"Decompose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shall have full instructions. And, for the present, you may know that it is a continuous explosion that drives the ship. I have learned to decompose water into its components and split them into subatomic form. They reunite to give something other than matter. It is a liquid—liquid energy, though the term is inaccurate—that separates out in two forms, and a fluid ounce ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... A total absence of all provisions for effectual drainage around cottages is the most prominent source of malaria; throughout the whole district there is scarcely an attempt at it. The refuse vegetable and animal matters are also thrown by the cottagers in heaps near their dwellings to decompose; are sometimes not removed, except at very long intervals; and are always permitted to remain sufficiently long to accumulate in some quantity. Pigsties are generally near the dwellings, and are always surrounded by decomposing matters. These constitute some ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... another side to the question. To decompose any substance, it must be placed between the poles of the battery. Now theology is but one pole; philosophy is the other. No one can make out the combinations of our day unless he read the writings both of the priest and the philosopher: and if any one should hold the first word ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... cannot be said of these so-called chemical waves that lie chiefly in the violet and ultra-violet end of the solar spectrum. What, then, is a chemical wave, its particular nature, and its exact properties? That we know it can decompose certain compounds, as Carbonic Acid Gas, CO2, and so give rise to chemical decomposition, has been proved by Professor Tyndall and others, but I have never yet seen any record of any attempt to find out what these chemical waves are. There may have been such attempts ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... amusement that the amiable confederate of the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant. Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... useless gas in an arrangement like this is the nitrogen of the air, which being in large quantities does act as a serious diluent. To diminish the proportion of nitrogen, steam is often injected as well as air. The glowing coke can decompose the steam, forming carbonic oxide and hydrogen, both combustible. But of course no extra energy can be gained by the use of steam in this way; all the energy must come from the coke, the steam being already a perfectly burned product; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... characteristic of these rocks is their decomposition into the purest sand and clay. Some of them decompose spontaneously, though slowly, on exposure to weather; the greater number only after being mechanically pulverized; but the sand and clay to which by one or the other process they are reducible, are both remarkable for their ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... visionary speculated on the possibility of black as well as white diamonds. Draper, by his most ingenious galvanic battery, of two metals and two liquids, with one set of elements, in a glass tube not the size of the little finger, was able to decompose water. Faraday, of England, discovered the principle, that when a current of electricity is set in motion, or stopped in a conductor, a neighboring conductor has a current produced in the opposite direction. Henry proved that this principle might be made available to produce ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... be it remembered, is not subject to decay; a saint does not decompose in the flesh like mortal sinners. One of these, I have been told, dead fifty years ago and now canonised, can be seen yet in one of the monasteries of North Lebanon, keeping well his flesh and bones together—divinely embalmed. It has been truly said that the work ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... decompose carbonic acid gas by light. A faint bluish cloud, due it may be, or it may not be, to the residue of some vapour previously employed, was formed in the experimental tube. On looking across this cloud through a Nicol's prism, the line of vision being horizontal, it was found that when the short ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... alcohol lamp and some asbestos into the pulpit and told his audience that God would turn their souls into a substance resembling asbestos. He showed them that though the asbestos were heated red hot it did not decompose into ashes. Fortunately the day of the hell preacher has gone by, and if we believe the Bible which says that "in God we live and move and have our being," we can readily understand that a lost soul would be an impossibility, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... gallic acid was used, for ink so made was found to precipitate only after a long exposure, it required no free acid to keep the precipitate in solution, and retained the indigo blue color for a long time; alkalis did not decompose the ink, and provided blacker and more permanent writing. Determination of the correct proportions of gallic acid and ferrous-sulphate was the subject of prolonged experiments conducted on similar lines to those already detailed. The conclusions as to precipitation were also similar. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... Truesdale, "we don't look at a painting with our noses, but with our eyes. I decompose what is before me into the primary colors. Now the thing for you to do is to step back ten or twelve feet and recompose them. That armchair over there is just about your point of view precisely—and so inviting and comfortable! ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... were the means of preserving his whole family in health, while many died in the neighbouring houses. It was impossible to bury all the dead, and the bodies were left to decompose where they died. After the plague had ceased, the Arabs of the desert made their appearance for the purpose of robbing and plundering. They found an easy spoil, for they penetrated without resistance into the empty houses, or without ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... about death? No, when you die, I'll follow your funeral and proclaim to all: "Behold, here is a man who has come to know the truth." Oh no, I'll rather hang you up as a banner of truth. And, the more your skin and flesh decompose and crumble, the more will the truth come out. It will be a most instructive object lesson, highly educative. Tony, why are you ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... always be fresh, although different forms of the drug are used. It tends quickly to decompose—forming a toxic by-product—and, according to some authorities, this decomposed scopolamin is responsible for many undesirable results which have attended some cases of "twilight sleep." Various forms of morphin are also used, as also ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Anne ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... really reading Hamlet, the action and the characters are not something which you conceive apart from the words; you apprehend them from point to point in the words. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of the poetic experience, but remember it, you may by analysis decompose this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated, and a form more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not in the poem, which is poetic experience. And if you ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... long for the infinite, rush into rash and wicked suicide, that they may thus escape from the contradictions and complicated pangs of the finite. The rays of light from the everlasting sun of wisdom and love are indeed forever falling round us, but we no longer bear the prism of faith which would decompose them for us, giving them such direction as they fall upon the symbolic, the relative, that we might read in their three-fold splendor the symbolized, the Absolute. The human soul was created for the enjoyment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which its nomenclature came to pass; Thus most appropriately has been shown 'Lucus a non lucendo,' not what was, But what was not; a sort of style that 's grown Extremely common in this age, whose metal The devil may decompose, but never settle: ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... metal were not completely successful; in fact, metallic calcium remained a laboratory curiosity until the beginning of the 20th century. Davy, inspired by his successful isolation of the metals sodium and potassium by the electrolysis of their hydrates, attempted to decompose a mixture of lime and mercuric oxide by the electric current; an amalgam of calcium was obtained, but the separation of the mercury was so difficult that even Davy himself was not sure as to whether he had obtained pure metallic calcium. Electrolysis of lime or calcium chloride in contact with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... analysis into the most obscure and inmost region; he searched out what, in this totality which forms consciousness, is the province of reason; what comes from it, and not from the imagination and the senses—from within, and not from without."[578] Now to analyze is to decompose, that is, to divide, and to define, in order to see better that which really is. The chief logical instruments of the dialectic method are, therefore, Division and Definition. "The being able to divide according to genera, and not to consider the same species ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to the sea, where it formed a rugged promontory which at this day appears as black, bare, and herbless as on the day when its fiery course was arrested by the boiling waters. And here I would remark, that the lavas of AEtna are very different from those of Vesuvius. The latter decompose in half a century, and become capable of cultivation; those of AEtna remain unchanged for centuries, as that of Monte Rosso testifies. It has now been exposed to the action of the weather nearly two hundred years, with the exception ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... hyenas and jackals, and leaving them to be devoured by these voracious brutes, the negroes give them a species of sepulture; and that is as described, by closing them up in vaults hewn in trunks of the baobab—and in my opinion a very comfortable kind of tomb it is. The bodies thus deposited do not decompose or decay as those buried in the ordinary way; on the contrary, from some preservative quality in the wood, or the atmosphere of the place, they become desiccated, or dried up very much after the manner ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... various kinds are produced from the recrements of animal and vegetable bodies, such as phosphoric, ammoniacal, marine salt, and others; these are washed from the earth by rains, and carried down our rivers into the sea; they seem all here to decompose each other except the marine salt, which has therefore from the beginning of the habitable world been ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... solitude. Ways of rendering the electricity sensible at the far end of the line were considered. The spark might pierce a band of travelling paper, as Professor Day had mentioned years before; it might decompose a chemical solution, and leave a stain to mark its passage, as tried by Mr. Dyar in 1827; Or it could excite an electro-magnet, which, by attracting a piece of soft iron, would inscribe the passage with a pen or pencil. The signals ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... of syenite, reposing on clay or on one another. These do not descend the hill, and are the remains of an extensive formation which we could only find in situ at one spot on the road to Myrung (see earlier), but which must have been of immense thickness.* [The tendency of many volcanic rocks to decompose in spheres is very well known: it is conspicuous in the black basalts north of Edinburgh, but I do not know any instance equal to this of Nunklow, for the extent of decomposition and dimensions of the resulting spheres.] One block within ten yards of the bungalow door was fifteen feet ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... genitals should never be omitted in any case of dysuria during childhood. You will not infrequently discover a phimosis which interferes more or less with the discharge of urine and retains portions of the latter behind the foreskin, where it may decompose and give rise to an inflammatory condition of the prepuce, with painful dysuria.... This is also true of the occasional adhesion of the labia minora in little girls, like the similar adhesion of the foreskin in boys. It is ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... is, one which contains the exact proportion of alkali and fat acid, will, when placed in cold water, decompose into two portions, one containing an excess of the acid, the other an excess of alkali. The latter dissolves, and gives a slightly alkaline solution; the former precipitates, and gives the peculiar turbidity constituting "suds." These reactions must be kept in mind ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... of acids to the teeth cannot be too strongly deprecated: they decompose their substance, and lead to their rapid decay. Hence the whiteness produced by acid tooth-powders and washes is not less deceitful than ruinous in its consequences. As has been just observed, they perform all that their vendors promise, causing the teeth, for a little while, to become very white ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... necessarily small, and as this small quantity can be produced by a small marshy spot as well as a large one, it is the same, as to the production of the disease, whether the marsh is a foot square or a mile, provided the exposure be complete; while also any piece of ground where vegetables decompose under the action of water is virtually a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... remedy does not necessarily condemn them as preventives. One dram of caustic potash or of hydrochloric acid may be given daily in the drinking water. In diametrically opposite ways these attack and decompose the less soluble salts and form new ones which are more soluble and therefore little disposed to precipitate in the solid form. Both are beneficial as increasing the secretion of urine. In cases in which ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Here's more for you!" said the watchman; and one after the other, opening the lids, exhibited the decedents—all, probably, the poorest of the poor: picked up on the streets, intoxicated, crushed, maimed and mutilated, beginning to decompose. Certain ones had already begun to show on their hands and faces bluish-green spots, resembling mould—signs of putrefaction. One man, without a nose, with an upper hare-lip cloven in two, had worms, like little white dots, swarming upon his sore-eaten face. A woman who had ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... historians were alike, but with this point of resemblance the similarity ends. Neander is entirely free from that necessity under which Niebuhr labored, of regarding every recorded aggregate of facts as a mass of error which the modern philosophy of history was either to decompose into a myth, or reconstruct into a new form more consistent with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... is a weak oxidiser, and therefore, although (p. 035) strong enough to destroy the colouring matter of the fibre is not strong enough to decompose the fibre itself. Hydrogen peroxide is sold as a water-white liquid, without any odour or taste. Its strength is measured by the quantity of oxygen which is evolved when one volume of the liquid is treated with potassium permanganate; the most ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... discolor and impart a disagreeable flavor to food cooked in them, are not objectionable from a health standpoint, if kept clean and free from rust. Iron rust is the result of the combination of the iron with oxygen, for which it has so great an affinity that it will decompose water to get oxygen to unite with; hence it is that iron utensils rust so quickly when not carefully dried after using, or if left where they can collect moisture. This is the reason why a coating of tallow, which serves to exclude ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... kind will run a small motor, operate a telegraph sounder, make a simple electro-magnet, or ring an electric bell; two cells will decompose water: three will heat a piece of fine iron ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... impossible to fire a pistol at the bottom of the cavern, for although gunpowder may be exploded even in carbonic acid by the application of a heat sufficient to decompose the nitre, and consequently to envelop the mass in an atmosphere of oxygen gas, yet the mere influence of a spark from steel produces too slight an augmentation of temperature for ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... of the electric current to decompose a liquid and to deposit a metal constituent has practically revolutionized the process of printing. Formerly, type was arranged and retained in position until the required number of impressions had been made, the type meanwhile being ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... primordial germs—the first elementary principles of life—whenever inorganic conditions favor, and, assimilating air, water, and other inorganic materials, convert them into organic substances, or such as answer to the conditions of organic life. In doing this, they take up and decompose carbonic acid, retain the carbon, and give off oxygen—a vital process not known to occur in the case of animal life. That their primordial germs, or vital units, are in the earth, as the Bible Genesis declares, is conclusively shown by the experimental processes first successfully ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the beach become, in ascending, gradually less and less perfect, until scarcely a trace of their original structure can be discovered. It is known that carbonate of lime and common salt left in a mass together, and slightly moistened, partially decompose each other (I am informed by Dr. Kane, through Mr. Reeks, that a manufactory was established on this principle in France, but failed from the small quantity of carbonate of soda produced. Sprengel "Gardeners' Chronicle" 1845 page 157, states, that ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... when a feeble acid is required to prevent the absorption of iodine by the alkaline carbonate. It is prepared when wanted in solution, by adding a gram or so of bicarbonate of soda and then as much acid as will decompose the bicarbonate mentioned. When a quantity of the gas is wanted, it is prepared, in an apparatus like that used for sulphuretted hydrogen, by acting on fragments of marble or limestone ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... We may connect an insulated line to a source of such currents, we may pass an inappreciable current over the line, and on any point of the same we are able to obtain a heavy current, capable of fusing a thick copper wire. Or we may, by the help of some artifice, decompose a solution in any electrolytic cell by connecting only one pole of the cell to the line or source of energy. Or we may, by attaching to the line, or only bringing into its vicinity, light up an incandescent lamp, an exhausted tube, or ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... claim, it is that he has established as a new principle of science that electricity possesses the qualities of weight, compressibility and gravitation; that he has proved water to be in reality a simple elemental substance, which he can decompose or transform into either hydrogen or oxygen gas according to its electrical condition, and according as positive or negative electricity is applied to it; and that he has invented the means whereby from water he can produce ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... frequent causes of decay of the teeth is the retention of fragments of food between and around them. The warmth and moisture of the mouth make these matters decompose quickly. The acid thus generated attacks the enamel of the teeth, causing decay of the dentine. Decayed teeth are often the cause of an offensive breath and a ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... of Dauphiny was held in 1788, is a Republican, actually undertook to 'ring up the curtain' on the Centennial of 1789 by representing Barnave and Mounier as clamouring in 1788 for a republic at Vizille! Of all which let us say with Mr. Carlyle, 'What should Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr. Carlyle's own dithyrambic ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... their original perpendicularity,—and that there was much irregularity in the laying of the bricks among the stones. But time, design, and accident, have each in turn (in all probability) so contributed to decompose, deface, and alter the original aspect of the building, that there is no forming a correct conjecture as to its ancient form. Earth, grass, trees, flowers, and weeds, have taken almost entire possession ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... prove no fact; it only yields probabilities. Its end and result is to decompose documents into statements, each labelled with an estimate of its value—worthless statement, statement open to suspicion (strong or weak), statement probably (or, very probably) true, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... the expended energy of the enemies' rays must needs be absorbed. It could not disintegrate them nor decompose their bodies, but the contacts were many and the liberation of heat enormous. They were suffocating! But Karl would not desist. They drove on, now beneath, now above an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... is contained the capacity to produce leaves and flowers and fruits and roots and bark. From the grass and water that is taken by a cow are produced milk and butter, substances whose nature is different from that of the producing causes. Substances of different kinds when allowed to decompose in water for some time produce spirituous liquors whose nature is quite different from that of those substances that produce them. After the same manner, from the vital seed is produced the body and its attributes, with the understanding, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... that have been adulterated, when heated up, will partially decompose, forming acid. These oils may be very good lubricants when first put into use, but after awhile they lose all their good qualities and become very harmful to the machine by eating the journals in which they are used. ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... usually seen in people who are very much debilitated, in young factory girls, and sometimes in healthy boys. Retained secretions in the nose, usually cause the odor. These decompose and ferment. The nose is large and roomy, the nostrils are filled with scabby secretions; hard masses are formed which sometimes ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the frozen corpse, which was covered with the mantle, had thawed. It may be from the heat of the burning candles, it had begun to decompose with extraordinary rapidity, and the face of the young count looked indeed terrible. The enormously swollen, and livid mouth looked something monstrous, the blue and swollen curled lips had the appearance ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a Mr. J.B. Thompson, of New Cross, London, patented a new process of bleaching, the main feature of which consisted in the use of carbonic acid gas in a closed vessel to decompose the chloride of lime. The "chemicking" and "souring" operations he performed at one and the same time. The reactions which took place in his bleaching keir were stated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... prepuce so that it cannot sometimes be drawn forward and inflammation with oedema results; this condition is called paraphimosis, and may become dangerous. Secretions, urine and semen accumulate and decompose in a phimosed prepuce, cause irritation and lead to masturbation. All cases of phimosis should be operated upon in infancy, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... cultivate, at any rate, whether they irrigate or not. In the East, where people are supposed to be very industrious, we have adopted the lazier way of letting the trees grow in sod; but that is not so bad if we follow the principle brought forward by Stringfellow of letting the leaves all decompose, and adding more fertilizer and more leaves and taking away nothing. In France and Germany and England, where the trees are cultivated, particularly in France, where they are best cultivated, we find two methods; first, keeping up clean cultivation ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association |
