"Prussic acid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attracted by, the stone. In the case of a sensation produced in our organs, the laws of our organization, and even those of our minds, are as directly operative in determining the effect produced, as the laws of the outward object. Though we call prussic acid the agent of a person's death, the whole of the vital and organic properties of the patient are as actively instrumental as the poison, in the chain of effects which so rapidly terminates his sentient existence. In the process of education, we ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... can't you say a word to a fellow that is driven into a corner, instead of glaring at me like that? There! I know it is ungrateful; but what can a fellow do? I must live like a gentleman or else take a dose of prussic acid; you don't want to drive me to that. Why, you proposed to part, last ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... forgotten something upstairs. They waited some time for her, but she did not come down again. They ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of her dressing-room. She had swallowed something by mistake, some dreadful thing they use at theatres. I don't know what it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. I should fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... productions of the vegetable kingdom, we find that their properties are generally due to the presence of some acid or alkali contained in the plant from which they are derived. Oil of bitter almonds and cherry laurel water are poisonous in consequence of containing prussic acid. Opium owes its activity to the alkaloid morphia. The Upas-tiente derives its energetic powers from the alkaloid strychnia; conia is the active principle of hemlock; veratria of hellebore; aconita of monk's hood; and although there are several poisonous plants in which the active principle ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... sweet-fleshed gourd that loves to gad along the sand—the citron in its carved net, and the enormous melon, carnation-colored within and dark-green to blackness outside. The peaches here are golden-pulped, as if trying to be oranges, and are richly bitter, with a dark hint of prussic acid, fascinating the taste like some enchantress of Venice, the pursuit of whom is made piquant by a fancy that she may poison you. The farther you penetrate this huge idle peninsula, the more its idiosyncrasy is borne in on your mind. Infinite horizons, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... nervousness was to be noticed. And a plane tried to deliver a message to him. Your father thought the parcel contained the antidote to the poison that was driving him mad. Actually, it was very conventional prussic acid. Your father would have drunk it and dropped dead, a suicide, after a conspicuous period of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... the retreat of their troops and the arrival of our own in Morogoro I myself can testify. For the German nursing sisters who worked with me told of the flight to this town of outlying families, and how the women were all supplied with tablets of prussic acid to swallow, if the dreadful end approached. For death from the swift cyanide would be gentler far than at the hands of a savage native. But the Germans have to admit that as they showed no mercy to the native in the past, so they could expect none at such a time as this. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... that leave no vivid impressions on the mind; for dinners, harmless dishes that are forgotten as they are eaten. My dinners stick in the memory. I cannot study these people—my genius is all too imperative. If I needed a flavour of almonds and had nothing else to hand, I would use prussic acid. Do right, I say, as your art instinct commands, and take no heed of the consequences. Our function is to make the beautiful gastronomic thing, not to pander to gluttony, not to be the Jesuits of hygiene. My friend, you ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... almond and has a bitter taste. It contains about 50%, of the fixed oil which also occurs in sweet almonds. It also contains a ferment emulsin which, in the presence of water, acts on a soluble glucoside, amygdalin, yielding glucose, prussic acid and the essential oil of bitter almonds or benzaldehyde (q.v.), which is not used in medicine. Bitter almonds may yield from 6 to 8% of prussic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... years I have carried about a quietus with me. I began the habit at Cambridge. Men have often asked me what is the curious little flask with a secret fastening, that stands on my dressing-table. It is prussic acid. The morning before I wrote that letter, the impulse was so strong upon me that I determined, if matters should not shift a little, to take it on the following evening. I made, in fact, most methodical arrangements. I seemed so completely to have ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... carafe of kirsch for clear water," continued the notary, without paying any attention to the Baron's agitation. "The devil! the safe thing to do is to give him an emetic at once; this poor fellow has enough prussic acid in his stomach to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... warmly challenged; in actual life, we are told, many of those who profess determinist principles are notorious for their strenuous moral calibre, and certainly not open to the charge of laxity. Let that statement be ungrudgingly accepted; what it proves is no more than that prussic acid is entirely harmless—provided it is not taken. We are quite willing to admit that Determinism, provided it is not put into practice, is nothing more than a mistaken theory. So long as men are content to be determinists in their studies and libertarians everywhere else, no particular ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of cyanide of cacodyl, in its action the swiftest and most deadly of existing poisons. In the '40's, Bunsen, the German chemist, combined oxide of cacodyl with cyanogen, a radical of prussic acid, producing cyanide of cacodyl, or diniethyl arsine cyanide. As both of its components are of the deadliest description, it is extremely dangerous to make. It can be made only in the open air, and not without the most extreme precaution known to science. Mr. Lacelles Scott, of ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... hundred miles that word of his coming did not reach Bwana long before the stranger. His every move was reported to the big Bwana—just what animals he killed and how many of each species, how he killed them, too, for Bwana would not permit the use of prussic acid or strychnine; and how he treated ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Stennecke, occurs not infrequently from insidious disease of the kidneys, yet these organs were not taken out of the body. The stomach was examined chemically by Professor Aiken of the University of Maryland, who reported that he had found prussic acid, and who testified on the trial that Miss Stennecke had received a fatal dose of that poison. When, however, his evidence was sifted, it was discovered that he had only obtained traces of the poison by the distillation of the stomach with sulphuric acid. As saliva contains ferrocyanide ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... made up his mind in regard to the murder, and as Therese was drinking a glass of sugar and water before him, Laurent remembered that he had seen in this laboratory a small stoneware flagon, containing prussic acid, and that the young dispenser had spoken to him of the terrible effects of this poison, which strikes the victim down with sudden death, leaving but few traces behind. And Laurent said to himself, that this was the poison he required. On the morrow, succeeding in escaping ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... known among chemists as a six-ounce bottle. It contained a colourless liquid. The label stated the dose to be "two table-spoonfuls," and bore, as usual, a number corresponding with a number placed on the prescription. She took up the prescription. It was a mixture of bi-carbonate of soda and prussic acid, intended for the relief of indigestion. She looked at the date, and was at once reminded of one of the very rare occasions on which she had required the services of a medical man. There had been a serious accident at a dinner-party, given by some friends. She had eaten sparingly of ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... wards—Life, Labor, Capital. And, when forged, the Philanthropic Society shall pay you a good price for it. Meantime, don't dream of leaving Hillsborough, or I shall give you a stirrup-cup that will waft you much further than London; for it shall be 'of prussic acid all composed,' or 'juice of cursed Hebenon in a vial.' Come, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... wish himself dead? In such a condition, a man can simply walk the streets by himself, and declare to himself that everything is bad, and rotten, and vile, and worthless. He wishes himself dead, and calculates the different advantages of prussic acid and pistols. He may the while take his meals very punctually at his club, may smoke his cigars, and drink his bitter beer, or brandy-and-water; but he is all the time wishing himself dead, and making ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... a haggis, sprinkle well with prussic acid or cayenne pepper. Repeat three times daily. (This method has never been known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... contained the common spirits of camphor, of which he had once given Annetta a teaspoonful when she had complained of a chill and sickness. One, however, was more than half full of a solution of hydrocyanide of potassium, a liquid little less suddenly and surely fatal than the prussic acid which enters ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... connected at one end to its month, the other passing into the second vessel; heat should be cautiously applied by means of an Argand lamp, a little vessel of sand being placed under the flask, which helps the acid to decompose the salt. Prussic acid is then generated and passes through the tube to the recipient vessel, which is to be charged ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... very little success.[62] Even those who advocate the medicinal use of tobacco, admit that it is one of those violent remedies, which nothing but the most skilful management can render beneficial; such as arsenic, prussic acid, and many other deadly poisons, which, if cautiously and properly administered, become excellent medicines. Thus the liniment of tobacco, which has formerly been called one of the best in the dispensatory, is said, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... writer does not tell, To guess the themes which prompt the brightest sallies; Louvain; the Lusitania; Nurse CAVELL— With these Hun wit most delicately dallies; The wreck of Reims; the Prussic acid shell; The desolation of Armenia's valleys; The toll of Belgian infants slain ere birth— All these excite Berlin's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... lost the bravest and truest and most generous friend that ever man had, when John Meavy died. And that dose of Prussic Acid should properly have gone to me, whose fault it all was, instead of to him, so innocent. Eh, bien, Monsieur! his lot was the happiest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various |
