"Nitre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the cellar, convinced by their silence that they were all in a deep slumber. Then he had run to the train, impetuous as a man who is excited by revenge, and full of confidence, as are those whom God blinds, he had set fire to the wick of nitre. ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... taken down with yellow fever, which broke out suddenly and raged with a fearful violence. To the ordinary odours of carcasses and garbage, were added those of vinegar, tar, nitre, garlic, and gunpowder. Every disinfectant America had ever heard of was given a trial, and every man who possessed a shot-gun fired it all day and all night. The bells tolled incessantly. The din and the smells were ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... wish to purify, in an equal measure of boiling water; a cupful of one to a cupful of the other. Strain this solution, and, letting it cool gradually, somewhat less than three-fourths of the nitre will separate in regular crystals. Saltpetre exists in the ashes of many plants, of which tobacco is one; it is also found copiously on the ground in many places, in saltpans, or simply as an effloresence. ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... mixture of two parts nitre, two parts neutral carbonate of potash, one part of sulphur, and six parts of common salt, all finely pulverized, makes a very powerful fulminating powder. M. Landgerbe adopts the extraordinary error of supposing that these preparations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... assumed the pomp and insolence of his lofty station; but he still betrayed the vices of his base and servile extraction. The merchants of Alexandria were impoverished by the unjust, and almost universal, monopoly, which he acquired, of nitre, salt, paper, funerals, &c.: and the spiritual father of a great people condescended to practise the vile and pernicious arts of an informer. The Alexandrians could never forget, nor forgive, the tax, which he suggested, on all the houses of the city; under an obsolete ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a very difficult thing to get clear of a cold if taken in time. Confinement to the house for a day, or even two, a lowered diet, a mixture of the solution of acetate of ammonia and spirits of sweet nitre the first day, some aperient medicine and an ordinary cough mixture the second or third day, warmer clothing and avoidance of exposure to high winds; this treatment will be found successful in nine cases ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... and, as we shall see, to that of his employers, that the tumuli were erected for burying-places; that their builders were Malays who chartered the ship Argo from Jason, and came over from the Sandwich Islands in the ninth year of pope Boniface the third; that they had the art of embalming in nitre, and were adepts at making triune idols. They were idolaters, worshippers, he was convinced, of Brahma and his Hindoo brothers. He was puzzled for a while to tell what became of them finally; nor were his doubts cleared up until he travelled into Mexico. A residence ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... identity of the diseases. He acknowledges, however, "rubedo, calor, dolor," among its symptoms. Cochlearia, theriaca and similar articles, according to him, are almost always injurious. If no foetor exist, (and, of coarse, no actual mortification,) he applies a solution of sal ammoniac or nitre, with some vinegar or lemon juice; sometimes as a lotion, sometimes by keeping a rag imbued with it always in the ulcer. Hard rubbing he reprobates. If the disease have made progress, and foetor exist, muriatic acid is used: in the less aggravated stages, diluted with honey of ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... he gave oftener than any other, was nitre; which he ordered in doses of twenty or thirty grains to adults, and of three grains to infants. Measles, colics, sciatica, headache, giddiness, and many other ailments, all found themselves treated, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his head and arms on the counter; and Master Cheese recommenced his studies. Solacing himself first of all with a few mouthfuls of tamarinds, as he intended to do at intervals throughout his labours, he plunged his hands into a mass of incongruous substances—nitre, chlorate of potass, and sulphur ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Greek Fire was the name given to a composition which was largely used by the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire in their wars with the Mohammedans. Its nature was kept a profound secret for centuries, but the material is now believed to have been a mixture of nitre, sulphur, and naphtha. It burned with terrible fury wherever it fell, and it possessed the property of being inextinguishable by water. Even when poured upon the sea it would float upon the surface and still ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... north, after which we had a violent gust about seven o'clock. One of the hunters saw in a pond to the north which we passed yesterday a number of young swans. We saw a large rat, and killed a wolf. Another of our men had a stroke of the sun; he was bled, and took a preparation of nitre which relieved him considerably. ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... (for it is only in a state of vapour that matter emits distinctive light) was a young Scotchman named Thomas Melvill, who died in 1753, at the age of twenty-seven. He studied the spectrum of burning spirits, into which were successively introduced sal ammoniac, potash, alum, nitre, and sea-salt, and observed the singular predominance, under almost all circumstances, of a particular shade of yellow light, perfectly definite in its degree of refrangibility[368]—in other words, taking up a ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... matter was "acid to the taste and contained two grains of nitre," but Cavendish, suspecting that this was due to impurities, tried another experiment that proved conclusively that his opinions were correct. "I therefore made another experiment," he says, "with ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... by staying such long stretches of time without breathing; and from dysentery caused by the frigidity. 40. Their hair, which is by nature black, changes to an ashen colour like the skin of seals, and nitre comes out from their shoulders so that they resemble human monsters of some species. 41. With this insupportable toil, or rather, infernal trade, the Spaniards completed the destruction of all the Indians of the Lucayan ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... closed. Of four daily newspapers, only one continued to be published. Some people constantly smoked tobacco,—even women and children, did so; others chewed garlic; others exploded gunpowder; others burned nitre or sprinkled vinegar; many assiduously whitewashed every surface within their reach; some carried tarred rope in their hands, or bags of camphor round their necks; others never ventured abroad without a handkerchief or a sponge wet with vinegar at their noses. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton |
