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Alkali   Listen
noun
Alkali  n.  (pl. alkalis or alkalies)  
1.
Soda ash; caustic soda, caustic potash, etc.
2.
(Chem.) One of a class of caustic bases, such as soda, potash, ammonia, and lithia, whose distinguishing peculiarities are solubility in alcohol and water, uniting with oils and fats to form soap, neutralizing and forming salts with acids, turning to brown several vegetable yellows, and changing reddened litmus to blue.
3.
Soluble mineral matter, other than common salt, contained in soils of natural waters. (Western U. S.)
Fixed alkalies, potash and soda.
Vegetable alkalies. Same as Alkaloids.
Volatile alkali, ammonia, so called in distinction from the fixed alkalies.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Alkali" Quotes from Famous Books



... refused to bring in this bunch of stock except for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... water of ammonia should be decidedly in excess, and that the heat should not exceed that I have described. The color will be a bright crimson inclining to yellow. I have tried both potash and soda, pure, instead of water of ammonia, but after washing with some degree of care, a trace of the alkali still remained, and the peroxide was of an ochrey color, till overheated, and ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey

... plants to burn for ashes (whence the lye is to be made by pouring hot water on them), it must be recollected that all plants are not equally efficacious: those that contain the most alkali (either potash or soda) are the best. On this account, the stalks of succulent plants, as reeds, maize, broom, heath, and furze, are very much better than the wood of any trees; and twigs are better ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... dollars and many a longing glance was cast on a magnificent bridle that would have cost any bricklayer a month's pay. Panchito, a splendid big chestnut with two white stockings and a blazed face, was gray with sweat and alkali dust and shod like a plow horse. He wore cactus burrs in his tail and mane and had evidently ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... which are unable to eat anything but flesh, if such there are, which I very much doubt.] Milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal, is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali like animal matter, it gives a ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... had pulled Harry up and descended myself I soon found that there was no danger—or chance. The water had a touch of alkali, but ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... of the cow camp. I have knocked about cow camps, mining camps, railroad and telegraph camps, and kicked up alkali dust for many a weary mile on the desert. Yet wherever I went I never failed to meet him. He is part and parcel of every outfit.... He is indispensable, irresistible, and incorrigible; and while in ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... against the sun, or, further still southeast among the "breaks" of the many forks of the South Cheyenne, on the sandy flats men dug for water for their suffering horses, yet shrank from drinking it themselves lest their lips should crack and bleed through the shriveling touch of the alkali. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King

... was a woman who sent to the refinery for a pail of alkali to clean her floor. The man thought he'd get benzine instead; and just as he got into the house, the fire from his pipe dropped into it, and the whole shanty was in a blaze before the poor woman knew what had happened. The stupid fool that was to blame got off, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... accuracy and brevity, it may be almost valueless to the ordinary reader. For instance, this definition, "An acid is a substance, usually sour and sharp to the taste, that changes vegetable blue colors to red, and, combining with an earth, an alkali, or a metallic oxide, forms a salt," would not generally be understood. So it frequently becomes necessary to do more than give a definition in order to explain the meaning of a term. This brings us to the study of exposition, ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... you take a pen and drop some ink into a tumbler of water, it will scatter and form for the moment an appearance like a moss agate. These agates, when found on bluffs or dry places, are coated over with a white covering of lime or alkali. Those in the beds of rivers found along the line of the Pacific Railroad, are smooth and transparent. They are called the "Cheyenne brown agate," "Granger water agate," "Church Buttes light-blue agate," and the ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle

... water, it came straight to Sandy, uttered a harsh whine, catching at the leather tassel on the cowman's worn leather chaparejos, tugging feebly. As Sandy stooped to pat its head, powdered with the alkali dust that covered its coat, the collie released its hold and collapsed on one side, panting, utterly exhausted, with glazing eyes that ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... for you to be huffy, my lad," growled Joses. "You never know when danger's coming. I knowed a young fellow once up in the great north plains. He'd been across the Alkali Desert in a bad time, and had been choked with the heated dust and worried with the nasty salty stuff that had filled his eyes and ears, so that when he got to a branch of one of the rivers up there that was bubbling over rocks and stones just as ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... tracks of the dog and burro to Bitter Seeps, a shallow spring of alkali, and there lost all track of them. The path up the cliffs to the Navajo ranges was bare, time-worn in solid rock, and showed only the imprint of age. Desertward the ridges of shale, the washes of copper ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... day, passed through a fertile cienega,[Valley.] thence over an alkali plain. It was while crossing this latter, that I met with an adventure, the most desperate we encountered on the trip. Our route carried us over this vast plain, strongly impregnated with alkali, and sparsely covered with dwarfed ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens

... Virden (Chairman and Director of Eaton Manufacturing Co.; member of the Board of Directors of Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., Youngstown Steel Door Co., Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Interlake Iron Corp., Diamond Alkali Co.) ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot

... complicated a mineral as we have. It is a very complex silicate, containing aluminum, magnesium, sodium (or other alkali metal, as, for example, lithium), iron, boron, and hydrogen. As Ruskin says of it in his The Ethics of the Dust, when Mary asks "and what is it made of?" "A little of everything; there's always flint (silica) and clay (alumina) and ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... head the coulee was merely a slight depression. Farther on it broadened and deepened. Down the middle of its length ran a sinuous grove of cottonwoods. On either side its flanks were bare, white with clay and alkali, rising to steep banks of yellow earth, bald and ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... prison, and cruel persecutions were exercised everywhere. A committee of public safety was established and immediately the prisons of Caracas and Puerto Cabello were filled with men, many of whom died of suffocation. Into a dungeon in Puerto Cabello, a Spaniard threw five flasks of alkali, thus causing the death by asphyxiation of all ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell

... barren buttes, where it was not thought more than a few head of stock would be found. On rounding the corner of a small washout he almost ran over a bear which was feeding on the carcass of a steer that had died in an alkali hole. After a moment of stunned surprise the bear hurled himself at the intruder with furious impetuosity; while the cowboy, wheeling his horse on its haunches and dashing in the spurs, carried it just clear of his assailant's headlong rush. After a few springs he reined in and once more ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... 74. Filter A, and carefully neutralize the filtrate with very dilute hydrochloric or acetic acid, equal to a precipitate of alkali-albumen. Filter off the precipitate, and on testing the filtrate, peptones are found. The intermediate bodies, the albumoses, are not nearly so readily obtained from pancreatic as from ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... fatigue of the unusual week, nor could any ingenuity make the desert interesting to strenuous people. Its beauties are contemplative rather than pungent, and the travellers were frankly advised to fall back on books and ping-pong. Crawling across an interminable alkali basin in the late afternoon their train was laid out a long time by ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman

... 'algebra', 'almanack', 'azimuth', 'cypher'{5}, 'nadir', 'talisman', 'zenith', 'zero'; and chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists, no less than the astronomers and arithmeticians of the middle ages; as 'alcohol', 'alembic', 'alkali', 'elixir'. Add to these the names of animals, plants, fruits, or articles of merchandize first introduced by them to the notice of Western Europe; as 'amber', 'artichoke', 'barragan', 'camphor', 'coffee', 'cotton', 'crimson', 'gazelle', 'giraffe', 'jar', ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... the mule that I got from the soldiers in Santa Fe. It drank more of the alkali water than was good for it; we left it on the plains and went our way. We saw so many fresh Indian signs that we knew we had no time to stay and doctor sick mules. A few nights later I saw a large body of ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee

... extending over more than 200 square miles. It was brought to England at less than half the freight of the East India saltpetre (nitrate of potassa); and as, in the chemical manufacture neither the potash nor the soda were required, but only the nitric acid, in combination with the alkali, the soda-saltpetre of South America soon supplanted the potash-nitre of the East. The manufacture of sulphuric acid received a new impulse; its price was much diminished without injury to the manufacturer; and, with the exception of ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig

... broad—almost squat of figure. His complexion was brick red. He had a thin, curling black beard and mustache. He was one of the men to whom alkali is a constant poison, and his lips were always cracked and bleeding. His voice was husky and disagreeable, his small eyes bespoke the brute in him, and yet he was not without certain qualities of leadership which seemed to appeal ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... I'm in the game. She's an ace-high trump just the same. Wonder if she would have any use for a maverick rancher from the alkali country? I got a pretty good outfit ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... nature. It is called the acid-maker of the universe. The name is derived from two words, oxy and gen; one denoting oxydation, and the other that it generates. In other words, it is the generator of oxides. It is the element which, when united with any other element, produces an acid, an alkali or a ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... their aeroplanes. Finally he made an advantageous proposal to Roy to travel West and operate for him a line of aeroplanes from some desert mines he had discovered on a trip which almost cost him his life. As autos could not cross the alkali, and transportation of the product by wagons would have been prohibitive in cost, as well as almost impossible to achieve, Mr. Bell had hit on the happy idea of conveying the precious product of his property ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... an orange color, and is subsequently washed in a tank, a kilo. of caustic soda being added per 100 kilos. of jute; this amount of alkali is sufficient to dissolve the pigment, which colors the water flowing from the washer a deep brown. After washing, the jute can be completely bleached by the use of 5-7 kilos. of bleaching powder per 100 kilos. of jute.—Mon. de ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... organization of the Saints within Arizona and is the center of one of the most prosperous Stakes of the Church. It is beautifully located on a broad tableland, from which its Spanish name is derived, and is the center of one of the richest of farming communities. In general, the soil is of the best, without alkali, and its products cover almost anything that can be grown in ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... volcanoes of Santa Fiora, and in the Solfatara of Puzzuoli. It is not easy to form an idea of the origin of these incrustations. The aqueous vapours, discharged through great spiracles, do not contain alkali in solution, like the waters of the Geyser, in Iceland. Perhaps the soda contained in the lavas of the peak acts an important part in the formation of these deposits of silex. There may exist in the crater small crevices, the vapours of which are not of the same nature as those on which travellers, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... additional grace to the most regular features. The choice of soaps has considerable influence in promoting and maintaining this desideratum. These should invariably be selected of the finest kinds, and used sparingly, and never with cold water, for the alkali which, more or less, mingles in the composition of all soaps has an undoubted tendency to irritate a delicate skin; warm water excites a gentle perspiration, thereby assisting the skin to throw off those natural secretions which, if allowed to remain, are likely to accumulate ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous

... rolled up tight, and rubbed hard on the spots. If it answers the purpose, it is altogether best to use it, as there is always danger attending the use of oil of vitriol, it being so powerful as to corrode whatever it may get dropped on, without its effects are destroyed by the use of an alkali. ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous

... less than a hundred miles below. Inviting, however, only in outline; in color it was a grayish buff, scorched and forbidding. The hills were yellower, and an alkali ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... the classifications in any science are continually modified as scientific knowledge advances, the definitions in the sciences are also constantly varying. A striking instance is afforded by the words Acid and Alkali, especially the former. As experimental discovery advanced, the substances classed with acids have been constantly multiplying, and by a natural consequence the attributes connoted by the word have ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... colonists were supported by cash loans which were charged against them. After the first two years, crops were good[64], and the outlook was promising, in spite of certain insect pests, but after about seven years a great difficulty showed itself. The land on which the Colony was located was alkali land, and bottom land, without any drainage. The result of constant irrigation was that the alkali rose to the surface in larger and larger quantities, until no good crop could be raised. The only salvation was ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb

... by the Hayward patent (No. 40,407), granted in 1868, for "boiling waste rags of fibrous material and rubber in an acid or alkali, for the purpose of destroying the tenacity of the fibers of the rags, so that the rubber may be reground." But this process extended only to the weakening of the fibers, and not their complete destruction. A later patent, in the same year, provided for exposing the ground rubber ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

