their bodies horribly mutilated. After their successful raid, the savages destroyed everything they found in the wagons, tearing the covers into shreds, throwing the flour on the trail, and winding up by burning everything that was combustible. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... in gauze wire which, while it admits oxygen to feed the flame, prevents communication between the flame and any combustible or explosive ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... forgotten that at her wish, if by Margaret's deed, he was summoned into this danger. Her mother was one of those who throw out terrible possibilities, miserable probabilities, unfortunate chances of all kinds, as a rocket throws out sparks; but if the sparks light on some combustible matter, they smoulder first, and burst out into a frightful flame at last. Margaret was glad when, her filial duties gently and carefully performed, she could go down into the study. She wondered how her father and Higgins ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... England in its place. On the approach, however, of an overwhelming army of the enemy in the autumn of the ensuing year it was abandoned by our troops, after having been dismantled and reduced, in its more combustible parts, to ashes. The Americans, who have erected new fortifications on the site of the old, still retain possession of a post to which they attach considerable importance, from the circumstance of its being a key to the more ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... War was, of course, a percussion-cap weapon. Even with the powder and bullet contained in a combustible paper cartridge, loading such an arm was a slow process: each bullet had to be forced in the front of the chamber on top of its propellant charge by means of a hinged rammer under the barrel, and a tiny copper cap had to be placed on each nipple. It was nothing to attempt on a prancing ...
— Rebel Raider • H. Beam Piper
... beacons, but as common street-lights, before either oil or gas-lights were known. Some of these cressets were formed of a wreathed rope, smeared over with pitch, and placed in an elevated cage of iron, others contained combustible materials in a hollow pan. Occasionally these primitive street-lights were placed at the summit of a pole, from either side of which, projecting pieces of wood formed a ready mode of ascent to trim the light, and obviated the need of a ladder for ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... place in front of the church. A figure of Judas, the size of life, is filled with squibs and crackers, and is frequently made to bear a resemblance to some obnoxious inhabitant of the place. After the match is applied to the combustible figure, the cholos dance around it, and exult in the blowing up ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... special metallic cylinder, fitted with a vane tail to ensure direction of flight when launched, and with a detonating head. This is dropped overboard. When it strikes the ground the detonator fires a charge which emits a report without damaging the message container, and at the same time fires a combustible charge emitting considerable smoke. The noise attracts anyone in the vicinity of the spot where the message has fallen, while at the same time the clouds of smoke guide one to the point and enable the cylinder to be recovered. This device is extensively used by the German aviators, ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... and purposes, the slow burning of iron. It develops heat, and, if the heat be preserved, a high temperature may be thus attained. The destruction of the first Atlantic cable was probably due to heat developed in this way. Other metals are still more combustible than iron. You may ignite strips of zinc in a candle flame, and cause them to burn almost like strips of paper. But we must now expand our definition of combustion, and include under this term, not only combustion in air, but also combustion in liquids. Water, for example, contains a store of ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... as a reasoner, he has convinced those who had no doubt before; as a moralist, he has taught, that virtue may disgrace; and, as a patriot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the high. Finding sedition ascendant, he has been able to advance it; finding the nation combustible, he has been able to inflame it. Let us abstract from his wit the vivacity of insolence, and withdraw from his efficacy the sympathetick favour of plebeian malignity; I do not say that we shall leave him nothing; the cause that I defend, scorns the help of falsehood; but if we leave him only ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... marked its advance, and now dying away in hoarse murmurs, as if to gather strength for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered, and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... because they were afraid of some few arquebuses with which those of the inside threatened them. But they endeavored to set fire to the convent and church three times without being able to succeed, notwithstanding that the material of the building was but little less combustible than tinder, for it was all constructed of wood, bamboo, and nipa. Those who tried to burn that edifice, regarded that as a miracle. Moreover, one can well understand the necessity that they suffered for they had no place whence to get relief, not even for the necessities of life. Consequently ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... puts a stop to the mischief; but parties of men are also sent out into the woods to "fight the fire." They tread out the flames among the dry leaves by trampling them down, and they rake away the combustible materials, to confine the enemy to its old grounds, when it soon exhausts itself. The flames spread more frequently along the earth, than from ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... from the clouds by rods erected on elevated buildings. As this was not sufficiently demonstrative he succeeded at length in drawing the lightning from the clouds by means of a kite and silken string, so as to ignite spirits and other combustible substances by an electric spark similar to those from a Leyden jar. To utilize his discovery of the identity of lightning with electricity he erected lightning-rods to protect buildings, that is, to convey the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... sticking in handfuls in different parts of the vessel. Three dead bodies were found in her hold, but nothing having life was met with on board. There was a tar-bucket filled at hand, and this was placed beneath the hatch, covered