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Putrefaction   Listen
noun
Putrefaction  n.  
1.
The act or the process of putrefying; the offensive decay of albuminous or other matter. Note: Putrefaction is a complex phenomenon involving a multiplicity of chemical reactions, always accompanied by, and without doubt caused by, bacteria and vibriones; hence, putrefaction is a form of fermentation, and is sometimes called putrefaction fermentative. Putrefaction is not possible under conditions that preclude the development of living organisms. Many of the products of putrefaction are powerful poisons, and are called cadaveric poisons, or ptomaïnes.
2.
The condition of being putrefied; also, that which putrefied. "Putrefaction's breath."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Putrefaction" Quotes from Famous Books



... once, and that for a few hours only. When she fell sick shortly afterwards, he was quite unconcerned about visiting her in her illness; and when she died, after promising to attend her funeral, he deferred his coming for several days, so that the corpse was in a state of decay and putrefaction before the interment; and he then forbad divine honours being paid to her, pretending that he acted according to her own directions. He likewise annulled her will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and acquaintance; ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... air; it was an outlaw of the tomb. There was no peace for it even in annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust, in the winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should have its reserve. Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed putrefaction. It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... no repentance. It is the offspring of selfishness; perverting the golden rule by flattering stupidity and winking at vice, with the hope of being treated in the same way by the community. It is a bed of flowers, growing over a sepulchre, and drawing its life from the loathsome putrefaction within. ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady

... disease thus wonderfully generated, betrayed more terrible symptoms. Fever and delirium terminated in lethargic slumber, which, in the course of two hours, gave place to death. Yet not till insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction had driven from his chamber and the house every one whom their duty ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... multitude Elm trees. Stalk along the road towards them and mind and keep yourself concealed as my mother brings a blood-stained stiletto which she purposes to make you bathe in the lifeblood of your enemy. Never mind the Death-demons and skeletons dripping with the putrefaction of the grave, that occasionally may blast your straining eyeballs. Persevere even though Hell and destruction should ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... consider that an adult in health exhales by the lungs and skin in the twenty-four hours three pints at least of moisture, loaded with organic matter ready to enter into putrefaction; that in sickness the quantity is often greatly increased, the quality is always more noxious—just ask yourself next where does all this moisture go to? Chiefly into the bedding, because it cannot go anywhere else. And it stays ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... acrimony: while it lies dormant, this does no more mischiefs, than those named already; but when violent exercise, a fit of outrageous anger, or any thing else that suddenly shocks and disturbs the frame, puts it in motion, it melts at once into a kind of liquid putrefaction. Being now thin, it mixes itself readily with the blood again, and brings on putrid fevers; destroys the substance of the spleen itself, or being thrown upon some other of the viscera, corrodes them, and leads on this way a swift and miserable death. If it ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill

... pipes occasionally, to dissolve any grease which may tend to obstruct the passage; but this is only a partial safeguard, as there is no certainty that all the grease will be dissolved, and any particles adhering to the pipes very soon undergo putrefaction. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity. Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory VII, could ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... might still have remaining in its stomach. This I effected, and having quenched my thirst—to which even the heated element which I poured down, seemed delicious—I hastened to open the remainder of the animals before putrefaction should take place, and collect the scanty supplies in the water-skins. I procured more than half a skin of water, and then returned to my own camel, which I had lain down beside of, during the simoom. I sat on the body of the animal, and reflected upon ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... of this great army be called, and they could come up from the dead, what eye could endure the reeking, festering putrefaction and beastliness! What heart could endure the ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... fluids are called gases. Some are salutary, but many extremely noxious, especially such as those arising from the putrefaction of animal bodies; the burning of charcoal; corrupted air at the bottom of mines, cellars, &c. The inflammable gas, which lights our streets, churches, shops, &c., is procured chiefly from coal, burnt in furnaces ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... punishment therefor with the pride of a soldier who takes the medaille militaire in recompense for his valour); noted the increasing pallor of her flesh, watched the skin gradually assume a distinct greenish tint (a greenishness which I cannot describe save that it suggested putrefaction); heard the coughing to which she had always been subject grow thicker and deeper till it doubled her up every few minutes, creasing her body as you crease a piece of paper with your thumb-nail, preparatory to tearing it in two—and I realised ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... is a fascinating problem: either the victims deposited by the mother are dead, and desiccation or putrefaction attacks them promptly, or else they are living, as indeed the larvae require; but then "what will become of this fragile creature, which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end working their long spurred ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... standing between the crates. Presently feeling an almost ravenous appetite, I bethought myself of the cold mutton, some of which I had eaten just before going to sleep, and found excellent. What was my astonishment in discovering it to be in a state of absolute putrefaction! This circumstance occasioned me great disquietude; for, connecting it with the disorder of mind I experienced upon awakening, I began to suppose that I must have slept for an inordinately long period of time. The close atmosphere of the hold might have had something to do with this, and might, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... that face again!" he exclaimed, shuddering wildly. "Open me up the shrouded graves, my friend; I will call you so notwithstanding what has happened, for I still think you are a gentleman; open me up, I say, the shrouded graves—set me among the hideous dead, in all their ghastly and loathsome putrefaction—lay me side by side with the sweltering carcass of the gibbeted murderer—give me such a vision, and expose me to the anger of the Almighty when raging in his vengeance; or, if there be a pitch of horror still beyond this, then I say—mark me, my friend—then I say, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... the least desirable source of protein food. The use of much meat may lead to the formation of an excess of uric acid which is eliminated by some persons with difficulty. It may also cause intestinal putrefaction. ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer

... the whited sepulchre of his religious observances had concealed a mass of putrefaction. The sceptic confessed that his refusal of religion was largely due to his hatred of the demands of God's holy law. The multitudes confessed that they had been selfish and sensual, shutting up their compassions, and refusing clothing and ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... stone butter-jars or any other convenient dishes. Prepare and cook the fruit precisely as for canning in glass jars; fill your dishes with fruit while hot and immediately cover with cotton batting, securely tied on. Remember that all putrefaction is caused by the invisible creatures in the air. Cooking the fruit expels all these, and they cannot pass through the cotton batting. The fruit thus protected will keep an indefinite period. It will be remembered that Tyndall has proved that ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... We find means to make commixtures and copulations of different kinds; which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes, of putrefaction; whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures, like bests or birds; and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand, of what matter and commixture what kind of ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon

... powder, and mixed with an equal quantity of magnesia, renders the teeth white, and stops putrefaction. ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore

... illustrated in human history. After man fell into sin, and died, he was given fullest opportunity to recover himself and to demonstrate thereby that he was still spiritually alive. But the corruption of spiritual death worked until man was so far down in the filth of his moral putrefaction that the only way God could save the race from extinction was to save the one family that had accepted spiritual life from Him, and blot the rest of the race out in ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant

... the rest perished miserably, amidst the stench and horrors of noisome dungeons. Even the prison of Newgate was rendered so infectious by the uncommon crowds of confined felons stowed together in close apartments, that the very air they breathed acquired a pestilential degree of putrefaction. It was this putrefied air, which, adhering to the clothes of the malefactors brought to trial at the bar of the Old Bailey, in May, produced among the audience a pestilential fever, which infected ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... every individual of the class whom our Lord is addressing—that is to say, His disciples. He is laying down the law for all Christians. I take the paradox which brings together 'salting' and 'fire,' to refer, not to salt as a means of communicating savour to food, but as a means of preserving from putrefaction. And I take the 'fire' here to refer, not to the same process which is hinted at in the awful preceding words, 'the fire in not quenched,' but to be set in opposition to that fire, and to mean something entirely different. There is a fire that destroys, and there is a fire that preserves; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... seen a crime which the mother could never forgive, the partner had seen a crime which the friend could never forgive. Think of a loved face suddenly melting before your eyes into a grinning skull, then into a mass of putrefaction, then into the ugliest fiend of hell, leering at you, distorted with all the marks of vice and shame. That is what I saw, that is ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... of which I speak probably died of old age in the act of drinking, and was engulfed in a pool of the great curdling, reedy river that ran lazily through the forest. The imagination sickens before the thought of the speedy putrefaction of such a beast under such conditions; but this process over, the creature's bones lay deep in ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of keeping the putrefying corpse unburied in the house as a mark of affection. At Gaua, in Santa Maria, the body was dried over slow fires for ten days or more, till nothing but skin and bones remained; and the women who watched over it during these days drank the juices of putrefaction which dripped from the decaying flesh. The same thing used formerly to be done in Mota, another of the Banks' Islands. The corpses of great men in these islands were adorned in all their finery and laid out on the open space in the middle ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... the fruits of his victory. Shortly after occurred his death, brought on by his own crimes. In his war against Jeroboam he had indulged in excessive cruelty; he ordered the corpses of the enemy to be mutilated, and permitted them to be buried only after putrefaction had set in. Such savagery was all the more execrable as it prevented many widows from entering into a second marriage. Mutilating the corpses had made identification impossible, and so it was left doubtful whether their husbands were among ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... ferments to which air was necessary, called by Pasteur the aerobics, and others to whom oxygen was fatal, the anaerobics. He proved, also, by an exhaustive series of experiments, that what is called putrefaction of animal matter is the result of the combined work of the aerobics and the anaerobics, which reduce that part not taken up by oxygen to dead organic matter, ready in its turn to form ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... sepulchres 10 Seized on her sinless soul? Must then that peerless form Which love and admiration cannot view Without a beating heart, those azure veins Which steal like streams along a field of snow, 15 That lovely outline, which is fair As breathing marble, perish? Must putrefaction's breath Leave nothing of this heavenly sight But loathsomeness and ruin? 20 Spare nothing but a gloomy theme, On which the lightest heart might moralize? Or is it only a sweet slumber Stealing o'er sensation, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... of life, which not only gives a grateful smack to it, but dries up those crudities that would offend, preserves from putrefaction, and drives off all those blowing flies that would corrupt it. Let a man be sure to drive his business rather than let it drive him. When a man is but once brought to be driven, he becomes a vassal ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... said Christ. Yes, and if you keep the meat on one plate and the salt on another, what good will the salt be? It has to be rubbed in particle by particle, and brought into contact over all the surface, and down into the depths of the meat that it is to preserve from putrefaction. And no Christian churches or individuals do their duty, and fulfil their function on earth, unless they are thus closely associated and intermingled with the world that they should be trying to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... artists and men of letters, as a "tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents—a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction." ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... the surgeon has been led on to the performance of operations that were hitherto considered rash, audacious or impossible; and secondly, by the immunity which the surgeon has gained in the treatment of wounds through the increased knowledge he possesses of putrefaction and the means of preventing it. It were hard to say whether the surgeon's increase of skill and courage in performing operations has equalled his increased skill in the after treatment ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... spite of all medical aid, in six hours. On the abdomen, the neck, the chest and especially on the feet of the corpses of these men there were gangraenous spots of different sizes, a plain proof that the acute inflammation, gangraene and putrefaction had been caused by the excessive irritation of the extremely weak body. Circumstances forbade ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... so to get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to fret him with a feverish being, tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him above ground an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted himself, and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... urges us to an act, but, on the other hand, one or more sensations may exist at the base of this something to put it in action. I have proved, for example, that the egg-laying instinct in the corpse fly (Lucilia caesar) is only produced by the odor of putrefaction. As soon as the antennae, which contain the organ of smell, are removed from these flies they cease to lay, while other more severe operations, or removal of one antenna only does not produce ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... neither savoury nor safe. It was built round a courtyard which consisted of a gigantic hole crammed with manure in all the stages of unpleasant putrefaction. One side is a barn; two sides consist of stables, and the third is the house inhabited not only by us but by an incredibly filthy and stinking old woman who was continually troubling the general because some months ago a French cuirassier took one of her chickens. The day after we arrived ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... tundra as the very grave of nature, the sepulchre of the primeval world, because it is the tomb of so many animals whose remains have been protected from putrefaction for thousands of years. How interesting would it be could these animals be brought to life and be endowed with sufficient intelligence to relate the history of their ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... provisions. You must know that, in a climate so sultry as mine, it is frequently impossible to keep a spirit alive for more than two or three hours; and after death, unless pickled immediately (and a pickled spirit is not good), they will—smell—you understand, eh? Putrefaction is always to be apprehended when the souls are consigned to us ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... prevent this cry from escaping us? For these hapless ones, enjoy, laugh, sing, please, and love exist, persist; but there is a death-rattle in sing, a grating sound in laugh, putrefaction in enjoy, there are ashes in please, there is night in love. All these joys are attached to their destiny ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... the pantry and cellar is important, in order that one may make improvements in conditions. Putrefaction will start at 50 deg., so that a pantry or closet where food is kept should have a temperature at least as low as that. Cellars where canned goods are stored should have a temperature of 32 deg. or over. Apples are frequently stored in outside ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... Fish and Beasts, nay, even to Man himself; that air, or breath of life, with which God at first inspired mankind, he, if he wants it, dies presently, becomes a sad object to all that loved and beheld him, and in an instant turns to putrefaction. ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... frequently contain blood. Stools full of air bubbles with pungent sour odor show fermentation; in which cases the starches should be reduced, if not entirely taken away from the food mixtures. Green stools mean putrefaction from filth-germs; a thorough cleansing of the bowel should be immediately followed by a reduction in the strength of the food and the boiling ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler

... mistake - a newfangled notion altogether - to suppose that there is any natural antagonism between putrefaction and health. They know better than that, in the Common Council. You may talk about Nature, in her wisdom, always warning man through his sense of smell, when he draws near to something dangerous; but, that won't go ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... philosophy of Aurelius could not save the Empire which he ruled. And yet the piety of Noah, the faith of Abraham, the wisdom of Moses, and the stoicism of Aurelius have proved alike a spiritual power,—the precious salt which was to preserve humanity from the putrefaction of almost universal selfishness and vice, until the new revelation should arouse the human soul to a more serious contemplation ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... is fixed at one hundred thousand. In any case the carnage was great, for the battle-field, where all the corpses rested without burial, rotting in the sun and rain, got the name of Campi Putridi, the Fields of Putrefaction, a name still traceable in that of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... also had from him a testimony, that her alabaster box of precious ointment poured on his head and feet, and that spikenard, and those spices that were by her dedicated to embalm and preserve his sacred body from putrefaction, should so far preserve her own memory, that these demonstrations of her sanctified love, and of her officious and generous gratitude, should be recorded and mentioned wheresoever his Gospel should be read; intending thereby, that as his, so her name, should also live to succeeding generations, even ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children—and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... moment, when he is on the verge of despair, here again, duly furnished with an egg, is a sterile cocoon, that is to say, one containing only a shrivelled and decaying larva. All my suspicions are confirmed, down to the most inconsequent: the egg housed with a mass of putrefaction. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... water in which it was dissolved, and enters into combination with the animal substance, which substance, after being thus acted upon, is found to have lost its tendency to spontaneous decomposition, or putrefaction. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... society of which I was once an unworthy member, that the annual custom of salting alludes to that saying of our Saviour to His disciples, 'Ye are the salt of the earth;' for as salt draws up all that matter that tends to putrefaction, so it is a symbol of our doing the like in a spiritual state, by taking away all natural corruption.... If this will not please, why may it not denote that wit and knowledge by which boys dedicated to learning ought to distinguish themselves. You know what sal sometimes signifies among ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various

... gave directions for preparing essence of hartshorn—prepared, literally, from the horn itself. The preparation, strongly alkaline, he prescribed in small doses of eight to ten drops. The medicine "resists malignity, putrefaction, and acid humours," for it destroys the acidity. He used it "in fevers, coughs, pleurisies, obstructions of the spleen, liver, or womb, and principally in ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... of Flers," wrote one of these Germans, "the men were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of putrefaction which filled the trench—almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... of infection, carbolic acid strikes at the very root and origin of disease by oxidising and consuming the germs which breed it. So powerful is it that one part in five thousand parts of flour paste, blood, &c., will for months prevent fermentation and putrefaction, whilst a little of its vapour in the atmosphere will preserve meat, as well as prevent it from becoming fly-blown. Although it has, in certain impure states, a slightly disagreeable odour, this is never such as to be in any way harmful, whilst on the other hand it ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... perceive the odour of the rhubarb, which the wind wafts towards them. In the morning they go towards the place whence came the odour, and search there for the rhubarb until they find it. Rhubarb is the putrefied wood of a great tree, and acquires its odour even from its putrefaction, the best part of the tree is the root, nevertheless the trunk, which they call calama, has ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... prey they respectively attack. The Scolia, which attacks a larva of the rose-beetle, stings it in one point only, but in this point the motor ganglia are concentrated, and those ganglia alone: the stinging of other ganglia might cause death and putrefaction, which it must avoid.[70] The yellow-winged Sphex, which has chosen the cricket for its victim, knows that the cricket has three nerve-centres which serve its three pairs of legs—or at least it acts as if it knew this. It stings the insect first under the neck, then behind the prothorax, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... has been so often mentioned by navigators, and of which such various causes have been assigned; some supposing it to be occasioned by fish, which agitated the water by darting at their prey, some by the putrefaction of fish and other marine animals, some by electricity, and others referring it to a great variety of different causes. It appeared to emit flashes of light exactly resembling those of lightning, only not so considerable, but they were so frequent that sometimes eight or ten were visible ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... vain efforts? Solitude sent me to nature, and nature to love. Standing in the street of Mental Observation, I saw myself pale and wan, surrounded by corpses, and, drying my hands on my bloody apron, stifled by the odor of putrefaction, I turned my head in spite of myself, and saw floating before my eyes green harvests, balmy fields, and the pensive harmony of the evening. "No," said I, "science can not console me; rather will I plunge into this sea of irresponsive nature and die ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... Hardening by Exposure to Air. Concretionary Nodules. Consolidating Effects of Pressure. Mineralization of Organic Remains. Impressions and Casts: how formed. Fossil Wood. Goppert's Experiments. Precipitation of Stony Matter most rapid where Putrefaction is going on. Sources of Lime and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... the prison yard the breeze had brought the fresh vivifying air from the fields. But in the corridor the air was laden with the germs of typhoid, the smell of sewage, putrefaction, and tar; every newcomer felt sad and dejected in it. The woman warder felt this, though she was used to bad air. She had just come in from outside, and entering the corridor, she ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... the first case a troublesome creature gained admission to the hive, which, from its unwieldiness, they could not remove, and which, from the impenetrability of its shell, they could not destroy: here then their only resource was to deprive it of locomotion, and to obviate putrefaction; both which objects they accomplished most skilfully and securely—and as is usual with these sagacious creatures, at the least possible expense of labor and materials. They applied their cement where alone it was required, round the verge of the shell. In the latter ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... retractile glue. l. 567. The constituent parts of animal fibres are believed to be earth and gluten. These do not seperate except by long putrefaction or by fire. The earth then effervesces with acids, and can only be converted into glass by the greatest force of fire. The gluten has continued united with the earth of the bones above 2000 years in Egyptian mummies; but by long exposure to air or moisture it diffolves and leaves only the earth. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... the largest constituent of urine, and forms about one-third of its total solids. Derived from ammonic carbonate by abstracting two molecules of the elements of water, it is readily converted by putrefaction into that salt, and the urine under these circumstances becomes strongly alkaline in reaction. Earthy phosphates then fall naturally out of solution, so that the putrid fluid is always well furnished with sediment. Nitrogen ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... periodical plague of London was thinning out the inhabitants of that dirty city. In the lower part of the city skirting the Thames, the sewerage was very bad and but the poorest sanitary rules existed. After a hard rain, the lanes, alleys and streets ran with a stream of putrefaction, as the offal from many tenement houses was thrown in the public highway, where the rays from the hot sun created malarial fever or ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... gay; and the lettuces lounged in line with an air of careless indolence. And as he looked at them all, the markets which he had left behind him that morning seemed to him like a vast mortuary, an abode of death, where only corpses could be found, a charnel-house reeking with foul smells and putrefaction. He slackened his steps, and rested in that kitchen garden, as after a long perambulation amidst deafening noises and repulsive odours. The uproar and the sickening humidity of the fish market had departed from him; and he felt as though he were being ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... that it is good, and then throw it into a basin with the rest. One bad egg would spoil fifty. Supposing you have a dozen or two dozen new-laid eggs just taken from the nest, it is not an uncommon thing to have one that has been overlooked for weeks, and which may be a half-hatched mass of putrefaction. ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne

... dark-coloured liquor of the cuttle fish, was also bleached by chlorine, but the black matter of the lungs was not destroyed or bleached in the slightest degree by chlorine, it even survived unimpaired the destruction of the lungs by putrefaction in air. ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar

... Rhodes to music, and producing the first English opera. At the Restoration, when the theaters were reopened, the dramas then produced reflected most vividly the looseness and immorality of the times. Their worst feature was that "they possessed not wit enough to keep the mass of moral putrefaction sweet." ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... bringing the question into play again, Moschio the physician said, that putrefaction was a colliquation of the flesh, and that everything that putrefied grew moister than before, and that all heat, if gentle, did stir the humors, though not force them out, but if strong, dry the flesh; and that from these considerations ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... filthy water, all things disgusting—so is every part of life and everything" (viii. 24); and again:—"Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment." But more often he retains his perfect tranquillity, and says, "Either thou livest here, and hast already accustomed thyself to it, or thou art going away, and ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... They buried in their houses, or carried their bodies to grottoes dug in the solid rock. More frequently they were deposited in natural caves, a kind of catacombs, where the corpses were preserved without putrefaction, drying like mummies. It was a sacred duty to furnish food to the dead for several weeks. Sometimes the remains were thrown into the boiling lava of the volcanoes, and this mode of sepulture was regarded as homage paid to the goddess Pele, who fed ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... of some mineral poison, like lead or arsenic, or the irritating juice of some poisonous plant or herb, or to the every-day accident of including in the menu some article of diet which was beginning to spoil or decay, and which contained the bacteria of putrefaction or their poisonous products. The reaction of defense is practically the same, varying only with the violence and the character of the poison. If the dose of poisonous substances be unusually large or virulent, nature may short-circuit the whole attack by ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... characterized by intermissions and remissions, and thus include our intermittent and remittent fevers; synochus depended theoretically upon putrefaction of the blood in the vessels, and was a continued fever. Synocha, on the other hand, was occasioned by a mere superabundance of hot blood, ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... such Medicines, with a very few of which, we may much sooner, and more safely re-integrate the decayed, and languishing Health of Man, unless the Disease be Mortal, from a deficiency of Nature, or from the putrefaction of some noble internal part hurt, or by reason of a total absumption of the radical humidity in which desperate Cases, no Galenick Cure, or Paracelsick Tincture can yeild releif. But in ordinary Diseases it is not so; and yet here, very many Men, before the fatal term of Life be ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius

... condition of the captives from being such as would disgrace that of a wild beast in a small travelling menagerie. The space between the floor and the ground, and the interval which separates the cells from the surrounding fence, is one seething, living mass of stinking putrefaction. Here in the tropics, under a brazen sun, all unclean things turn to putrid filthy life within the hour; and in a native gaol the atmosphere is heavy with the fumes and rottenness of the offal of years, and the reeking ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... excess of the Latin element. He liked to have his statements sound well. He once said in forcible Saxon: "The Rehearsal! has not wit enough to keep it sweet," but a moment later he translated this into: "It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction." In his Dictionary he defined "network" as "anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections." Some wits of the day said that he used long words to ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... ordinary chemist to the Emperor, with orders to preserve it, as that of Colonel Morland had been, who was killed at the battle of Austerlitz. For this purpose the corpse was carried to Schoenbrunn, and placed in the left wing of the chateau, far from the inhabited rooms. In a few hours putrefaction became complete, and they were obliged to plunge the mutilated body into a bath filled with corrosive sublimate. This extremely dangerous operation was long and painful; and M. Cadet de Gassicourt deserves ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... ordinances. As in the law of the leprosy, where it is said, "If the whiteness have overspread the flesh, the patient may pass abroad for clean; but if there be any whole flesh remaining, he is to be shut up for unclean;" one of them noteth a principle of nature, that putrefaction is more contagious before maturity than after; and another noteth a position of moral philosophy, that men abandoned to vice do not so much corrupt manners, as those that are half good and half evil. So in this and very many other places in that law, there is to be ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... they are trampled. In its trenches they fall. On its ghastly holocaust they burn. Could the muster-roll of this great army be called, and could they come up from the dead, what eye could endure the reeking, festering putrefaction? What heart could endure the groan of agony? Drunkenness! Does it not jingle the burglar's key? Does it not whet the assassin's knife? Does it not cock the highwayman's pistol? Does it not wave the incendiary's torch? Has it not sent the ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... unformed mass, by the incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers. Let us consider; can there be more wanting to complete the Meditation on a Pudding? If more is wanting, more may be found. It contains salt, which keeps the sea from putrefaction: salt, which is made the image of intellectual excellence, contributes to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... marble, which are in use, do well: but the main matter is so to convey the water, as it never stay, either in the bowls or in the cistern; that the water be never by rest discolored, green or red or the like; or gather any mossiness or putrefaction. Besides that, it is to be cleansed every day by the hand. Also some steps up to it, and some fine pavement about it, doth well. As for the other kind of fountain, which we may call a bathing pool, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

... having had occasion to repeat it, I learned from him that heat is not necessary; and he has moreover added an useful purpose to which this property of magnesia may be applied; I mean the sweetening of water at sea, with which lime may have been mixed to prevent its putrefaction. ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black

... suspect to have been, that certain of those authors possessed grace:—do not take me for a disciple of Lord Chesterfield, nor Imagine that I mean to erect grace into a capital ingredient of writing; but I do believe that it is a perfume that will preserve from putrefaction, and is distinct even from style, which regards expression. Grace, I think, belongs to manner. It is from the charm of grace that I believe some authors, not in Your favour, obtained part of their renown; Virgil in particular: and yet I am far from disagreeing with ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... sights and odours that had met her on the occasion of her visit. But upon our arrival at the scene of operations we soon found that a fortnight had made a vast amount of difference in the condition of the oysters. For whereas when we had last visited the oyster-bed the process of putrefaction had only just begun, it had now advanced so far that the fish were not only completely decayed but had also in many cases so completely dried up under the influence of the sun's rays as to have, to a very great extent, ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood

... old time did not have," came a deep voice from under a bowler hat, "was the leisure to be sad. The sweetness of putrefaction, the long remembering of palely colored moods; they had the sun, we have the colors of its setting. Who shall say which ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... in the middle of that strange and sinister city within a city, that flat expanse of silence, decay, and putrefaction which is surrounded on every side by the pulsating arteries of London. The living visit the dead during the day, but at night the dead are left to themselves, and the very flowers which embroider their dissolution close up and forget them. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... by heroick fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands, that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were, at last, whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... the most offensive state of putrefaction, and already so much decayed that we could not even distinguish the persons, except by the smaller frame of Bombelli. The body of the bullock-driver lay under the cart, where he had been accustomed to sleep; that of Bombelli about four feet from it. No dress ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... always fatal to virtue. Let us add especially that there are less atheists to-day than ever, since philosophers have recognized that there is no being vegetating without germ, no germ without a plan, etc., and that wheat comes in no wise from putrefaction. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... of the underworld, and she conjures him, while she is seeking that permission, not to attempt to look on her face. He, however, weary of waiting, breaks off one of the large teeth of the comb that holds his hair*** and, lighting it, uses it as a torch. He finds Izanami's body in a state of putrefaction, and amid the decaying remains eight Kami of thunder have been born and are dwelling. Izanagi, horrified, turns and flees, but Izanami, enraged that she has been "put to shame," sends the "hideous hag of hades" to pursue him. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... the seventh Poplar, and the last had the name of Elm, who was the greatest surgeon in his time. I shall forbear to tell you how the juice or sap thereof, being poured and distilled within the ears, killeth every kind of vermin that by any manner of putrefaction cometh to be bred and engendered there, and destroyeth also any whatsoever other animal that shall have entered in thereat. If, likewise, you put a little of the said juice within a pail or bucket ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... disputable thing. After affirming his notion he added, "If the world had a beginning, and if men were once earth-born, then must they have been, in all probability, either generated as worms, out of putrefaction, or else out of eggs." But the question comes up for an answer, From whence ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various

... but, in its present condition, is very interesting. Some hints, not altogether useless, may be collected from it. In England, our churches are charnel houses. The pews of the congregation are raised upon foundations of putrefaction. For six days and nights the temple of devotion is filled with the pestilent vapours of the dead, and on the seventh they are absorbed by the living. Surely it is high time to subdue prejudices, which endanger health without promoting piety. The scotch ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr

... has very neatly set forth what he considers the task of the author. According to him, the man of to-day has lost courage; he interests himself too little in life, his desire to live with dignity has grown weaker, "an odor of putrefaction surrounds him, cowardice and slavery corrupt his heart, laziness binds his hands and his mind." But, at the same time, life grows in breadth and depth, and, from day to day, men are learning to question. And it is the writer who ought to answer their questions; but he should not content ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... behind this you find great stretches of death;—miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white mangrove skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not yet earth and is no longer slime, and through the crust of which you can sink into rotting putrefaction. Yet, long after you are dead, buried, and forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants and palms; and finally of hard-wooded trees. Districts of this description you will find in great sweeps ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... against cultivating him as a pet, and mars his attractiveness as game, is by no means the greatest indignity that can be offered to a nose. It is a rank, living smell, and has none of the sickening qualities of disease or putrefaction. Indeed, I think a good smeller will enjoy its most refined intensity. It approaches the sublime, and makes the nose tingle. It is tonic and bracing, and, I can readily believe, has rare medicinal qualities. I do not recommend its use as eye-water, though an old farmer assures ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... it—not even for his own filthy servants! Pity for a lickspittle parasite that battens on the passions and vices of hopeless gaol-birds, abandoned women, jaded pleasure-hunters and terrified neurasthenics! Pity on a speculator calculating huge revenues from the festering putrefaction of human disease! I haven't hit you yet, because your flesh is foul to me—but—drink that down, or, by God! I'll smash every bone in ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... a purer intellectual one, so that it can present itself to the mind, without feeling itself befogged by the exhalations of that humour, which, through the exercise of contemplation, has been saved from putrefaction in the stomach and is duly digested. In this state, the present enthusiast shows himself to have remained thirty years, during which time he had not reached that purity of conception which would make him a suitable habitation ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... by burying him. But to all this they answered, that he came in the night, but invisibly, and fed only on the soul, or immaterial part, which, according to their doctrine, remains about the place of sacrifice, until the body of the victim be entirely wasted by putrefaction. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... the first accomplishment of this as of a hundred other zoological triumphs. As early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable nature of the common pink Coralline, which fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it for eight weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any putrefaction ensuing. The ground, of course, on which the proof rested in this case was, that if the coralline were, as had often been thought, a zoophyte, the water would become corrupt, and poisonous to the life of the small animals in the same jar; and that its remaining fresh argued ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley

... alphabet. How often by changing a letter in a word, by reversing their order, or by substituting one letter for another, we get a word of an entirely different meaning, as in umpire and empire, petrifaction and putrefaction, malt and salt, tool and fool. And by changing the order of the words in a sentence we express all the infinite variety of ideas and meanings that the books of the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... more tangible accomplishments of Empedocles, we find it alleged that one of his "miracles" consisted of the preservation of a dead body without putrefaction for some weeks after death. We may assume from this that he had gained in some way a knowledge of embalming. As he was notoriously fond of experiment, and as the body in question (assuming for the moment the authenticity of the legend) must have been preserved without ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... slightest use or profit. I do not believe they appreciate the perfume of flowers, and I am sure that they never mind the most noisome stench or the most loathsome sight. A dead horse will draw a crowd of small boys, who will dwell without shrinking upon the details of his putrefaction, when they would pass by a rose-tree in bloom with indifference. Hideous reptiles and insects interest them more than the loveliest form of leaf or blossom. Their senses have none of the delicacy which they ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... suggestive knowledge from the study of mere putrefaction; he places an infusion of common hay-seeds or meat or fruit in his phials, and awaits events; presently a drop from one of the infusions is laid on the field of the microscope, and straightly the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... the last convulsive throes of a whole universe in the death agony. As soon as that world was dead, lo! clouds of rhetoricians, grammarians, sophists, swooped down like insects on its immense body. People saw them swarming and heard them buzzing in that seat of putrefaction. They vied with one another in scrutinizing, commenting, disputing. Each limb, each muscle, each fibre of the huge prostrate body was twisted and turned in every direction. Surely it must have been a keen satisfaction to those anatomists of the mind, to be able, at their debut, to make experiments ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies while sanity remained in them, but at length, becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... the fetor attending copious continued sweats, it is owing to the animalized part of this fluid being kept in that degree of warmth, which most favours putrefaction, and not suffered to exhale into the atmosphere. Broth, or other animal mucus, kept in similar circumstances, would in the same time acquire a putrid smell; yet has this error frequently produced miliary eruptions, and increased every kind of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... ground was absolutely littered with the horrible wastage of war; roads were torn open, leaving great yawning gaps that looked for all the world like huge jagged wounds. On my right lay the Chateau of La Maisonnette. The ground there was a shambles, for numerous bodies in various stages of putrefaction lay about as they ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... a deadly dose of the diphtheritic poison; if it saves the little creature from death, it is assumed to be potent enough for use on human beings, and, handled with all possible precautions against putrefaction or any contamination with pathogenic bacteria, it is furnished to physicians, its degree of potency ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... they lamented over him, they begged his pardon for the accident, and they protested their innocence of any design. In every way they provided themselves with a plausible defense in case he should recover or they should be suspected. After several days, putrefaction happily settled all their doubts about the mortality of their conquerors, and the glad news was communicated to ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall

... over has the note of disagreeableness, or of putrefaction, been struck—long duration. Other ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... highly impregnated, preserves animal flesh, and it will neither putrify nor decompose when confined to its unchanging action. Heat and moisture are both absent from the Cave, and it is these two agents, acting together, which produce both animal and vegetable decomposition and putrefaction. ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt

... beast's than a human being's. On entering the Pass, which we did as if expecting an enemy, with skirmishers, flanking parties, &c., we were nearly stifled by the horrible smell arising from the number of dead camels which were lying on the ground, in every degree of putrefaction. We soon, however, came to bodies of a different sort; for on the banks of a small rivulet, and in the water, most in the long reeds, some in the middle of the road, were about twenty or thirty dead Sepoys and followers. They were in every kind of shape and contortion ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth

... order they are cruciferous plants; and all contain much nitrogen, or vegetable albumen, with a considerable quantity of sulphur; hence they tend strongly to putrefaction, and when decomposed their odour is very offensive. Being cut into pieces, and pressed close in a tub with aromatic herbs and salt, so as to undergo an acescent fermentation (which is [75] arrested at that stage), Cabbages form the German ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... flouting, jeering, and laughing at them; and then giving them some ill names, boxed them on their ears and cheeks; which done, the hangman put them into his kettle, and parboiled them with bay-salt and cummin-seed: that to keep them from putrefaction, and this to keep off the fowls from seizing upon them. The whole sight, as well that of the bloody quarters first as this of the heads afterwards, was both frightful and loathsome, and begat an abhorrence in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... June and July, the thermometer is at from 88 to 90 degrees. What must it be, then, in the latitude of 6 or 7, under a vertical sun, and where, after the rainy season, the effluvium which arises from the putrefaction of vegetables is productive of the most fatal effects? Sir James L. Yeo agrees with their account, in his statement laid before ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... bacillus is not really destroyed by external influences, and it may retain its virulence for several months in dried sputum if protected from the light. Its vitality enables it to resist high temperatures, changes in temperature, drying and putrefaction to a, greater degree than most non-spore-producing germs. Direct sunlight destroys the germ within a few hours, but it may live in poorly lighted, filthy stables for months. A temperature of 65260 C. destroys it in ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... flocked into the streets, raising cries of welcome to us. Of all the vile, dirty places on earth, Omdurman must rank first. There was no effort at sanitary observances, and dead animals, camels, horses, donkeys, dogs, goats, sheep, cattle, in all stages of putrefaction, lay about the streets and lanes. There were dead men, women, and children, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... Maine was the last to leave the wreck, and then all that was left of the mighty ship was beginning to settle in the slime and putrefaction which covers the bottom of ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis

... sanitary works are in no way to be underrated, but it still remains the first duty of town authorities to remove, as quickly as possible, all liquid and other refuse from the midst and immediate vicinity of large populations, before putrefaction has ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various

... ordered to drag out the dead from among the ill, and though they were constantly drenched with rum to brutalize them, still we were forced to aid the gang by reckless volunteers from our crew, who, arming their hands with tarred mittens, flung the foetid masses of putrefaction into the sea! ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... death begins to fall upon them, it is as ready to aid in their destruction. Like calumny, which blackens whatsoever is suspected, oxygen pounces upon the failing and completes their ruin. The processes of fermentation and putrefaction cannot commence in any substance, until it has first taken oxygen into combination. Thus, cans of meat, hermetically sealed, with all the air first carefully expelled, undergo no change so long as the air does not get access to them. If the minutest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... all fermented liquors have an antiseptic quality. They act in direct opposition to putrefaction, and in proportion to the quantity of alcohol which they contain, so will be their value and beneficial tendency. Now the circulating fluids of our system have a continual tendency to putrefaction; and the food ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various

... morbid melancholy, in the receptacle for the bodies of those unfortunate persons who had perished in the snow. There would I remain for hours, musing on their fate: the purity of the air admitted neither putrefaction, or even decay, for a very considerable time; and they lay, to all appearance, as if the breath had even then only quitted them, although, on touching those who had been there for years, they ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... in an air-tight receptacle into which a secret gas is pumped. The dead body, lying in this receptacle for two hours, absorbs certain parts of the gas which enters the pores and touches those parts of the dead body not reached by the injected fluid. By this process no part of the body is subject to putrefaction and the muscles all retain their rigidity, so that one hundred years after burial the features are ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... 'must of necessity fetch their beginning from Noah's ark, which rested after the deluge, in Asia, seeing they could not proceed by the course of nature, as the imperfect sort of living creatures do, from putrefaction.' Bernard Romans is of opinion that God created an original man and woman in this part of the globe. Doctor Barton thinks they are not specifically different from the Persians; but, taking afterwards a broader range, he thinks, 'that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... made, and one fine morning in the month of March she slipped into the beautiful harbour of Stavanger to have the broken pump-stand and shattered rigging and sails put right. The two boys were landed, and the doctors said their feet were in such a state of putrefaction they must be taken off at once. None of the other members of the crew were bitten by frost, but it took many days to heal their raw wounds. The salt of the sea had not only pickled them, but had penetrated ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman

... in the world, and it is not unreasonable to believe that there may be some connection between this fact and the equally notorious one that we are the most unhealthy people in the world. An untold amount of disease results from the too free use of flesh during the hot months. Heat promotes putrefaction; and as this change in meat is very rapid in warm weather, we can not be too careful not to eat that which is in the slightest degree tainted. Even when it goes into the stomach in a normal condition, there is danger; for if too much is eaten, or the ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells

... ruddy and tawny tints that lend to Florentine bronze that warm living look so much preferable to the gray-green aspect of common bronzes, which might easily be mistaken for statues in a state of putrefaction. Satiny gleams played over its rounded forms, doubtless polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries, for it seemed a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era of art, ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier

... flakes of snow were winging through the air—driven now by the breeze, or lingering over our heads as if afraid to be soiled by the earth, which we were bent to open where the dead then lay—or some time before lay—a mass of putrefaction; yet dear to the feelings of the bereaved, and sought now with greater avidity than when the body was arrayed in the smiles of beauty, and filled with living, breathing love. The husband spoke nothing; and George was silent, save for the deep sobs that burst from him ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton

... chemical compounds of an alkaloidal nature formed in protein substances during putrefaction. They are purely chemical bodies and differ from the toxins. There are also what are called leucomaines, formed in living tissues, and when not given off by ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... he was an eye-witness; and carried with him a little piece of flesh, which he had cut off, and which was about a finger's length. All the company ran immediately to the place of burial, and having made an exact observation of the body, found it to be all entire, and without any putrefaction. The sacerdotal habits, with which he had' been vested after his disease, were nowise damaged by the lime. And what was most amazing to them all, was, that the holy corpse exhaled an odour so delightful, and so fragrant, that, by the relation of many ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden

... cannot blast his laurels, Attempt to stigmatize his morals; Through Scandal's magnifying glass His foibles view, but virtues pass, And on the ruins of his fame Erect an ignominious name. So vermin foul, of vile extraction, The spawn of dirt and putrefaction, The sounder members traverse o'er, But fix and fatten on a sore. Hence! peace, ye wretches, who revile His wit, his humour, and his style; Since all the monsters which he drew Were only meant to copy you; And, if the colours be not fainter, Arraign ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... drain as much rain water (the only water obtainable here) as possible into a small pond, but the pond was nearly dry and only had in it some filthy salt water densely mixed with camel refuse. It was of a ghastly green with patches of brown, and some spots of putrefaction in circular crowns of a whitish colour. The surface was coated with a deposit of sand, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... character or social position were sent to the Bastille or other state prisons; some were entombed in subterranean dungeons—in those dark pits, stifling or deadly cold, invented by feudal barbarism. The remains of animals in a state of putrefaction were sometimes thrown in after them, to redouble the horror! The hospital of Valence and the tower of Constance at Aigues-Mortes have preserved, in Protestant martyrology, a frightful renown. The women usually showing themselves more steadfast than the men, the most ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... these "alkaloids of putrefaction," as he called them, from blood which had been allowed to putrefy in a warm place. He found that albuminoids derived from decaying vegetable substances did not ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... construction of their cottages. Their dwellings are often built, for convenience, in too close proximity to the barn. Because they do not construct a suitable sewer or drain, the filth and refuse food is thrown out of the back door, where it accumulates and undergoes putrefaction; the vitiated air penetrates the interior of the house, and, there being no means of ventilation, it remains to be breathed by the occupants. The result is, that for the sake of saving a few dollars, which ought to be expended in the construction ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... "spontaneous generation" being revived by the way. When Pasteur in 1857 showed that the lactic fermentation depends on the presence of an organism, it was already known from the researches of Schwann (1837) and Helmholtz (1843) that fermentation and putrefaction are intimately connected with the presence of organisms derived from the air, and that the preservation of putrescible substances depends on this principle. In 1862 Pasteur placed it beyond reasonable doubt that the ammoniacal fermentation of urea is due to the action of a minute Schizomycete; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... it was further developed by superstition and religion into the proportions it attained in Fiji or in Mexico. It is a fact that until this day many savages are compelled to devour corpses in the most advanced state of putrefaction, and that in cases of absolute scarcity some of them have had to disinter and to feed upon human corpses, even during an epidemic. These are ascertained facts. But if we now transport ourselves to the conditions which man had to face during the glacial period, in a ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... not the faults of his rivals, and he may swarm at last to the top-gallant. There is no other way. Admiration is the only road to excellence; and the critical spirit kills, but envy and injustice are putrefaction on its feet. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the blood, which give rise to the disease characteristic of the fungus with which the animal has been infected. The condition called sapraemia, or septic intoxication, for example, is undoubtedly due to the entrance of the excretory products of putrefaction bacteria into the circulation. This can be proved by injecting into an animal a small portion of these products obtained from cultures of germs of putrefaction. Characteristic symptoms ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... compact, brittle texture; the flesh is white; they grow more readily in open places, such as dry pastures and waste lands, than in places humid or shaded by wood. In general, those should be suspected which grow in caverns and subterranean passages, on animal matter undergoing putrefaction, as well as those whose flesh is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various

... Talking of the Comedy of The Rehearsal, he said, 'It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.' This was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence; 'It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... expected in the circumstances. It was the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our northern region the floating carcasses of the animals of all climates, to sink in unwonted companionship, when putrefaction had done its work, into the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked the fact, that comparative anatomy is in reality a science; and further, that it is a science of which men such as Cuvier and Owen know a great deal ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... few inches of loose earth. In every direction the ground was dotted with graves; the soil cracked and split in obedience to the forces acting beneath its surface, and from the fissures thus formed the gases of putrefaction issued to poison the living. In those more recent days, moreover, another center of contamination had been discovered, the Meuse, although there had already been removed from it the bodies of more than twelve hundred dead horses. It was generally believed ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... poison, nor does it appear to corrupt sooner than that killed by the gun or knife. The body of this fowl was kept for sixteen hours in a climate damp and rainy, and within seven degrees of the equator, at the end of which time it had contracted no bad smell whatever and there were no symptoms of putrefaction, saving that just round the wound the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... of wood fungus found about the roots of old trees is designated "fairy-butter," because after rain, and when in a certain degree of putrefaction, it is reduced to a consistency which, together with its colour, makes it not unlike butter. The fairy-butter of the Welsh is a substance found at a great depth in cavities of limestone rocks. Ritson, in his "Fairy ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... nostrils; sometimes they are excessively enlarged by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose eaten away. The embalmers, we know, were not sure of their means, and the mummies were not always a success. In some cases putrefaction ensued, and corruption and even sudden hatchings of larvae, those "companions without ears and without eyes," which died indeed in time but only after they ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... words, the deposit of Globigerina skeletons, did not go on very fast. It is demonstrable that an animal of the cretaceous sea might die, that its skeleton might lie uncovered upon the sea-bottom long enough to lose all its outward coverings and appendages by putrefaction; and that, after this had happened, another animal might attach itself to the dead and naked skeleton, might grow to maturity, and might itself die before the calcareous ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... given them some inventive horror. But the pure mortiferousness of this mind, capable neither of patience, fidelity, grace, or wit, in any place, or from any motive,—this horrible apathy of brain, which cannot ascend so high as insanity, but is capable only of putrefaction, save us the task of all analysis, and leave us only that of examining how this black aqua Tophana mingles ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... than beget man. But the power of a non-univocal agent does not wholly manifest itself in the production of its effect: as, for example, the power of the sun does not wholly manifest itself in the production of an animal generated from putrefaction. Now it is clear that God is not a univocal agent. For nothing agrees with Him either in species or in genus, as was shown above (Q. 3, A. 5; Q. 4, A. 3). Whence it follows that His effect is always less than His power. It is not necessary, therefore, that the infinite power ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... their attention, not only from the government, but from their governors; that the stream of public vigilance, far from clearing and enriching the prospect of society, would by its stagnation consign it to barrenness, and by its putrefaction infect it with death. You have aimed an arrow at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race; why, like the inveterate enemy of Philip, in putting your name to the shaft, did you not declare ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... the contrast at London — I am pent up in frowzy lodgings, where there is not room enough to swing a cat; and I breathe the steams of endless putrefaction; and these would, undoubtedly, produce a pestilence, if they were not qualified by the gross acid of sea-coal, which is itself a pernicious nuisance to lungs of any delicacy of texture: but even this boasted ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... deep and harmonious voice went on, "am also a Christian. Not a Catholic, but a Christian. Indeed, because I am a Christian am an anti-Catholic. My heart is Christian, and my brain is Protestant. It is with joy that I see in Catholicism signs, not of decrepitude, but of putrefaction. Charity is being dissolved in the most sincerely Catholic hearts into a dark mud, full of the worms of hatred. I see Catholicism cracking in many places, and I see the ancient idolatry upon which it has raised itself bursting forth ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro



Words linked to "Putrefaction" :   putridness, immorality, biology, decay, rottenness, depravity, depravation



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