... produced. The artist must be guided by these proof pieces in using his colours. The proper glass for receiving these colours should be uniform, colourless, and difficult of fusion. For this reason crown glass made with a little alkali or kelp is preferred. A design must be drawn upon paper and placed beneath the plate of glass. The upper side of the glass being sponged over with gum-water affords, when dry, a surface proper for receiving the colours, without the risk of their running irregularly, as they would be apt ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... life will be worthy to be recorded as a year of battles. Yes, these friends so true, these lovers so ardent, these individuals in themselves so admirable, cannot come into the intimate relations of life without an effervescence as great as that of an acid and alkali; and it will be impossible to decide which is most in fault, the acid or the alkali, both being in their way of the very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... week Turk was able to walk with the caravan; a fortnight later it could gallop by Frank's side. They were now entering the Alkali Plains, a wide and desolate region, where water is extremely scarce, and, when found, brackish and bitter to the taste, and where the very shrubs are impregnated with salt, and uneatable by most animals. In anticipation of the hardships to be endured in ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... this narrative without a further reference to the boy, Eugene Jones. During the first two weeks of the campaign my eyes became badly affected from the dust and glare of the sun, reflected from the white alkali plains on the head of Crooked River. At times I could scarcely bear the light, which seemed fairly to burn my eyeballs. From the first Eugene had attached himself to me. He would insist on taking care of my horse in camp, and often would stop at a spring or stream and wetting a handkerchief ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson

... means of reaching the capital were by springless cart over the grey alkali plains, or by boat along the Grand Canal. Both were slow; neither was enjoyable, but since the latter perhaps presented fewer discomforts, Robert Hart chose to spend a week in the monotonous scenery of mudbanks, and land at Tungchow, a little town some fifteen miles from his destination. ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon

... concentrated lead solutions give loose peroxide along with much spongy metallic lead. Free alkali decreases the separation of peroxide; feebly alkaline solutions, concentrated and dilute, yield relatively much peroxide along with metallic lead, while strongly alkaline ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... went on with what I had been speaking about when she shivered. But as I talked it slowly dawned on me that we had been standing still some time, and presently I stopped speaking and glanced off, expecting to recognize something, only to see alkali plain on both sides. A little surprised, I looked down, to find no siding. Rising hastily, I looked out forward. I could see moving figures on each side of the train, but that meant nothing, as the train's crew, and, ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford

... of Rhubarb.—It is some time since Mr. NANI, an Italian chemist, announced the discovery of a crystallizable vegetable alkali in rhubarb. Mr. CAVENTOU has repeated the experiments of Mr. N. and finds them, in many respects, inaccurate. Upon analysing the alcoholic extract of rhubarb, by the aid of alcohol and ether, employed separately and combined, Mr. C. obtained a fatty matter, containing ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska, in Arizona or somewhere—somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man, had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached: the ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... assent of all those who were competent to consider the subject; and the question seemed to me very much in the condition of that which Sir H. Davy solved so beautifully,—namely, whether voltaic electricity in all cases merely eliminated, or did not in some actually produce, the acid and alkali found after its action upon water. The same necessity that urged him to decide the doubtful point, which interfered with the extension of his views, and destroyed the strictness of his reasoning, has obliged me to ascertain the identity or difference of common and voltaic electricity. ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday

... the wrapper tobacco in Sumatra and the filler tobacco in Cuba. It will be only a question of time when the large amounts paid to these countries will be paid to our own people. The reclamation of alkali lands is progressing, to give object lessons to our people in methods by which worthless lands ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... remaining. It had shrunk by evaporation far away from its banks, and where the water once had been there was a dark incrustation of impurities. On the land side, all was a great white plain of glittering alkali without a sign of vegetation. I went on ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson

... beautiful goods. At once it was noised abroad that India rubber had been so treated that it lost its stickiness, and he received medals and testimonials and seemed on the high road to success, till one day he noticed that a drop of weak acid, falling on the cloth, neutralized the alkali, and immediately the rubber was soft again. To see this, with his knowledge of what rubber should do, proved to him at once that his process was not a successful one. He therefore continued experimenting, and after preparing his mixtures in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... native in small quantities. It forms the chief surface deposit of the "alkali belt" in western United States, where it often forms incrustations from an inch to a foot in thickness. It was formerly obtained from sea-weeds, by leaching their ashes, as, by a like process, K2CO3 was obtained from ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams

... chain of Dry-towns that lie in the bed of a long-dried ocean, is set at the center of a great alkali plain; a dusty, parched city bleached by a million years of sun. The houses are high, spreading buildings with many rooms and wide windows. The poorer sort were made of sun-dried brick, the more imposing being cut from ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... present in combination with iron, alumina, or lime, or possibly also as magnesium-ammonium-phosphate. Sulphuric acid is generally present in a more or less insoluble condition, in combination with iron and lime; whereas chlorine is combined with the alkali bases in an easily soluble form. An important point is as to the form in which the plant absorbs these food constituents. In this connection reference may be made to a theory put forward by a very distinguished French agricultural chemist, Professor Grandeau. His theory is that the ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... friends to fight on his side, and at a certain hour to vote for "no more wine," and bravely demand "tea," and will select his company with as much care as a chemist composes a neutral salt, judiciously providing quite as large a proportion of alkali (tea men) as he has of acid (wine men.) To adjust the balance of power at the court of Bacchus, occasionally requires as much address as sagacious politicians say is sometimes requisite to direct the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various

... water may be drunk after the above remedies have operated, and the body may be sponged with the same. Water made very sweet with sugar, with aromatic spirits of ammonia added, may be drunk freely as a corrective. A solution of cholorate of potash, or of alkali, the latter weak, may be given to obviate the effect of the poison. If spasms ensue after evacuation, laudanum in considerable doses it necessary. If inflammation should occur, combat in ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... a frame structure, one hundred feet long and forty feet wide, floored for dancing, to which and gambling it was entirely devoted. A visitor to the city thus described it: "One to two thousand men and a dozen or more women were encamped on the alkali plain in tents and shanties." Only a small proportion of them had aught to do with the road or any legitimate occupation. Restaurant and saloon keepers, gamblers, desperadoes of every grade, the vilest of men and ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey

... rest." "Sir," said the gentleman, who was a Bagdad merchant, "I hope you do not think my refusal proceeds from any mistaken delicacy; if you insist on my compliance I will submit, but it must be on this condition, that after having eaten, I may, with your permission, wash my hands with alkali forty times, forty times more with ashes, and forty times again with soap. I hope you will not feel displeased at this stipulation, as I have made an oath never to taste garlic but on ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... soil in distilled water, and filter as before. Is this solution acid, alkaline or neutral? Are you quite certain of your result? Did you test the distilled water with litmus paper? And are you sure that your litmus does not contain excess of free acid or free alkali? ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell

... quantity of seaweed to spread over them, which was afterward burnt to make alkali, when we returned to secure ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... suffers terribly from indigestion. That's an alkali powder he takes twenty minutes after eating. Peter, ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch

... elaboration, about 1859, jointly with G.R. Kirchhoff, of spectrum analysis, which has put a new weapon of extraordinary power into the hands both of chemists and astronomers. It led Bunsen himself almost immediately to the isolation of two new elements of the alkali group, caesium and rubidium. Having noticed some unknown lines in the spectra of certain salts he was examining, he set to work to obtain the substance or substances to which these were due. To this end he evaporated large quantities ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... doomed to listen, for a thousand years, to conversations between Caroline and Emily, where Caroline should always give wrong explanations in chemistry, and Emily in the end be unable to distinguish an acid from an alkali." ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... cunningly devised fabrications, every wind freighted for her with phantasmal rumors, no ray of direct daylight visiting the poor Sovereign Woman; who is lazy, not malignant if she could avoid it: mainly a mass of esurient oil, with alkali on the back of alkali poured in, at this rate, for ten years past; till, by pouring and by stirring, they get her to the state of SOAP and froth! Is it so wonderful that she does, by degrees, rise into eminent suspicion, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... little man, combining in his small person the four functions of husband, cook, nurse, and gentleman, made us a cup of tea and some saleratus biscuit, and though I detest saleratus biscuit, and was longing for some of the beef, yet, by killing the taste of the alkali with onions, we contrived to satisfy our hunger, and the tea warmed us a little. Our host, in his capacity of chambermaid, had prepared us a couch. I was ushered into the presence of the fair invalid, to whom I made a polite apology ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... horses' hoofs the white alkali crust which thinly covers the desert floor, crumbles and breaks. Gaunt cacti stretch their skinny branches across the trail, which winds among foothills and ravines, and the horned toads and the lizards, the only visible beings of the animal world here, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... they are wanted, still further adorn the landscape. (Cheers.) The meshes of this wood-netting are never further than twenty or thirty miles apart Little hay swamps and sparkling lakelets, teeming with wild fowl, are always close at hand, and if the surface water in some of these has alkali, excellent water can always be had in others, and by the simple process of digging for it a short distance beneath the sod with a spade, the soil being so devoid of stones that it is not even necessary to use a pick. No wonder that under these circumstances ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell

... the immigrant told us sombrely. "There were long white fields of alkali and drifts of ashes across them so soft that the cattle sank way to their bellies. They moaned and bellowed! Lord, how they moaned! And the dust rose up so thick you couldn't breathe, and the sun beat down so fierce you felt ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks without form or color, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of great mirth to some of my fellow travellers, and I smile rather ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton

... all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... or a sense of desperation might land and keep one at Las Palmas. I would as soon stay there for a long time as I would deliberately get out of a Union Pacific overland train at Laramie Junction and put down my stakes in that dusty and bedevilled sand and alkali hell. And yet there is the climate at Las Palmas. And out of it are the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... crystalization, calcination, detonation, effervescence, and saturation. Water and fire, salt and sugar, lime and vinegar, are not very difficult to be procured; and a wine-glass is to be found in every house. The difference between an acid and alkali should be early taught to children; many grown people begin to learn chemistry, without distinctly knowing what ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction, and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe. The writer met recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam. He had lost his reckoning, and did not know the day of the week or of the month. In all the vast territory, away up to the Utah line, over which he had wandered, he met human beings (excluding "Indians ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... neutralize a certain redundant acid in the juice of the cane, by a fit proportion of some alkaline ingredient to enable the sugar to crystallize: The ordinary temper, as it is called, for this purpose, in the West Indies, is lime, but any alkali will produce nearly the same effect. This subject will be fully elucidated in that part of our work which is peculiarly appropriated to the sugar colonies in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... told him that the Spaniard had gone mad. Then, and not till then, he drew rein and watched the horse with its dead and maniac riders until they disappeared in the yellow void. He turned away, but nevermore sought his home. To and fro, through the brush, the sand, the alkali of the plains, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... the power minus six)N at Pacific Grove, California, and about (10 to the power minus 5)N at Woods Hole, Massachusetts). If we slightly raise the alkalinity of the sea-water by adding to it a small but definite quantity of sodium hydroxide or some other alkali, the eggs of the sea-urchin can be fertilised with the sperm of widely different groups of animals, possibly with the sperm of any marine animal which sheds it into the ocean. In 1903 it was shown ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... civil clergy, laity capital, labor ingress, egress element, compound horizontal, perpendicular competition, cooeperation predestination, freewill universal, particular extrinsic, intrinsic inflation, deflation dorsal, ventral acid, alkali synonym, antonym prologue, epilogue nadir, zenith amateur, connoisseur anterior, posterior stoic, epicure ordinal, cardinal centripetal, centrifugal stalagmite, stalactite orthodox, heterodox homogeneous, heterogeneous monogamy, polygamy induction, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... kind of acid be taken, in poisonous quantities, give strong pearlash-water. If ley, or pearlash, or any alkali be taken, give sweet-oil; or, if this be wanting, lamp-oil; or, if neither be ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... favorable conditions it sometimes happens that the soluble materials, which would normally be washed out of humid soils, accumulate to so large a degree in arid soils as to make the lands unfitted for agricultural purposes. Such lands are called alkali lands. Unwise irrigation in arid climates frequently produces alkali spots, but many occur naturally. Such soils should not be chosen for dry-farm purposes, for they are ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe

... the enormous profits of the carrying trade the Phoenicians had a practical monopoly of the famous "Tyrian dyes," which were in great demand throughout the known world. These dyes were obtained from two kinds of shellfish together with an alkali prepared from seaweed. Phoenicians were also pioneers in the art of making glass. It is not hard to understand, therefore, how Phoenicia grew so extraordinarily rich as to rouse the envy of neighboring rulers, and to maintain themselves the traders of Tyre and Sidon had to develop fighting ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... see Andy at the first glance. A film of smoke shifted and eddied through the shop, and Andy, working the bellows, was a black form against the square of the door, a square filled by the blinding white of the alkali dust in the road outside and the blinding white of the sun above. Andy turned from the forge, bearing in his tongs a great bar of iron black at the ends but white in the middle. The white place was surrounded by a sparkling radiance. Andy caught ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand

... is the Bitter Creek division of the Overland route, of which we had heard so many unfavorable stories. The division is really well managed by Mr. Stewart, though the country through which it stretches is the most wretched I ever saw. The water is liquid alkali, and the roads are soft sand. The snow is gone now, and the dust is thick and blinding. So drearily, wearily ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne

... mountains. The town extends along the west bank of the river some three miles, and back from it about one mile. The Rio Grande water is passable for drinking purposes, and good for general use, though it is somewhat impregnated with alkali. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... drier bean, and one which has, when roasted, a finer flavour, colour, and aroma, than the unfermented. Fermentation is generally considered to produce so many desirable results that M. Perrot's suggestion[4] of removing the pulp by treatment with alkali, and thus avoiding fermentation, ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp

... three to five pounds of nitrate of lime to the bushel, requiring a large proportion of fixed alkali to produce the required crystalization, and when left in the Cave become re-impregnated in three years. When saltpetre bore a high price, immense quantities were manufactured at the Mammoth Cave, but the return of peace brought the saltpetre ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt

... of a Europe that once seemed divided between tourists and hotel-keepers—outdash the most dashing war correspondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians are found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis with you as you do in a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... constructed especially for the purpose. Logwood, when boiled in water, easily imparts its red colour. If a few drops of acetic acid (vinegar) is added, a bright red is produced; and when a little alum is added for a mordant, it forms red ink. If an alkali, such as soda or potash, is used instead of an acid, the colour changes to a dark blue or purple, and with a little management every shade of these colours can be obtained. Logwood put into polish or varnish also imparts ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead

... Willard. The Federal officers in some way learned of it; he was arrested, on the train, at Humboldt Wells, Nevada, and brought back to Utah. Near Promontory he fell from the steps of the moving car, at night, in the midst of an alkali desert, and hurt himself seriously. He was recaptured and brought to Salt Lake City on a stretcher, in a special car, guarded by a squad of soldiers from Fort Douglas, with loaded muskets, and a captain ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... indigo works; green hair in copper smelters; deep red-brown hair in handlers of crude anilin; and the hair is dyed a purplish-brown whenever chrysarobin applications used on a scalp come in contact with an alkali, as when washed with soap. Among such cases in older literature Blanchard and Marcellus Donatus speak of green hair; Rosse saw two instances of the same, for one of which he could find no cause; the other patient worked in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... trough from which burros were drinking. Here he found the spring, a deep well of eddying water walled in by stones, and the overflow made a shallow stream meandering away between its borders of alkali, like a crust of salt. Shefford tasted the water. It bit, but it ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey

... five cents a pound. He was a sure shot, absolutely fearless, and with a debonair gayety that found occasional expression in odd pranks. Once, riding through the prairie near the railroad, and being thirsty and not relishing a drink of the alkali water of the Little Missouri, he flagged an express with his red handkerchief, stepped aboard, helped himself to ice-water, and rode off again, to the speechless indignation of ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... does neither the one thing nor the other: it will not take fire; it will not let the taper burn; it puts out the combustion of everything. There is nothing that will burn in it in common circumstances. It has no smell; it is not sour; it does not dissolve in water; it is neither an acid nor an alkali; it is as indifferent to all our organs as it is possible for a thing to be. And you might say, "It is nothing; it is not worth chemical attention; what does it do in the air?" Ah! then come our beautiful and fine results shewn ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday

... but he became more explicit. "Cold cream to the eyes and ears," said he. "To the untutored face, the sun of this heathen district is something sinful; and like enough she never heard of collodion for cracked lips in an alkali country. And a veil—oh, sacred spirits! that veil and its contents is now hatin' Carrizoso flats and all the inarticulate earth till fare-ye-well! Wrapped up to the topmast in a white veil,—or one of was-white,—gray travelling gown, common-sense ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough

... climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn—clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at St. Jo—dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother: Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... means of phosphorus pentachloride, chlorine can be substituted for the oxygen of chloral, the body CCl3.CCl2H being produced; an analogous compound, CCl3.C(C6H5)2H, is obtained by treating chloral with benzene and sulphuric acid. With an alkali, chloral gives chloroform (q.v.) and a formate; oxidizing agents give trichloracetic acid, CCl3.CO(OH). When kept for some days, as also when placed in contact with sulphuric acid or a very small quantity of water, chloral undergoes spontaneous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... Black, who suggested it to me. It is an alkaline salt, found in a mineral state, and described in the Philosophical Transactions, anno 1771. But to understand this specimen, something must be premised with regard to the nature of fossil alkali. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... anything more to stir him to the fighting point, that one sentence admirably supplied the lack. "Yuh low-down skunk!" he cried, and struck him full upon the insulting, smiling mouth. "If I was as rotten-minded as you are, I'd go drown myself in the stalest alkali hole I could find. I dunno why I'm dirtying my hands on yuh—yuh ain't fit to be clubbed to death with a tent pole!" He was, however, using his hands freely and to very good purpose, probably feeling that, since the Pilgrim was much bigger than he, there ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower

... rapidly approached it. As he came nearer, he saw that the outfit was in the center of a field of alkali and making slow and painful progress. He did not see the beef herd. Plainly, something had ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... "Nkazya:" Battel (loc. cit. 334) terms the root "Imbando," a corruption of Mbundu. M. du Chaillu (chap. xv.) gives an illustration of the "Mboundou leaf" (half size): Professor John Torrey believes the active principle to be a vegeto-alkali of the Strychnos group, but the symptoms do not seem to bear out the conjecture. The Mpongwe told me that the poison was named either Mbundu or Olonda (nut) werere—perhaps this was what is popularly called "a sell." Mbundu is the decoction of the scraped bark which corresponds ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... in administering solutions of carbonate of potash, of soda, or of magnesia when an acid has been swallowed, or vinegar diluted with water in the case of an alkali. When carbolic acid has been swallowed, a large quantity of olive oil should be administered. The stomach should be washed out with water, the tube being passed with the greatest gentleness to avoid perforating the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... three days after marriage, the girl and her husband should sleep on the floor, abstain from sexual pleasures, and eat their food without seasoning it either with alkali or salt. For the next seven days they should bathe amidst the sounds of auspicious musical instruments, should decorate themselves, dine together, and pay attention to their relations as well as to those who may have ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana

... dusty green on the crests, then fading into ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last color forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren. Not a tuft of grass, not a stick of brushwood, not even a stone, but only the vast expanse ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... mixture is recommended by the Board of Agriculture: "To prepare caustic alkali wash, first dissolve 1 lb. of commercial caustic soda in water, then 1 lb. of crude potash (potashes or pearl ash of oilmen) in water. When both have been dissolved, mix the two well together, then add 3/4 lb. of soft soap or agricultural treacle, ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum

... volatile alkali, my lad," he said, laughing. "There!—you'll soon be all right. I've ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... at times glum, but his face was the only one at the bar that showed any irritation or sadness. This railroad town was a bright, new thing for the horsemen of the trail—a very joyous thing. No funeral could check their hilarity; no whisky could daunt their throats, long seared with alkali. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... such a metier. The old man was left to recover from the sting inflicted by the Leppins, to study over the future of his youngest daughter, to keep a careful eye upon his business associates, and to combat—as one combats the alkali dust of the Plains—all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the stage when such elemental features as walls ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... over," responded the young lady addressed, "is that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers, or what ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... body like his own, except so far as his own qualities and properties come in contact with opposite ones in the female; then, of course, some modification of the foetus may be expected. If an acid and an alkali are brought in contact, the result will be a neutral salt. We will generally find, however, that in what are called neutral mixtures, there is either a predominance of the acid, or the alkali. So it is with the children of parents ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward

... what? To get me free again; to bring me things to eat in jail, and picture papers and tobacco—when she was living on bacon and potatoes, and drinking alkali water—working to pay for a lawyer to fight for me—to pay for the best lawyer! She worked in the fields with her own hands, planting and ploughing, working as I never worked for myself in my whole lazy, rotten life. That's what that ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... presently sank behind Clarence like the details of a dream, and he was alone with the moon, the hazy mystery of the level, grassy plain, and the monotony of the unending road. As he rode slowly along he thought of that other dreary plain, white with alkali patches and brown with rings of deserted camp-fires, known to his boyhood of deprivation, dependency, danger, and adventure, oddly enough, with a strange delight; and his later years of study, monastic seclusion, and ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... everything? Before declaring that the hunting insects' poison has preservative properties merely because of its acid qualities, it would have been well to enquire if the sting of a Bee, with its acid and its alkali, could not perchance produce the same effects as that of the paralyser, whose skill is categorically denied. The chemists never gave this a thought. Simplicity is not always welcome in our laboratories. It is ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... San Joaquin this morning we met two men, couriers, bearing despatches from Commodore Stockton, the governor and commander-in-chief in California, to Sutter's Fort. Entering upon the broad plain, we passed, in about three miles, a small lake, the water of which was so much impregnated with alkali as to be undrinkable. The grass is brown and crisp, but the seed upon it is evidence that it had fully matured before the drought affected it. The plain is furrowed with numerous deep trails, made by the droves ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant

... I want to GO—I want to go out THERE—where there ain't no plains and alkali and buffalo-grass—where they's pavements and policemen and people in beautiful clothes. I don't mean NOW, I mean when I have got civilized." She drew herself up proudly. "I wouldn't go till I was civilized, till I ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis

... The alkali metals, such as sodium, potassium, and lithium, do not color glass appreciably, but they have indirect effects upon the colors produced by manganese, nickel, selenium, and some other elements. Gold in sufficient amounts produces a red in glass and in low concentration ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... factitious body, produced by fusing sand with an alkali. The essential ingredients of glass are silex and potash, or soda; a few other substances are sometimes added. Silex is found nearly pure in rock crystal, flint, and other varieties of quartz; for the manufacture of the better kinds ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... parts in 100 of alcoholized caustic soda; at the expiration of one hour the envelopes of the pericarp, and of the testa Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, should be separated by friction in a coarse cloth, having been reduced by the action of the alkali to a pulpy state; each berry should then be opened separately to remove the portion of the envelope held in the fold of the crease, and then all the berries divided in two are put into three parts of water charged with one-hundredth of caustic potash. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... The rivers sank beneath the desert sand, The tall pines dwarfed to sage-brush, and the grass Grew sparse and bitter in the alkali, But fared we always toward the setting sun. Our oxen famished till the last one died And our great wagons rested in the snow. We climbed the high Sierras and looked down From winter bleak upon the land we sought, A sunny land, a rich and fruitful land, The warm ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London

... but one altogether of peculiar character and temperament—as unlike him who rode by my side as acid to alkali. The latter was a dashing, cheerful fellow, dressed in half-Mexican costume, who could ride a wild horse and throw the lazo with any vaquero in the crowd. He was a true Texan, almost by birth; had shared the fortunes of the ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... queer red cliffs and high rocks carved in strange shapes by winds and weather; the stretches of sandy desert; and beyond those, grassy meadows and streams fringed with green willows. After a while Great Salt Lake lay sparkling in the sun and looking cool and blue. All around it were alkali deserts or wide plains, hot and dusty and white with salt or soda. The "prairie schooners," with their covers faded and burnt by the sun, went very slowly over these desert wastes, Polly thought, and Nevada, with its ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... invisible in a cloud of its own dust as it lurched and rolled along the alkali flats down the valley, and Sancho, the ranch-keeper, could not make out whether any passengers were on top or not. He had brought a fine binocular to bear just as soon as the shrill voice of Pedro, a swarthy little scamp of a half-breed, announced the dust-cloud sailing over the ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King

... without complaint, stolidly thanking his lucky stars that men were n't still traveling across America's deserts by ox-team. He was glad when he reached the Colorado River and wound up into California, leaving the alkali and sage brush and yucca palms of the Mojave well behind him. He was glad in his placid way when he reached his hotel in San Francisco and washed the grit and grime from ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... putrescent carcasses issued streams of effluvium and stench that formed contagious domes over the dismantled settlements. Domestic animals of all kinds lay dead and dying in different parts of the country. Myriads of salmon, trout, bass, and other fish, which, poisoned by the alkali formed by the ashes precipitated into the river, now lay dead or floundering and gasping on the scorched shores and beaches, and the countless variety of wild fowl and ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... Marianne for she was falling into a pleasant haze, comfortably aware of eyes of admiration lifted to her more and more frequently from the crowd. She envied the blue coolness of the mountains, or breathed gingerly because the sting of alkali-dust was in the air, or noted with impersonal attention the flash of sun on a horse struggling in the far off corrals. The growing excitement of the crowd, as though a crisis were approaching, merely lulled her more. ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... decided to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands of ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... Works at Newton, near Liverpool. Here he continued for four-and-a-half years, improving, of course, his acquaintance with the practical bearings of his favourite science, especially in regard to the manufacture of alkali and bleaching powder, the staple products of Muspratt's works. Mr. Young afterwards removed to Manchester, where he undertook a responsible position in Tennant's Chemical Works—a branch of Tennant's of Glasgow. This would be in the year ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... doth exist between two simple bodies: I am Potassium to thine Oxygen. 'Tis little that the holy marriage vow Shall shortly make us one. That unity Is, after all, but metaphysical. Oh, would that I, my Mary, were an acid, A living acid; thou an alkali Endow'd with human sense, that, brought together, We both might coalesce into one salt, One homogeneous crystal. Oh, that thou Wert Carbon, and myself were Hydrogen; We would unite to form olefiant gas, Or common coal, or naphtha—would to heaven That I were Phosphorus, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... Bul. Soc. Chim. de Bel., xix., August 1905, contends that experience does not warrant the assumption that free acid is a source of danger in nitro-glycerine or nitro-cellulose; free alkali, ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford

... works of man; for the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on the north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this forbidding residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and deserted, I remarked to my parents that some day it ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... desert out yonder?" McTeague's eyes wandered over the illimitable stretch of alkali that stretched out forever and forever to the east, to the north, and to ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... the zinc the battery will work without notable polarization, and almost until completely exhausted, even under the most unfavorable conditions. The transformation of the products, the change of the alkali into an alkaline salt of zinc, does not perceptibly vary the internal resistance. This great constancy is chiefly due to the progressive reduction of the depolarizing electrode to the state of very conductive metal, which augments its conductivity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... after it has soaked all night, and there has been a frequent change of the water. And with all this boiling, the skins sometimes adhere rather strongly, unless you boil with them some ashes, or other alkali. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... stroking his beard; "but Stutter come back thet way onct, from a hunt or something. He never said nothin' when he struck in, but yer could 'a' scraped alkali off him with a hoe, an' he drunk a whole bucket o' water without takin' breath. So I reckon it ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... game was not pleasant. Either Alfred or Tom usually rode night-herd on the ponies—merely as a matter of precaution—and they felt just a trifle more shut off by themselves and alone than if they had ridden solitary over the limitless alkali of the Arizona plains. This feeling struck in the deeper because Tom had just entered one of his brooding spells. Tom and Alfred had been chums now for close on two years, so Alfred knew enough to leave him entirely ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... shall go up as dust—' 'Awake, ye drunkards, and weep and howl, all ye drinkers of wine.' 'For while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.'—Dry? Good Lord! Ring up a can of suds, Grif. I've got ten miles of alkali ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... excess of tricarbomethoxygalloyl chloride for twenty-four hours and precipitating the resulting product with methyl alcohol; suitably purified, a light amorphous colourless substance was obtained which proved to be penta-(tricarbomethoxygalloyl) glucose. Careful saponification with excess alkali in acetone-aqueous solution at room temperature yielded a tannin very closely resembling tannin, identified as pentagalloyl glucose. It is doubtful, however, whether this substance is homogeneous, and it is probably a mixture of ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser

... seems to some to be a return to monarchy; and so perhaps it is. To give Tom, Dick and Harry the power to unseat these monarchs at will is said to be dangerously socialistic; and possibly it is. Only it is possible that by combining these two poisons—this acid and this alkali—in the same pill, we are neutralizing their harmful qualities. At any rate this would seem to be the idea on which ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... very abundant, are widely scattered over the plains. The numerous lakelets abound with water fowl. Some of the pools contain alkali, but we experienced no inconvenience on the journey from scarcity of fresh water. The grass in many places is short and thin, but in the hollows feed for horses is easily obtained. Altogether, though the plains are perfectly treeless, not even a shrub being visible, a journey across them in ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris

... are daily teaching us new lessons in dietetics, some of which are of commanding importance. One of the most significant of these is the necessity for taking account of the nature of the ash left by a foodstuff in the body. There are basic or alkali-ash foods and acid-ash foods. Foods of the latter class when freely used cause acidosis. Meats are high up in the list of acid-ash foods. It is for this reason that such animals as the lion and flesh-eating men ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... send the moisture away through the atmosphere. Wherever these conditions occur we observe that the soil in dry seasons becomes coated with a deposit of mineral matter, which, because of its taste, has received the name of alkali. The origin of this coating is as follows: The pores of the soil, charged from year to year with sufficient water to fill them, become stored with a fluid which contains a very large amount of dissolved mineral matter—too much, indeed, to permit the roots of plants, save a ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... alkali water all summer, and along about midnight they began to drop out until there was no one left to face the music except a little cattle salesman and myself. After all the others quit us, we went into ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... gents!' called Barbee genially. 'Stack up alongside the bar and I'll buy! Moraga,' to the bartender, 'you know me. I got a real bad case of alkali throat. Roll up, boys!—Say, wait a minute. Moraga, meet my friend Longstreet.' Moraga showed many large white teeth in a friendly smile and gave into Longstreet's keeping a small, moist and very flabby hand. The other men, silently accepting the invitation, came forward; Barbee introduced ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... natural result. Then came our orders to hasten to the support of Crook, and so it happened that July found us marching for the storied range of the Big Horn, and the first week in August landed us, blistered and burned with sun-glare and stifling alkali-dust, in the welcoming camp ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... growth does not concern us as there are no alkali lands in the counties near the Twin Cities, and the harmful minute animals that destroy the beneficial bacteria in the soil are as a rule found ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... adventure, seek it in the unexplored regions of the great Northwest; if we crave grandeur, visit the Yellowstone and the fastnesses of the Rockies; if we wish the sublime, gaze in the mighty chasm of the Canon of the Colorado, where strong men weep as they look down; if we seek desolation, traverse the alkali plains of Arizona where the trails are marked by bones of men and beasts; but if the heart yearns for beauty more serene, go forth among the habitations of men where fields are green and sheltering woods offer refuge from the noonday sun, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... him, and that was where he had seen him sitting up in his dripping but well-fitting clothes. In the rough garments he had worn and returned lingered a new scent of some delicate soap, overpowering the strong alkali flavor of his own. He was early by the river side, having a vague hope, he knew not why, that he should again see him and recognize him among the passengers. He was wading out among the reeds, in the faint light of the rising moon, recalling the exact spot where he had first seen the stranger, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... of about three acres, and looked like a series of cataracts changed into stone, each edge being fringed with a festoon of delicate stalactites. The water contained about eighty-five per cent. of silica, with one or two per cent of iron alumina, and a little alkali. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... busy working my booze hydraulic when I see an arid appearin' pilgrim 'longside lookin' thirsty as an alkali flat. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... the awful solitudes, shared sometimes by his hardy and equally confident wife, and, at the last, by his boy, who had become old enough to endure with his father the snow and ice of the mountain tops and the withering heat of the alkali wastes. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... into his camp. He said you had quit him. I asked him if you come up here, but he only shook his head and handed me the usual 'Quien sabe?' He'll never git a sore throat from talkin' too much. Say, wait till I git some of this here alkali out of my ears and we'll go and eat and then have a smoke and talk it out. Gee! But I'm glad you landed! How'd you ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... composition or constitution of the final product. None of the available criteria are applied to the product to determine whether it is a cellulose (anhydride) or a hydrate or a hydrolysed product. After these alkali-fusion processes the method of chlorination is experimentally reviewed and dismissed for the reason that the product retains furfural-yielding groups, which is, from our point of view, a particular recommendation, ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross

... his months of experience in the hills, felt sure he could find his way back with less trouble by continuing as they were. The grass and the shrubs gradually disappeared as they walked, and soon he realized that they were on the edge of an alkali desert. Still he thought he could swing around into the valley from which they started, and they plunged steadily on, only to see in a few minutes ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... soil, providing the underlying strata are not charged with alkali, would give you a good growth of lemon trees if moisture was regularly present in about the right quantity, neither too much nor too little, and the temperature conditions were favorable to the success ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... his life of isolation made him taciturn, it at the same time created a spirit of hospitality, primitive and hearty as that found in the mead-halls of Beowulf. He faced the wind and the rain, the snow of winter, the fearful dust-storms of alkali desert wastes, with the same uncomplaining quiet. Not all his work was on the ranch and the trail. To the cowboy, more than to the goldseekers, more than to Uncle Sam's soldiers, is due the conquest ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... is always on the wander and for which a search has to be made. Nipping is too much in vogue in this country, but we are told that a lot of support is wanted, the air is so rarefied and the water has so much alkali in it, and therefore not supposed to be healthy, but it is most beautifully clear and delightfully ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall

... wherein, though the Directions for Practice are but obscurely intimated; yet I have some reason not to Dis-believe the Process, without affirming or denying any thing about the vertues of the remedy to be made by it. Quando (sayes he) oleum cinnamomi &c. suo sali alkali miscetur absque omni aqua, trium mensium artificiosa occultaque circulatione, totum in salem volatilem commutatum est, vere essentiam sui simplicis in nobis exprimit, & usque in prima nostri constitutivasese ingerit. A not unlike ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle



Words linked to "Alkali" :   alkali metal, alkali poisoning, iminazole, glyoxaline, alkalize, melamine, pyridine, alkali grass, salt, alkalic, base



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