with all the combustible materials that could be laid hold of, and set on fire. So active were the flames at that dry season that Raoul regretted he had not taken the precaution to awaken them after he had removed his own vessel; but the southerly air continuing, he was enabled to get to a safe distance ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... human kind. [32] They died in torments, and their torments were imbittered by insult and derision. Some were nailed on crosses; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts, and exposed to the fury of dogs; others again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse-race and honored with the presence of the emperor, who mingled with the populace in the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... given; because they had fired red-hot shot, and had also a preparation sent, as they said, by the convention from Paris, which seems to have been of the nature of the Greek fire; for it became liquid when it was discharged, and water would not extinguish its flames. This combustible was concealed with great care in the captured ships; like the red-hot shot, it had been found useless in battle. Admiral Hotham's action saved Corsica for the time; but the victory had been incomplete, and the arrival at Toulon of six sail of the line, two ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... mankind. Their executions were so contrived, as to expose them to derision and contempt. Some were covered over with the skins of wild beasts, that they might be torn to pieces by dogs; some were crucified; while others, having been daubed over with combustible materials, were set up for lights in the night time, and thus burned to death. For these spectacles Nero gave his own gardens, and, at the same time, exhibited there the diversions of the circus; sometimes standing in the crowd as a spectator, in the habit of a charioteer; ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... were supposed to have the secret of a mysterious combustible known as "Greek Fire" which was unquenchable by water. I think that "Greek Fire" was nothing more or less than ordinary petroleum, which was practically unknown in Europe in 1866, though from personal experience I can say that it was ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... allow the bonfire no more—no, not at all; nor the fireworks neither—no, nothing of no kind of the sort." All this in his natural voice: then, swelling in dignity and in diction, "but, for the accumulated pile of combustibles, I say—for the combustible pile that you have accumulated, that you may not be deprived of the merit of doing a good action, the materials of which it is composed, that is to say, the logs of wood, and the bavins of furze, with the pole and tar-barrel, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... more; I fear that if I were to arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... circumstances frequently occur, in which the ebullition of party spirit is, although temporary, subsiding after the cause that produced it has passed away, and leaving the kind peasant to the natural, affectionate, and generous impulses of his character. But poor Paddy, unfortunately, is as combustible a material in politics or religion as in fighting—thinking it his duty to take the weak side*, without any other consideration than because it ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... he found the depth diminished, but the fire was not three hundred paces distant. His heart sank within him. But when on the eve of returning to his former position, with a resolution to remove as much of the combustible matter as possible, a gleam of joy spread over his features, as, casting a glance in a contrary direction from that they had recently pursued, he beheld the identical mound he had ascended before dark, and from which his unsteady and erratic riding in the ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... mines extend under the waves like the coalfields at Newcastle. Here, dressed in diving suits, pick and mattock in hand, my men go out and dig this carbon fuel for which I don't need a single mine on land. When I burn this combustible to produce sodium, the smoke escaping from the mountain's crater gives it the appearance ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... raised by Mr. Johnson is finally quitted, to acquaint the reader with its fate. In 1798, after having stood only five years, it was discovered one evening to be on fire, and, all efforts to save it proving useless, from the combustible nature of the materials, it was consumed in an hour. "This was a great loss," observes the historian of the colony, "for during the working days of the week the building was used as a school, in which from 150 to 200 children were educated, under the immediate inspection of Mr. Johnson. As this ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... accident, by purposely setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that prompt assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the remotest possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a moment's consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort from his mind. Remembering the quantity of combustible objects in the vestry—the straw, the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood, the old worm-eaten presses—all the probabilities, in my estimation, point to the fire as the result of an accident with his matches or ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... to be the most nearly fire-proof church structure on the continent, the only combustible material used in its construction being that used in the doors and pews. A striking feature of the church is a beautiful apartment known as the "Mother's Room," which is approached through a superb archway ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... obtained, at least during sufficient time to enable the chief defences to be blown up and the harbour fleet to be destroyed. If you will so far favour me, I should be gratified by having an opportunity of demonstrating to your strong mind, free from professional bias, the fact that combustible ships may be not only placed on a parity with stone forts fitted to fire red-hot shot, but secured from injury more effectually than if incased ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... was burned. Animal bodies, full of moisture, glowed awhile and then remained charred wrecks. Wood and other easily combustible things burned to ashes. On the ground lay the bodies, amidst heaps of hot mud, heaps of gleaming ashes and piles of volcanic ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... equilibrium. We