"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been fired as many times as you please with the heaviest charges of that powder without its sustaining the slightest injury. Our wise Ordnance people, however, having taken a fancy to a 'slow combustion powder,' whose force, instead of being expended in the breech, is sustained throughout the whole length of the gun, as the particles of powder ignite and expand, bethought themselves they would, for cheapness' sake, ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and the mail will have carried it everywhere: so wonderful a machine is this of ours for disseminating intelligence! Think of it! When my father was born——but that is another story. To return: we had here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of—your cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the Viscount's usual reading. It is my conviction he had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would have preferred to write it, Albert and Victoria. The fiery little spurt of revolt in Canada, called rather ambitiously, "The Canadian Rebellion," had ended in smoke, and the outburst of Chartism, from the spontaneous combustion of sullen and long-smothered discontent among the working classes, had been extinguished, partly by a fog of misapprehension and misdirection, partly by a process of energetic stamping out. The shameful Chinese opium war, the Cabul ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... and there in Scripture, fire stands for a symbol of destroying power. But that is a less frequent use than that in which it stands as a symbol of life. In a very real sense life is warmth and death is cold. Is not respiration a kind of combustion? Do not physiologists tell us that? Is not the centre of the system and the father of all physical life that great blazing sun which radiates heat? And is not this promise, 'I will send fire on the earth,' the assurance that into the midst of our death there shall come the quick energy ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an asthmatic old man about to suffer spontaneous combustion," said Honor moving away from the vicinity of the American organ, vexed to see the transparent arts practised by Mrs. Fox to ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?" inquired Putz. "Sometimes der lead ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... of bad language from the Exhaust Pipe, accompanied by gouts of smoke and vapour? The engine, now revolving at no more than one-tenth its normal speed, has upset the proportion of petrol to air, and combustion is taking place intermittently or in the Exhaust Pipe, where it has no business to be. "Crash, Bang, Rattle——!——!——!" and worse than that, yells the Exhaust, and the Aeroplane, who is a gentleman and not a box kite,[13] remonstrates with the severity of a Senior ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... girls," he would say, "Music is a conglomeration of pleasing sounds, or a succession or combernation of simultaneous sounds modulated in accordance with harmony. Harmony is the sociability of two or more musical strains. Melody denotes the pleasing combustion of musical and measured sounds, as they succeed each other in transit. The elements of vocal music consist of seven original tones which constitute the diatonic scale, together with its steps and half steps, the ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... Iames Towne they were all in combustion, the strongest preparing once more to run away with the Pinnace; which with the hazzard of his life, with Sakre falcon and musket shot, Smith forced now the third ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... and water to obtain from them the energy necessary to do its work. So, we consume within our bodies certain nutritious substances to obtain from them the energy necessary for our activities. Just as the energy for the working of the engine is obtained from steam by the combustion of fuel, so the energy possessed by our bodies results from the combustion or oxidation within us of the food we eat. Unless this energy is provided for the body it will have but little power of doing work, and like an engine without steam, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... of temperature; heating &c v.; calefaction^, tepefaction^, torrefaction^; melting, fusion; liquefaction &c 335; burning &c v.; ambustion^, combustion; incension^, accension^; concremation^, cremation; scorification^; cautery, cauterization; ustulation^, calcination; cracking, refining; incineration, cineration^; carbonization; cupellation [Chem]. ignition, inflammation, adustion^, flagration^; deflagration, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion, as well as to physical activity by those unaccustomed to it from birth; flooding in the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that makes the animal engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does in the artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an engine; a free draught of open air is also required in order to produce combustion. Just in like manner the food we eat cannot be utilised to drive our muscles and other organs unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air to burn it slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the system, in all higher animals, by means of lungs or gills. Now, when we are ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... extinguish a flame; some will cause the flame to burn brilliantly, but will not burn themselves; and some will take fire and burn themselves, though extinguishing the flame which has ignited them. We say the first are non-combustible, and will not support combustion; the second are supporters of combustion, the third are combustible gases. Of course these are, as the lawyers say, only ex parte statements of the truth; still they are usually accepted. Oxygen gas will ignite ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... censured a practice prevalent among the Romans, of decorating a corpse, previous to interment or combustion, with garlands and flowers. Their reprehension extended also to a periodical custom of placing the "first-fruits of Flora" on their graves and tombs. Thus Anchises, in Dryden's Virgil,Aeneid, book ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... no charcoal, no soot, to trouble you; no ashes, no wood, to soil your apartments. By night, as well as by day, you can have a fire in your room, without a servant being obliged to look after it. Nothing in the thermolampes, not even the smallest portion of inflammable air, can escape combustion; while in our chimnies, torrents evaporate, and even carry off with them the greater part of the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... to maintain these states of existence in bodies, may be produced in various ways. Our usual experience leads us to consider it as more generally arising from two causes, radiation from the sun, and the chemical action causing combustion. The former could never have produced the temperature known to exist at present upon the surface of the globe, for the earth radiates as well as the sun, and is constantly throwing off heat into the surrounding space. We know that these two actions have for ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... earnestness, flew from window to window, to trace footsteps upon the turf which he knew had not printed it: yet, never inattentive to his own interest, when he perceived in the midst of the combustion he had raised, that Lady Margaret was incensed at the noise it produced, he artfully gave over his search, and seating himself in a chair next to her, eagerly offered to assist her with cakes, chocolate, or ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... processes have been perfected by the collective experience of generations, and shows us how much we of the present day owe to our predecessors. From the earliest times, as among the native smiths of Africa to-day, the blast of a bellows has been used in working iron to increase the heat of the combustion by a more plentiful supply of oxygen. The blast-furnace is supposed to have been first used in Belgium, and to have been introduced into England in 1558. Next came the use of bituminous coal, urged with a blast ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Nasmith, suggested a submerged motor, driven by a steam engine. None of the boats of this period proved successful enough, however, to receive more than passing notice, and very few, indeed, ever reached the trial stage. But before long the rapid development of internal-combustion engines and the immense progress made in the study of electricity was to advance the development of submarines by leaps ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... book to deal with the science of nutrition; but a few general principles may be given which concern the effect upon the system of the different classes of food. Animal food requires a considerable quantity of oxygen for its complete combustion. Meat in general has a more stimulating effect upon the system and is more strengthening than vegetable food. There is, however, a tendency to eat too much meat, and when its effects are not counter-balanced by free outdoor exercise, it causes biliousness and sometimes ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... in material poverty as when its members are deprived of a large part of their humanity. This unhappiness goes on smouldering in the subconscious mind of the community till its life is reduced to ashes or a sudden combustion is produced. The repressed personality of man generates an inflammable moral gas deadly ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... stagnating in his pose, he is a man that the first casual gaze instantly returns to with sharpened focus. You have seen gymnasts whose normal movements were slowly performed springs, just as rust is a slow combustion and fire the same thing in less time. Well, Clinton Browne strongly suggested that sort of athlete. Add to this a regularly formed, clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful face, with a pair of wonderfully piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black eyes, and ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... going to make the fireworks; it combines explosively with fluorine. The hydrogen-fluorine combination is what passes for combustion here; the result is hydrofluoric acid, the local equivalent of water. See, the metallic core of this planet is covered, much less thickly than that of Terra, with fluoride rock—fluorspar, and that sort of thing. There's nothing like granite here, for instance. That's why those big dunes, out ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... begins by making himself a goling, or fireplace of mud and stone, some three feet high and four or five long, by one and a half wide, with two, three, or more side ventilators and draught-holes. By this ingenious contrivance he manages to increase the combustion of the dried dung, the most trying fuel from which to get a flame. On the top of this stove a suitable place is made to fit the several raksangs, or large brass pots and bowls, in which the brick tea, having been duly pounded in a stone or wooden mortar, is boiled and stirred with a long ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... not strong enough to stand up under nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket you—you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would." ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Flatbush Avenue Terminal to East New York Station, a distance of 5-1/4 miles. One of the requirements of this improvement was that the motive power should be changed to some form of power not involving combustion. This led to the adoption of electricity, and, in order to meet operating necessities, involved the electrification of connecting lines beyond the improvement proper, so that local service could be handled to the end of the runs without changing the motive power. The extent ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... oxidation, and oxidation is a disintegrating process, while life is an integrating process, or a balance maintained between the two by what we call the vital force. Life is evidently a much higher form of molecular activity than combustion. The old Greek Heraclitus saw, and the modern scientist sees, very superficially ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... did not require to have the end cut off—which might have led to a discovery of the poison. The plan also shows a certain knowledge of chemistry; the poison was not intended merely to be dissolved in the moisture of the mouth. The idea evidently was that the steam generated by the combustion of the leaf at the distal end, would condense in the cooler part of the cigar and dissolve the poison, and the solution would then be drawn into the mouth. Then the nature of the poison and certain similarities of procedure seem to identify ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... O'Rourke was there, stuffed carefully into a rented dress suit and was being attentioned to the point of combustion by Polly, who was thus putting off a reckoning with young New England, promised for "after the election." Freckles, the devil, was having the lark of his life in removing hats and coats under the direction of an ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... two very large ovens in the earth at Tiberias. Two years had elapsed at the time of our arrival since they had set fire to their granary; and it was considered as a miracle by the inhabitants that the combustion was not yet extinguished. We visited the place, and perceived, that whenever the ashes of the burnt corn were stirred, by thrusting a stick among them, sparks were even seen glowing throughout the heap; and a piece of wood ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... types of lamps used in domestic lighting present several imperfections, and daily experience shows too often how difficult it is, even with the most careful and best studied models, to have a perfect combustion of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... entered he proceeded to divest his throat of a large shawl, which he hung over the back of a chair; then doffing his great-coat, which was placed in a similar position, he rubbed his hands, and walked up to the fire, into which he insinuated the poker, and immediately destroyed the small symptoms of combustion which remained, reducing the whole ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... said, could do that. His slender convex silver cigarette-case invariably contained the only cigarettes worthy of the palate of a connoisseur, as his pipes were invariably the only pipes fit for the combustion of truly high-class tobacco. Old women, especially charwomen, adored him, and even municipal seigniors admitted that Harry was a smart-looking youth. Fatherless, he was the heir to a tolerable fortune, the bulk of which, during his mother's life, he could not touch save with her consent; ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... this technology revolution is in the information and information management areas- which, in the U.S., are heavily commercially oriented. Future military application may well be analogous to the impact of the internal combustion engine and wireless radio on land, sea, and air forces in the 1920s and 1930s. The size of this technological lead between ourselves and the rest of the world, especially in the base for new information products and services, should widen further in knowledge ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... union between us and you Protestants. One is, that ye yield unto us. To that you say you cannot. The second is, that we yield unto you; but that we will not do. The third is, that the one party, by force, should be compelled to yield to the other; but thereupon a great combustion and tumult might be raised. Therefore the fourth way or means were to be applauded and used, namely, that now being here assembled together, the one party should strive to thrust out the other, and that party which shall have the advantage, and be the stronger, the same should ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... companion. "I had forgotten the chimneys, it is so long since they went out of use. It is nearly a century since the crude method of combustion, on which you ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... on a small scale, and is confident that it will prove equally successful on a large one. Sturtevant was not very specific as to his process; but it incidentally appears to have been his purpose to reduce the coal by an imperfect combustion to the condition of coke, thereby ridding it of "those malignant proprieties which are averse to the nature of metallique substances." The subject was treated by him, as was customary in those days, as a great mystery, made still more mysterious by the multitude of learned words ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... solemnly, "a comet, Lauchlan, so far as Ah can mak' oot frae the book, is jist naething more nor less than an indestructible, incomprehensible combustion o' ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... explosive; it is the "hair-trigger" which liberates the enormous energy contained in the cartridge, etc. To apply the analogy: life utilizes and directs the energy obtained from food (by a species of chemical combustion) so that the bodily energy, as such, is, so to say, a "physical" energy, and subject to the law of conservation; while the power that guides, controls, and directs it is conscious life—the power of choice, the guider, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... inalienably vested in the local authorities (which, in order to secure the maximum of convenience and administrative efficiency, will probably control areas as large sometimes as half England), they will generate electricity by water power, by combustion, by wind or tide or whatever other natural force is available, and this electricity will be devoted, some of it to the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it, as a subsidy, to the World-State authority which controls the high roads, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... internal derangement ensues in every direction. All hands, so to speak, are strained to extra duty to discharge the noxious accumulation. The lungs labor to discharge the load thrown back upon them, with hastened respiration, increased combustion, and feverish heat. The pores of the mucous membrane in the nose, throat, alimentary canal, or bronchial passages, are forced by an aggravated discharge (or catarrh), and this congestive and inflammatory pressure is a fever also. There is nothing of "cold" ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... the subject of the first one I picked up, and I read the opening paragraph aloud: "The seasons change from one to the other without fuss or feather and obey the laws of nature. All mens change from one thing to other by spontaneous combustion and obey ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... great decision, the commander gives the general orders to submerge. The internal combustion engines, the oil motors which, during surface navigation are used to accelerate the speed of the boat, are immediately disconnected, as they consume too much air underseas, and electric motors are now quickly attached and set in motion. They are supplied by a large ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... Naphtha fount[131] Showers of consuming fire o'er all below; Looking as thro' the illumined night they go Like those wild birds that by the Magians oft[132] At festivals of fire were sent aloft Into the air with blazing fagots tied To their huge wings, scattering combustion wide. All night the groans of wretches who expire In agony beneath these darts of fire Ring thro' the city—while descending o'er Its shrines and domes and streets of sycamore,— Its lone bazars, with their bright cloths of gold, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... quarter of a mile under the surface of the earth; if, therefore, they were, as his hypothesis demands, carried off and mixed with the other materials, and not formed in vast and separate collections, they could never occasion, by their combustion, a heat capable of producing the smallest effect, much less those gigantic ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... is 2,500 years, while that of polonium is only 202 days, and that of niton 5.6 days. These unquestioned facts, together with the enormous amount of heat evolved by the disintegration of these substances (that from radium being about 250,000 times the heat evolved by the combustion of carbon), have thrown