had, on Thursday, an instance of their worth in the establishment of a cook-house to supply the native population with cooked rations. This was a praiseworthy innovation, for wood and such fuel as Mars permitted to be combustible were extremely scarce. The native had been cured of his weakness for the dismemberment of mahogany; indirectly the cooking-depot warded off a "relapse," and was altogether an Institution creditable ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... dormant because of shade, would begin to amount to something much quicker than that supplied by seed trees afterward. Nor is the system feasible where there is much fir or other species less fire-resisting than pine. It is dangerous in practice except where there is very little combustible matter on the ground and fire is generally easy of control, and exceedingly dangerous to advocate because serves as a pretext and example for indiscriminate carelessness with fire under all conditions. Finally, the alleged immunity of pine from injury ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... infernal machines, or "hell-burners," as they were called, a fleet of thirty-two smaller vessels was prepared. Covered with tar, turpentine, rosin, and filled with inflammable and combustible materials, these barks were to be sent from Antwerp down the river in detachments of eight every half hour with the ebb tide. The object was to clear the way, if possible, of the raft, and to occupy the attention of the Spaniards, until the 'Fortune' and the 'Hope' should ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... heated, as sulphur, nitre, etc., and those which do not. The metals were considered to be composed of sulphur and mercury. These substances are themselves compounds, but they act as elements in the composition of metals. Sulphur represented their combustible aspect, and also that which gave them their solid form; while mercury was that to which their weight and powers of becoming ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... The action of the burning candle may be thus explained. The radiant heat from the flame melts the tallow or wax, which then passes up into the texture of the wick by capillary attraction until it reaches the glowing wick, where the heat decomposes the combustible matter into carbonated hydrogen (C^{4}H^{4}), ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... with the curling fronds; and where I do not cut, the foresters and miners will be preparing heaps to carry away for litter and bedding. By the end of July the forest beneath the oaks will be covered with a carpet of stuff as combustible as tinder. Let us but fire it at Newnham, Littledean, Blakeney, Coleford, and at Speech by the courthouse, and we shall lay tens of thousands of oaks in blackened ruin. Philip of Spain has but to scatter the present small navy of England, for no more ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... first to show that combustion is due to union with oxygen. Previous to his time combustion was supposed to be due to the presence of a substance or principle called phlogiston. One substance was thought to be more combustible than another because it contained more phlogiston. Coal, for example, was thought to be very rich in phlogiston. The ashes left after combustion would not burn because all the phlogiston had escaped. If the phlogiston could be restored ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... once every other college generation, we try to make the celebration bigger than the stories of other celebrations that have been handed down. We'd been planning this celebration all winter and had everything combustible in Jonesville spotted. ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... But albeit ludicrous in his own plight and position, there was nothing of that character in the scene around him, or in his own contemplations. The fire raged with amazing fury and power,—stimulated to madness as it were, by the pitch, and tar, and dried timbers, and other combustible materials used in the constriction of the boat. The lurid flames ascended to a great height,—the smoke rolled upward in majestic volumes, while the light, red as the flames of AEtna, streamed across the lake, gilding the crumbling battlements ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... no knowledge; and their optics extend not beyond the making of convex and concave lenses of rock crystal to assist the sight in magnifying, or throwing more rays upon, small objects and, by collecting to a focus the rays of the sun, to set fire to combustible substances. These lenses are cut with a saw and afterwards polished, the powder of crystal being used in both operations. To polish diamonds they make use of the powder of adamantine spar, or the corundum stone. In cutting ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... a wide circle was traced by a small rod, tipped apparently with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a pale lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it, burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring, like that which, in our lovely native fable-talk, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the interest on the first cost of the plant, which is considerable, and probably some outlay for repairs in excess of that in the case of ordinary ovens, has also to be charged. Mr. Jameson takes credit for the combustible gas, which is used up in the Carves ovens, but which remains over in his process, and is available, though not nearly all consumed, in raising steam for the various purposes of a colliery, including, no doubt, before long, the generation of electricity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... the courts of Castile and Aragon, the Jews were active as ministers, physicians, astronomers. But the people, incited by the propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews, not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... whole mind. Such mercurial fire will indeed require a certain imaginative temperament; and there are many persons who, short of a life-long domestic attachment, can conceive of nothing but sordid vice. But even an inconstant flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturally combustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just because they come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, in which it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... machine to another, the thyroid may be compared to the accelerator of an automobile. That is a rough and superficial comparison because an accelerator lets in more of the fuel to be burned up, while the thyroid makes the fuel more combustible. It thus resembles more the primer, for a rich mixture of gasoline and air burns at a greater velocity than a poor one. But the action of thyroid could really be simulated only by some substance that could be introduced into ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... which I had come was indeed a novel sight. Its buildings average in height one-third of ours, although they occupy nearly as much ground space. They are composed almost totally of non-combustible materials. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... of a cow. But a week after that, on the 30th of July, 1844, the same destroying spirit Joe Smith was allowed to attack me directly, to show how he would be able to kill a man in a minute, if he would be permitted. But he was seized by my guardian and cast into a combustible matter which was by his infernal electricity instantly kindled. George Karle was permitted to be drowned, because the time for establishing our centre had not yet arrived, and Karle had an important mission in the spirit ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... or Bober and Queiss, into the Lausitz (to Gorlitz, Guben, where we have Magazines for him), comes upon it from the southeast,—nobody expecting any of them. Three simultaneous Armies hurled on the head of your Friedrich; combustible deluges flowing towards him, as from the ends of Germany; so opaque, silent, yet of fire wholly: will not that surprise him!' thinks Bruhl. These are the schemes ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... all ordinary combustion there is a definite temperature, called the ignition or kindling temperature, to which combustible substance must be heated in order that it may unite with the gas in supporting the combustion. The burning substance must not only be heated up to the kindling temperature, but it must be kept as high as this temperature, or combustion ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... thousands of barrels of petroleum had been stored up in vats, and when the combustible fluid was spouting from the wells at the rate of many hundred barrels per day. Before the present deep wells were bored, oil was not produced in sufficient quantities to cause such a conflagration, and there was never seen upon the creek a stratum of the fluid of such consistency ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... trwm," as a person "seirchiawc saphwyawc—(and perhaps) elydnan," would necessarily be. The bundles of combustible materials, which he also carried, would add to the weight of his armour, and tend to retard his movements. Or, "yn trwm" may refer to the battle, as being a pressure, or a ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... moment, now rising high into the air in a towering sheet of flame, now shooting forward like an enormous dragon vomiting streams of fire upon its foes. All at once the flames changed colour, and were partially obscured by a thick black smoke. A large warehouse filled with resin, tar, and other combustible matters, had caught fire, and the dense vapour proceeded from the burning pitch. But it cleared off in a few minutes, and the flames burnt more brightly ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... pieces of what is vulgarly called fox-fire,[A] made into the likeness of human eyes, some material being placed in its mouth, around which was a piece of the thinnest scarlet tiffany, in order to make it appear of a flame colour. They had also constructed a large combustible ball, of several thicknesses of paste-board, to which a match was placed. The image was to be conveyed into her room, and placed, in the dark, before her bed;—while in that position, the ball was to be rubbed over with phosphorus, the match set on fire, and rolled ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... our combustible material was expended, and a disheartening kind of darkness settled down upon us. The boys collected together here and there in knots, consulting as to what should be done. It yet lacked four or five hours of daybreak, and none of us were in the humor to return ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... theory was that finally adopted by the board. It was that a certain kind of powder, known as 'B' powder, degenerates under heat, and becomes, in time, extremely combustible, so that it will sometimes explode ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... of danger Hutter had made ample provision, and the building itself, the bark roof excepted, was not very combustible. The floor was scuttled in several places, and buckets provided with ropes were in daily use, in readiness for any such emergency. One of the girls could easily extinguish any fire that might be lighted, provided it had not time to make much headway. Judith, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... on burning coals (juxta carbones accensos). This punishment is described by Marsollier in his Histoire de l'Inquisition. First a good fire was started; then the victim was stretched out on the ground, his feet manacled, and turned toward the flame. Grease, fat, or some other combustible substance was rubbed upon them, so that they were horribly burned. From time to time a screen was placed between the victim's feet and the brazier, that the Inquisitor might have an opportunity to resume ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... Fontaine. The "enemy" was seldom obvious, but during the war it inflicted a loss upon us of eight killed and twenty-three wounded. We took various stockades, shot from sixty to eighty Malays, burned a good deal of what was combustible, and gave stability to the shaky rule of the Datu Klana, Syed Abdulrahman. Of this prince, who owed his firm seat on the throne to British intervention, the Resident wrote in 1880:—"Loyal to his engagements, he had gained the good will of the British Government. Straightforward, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... when they burst, they make a great noise. They consist of a large shell of cast iron, which is round and hollow. A hole is made through the shell to receive a fusee, as it is called; this is a small pipe, or hollow piece of wood, which is filled with some combustible matter. When a bomb is about to be fired, it is filled with powder, after which the fusee is driven into the vent, ...
— Whig Against Tory - The Military Adventures of a Shoemaker, A Tale Of The Revolution • Unknown
... thin? He's a broth of a boy; and I'll tell ye. Shure he knows all about the red-coats, case he's an arthillery man himself, and that's the way he's found out his gran' combustible." ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... of the laboratory were opened, ventilating blowers were built, and refrigerating coils were set up everywhere, even in the tubular structure and behind the visiplates. After assuring themselves that everything combustible had been removed, the two scientists put on under their helmets, goggles whose protecting lenses could be built up to any desired thickness. Rovol then threw a switch, and a hemisphere of flaming golden radiance surrounded ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... an extent that he had optical illusions favorable to the "darling" who deceived him. His most alluring illusion was a booby idea that his "pet" was an invalid, and she kept pouring oil on the joke to keep it burning, and pulled the wool down further and further so that hubby could not see the combustible fluid she was pouring into the flames. Her illness was one of those "to be continued" story kinds—better to-day, worse to-morrow—and she "took" to the blankets at the most annoying and inopportune moments; and every ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... to ask me what had changed her regard for Ingram during that solitary year, so that she received him at the end of it as she did, I don't know that I can tell you. Slowly discovery—of herself, of him—came to her, slowly combustible stuff was heaped within her; it slowly kindled, and smouldered long. No doubt he himself blew it into clear flame by his let-drop news of Claire's death. She had not known that: she never read the newspaper, having neither time for the world's affairs nor interest in ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... sketches by enquiring into the nature of the combustible which has fed for so many thousands of years the fire of the peak of Teneriffe;—I might examine whether it be sodium or potassium, the metallic basis of some earth, carburet of hydrogen, or pure sulphur combined with iron, that burns in the volcano;—but ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... being very high, the flame soon spread itself over the roof of the palace, and catching at every combustible in its way, the invaders became so terrified at the quick progress of fire which threatened to consume themselves as well as their plunder, that they quitted the spot with precipitation. Decrying the count and his soldiers at a short distance, they ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... sitting from September 1st to October 13th, framed a constitution and made request that California be taken into the Union. This constitution prohibited slavery, and thus a new firebrand was tossed into the combustible material with which the political situation abounded. By this time nearly all the friends of freedom were for the proviso, but its enemies as well had greatly increased. The immense growth, actual and prospective, of northern ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... miles above the surface, and was observed at different extremities of the kingdom. The sound of an explosion was heard through Devon and Cornwall, and along the opposite coast of Bretagne. Halley conjectured this and similar displays to proceed from combustible vapors aggregated on the outskirts of the atmosphere, and suddenly set on fire by some unknown cause. But since his time, the fact has been established, of the actual fall of heavy bodies to the earth from surrounding space, which requires another hypothesis. To these ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... restored either by the public care of government, or the activity of private interest. Yet two causes may be alleged, which render the calamity of fire more destructive to a flourishing than a decayed city. 1. The more combustible materials of brick, timber, and metals, are first melted or consumed; but the flames may play without injury or effect on the naked walls, and massy arches, that have been despoiled of their ornaments. 2. It ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... thundering AEtna, whose combustible And fuel'd entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... volcanoes, which in almost every corner of the earth are continually vomiting up either flames or smoke. "These," said he, "are the great vents appointed by nature for the discharge of that rarefied air and combustible matter, which, if confined, would burst the globe asunder; but, besides the larger outlets, there are some small chimneys through which part of the heat transpires; a vapour of that sort, I conceive, must pass through the bed or channel of this spring, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... was not plain and ordinary, and the smiles which were intended as innocent lures from snares, instead of into them, might make trouble for all concerned. Haldane was naturally combustible, to begin with, and was now at the most inflammable period ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "broke out," says an account in the Boston News-Letter, "in an old tenement within a backyard in Cornhill, near the First Meeting-house, occasioned by the carelessness of a poor Scottish woman by using fire near a parcel of ocum, chips, and other combustible rubbish." ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... Every thing that has the smell of woman will be destroyed. Woman is the capsheaf of the abomination of desolation-full of all deviltry. In a short time, the world will take fire and dissolve; it is combustible already. All women, not obedient, had better become so as soon as possible, and let the wicked spirit depart, and become temples of truth. Praying is all mocking. When you see any one wring the neck of a fowl, instead of cutting off its head, he has not got the Holy Ghost. ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... say it was. I've been worried about having him sit near the gasoline tank, it brings his hair so close to a high combustible. But it has one advantage: if we don't get home before dark we shan't need to light up. Red's torch of a head will do the trick; we can come in by the ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... regarded as fabulous. Tradition supports the narrative of Sacred Scripture so far as to teach that the channel of the Dead Sea was once a fertile valley, partly resting on a mass of subterranean water, and partly composed of a stratum of bitumen; and that a fire from heaven kindling these combustible materials, the rich soil sunk into the abyss beneath, and Sodom and Gomorrah were ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... winter, and ten in summer, there is a curfew-bell rung, warning the people to put out their lights, and go to bed. This is a very necessary precaution in towns subject to conflagrations; but of small use in Nice, where there is very little combustible in the houses. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... because a passive power is moved by an active principle. But in order that some quality be caused in that which is passive the active principle must entirely overcome the passive. Whence we see that because fire cannot at once overcome the combustible, it does not enkindle at once; but it gradually expels contrary dispositions, so that by overcoming it entirely, it may impress its likeness on it. Now it is clear that the active principle which is reason, cannot ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... fogies, when he lightens at 'em, Shrivel like leaves; to him 'tis granted Always to say the word that's wanted, So that he seems but speaking clearer The tiptop thought of every hearer; 80 Each flash his brooding heart lets fall Fires what's combustible in all, And sends the applauses bursting in Like an exploded magazine. His eloquence no frothy show, The gutter's street-polluted flow, No Mississippi's yellow flood Whose shoalness can't be seen for mud;— So simply clear, serenely deep, 89 So silent-strong its graceful sweep, None measures its ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... himself upon some occasion, fastened upon the basis, which was of dry deal board, underneath; which suddenly conceiving flame, gave fire to the device of the masque, all of oiled paper, and dry fir, etc. And so, in a moment, disposed itself among the rest of that combustible matter that it was past any man's approach before it was almost discovered. Two hours begun and ended that ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... some inflammable substance until a blaze comes; but where was I to get the punk from? I had also heard that fire had been made with lenses of glass, which, being held up to the sun, concentrate the rays and make a great heat, sufficient to set wood and like combustible things on fire; but I had no lens. Of course, I have no need to tell you that I had no matches, such as we ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... has been for some time hanging over the European world. If it should break forth into a storm, who can insure us that in its progress a part of its fury would not be spent upon us? No reasonable man would hastily pronounce that we are entirely out of its reach. Or if the combustible materials that now seem to be collecting should be dissipated without coming to maturity, or if a flame should be kindled without extending to us, what security can we have that our tranquillity will ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Livingston, with a regiment of Canadians, and Brown, with part of a Boston regiment, were to make false attacks on Cape Diamond Bastion, St. John and St. Louis Gates, which they were to fire, if possible, with combustible ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... however, I saw that we had little to hope for. While the masts and rigging were all enveloped in flame, a dense smoke was rising from the hold, indicating that the electric fluid, in its descent through the ship, had come in contact with something in the cargo that was highly combustible. Passengers and crew stood looking on with pale, horror-stricken faces. But the captain, a man of self-possession, aroused all from their lethargy by ordering, in a loud, clear voice, the masts and rigging to be cut away instantly. This order was ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... say the schools, "is received in proportion to the recipient." The power of a political treatise depends much upon the disposition of the people; the nation was then combustible, and a spark set it on fire. It is boasted, that between November and January eleven thousand were sold; a great number at that time, when we were not yet a nation of readers. To its propagation certainly no agency of power or influence was wanting. It furnished ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... each other, and then in consternation upon the burning building, every window of which was belching flame, while the sound of some falling rafter, or the explosion of some combustible substance, was continually heard! To venture into that blazing house, with its sinking roof and ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... now fix our attention for a moment on the gunpowder which urges the cannon-ball. This is composed of combustible matter, which if burnt in the open air would yield a certain amount of heat. It will not yield this amount if it perform the work of urging a ball. The heat then generated by the gunpowder will fall ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... loving people throughout the world, and the pride and glory of American citizens. Every year since the adoption of the old Constitution, have discordant elements cropped out, and incidents transpired, which demonstrated to every rational mind, that as time rolled on, the accumulation of combustible elements would ultimately explode, and shake the civilized world ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... the darkest house, Betwixt King Arthur's court and Caucasus: If you depart, the flame shall still remain, 410 And the bright blaze enlighten all the plain: Nor, till the fuel perish, can decay, By nature form'd on things combustible to prey. Such is not man, who, mixing better seed With worse, begets a base degenerate breed: The bad corrupts the good, and leaves behind No trace of all the great begetter's mind. The father sinks ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... being no undergrowth to supply their place, they become thinner every year; and, as they diminish, they shade the grass less, which therefore grows more luxuriantly; and, where a strong wind carries a fire through dried grass and leaves, which cover the earth with combustible matter several feet deep, the volume of flame destroys all before it; the very animals cannot escape. We have seen it enwrap the forest upon which it was precipitated, and destroy whole acres of trees. After beginning;, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... design, with marble and other trim work, and the railings of the main gallery construction are likewise of ornate treatment. All exterior doors and trim are of metal and all interior carpenter work is done with Kalomein iron protection, so that the building, in its strictest sense, will contain no combustible material. ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... minute to me, sir,' said my father, with a glowing reminiscence of Jorian DeWitt, which was almost too much for the combustible old man, even ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be inflicted. To those who have excited a spirit of resentment in the bosom of an Indian, the tomahawk and scalping knife are instruments of mercy. Death by the faggot—by splinters of the most combustible wood, stuck in the flesh and fired—maiming and disemboweling, tortures on which the soul sickens but to reflect, are frequently practiced. To an enemy of their own color, they are perhaps more cruel and severe, than ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... with combustible materials, and fitted with grappling-irons, to hook and set fire to the enemy's ships. Notwithstanding what is said respecting the siege of Tyre, perhaps the practice of using regular fire-ships ought to be dated ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the hardships of their march, had been thought so necessary a measure by all the chieftains, that even Oubacha himself was the first to authorize the act by his own example. He seized a torch previously prepared with materials the most durable as well as combustible, and steadily applied it to the timbers of his own palace. Nothing was saved from the general wreck except the portable part of the domestic utensils, and that part of the woodwork which could be applied to the manufacture of the long Tartar ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... by thongs of bamboo. Cutting a passage through these, we entered the place, which contained perhaps a hundred houses, neatly built of wicker-work, and having their high conical roofs thatched with palmetto-leaves. Such edifices were in the highest degree combustible, and being set on fire, it was worth while for a lover of the picturesque to watch the flames, as they ran up the conical roofs, and meeting at the apex, whirled themselves fiercely into ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... as he, it's like the rebellion had been more durable and sanguinarie' But as soon as the news of Argyll's landing on the west coast came, this is his note, 'Argile, minding the former animosities and discontents in the country, thought to have found us all alike combustible tinder, that he had no more adoe then to hold the match to us, and we would all blow up in a rebellion; but the tymes are altered, and the peeple are scalded so severely with the former insurrections, that they are frighted to adventure on a new on. The Privy Council, though they despised this invasion, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... as regards dynamic product, the gas motor preserves the advantage, although the relatively high price of the illuminating gas employed in the production of the motive power generally renders the use of this combustible more costly than steam, especially for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... detour we came into a valley flanked to the east by Raccoon Mountain, and we visited a large saltpetre works at Nick-a-Jack Cave. These works we destroyed by breaking the large iron kettles and by burning all combustible structures. A portion of the detachment was sent under cover of the thick woods to the railroad east of Shellmound, a station near the river, where we expected to cut off a train of cars engaged in loading, for removal, supplies of provisions. The engineer, a few moments ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... inde animis, &c. But when as I say, nox, vinum, et adolescentia, youth, wine, and night, shall concur, nox amoris et quietis conscia, 'tis a wonder they be not all plunged over head and ears in love; for youth is benigna in amorem, et prona materies, a very combustible matter, naphtha itself, the fuel of love's fire, and most apt to kindle it. If there be seven servants in an ordinary house, you shall have three couple in some good liking at least, and amongst idle persons how should it be otherwise? "Living ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... slaver, this is the most dreaded and unmanageable. The news appalled me. Impetuous with anxiety I rushed to the captain, and regardless of fever or insanity, disclosed the dreadful fact. He stared at me for a minute as if in doubt; then opening his bureau and pointing to a long coil of combustible material, said that it communicated through the decks with the powder magazine, and ordered me to—"blow ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... is, however, no reliable evidence to support the belief in the spontaneous combustion of the body. A few apochryphal cases only have been recorded. The opinion that the tissues of drunkards might be so saturated with alcohol as to render the body combustible is disproved by the simple experiment of placing flesh in spirits for a long time and then trying to burn it. Liebig and others found that flesh soaked in alcohol would burn only until the alcohol was consumed. That various substances ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... telegraphic and telephonic wires are extended so as to traverse practically all the streets of every city, the fire-insurance companies will find it to their advantage to promote a simple plan, depending on the use of a combustible thread passing round little pulleys in the corners of all the rooms and finally out to the front, where an electrical "contact-maker" is fixed, so that on the thread being burnt and broken at any point in its circuit, an electric message will be ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... several handspikes and pinch-bars aboard, and with these they attacked bulkheads and spare woodwork, and fed the fires with the fragments; for a glance down the hatches had shown them nothing more combustible and detachable in the cargo than a few layers of railroad iron, which covered and blocked the openings ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... suggested suspicion of incendiarism and suicide. The papers, the books, the oil betrayed themselves as combustible materials, carried into the place for a purpose. The medicine chest was known (by its use in cases of illness among the servants) to contain opium. Adjourned inquiry elicited that the laboratory was not ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... suggests to us. Ah, dear friends! we do not need to go to Jacob and Peter; let us look at our own hearts, and if we will honestly examine one day of our lives, I think we shall understand how it is possible for a man, on the foundation, yet to build upon it these worthless and combustible ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... sort of Pores to be found in all Woods and Vegetables; the shape of them; the number, thickness, manner and use of these Pores. An explication of the Phaenomena of Coals. The manner of charring Wood, or any other body. What part of Wood is combustible. An Hypothesis of fire explicated in twelve particulars, wherein the Action of the Air, as a Menstruum in the dissolution of all sulphureous bodies, is very particularly explicated, and some other Considerations ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... he knelt before the combustible accumulation he had been diligently heaping together and struck a spark which, seizing on the dry material, immediately ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Thousand Barrels of Gun-powder, in that they call the White-Tower, when all at once the middle Flooring did not only give way, or shrink, but fell flat down upon other Barrels of Powder, together with many of the same combustible Matter which had been placed upon it. It was a Providence strangely neglected at that Time, and hardly thought of since; But let any considerate Man consult the Consequences, if it had taken fire; perhaps to the Destruction of the ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... for, of all words in our vernacular tongue, to express comfort and security from ill, commend us to the expletive of free and easy. We had rather not meddle with civil or religious liberty: they are as combustible as the Cotopaxi, or the new governments, of South America; and our attempts at reformation do not extend beyond paper and print, which the unamused reader may burn or not, as he pleases without searing his own conscience or exciting our revenge. To ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... squashing in her shoes, her clothes spoiled and her bonnet looking like an over-ripe fig, with a terrible cold that made her voice only a whisper, and sneezing herself almost to pieces, Mrs. Sparsit found Bounderby at his city hotel, exploded with the combustible information she carried and fainted quite away on ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... people and the guards; then ensued a general pillage, and a conflagration. Every house was fired after it had been ransacked, and the English Ribauds running along the platform with torches in their hands, applied the flame to everything combustible—doors, galleries, partitions, rafters —all blazed, and the only portion of the castle and town that was left unconsumed were the latrines, to which they did not consider it worth their pains to ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... each. I say, it must be inferior, because nothing can be so hot, so tormenting, so intolerably insupportable, as the quickest apprehensions of, and the immediate sinking under, that guilt and indignation that is proportional to the offence. Should all the wood, and brimstone, and combustible matter on earth be gathered together for the tormenting of one body, yet that cannot yield that torment to that which the sense of guilt and burning-hot application of the indignation of God will do to the soul; yea, suppose the fire wherewith the body is tormented in hell should be seven times ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... wood, sticks, and other inflammable rubbish and refuse, on which they place the newly formed articles, and then set the floor on fire, until the whole is thoroughly burnt. Fragments of broken objects, etc., are not removed. The combustible material is thus reduced to ashes, and the broken pieces remain within them; their convex surfaces, of course, falling outwards, and thus resting on the floor. In this manner a thick layer of ashes and charcoal, ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... gathered together a goodly portion of combustible wood, and there was plenty more at hand, so that a roaring fire was soon casting its light away from the wood, which somewhat sheltered them behind; and as soon as some of the good-sized pieces of bush were well ablaze, Chicory began to send them flying in the directions where ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... day at sea, and a little flushed with drink; "Come," said he, "let us make a hell of our own, and try how long we can bear it." Accordingly he, with two or three others, went down into the hold, and closing up all the hatches, filled several pots full of brimstone, and other combustible matter; they then set it on fire, and so continued till they were almost suffocated, when some of the men cried out for air; at length he opened the hatches, not a little pleased that he had held ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... quantity of the seared grass, and heaped a dry couch upon which Ben laid his charge within the genial heat that came from the cedar tree. Then they gathered up all the combustible matter within reach, and began to kindle a fire so near to the place where she lay that its heat must help to drive back the chill of death if there was a spark of life yet vital ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... producing moss-roses—we clearly see that the nature of the conditions is of subordinate importance in comparison with the nature of the organism in determining each particular form of variation; perhaps of not more importance than the nature of the spark, by which a mass of combustible matter is ignited, has in determining the ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... policy of the Rebels in that region,—as of an effort to fulfil their threats and burn it, by some nocturnal dash. The most valuable buildings belonged to Union men, and the upper part of the town, built chiefly of resinous pine, was combustible to the last degree. In case of fire, if the wind blew towards the river, we might lose steamers and all. I remember regulating my degree of disrobing by the direction of the wind; if it blew from the river, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Tartars under Emir Mirza, the Cossacks of the Dobroja, by whom the electric shock is transmitted to Poland and Hungary, form an unbroken chain, by which the spark is carried into the heart of Europe, where all the combustible elements wait for the moment of explosion. Twenty-four years ago Turkey was believed to be in a decaying state; it is now stronger than it has been for the last ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... upon my settlement, about forty yards from the creek of St. John, till I could build my house, and lodging {19} for my people. As my hut was composed of very combustible materials, I caused a fire to be made at a distance, about half way from the creek, to avoid accidents: which occasioned an adventure, that put me in mind of the prejudices they have in Europe, from the relations that are ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
Copyright © 2026 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