a great deal of doubt upon the older estimates of the age ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... which takes place when moist vegetable substances are exposed to oxygen is that of slow combustion ('eremacausis'), the oxygen uniting with the wood and liberating a volume of carbonic acid equal to itself, and another portion combining with the hydrogen of the wood to form water. Decomposition takes place on contact with a body already undergoing ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... the cause; he considered it could never be spontaneous combustion, but always accident, unless, indeed, in an exceptional case like the present, said Mr. Holt sotto voce. Settlers, burning brush heaps, or logging, sometimes permit the flame to run along the ground into the bush; ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... cases, in some hardly do suffice, for the mere protraction of life; comfortable life being altogether out of the question. The course of the administration of the civilized states, and the recent dire combustion into which they have almost unanimously rushed, as in emulation which of them should with the least reserve, and with the most desperate rapidity, annihilate the resources that should have been for the subsistence and competence of their people, have ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... providence in this haste; for, ere I was half-way down the stair, the floor fell with a thud like thunder; and such a combustion of soot, stour, and sparks arose, as was never seen or heard tell of in the memory of man since the day that Samson pulled over the pillars in the house of dragon, and smoored all the mocking Philistines as flat as flounders. For the space of a minute I was as blind as a beetle, and was like ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes! I wish,' whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a chair, and discharging her strongest ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... been displaced by the reproductions of the antique, and by well-grates and scientifically constructed stoves and heating radiators by which heat can be conserved, the draught of the fire and the chimney regulated, and the coal burned more economically on slow-combustion and semi-slow-combustion principles. Science has taught builders and others how to radiate the heat, and prevent that waste which formerly went up the chimney, so that the necessity to sit round the fire is not as great as it once was, ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... in the living world and growth in the dead world, the energy relations with the environment reveal a marked contrast. Again, in the phenomena of combustion, there are certain superficial resemblances which have led to comparison between the two. Here again, however, the attitudes towards the energy of the environment stand very much as and -. The life absorbs, stores, ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... find resting upon the charred remains. The ends of the timber covering, where they were protected by the earth above and below, were reduced to charcoal, parallel pieces of which were found at right angles to the length of the mound. No charcoal was found among or near the remains, the combustion there having been complete. The porous and softer portions of the bones were reduced to pulverized bone-black. Mr. Stevens also examined the furnace. The mound had probably not been opened ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... defiance any artifices that their enemy might find time to practise. Even the two upper stories were comparatively safe; for they were composed of blocks so solid as to require time to heat them, and they were consequently as little liable to combustion as wood well could be. But the roof, like all of that, and indeed, like most of the present day in America, was composed of short inflammable shingles of pine. The superior height of the tower was some ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... rosetted corners, resting each on one of the heavily-epauletted shoulders. His face looked so fierce and rubescent under his vast hat, that he put me in mind of a large coal, the lower half of which was in a state of combustion. He landed with the other officers, and I then perceived that he was gouty and lame, and walked with a stick, that had affixed to it a transverse ivory head, something like a diminutive ram's horn. Amidst this group of officers, I observed my coffee-room ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... used in making concrete are broken or crushed stone, gravel, slag and cinders. Slag and cinders make a concrete that weighs considerably less than stone or gravel mixtures, and being the products of combustion are commonly supposed to make a specially fire resisting concrete; their use is, therefore, confined very closely to fireproof building work and, in fact, to floor construction for such buildings. Slag and cinder concretes are for this reason given ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... gas exhalations is another serious source of danger to books. In many well-lighted libraries, the heat itself from the numerous gas-burners is sufficient to injure them, and there is besides a sulphuric acid escaping from the coal-gas fluid, in combustion, which is most deleterious to bindings. The only remedy appears to be, where libraries are open evenings, to furnish them with electric lights. This improved mode of illumination is now so perfected, and so widely ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... glance, the means of extinction might operate upon it in their full power, and when the materials of the house were in ashes, the conflagration died. But the southern insurrection was the burning of a coalmine—a fire ravaging where human skill could scarcely gain access, kindled among stores of combustion scarcely to be calculated by human experience, growing fiercer the deeper it descended, and at every new burst undermining the land, and threatening to carry down into its gulfs all that was stately or venerable on the surface of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... desired, the interposition of a strip of glass of that color, or of a "medium" of red or green silk or tammy, will give the necessary tone. Colored fires are supplied for the same purpose, but are subject to the drawback of being somewhat odoriferous in combustion. Where, as is sometimes the case, a strong white light is required, this may be produced by burning the end of a piece of magnesium wire in the flame of an ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... house structure. The location of each chimney in the center of the boiler house between sets of six boilers divides the coal bunker construction into separate pockets by which trouble from spontaneous combustion can be localized, and, as described later, the divided coal bunkers can provide for the storage of different grades of coal. The unit basis on which the economizer and flue system is constructed will allow making repairs to any one section without shutting off the portions not ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... glory above his peers, He trusted to have equalled the Most High, If he opposed, and with ambitious aim Against the throne and monarchy of God, Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud, With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms. Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men, he, with his horrid crew, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... who are thus forced to demolish before they can reconstruct, deny most emphatically (a) that the sun is in combustion, in any ordinary sense of the word; or (b) that he is incandescent, or even burning, though he is glowing; or (c) that his luminosity has already begun to weaken and his power of combustion may be ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... for the combustion sell the article to the relatives. Some of them are cutting up fuel and arranging the pyre, while others seated on the walls play a lugubrious strain on the native instruments. The disposal of the body of an old man was in process while the tourists looked ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look at the respective net results. France lies down to rot into grand Spontaneous-Combustion, Apotheosis of Sansculottism, and much else; which still lasts, to her own great peril, and the great affliction of neighbors. Poor England, after such enormous stumbling among the chimney-pots, and somnambulism over all the world for twenty years, finds on awakening, that she ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a Young Messer the canvas probably presents to us a view of a poached egg apparently bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that is what it looks like to us—a golden buck, forty cents at any good restaurant—in the act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. But we are informed that this is an impressionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and we are expected to stand before it ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... flowers of Paradise, which burst in flame and scorch the demons, who, rushing at their angelic adversaries with their hellish prongs and forks and launching vainly their missiles of hell-fire, are hurled back by an invisible power and gradually driven off the stage, plunging in hideous ruin and combustion down headlong into ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think—as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... in his report to the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists for the year 1913, stated that the method giving the most uniform results was that of ashing the beer with an excess of standard calcium acetate, and that while the moist combustion method in the hands of those familiar with it gave satisfactory results, the various collaborators working with the method did not get as uniform results as with the method of ashing with calcium acetate. J. Assoc. Off. Agr. ...
— A Study Of American Beers and Ales • L.M. Tolman
... certain things about the plan and general build of it which are plain enough. It has a head end, where fuel supplies are taken in and where its lamps and other look-out apparatus are carried; a body in which the fuel is stored and turned into work or speed, and into which air is drawn to help combustion and to cool the engine pipes. It has a pair of fore-wheels (the arms) and a pair of hind-wheels (the legs), though these have been reduced to only one spoke each, and swing only about a quarter of the way around and back again when ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... by one large casement window and a smaller latticed one, both of them overlooking the courtyard. The woodwork was oaken and the walls were distempered a discreet and restful shade of blue. There were a central electric fitting and another for a reading-lamp, a fireplace of the latest slow-combustion pattern and a door communicating ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... elevation with the setting shown in section, and Figure 317 is an end view of the boiler and setting at the furnace end. The boiler is supported on each side by channel iron columns, these being riveted to the boiler shell angle pieces which rest upon the columns. The heat and products of combustion pass from the furnace along the bottom of the boiler, and at the end pass into and through the tubes and thence over the top of the boiler to the chimney flue. There is shown in the bridge wall an opening, ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... Shiels's word, and never looked at it so as to compare it with The Lives of the Poets, as published under Mr. Cibber's name. What became of that manuscript I know not. I should have liked much to examine it. I suppose it was thrown into the fire in that impetuous combustion of papers, which Johnson I think rashly executed, when moribundus.' BOSWELL. Mr. Croker, quoting a letter by Griffiths the publisher, says:—'The question is now decided by this letter in opposition to Dr. Johnson's assertion.' Croker's Boswell, p. 818. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... yourself in a smock-frock, the best of all working dresses, having cut the huge trees into lengths of a few feet, rolling these lengths up into a pile, and ranging the branches and brush-wood for convenient combustion; then waiting for a favourable wind, setting fire to all your heaps, and burying yourself in grime and smoke; then rolling up these half-consumed enormous logs, till, after painful toil, you get ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought their eternal, no less than their temporal, interests were at stake, could have done. When a logical blunder may ensure combustion, not only in the next world but in this, the construction of syllogisms acquires a peculiar interest. Moreover, the schools kept the thinking faculty alive and active, when the disturbed state of civil life, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... visited in 1896 with a planter friend, Eugenio Alonso, who was endeavouring to form a coal-mining syndicate. The Revista Minera (a Madrid mining journal) referred in 1886 to the coal of the Alpaco Mountain, in the district of Naga (Cebu Is.) as being pure, dry, of easy combustion, carrying a strong flame, and almost free from sulphur pyrites. Cebu coal is said to be of better quality and cleaner than the Labuan and Australian products, but its heating powers being less, it is less serviceable for long ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... our sun as a globe of gas in a state of combustion, burning at high temperature, and giving off a prodigious amount of heat and light. The dazzling surface of this globe is called a photosphere (light sphere). It is in perpetual motion, like the waves of an ocean of fire, whose roseate ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... outbreak of the street parade era, above noted, there came with spontaneous-combustion-like rapidity, a radical change in the style of female bathing suits "on ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... air,' as Dr. Lardner termed it. Elaborate calculations were made by that gentleman to prove that the provision of ventilating shafts would be altogether insufficient to prevent the dangers arising from the combustion of coke, producing carbonic acid gas, which in large quantities was fatal to life. He showed, for instance, that in the proposed Box tunnel, on the Great Western Railway, the passage of 100 tons would deposit about ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the test, and, on the engine being started, the farmer and Grace were rewarded by the chippetty, chippetty, chippetty, chippetty of perfect sparking and combustion. ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... for the man who would become an airplane mechanic, is a thorough knowledge of gasolene-engines. This should include not only a knowledge of such fundamentals as the theory of the internal-combustion engine, carburetion, compression, ignition, and explosion, but also a keen insight into the whims of the human, and terribly inhuman, thing—the gasolene-motor. Nothing can be sweeter when it is sweet, and nothing more devilish when it is cranky, ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... proper measures had been taken the moment the fire was discovered, it might have been extinguished, and if not, its progress might have been retarded. The ship had a large quantity of coals among her cargo, and there is no doubt it originated in it by spontaneous combustion. Some said it had been smouldering away ever since we left Liverpool. What would have been our sensations had we known that we had a volcano on board? When some of the passengers saw that the object of our exertions was to fill the hold with water, they began to cry out that the quickest way ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... present time. The origin of fire as represented in any of the myths of the superstitious beings of early ages is as suitable as any other, inasmuch as definite knowledge is unavailable. Active volcanoes, spontaneous combustion, friction, accidental focusing of the sun's image, and other means may have introduced primitive beings to fire. A study of savage tribes of the present age combined with a survey of past history of mythology, of material relics, and of the absence of lamps or other ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... complete purification of the air required the absorption of the carbonic acid, exhaled from the lungs. For nearly 12 hours the atmosphere had been gradually becoming more and more charged with this deleterious gas, produced from the combustion of the blood by the inspired oxygen. The Captain soon saw this, by noticing with what difficulty Diana was panting. She even appeared to be smothering, for the carbonic acid—as in the famous Grotto del Cane on the banks of Lake Agnano, near Naples—was ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficent amelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at the same time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that the earth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium would render all his benevolent schemes of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... stenographers' room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of "queering yourself." Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered, perspiringly, that you must never mention the Gazette's rival, the Internal Combustion News. The Gazette's attitude was that the News did not exist—except when the Gazette wanted the plate of an advertisement which the News was to forward. You mustn't chew gum in the office; you were to ask favors of the lieutenant, not of the office-manager; ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... boundless 'Armament of Mechanisers' and Unbelievers, threatening to strip us bare! 'The world,' says he, 'as it needs must, is under a process of devastation and waste, which, whether by silent assiduous corrosion, or open quicker combustion, as the case chances, will effectually enough annihilate the past Forms of Society; replace them with what it may. For the present, it is contemplated that when man's whole Spiritual Interests are once divested, these innumerable ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Engineers: Andrew L. Riker, vice-president of Locomobile Company, electrical and mechanical engineer and inventor of many automobile devices. Howard E. Coffin, vice-president of Hudson Motor Car Company and active in the development of internal-combustion engines. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... "It means 'Cheating-fire.' Sometimes this gas, rising to the top of the water in bubbles, takes fire (by what they call spontaneous combustion, or by mixing with some other gas, or in some other way), and then, as one bubble after another takes fire and goes flickering along, it looks as if some one were walking through ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... supposed that this force is a material thing which can be confined by bounds, as used to be thought of latent heat when that important phenomenon was first discovered. What is meant is that when the coal does at last, by combustion, generate a quantity of heat (transformable like all other heat into mechanical momentum, and the other forms of force), this extrication of heat is the re-appearance of a force derived from the sun's rays, expended myriads of ages ago in the vegetation of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... loses the bright red colour, and undergoes some new combinations in the glands or capillaries, in which the matter of heat is given out from the secreted fluids. This process therefore, as well as the process of respiration, has some analogy to combustion, as the vital air or oxygene seems to become united to some inflammable base, and the matter of heat escapes from the new acid, which is ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... needed not to observe the shadows to note its exact position in the heavens. Singly among the broken blocks, and in banks along the ledges, the cactus had burst under the heat, as it were, into the spontaneous combustion of flowery flame. To the traveler passing beside them their red blooms blazed with the irritating superfluity of a torch-light ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... an oleaginous liquid heavier than water, colorless, changing to dark yellow on contact with the air. Nicotianin or "camphor of tobacco" is another substance found in the leaves, crystalline, tasteless, with an odor resembling tobacco. Nicotinic acid is a product of the combustion of nicotine. ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... then all his prowess was in vain. Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... main flue, which also forms the dust chamber, is placed underneath the furnace hearths. The Fryer furnace ordinarily burns from 4 to 6 tons of refuse per cell per 24 hours. It will be observed that the outlets for the products of combustion are placed at the back near the refuse feed opening, an arrangement which is imperfect in design, inasmuch as while a charge of refuse is burning upon the furnace bars the charge which is to follow lies on the dead hearth near the outlet ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... if not kindled, originate either from accident, spontaneous combustion, or incendiarism. With war the origin may be traced to similar causes either singly or in combination, or, when we cannot hit the exact diagnosis, we explain it with a handy word and call it evolution, as we may do in the case ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead, filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... chemical compound into its elements by a sufficiently high degree of heat. All compounds are susceptible of dissociation, so that it follows that combustion is impossible at ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... to slow combustion; the oxygenous part of the atmosphere is received through the moist membranes, which line the air-cells of the lungs, and uniting with the inflammable part of the blood generates an acid, probably the phosphoric acid; a portion of carbonic acid is ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... overboard, and another hole having been cut in the deck on the other side, the other pump was rigged, and double the quantity of water poured into the hold; but it was evident to Philip that the combustion increased. The smoke and steam now burst through the interstices of the hatchways and the holes cut in the deck with a violence that proved the extent of the fire which raged below, and Philip thought it advisable to remove all the women and children to the poop and quarter-deck of the ship, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... metamorphosed is necessary. The engine may be perfect, the water may be in the boiler, but unless there be force in the form of heat there will be no steam; and there will be no heat unless there be fuel in a state of combustion. ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... practically constitutes a miniature conical roof suspended over the fireplace and depending upon the walls of the room for support. On account of the careful and economical use of fuel by these people the light and inflammable material of which the chimney is constructed does not involve the danger of combustion that would be expected. The perfect feasibility of such use of wood is well illustrated in some of the old log-cabin chimneys in the Southern States, where, however, the arrangement of the pieces is horizontal, not vertical. These latter ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... du Maine had done not a little to bring about these fancies, and they continued in secret to do more. Madame du Maine, it may be recollected, had said that she would throw the whole country into combustion, in order not to lose her husband's prerogative. She was as good as her word. Encouraged doubtless by the support they received from this precious pair, the Parliament continued on its mad career of impudent presumption, pride, and arrogance. It assembled on the 22nd of August, and ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... states of mind which have been able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; 161:9 while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... method of heating the air by allowing it to pass over a pipe or flue through which the products of combustion from a coke or coal fire are proceeding under the floor of the drying chamber to a small shaft, has been superseded by steam heat. The air is either drawn or forced by means of quickly revolving fans through a cylinder placed in a horizontal position and ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... time, nor on any sure grounds of hope; and having got the opportunity of a passage in a ship then riding in the bay of Lisbon, was carried over into England. He made no long stay in that country, though fair offers were made him there; for he saw that all things were in a hurry and combustion, under a very young king; the nobles at variance one with another, and the minds of the commons yet in a ferment, upon the account of their civil combustions. Whereupon he returned into France, about the time that the ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... minutes. A train of eighty tons weight will take 240 passengers and luggage from Liverpool to Birmingham and back, each journey about four and a quarter hours; this double journey of 190 miles being effected by the combustion of one and a half tons of coke, worth about twenty-four shillings. To perform the same work by common road would require twenty coaches, and an establishment of 3800 horses, with which the journey would be performed each way in about twelve hours, stoppages ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... dead; it is a vast accumulation of the product of complete combustion, hydrogen burnt out. But just as dead worlds, which are the molecules of infinite space, shocking together, burst into spiral nebulae of flame which are the beginnings of live suns and planets and all luxuriant life thereon, so it seems as if the atoms of sea water, ever rushing to restless ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that age had never so much as happened to hear of a case like this, of animal combustion, in the horrid mood that came over me, I almost thought the burning body was a premonition of the hell of the Calvinists, and that Miguel's earthly end was a foretaste of ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... I got home found a letter from Joe, with one enclosed to Lord Wharton, which I will send to his Excellency, and second it as well as I can; but to talk of getting the Queen's order is a jest. Things are in such a combustion here, that I am advised not to meddle yet in the affair I am upon, which concerns the clergy of a whole kingdom; and does he think anybody will trouble the Queen about Joe? We shall, I hope, get ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... minutes, but the fire did blaze up royally in the end. You see, it wasn't a slow-combustion-grate, and it burned too much fuel, and flared away the coal, and did all sorts of comfortable, uneconomical things. So did Jane, who had put in a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Mantalini and Steerforth and David Copperfield and Barkis; and terrible figures: Fagan and Bill Sykes and Uriah Heap and Squeers and Mr. Murdstone and that fearful man who drank so much that he died of spontaneous combustion; and pathetic figures: Sidney Carton and Little Nell and Oliver Twist and Nancy and Dora and Little Dorritt and the ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This last is the point where old age starts from. The great fact of physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the fire is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish superstition," but remembering ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... partially imagined when it is remembered that these flames were of all hues, from rich ruby-red, to the pale lurid light of burning sulphur. Fancy all the gems of Aladdin's Palace or Sinbad's Valley in fierce flashing combustion, immensely magnified, and you may form some faint idea of the scene in that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... finally vindicated him. He soon discovered that his compound would not melt at any degree of heat. It next occurred to him to ascertain at how low a temperature it would char, and whether it was not possible to arrest the combustion at a point that would leave the India-rubber elastic, but deprived of its adhesiveness. A single experiment proved that this was possible. After toasting a piece of his compound before an open fire, he found that, while part of it was charred, a rim of India-rubber ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... is a chemical process, it is the action of fire on inflammable substances and is the union of the oxygen in the air with the carbon in the fuel; this is called rapid combustion. Slow combustion is the decaying of wood or ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... a farm lighting outfit is usually driven by an internal combustion engine furnished with the outfit. The engine may be connected to the generator by a belt, or its shaft may be connected directly to the generator shaft. A switchboard carrying the necessary instruments and switches also goes with the outfit. The ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... man whose wants were rather extensive and urgent, the "business" did not seem a very promising one. He glanced up at the houses as he sauntered along, appearing almost to expect that some of them would undergo spontaneous combustion for his special accommodation. Occasionally he paused and gazed at a particular house with rapt intensity, as if he hoped the light which flashed from his own eyes would set it on fire; but the houses being all regular bricks refused to flare ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... a little hotly, "if Annette is a spitfire, Mrs. Larkins is a lot of combustion. I think of all the women I know, she has the greatest genius for aggravation. I used to board with her, but as I did not wish to be talked to death I took refuge ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... of Toxemia. A healthy body struggles continually to purify itself of poisons that are inevitably produced while going about its business of digesting food, moving about, and repairing itself. The body is a marvelous creation, a carbon, oxygen combustion machine, constantly burning fuel, disposing of the waste products of combustion, and constantly rebuilding tissue by replacing worn out, dead cells with new, fresh ones. Every seven years virtually every cell in the body is replaced, some types of cells having a ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... been unruly: where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death; And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion, and confused events, New hatched to the ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... their places, flew through the room, and were broken to pieces. The particulars of this commotion were as curious as the loss and damage occasioned in this extraordinary manner were alarming and intolerable. Amidst this combustion, a young woman, Mrs. Golding's maid, named Anne Robinson, was walking backwards and forwards, nor could she be prevailed on to sit down for a moment excepting while the family were at prayers, during which time no disturbance ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... corrupt and dissolute Clergy, by the incitement and instigation of Bishops and others, whose avarice and ambition being not able to bear the Reformation endeavoured by the Parliament, they have laboured (as we can expect little better fruit from such trees) to kindle a flame, and raise a combustion within the bowels of this Kingdom: Which if by our humble supplication to His Majesty it may be prevented, and that according to our earnest desire therein, all Force and Warlike preparations being laid aside, we may returne to a peaceable parliamentary ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... bore consists in removing the fouling, resulting from firing, to obtain a chemically clean surface, and in coating this surface with a film of oil to prevent rusting. The fouling which results from firing is of two kinds—one, the products of combustion of the powder; the other, cupro-nickel scraped off (under the abrading action of irregularities or grit in the bore). Powder fouling, because of its acid reaction, is highly corrosive; that is, it will induce rust and must be removed. Metal fouling of itself is inactive, but may cover ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... colorless, tasteless, odorless gas, forming a large part of the atmospheric air, of water, of the earth's crust and of our foods. It is absolutely essential to life, for without oxygen there can be no combustion in the animal tissues, and without combustion there can be no life. The union of oxygen with fats, carbohydrates and proteins in the body results in slow combustion, which produces heat and energy. Our chief supply of oxygen ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... outrage of the college peace, and punished severely by the subtraction of some dozens from the numerical rank of the unfortunate youth engaged in so high a misdemeanor. A congregation of four was not esteemed an open, avowed contempt of the laws of decency and propriety, prophesying utter combustion, desolation, and destruction to all buildings and trees in the neighborhood; and lastly, a multitude of five, though watched with a little jealousy, was not called an intolerable, unparalleled violation of everything ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... on their twigs of thyme, light their lamps of an evening, in the cool of the beautiful summer nights. What do these fires signify? How explain the mystery of this phosphorescence? Why this slow combustion, "this species of respiration, more active than in the ordinary state"? and what is the oxidizable substance "which gives this white and gentle luminosity"? Is it a flame of love like that which lights the Agaric of the olive-tree ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros |
