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Putrefaction   Listen
noun
Putrefaction  n.  
1.
The act or the process of putrefying; the offensive decay of albuminous or other matter. Note: Putrefaction is a complex phenomenon involving a multiplicity of chemical reactions, always accompanied by, and without doubt caused by, bacteria and vibriones; hence, putrefaction is a form of fermentation, and is sometimes called putrefaction fermentative. Putrefaction is not possible under conditions that preclude the development of living organisms. Many of the products of putrefaction are powerful poisons, and are called cadaveric poisons, or ptomaïnes.
2.
The condition of being putrefied; also, that which putrefied. "Putrefaction's breath."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Putrefaction" Quotes from Famous Books



... enthusiastic mind it seemed that in ozone we had a means of stopping all putrefaction, of destroying all infectious substances, and of actually commanding and destroying the causes which produced the great spreading diseases; and, although increase of years and greater experience have toned down the enthusiasm, I still believe that here one of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... of many kinds of fish, when it is supposed to have undergone a beginning putrefaction, becomes luminous in the dark. This seems to shew a tendency in the phosphorus to escape, and combine with the oxygen of the atmosphere; and would hence shew, that this kind of flesh is not so perfectly animalized ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... cries of welcome to us. Of all the vile, dirty places on earth, Omdurman must rank first. There was no effort at sanitary observances, and dead animals, camels, horses, donkeys, dogs, goats, sheep, cattle, in all stages of putrefaction, lay about the streets and lanes. There were dead men, women, and children, too, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... an act, but, on the other hand, one or more sensations may exist at the base of this something to put it in action. I have proved, for example, that the egg-laying instinct in the corpse fly (Lucilia caesar) is only produced by the odor of putrefaction. As soon as the antennae, which contain the organ of smell, are removed from these flies they cease to lay, while other more severe operations, or removal of one antenna only ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... hundreds every day, and bore as heavy a load as we could carry across the ravine to the platform in front of our cabin, where we busied ourselves in skinning them, splitting them, and hanging them out to dry in the sun. The air of the island was so pure that no putrefaction ever took place, and during the last fortnight of the birds coming on the island, we had collected a sufficiency for our support until their return on the following year. As soon as they were quite dry they were packed up in a corner ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat

... disease—that ancient will-o'-the-wisp "spontaneous generation" being revived by the way. When Pasteur in 1857 showed that the lactic fermentation depends on the presence of an organism, it was already known from the researches of Schwann (1837) and Helmholtz (1843) that fermentation and putrefaction are intimately connected with the presence of organisms derived from the air, and that the preservation of putrescible substances depends on this principle. In 1862 Pasteur placed it beyond reasonable doubt that the ammoniacal fermentation of urea is due to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... was but a tiny heap of clothing with the angry black disks whirling and singing their song of hate. And then, in a puff of thick yellow vapor they were gone, their gruesome work completed. The odor of putrefaction lay heavy ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent

... translated into it. Talking of the Comedy of The Rehearsal, he said, 'It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.' This was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence; 'It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... end so many Medicaments? I believe, that God in the things of Nature, naturally gives such Medicines, with a very few of which, we may much sooner, and more safely re-integrate the decayed, and languishing Health of Man, unless the Disease be Mortal, from a deficiency of Nature, or from the putrefaction of some noble internal part hurt, or by reason of a total absumption of the radical humidity in which desperate Cases, no Galenick Cure, or Paracelsick Tincture can yeild releif. But in ordinary Diseases it is not so; and yet ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius

... by electricity, rapidly undergo putrefaction, and the action of electricity upon the flesh of animals is also found to accelerate this process in a remarkable degree. The same effect has been observed in the bodies of persons destroyed by lightning. It is also a well-established ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various

... bogs or morasses; and the animals which have been trodden down by their fellows and crushed in the mud at the river's bank, as the herd have come to drink. In any of these cases, the organisms may be crushed or be mutilated, before or after putrefaction, in such a manner that perhaps only a part will be left in the form in which it reaches us. It is, indeed, a most remarkable fact, that it is quite an exceptional case to find a skeleton of any one of all the thousands of wild land animals that we know ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... by any emotion, without ceasing for a single moment to see reality. The cemetery was a hideous, gloomy, repulsive place, with an odor of decay. Renovales thought he could perceive a stench of putrefaction scattered in the wind which bent the pointed tops of the cypresses, and swayed the old wreaths and the branches ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... wonderfully generated, betrayed more terrible symptoms. Fever and delirium terminated in lethargic slumber, which, in the course of two hours, gave place to death. Yet not till insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction had driven from his chamber and the house every one whom their duty ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... a compartment that smelt so intolerably stale and fusty that I had to come into the passage again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to the odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the bottom ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... of this great army be called, and they could come up from the dead, what eye could endure the reeking, festering putrefaction and beastliness! What heart could endure ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... confirmation of the theory that he proclaimed, day in, day out, namely: that the Latin races were on the rapid down-grade; Spain and Portugal, Italy, Roumania, the South American republics, were, in his opinion, in a state of moral putrefaction, France a sheer Byzantium. It had been a piece of foolhardiness without parallel to try to make this war a decisive racial struggle between the nation that, as Protestant, brought free research in its train and one which had not ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... some time after death the muscles continue to contract under stimuli. When this irritability ceases—and it seldom exceeds two hours—rigidity and hardening sets in, and in all cases precedes putrefaction. It is caused by the coagulation of the muscle plasma. It commences in the muscles of the back of the neck and lower jaw, and then passes into the muscles of the face, front of the neck, chest, upper extremities, and lastly ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... destroyed by external influences, and it may retain its virulence for several months in dried sputum if protected from the light. Its vitality enables it to resist high temperatures, changes in temperature, drying and putrefaction to a, greater degree than most non-spore-producing germs. Direct sunlight destroys the germ within a few hours, but it may live in poorly lighted, filthy stables for months. A temperature of 65260 C. destroys it in ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... is a fascinating problem: either the victims deposited by the mother are dead, and desiccation or putrefaction attacks them promptly, or else they are living, as indeed the larvae require; but then "what will become of this fragile creature, which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end working their long spurred legs; or at grips with ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... of the corpse, and when the light of morning filtered into her dreary place of refuge, and lighted up the body lying there, she sobbed with grief and terror. Her husband had been dead four days, when putrefaction set in, and she, able to bear it no longer, rushed out screaming to her neighbours: "You must bury him, or I will go into the middle of the avenue and await death there!"—They took pity on her, and came down into ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... be caused by wear and tear, unseen. In one place evil liquids and gases will percolate; in another evil accumulations will putrefy. Instead of blending small portions of needful manure quickly with small portions of earth that needs it, we secure in the drains a slow putrefaction and a permanent source of pestilence; we relieve a town by imposing a grave vexation and danger on the whole neighbourhood where its drains have exit; we make the mouth of every tide river a harbour and storehouse of pollution; and after thus wasting an agricultural treasure we send ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... the old fellow's fingers began to work impatiently. Mr. Eden broke off directly, put fiddle and bow into Strutt's hand, and ran off to the prison again to arrest melancholy, despair, lunacy, stagnation, mortification, putrefaction, by every art that philosophy and mother-wit ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... them could boast of their surgeon, nurse, or cook; and the space between decks was so confined that the miserable patients had not room to sit upright in their beds. Their wounds and stumps, being neglected, contracted filth and putrefaction, and millions of maggots were hatched amidst the corruption of their sores. This inhuman disregard was imputed to the scarcity of surgeons; though it is well known that every great ship in the fleet could have spared one at least for ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... such a house, as that that soul, which made but one step from thence to heaven, was scarce thoroughly content to leave that for heaven; that body hath lost the name of a dwelling-house, because none dwells in it, and is making haste to lose the name of a body, and dissolve to putrefaction. Who would not be affected to see a clear and sweet river in the morning, grow a kennel of muddy land-water by noon, and condemned to the saltness of the sea by night? and how lame a picture, how faint a representation is that, of the ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... the prison yard the breeze had brought the fresh vivifying air from the fields. But in the corridor the air was laden with the germs of typhoid, the smell of sewage, putrefaction, and tar; every newcomer felt sad and dejected in it. The woman warder felt this, though she was used to bad air. She had just come in from outside, and entering the corridor, she at once ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... unalterable even on exposure to the air and moisture. There is a vault at Toulouse in which a vast number of bodies that have been buried were found, after many years, dry and without a trace of the effects of putrefaction; and in the vaults of St. Michael's Church, Dublin, the bodies are similarly preserved. In both cases putrefaction is prevented by the constant absorption of the moisture from the atmosphere, and through its medium ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... assist them in their boundless misery, it only remained for him to sink down among them, or to avert his eyes, to close his ears to their supplications, and escape with hurried steps from this atmosphere of blood and putrefaction, in order to rescue his own life from the clutches ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... question into play again, Moschio the physician said, that putrefaction was a colliquation of the flesh, and that everything that putrefied grew moister than before, and that all heat, if gentle, did stir the humors, though not force them out, but if strong, dry the flesh; and that from these considerations an answer to the question might be easily ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... preponderance amongst these foreign particles. The air, however, is also mixed with another elastic substance resembling air, which differs from it in numerous properties, and is, with good reason, called aerial acid by Professor Bergman. It owes its presence to organised bodies, destroyed by putrefaction or combustion. ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele

... influence they may exert over living tissues has only lately become the subject of earnest attention. So long as they were not known to have any practical bearing upon human welfare, they interested almost nobody, but when, however, it was shown that putrefaction of meat is due to the agency of the bacterium termo, and the decomposition of albumen to the bacillus subtilis; when anthrax in cattle and sheep was found to depend on the bacillus anthracis, and that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of this land in the last twenty years. Now, it is amid such circumstances that I put the questions of overmastering importance to you and your families: What can ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... I had arrived within the thick nabbuk and high grass, I came to the conclusion that my only chance would be to make a long circuit, and to creep up wind through the thorns, until I should be advised by my nose of the position of the carcass, as it would by this time be in a state of putrefaction, and the lions would most probably be with the body. Accordingly I struck off to my left, and continuing straight forward for some hundred yards, I again struck into the thick jungle and came round to the wind. Success depended on extreme ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker

... in colour, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures and copulations of different kinds; which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes, of putrefaction; whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures, like bests or birds; and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand, of what matter and commixture what kind of those ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon

... happy condition, she also had from him a testimony, that her alabaster box of precious ointment poured on his head and feet, and that spikenard, and those spices that were by her dedicated to embalm and preserve his sacred body from putrefaction, should so far preserve her own memory, that these demonstrations of her sanctified love, and of her officious and generous gratitude, should be recorded and mentioned wheresoever his Gospel should be read; intending thereby, that as his, so her name, should also live to ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... coast before the wind at the rate of about three miles an hour. But it was not until they had gained half a mile from the bank that they were no longer annoyed by the dreadful smell arising from the putrefaction of so many bodies, for to bury them all would have been a work of too great time. The last two days of their remaining on the island, the effluvia had become so powerful as to be a source of the greatest horror and disgust even to ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... wind wafts towards them. In the morning they go towards the place whence came the odour, and search there for the rhubarb until they find it. Rhubarb is the putrefied wood of a great tree, and acquires its odour even from its putrefaction, the best part of the tree is the root, nevertheless the trunk, which they call calama, has the same ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... afflict the souls of the damned in hell is the pain of conscience. Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. The first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of past pleasures. O what ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... place. In a tomb recently opened at Canterbury Cathedral, a for the purpose of discovering what Archbishop's body it contained, the corpse was of an extremely offensive and sickening odor, unmistakably that of putrefaction. The body was that of Hubert Walter, who died in 1204 A.D., and the decomposition had been retarded, and was actually still in progress, several hundred years ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... power of man, for example, is not able to do more than beget man. But the power of a non-univocal agent does not wholly manifest itself in the production of its effect: as, for example, the power of the sun does not wholly manifest itself in the production of an animal generated from putrefaction. Now it is clear that God is not a univocal agent. For nothing agrees with Him either in species or in genus, as was shown above (Q. 3, A. 5; Q. 4, A. 3). Whence it follows that His effect is always less than His power. It is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... arsenic, or the irritating juice of some poisonous plant or herb, or to the every-day accident of including in the menu some article of diet which was beginning to spoil or decay, and which contained the bacteria of putrefaction or their poisonous products. The reaction of defense is practically the same, varying only with the violence and the character of the poison. If the dose of poisonous substances be unusually large or virulent, nature may ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... Fish and Beasts, nay, even to Man himself; that air, or breath of life, with which God at first inspired mankind, he, if he wants it, dies presently, becomes a sad object to all that loved and beheld him, and in an instant turns to putrefaction. ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... disturbers of play-houses; they break the windows, and commonly the landlords, of the taverns where they drink; and are at once the support, the terror, and the victims, of the bawdy-houses they frequent. These poor mistaken people think they shine, and so they do indeed; but it is as putrefaction shines in ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... Christian. Not a Catholic, but a Christian. Indeed, because I am a Christian am an anti-Catholic. My heart is Christian, and my brain is Protestant. It is with joy that I see in Catholicism signs, not of decrepitude, but of putrefaction. Charity is being dissolved in the most sincerely Catholic hearts into a dark mud, full of the worms of hatred. I see Catholicism cracking in many places, and I see the ancient idolatry upon which it has raised itself bursting forth through the cracks. What few youthful, healthy, and ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... set forth what he considers the task of the author. According to him, the man of to-day has lost courage; he interests himself too little in life, his desire to live with dignity has grown weaker, "an odor of putrefaction surrounds him, cowardice and slavery corrupt his heart, laziness binds his hands and his mind." But, at the same time, life grows in breadth and depth, and, from day to day, men are learning to question. And it is the writer who ought to answer their questions; but he should not content ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... First, then, in all known chemical changes in which oxygen gas is absorbed and carbonic acid gas formed, heat is produced. I could mention a thousand instances, from the combustion of wood or spirits of wine to the fermentation of fruit or the putrefaction of animal matter. This general fact, which may be almost called a law, is in favour of the view of Dr. Black. Another circumstance in favour of it is, that those animals which possess the highest temperature ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... corpses of persons newly buried, which were supposed to suck the blood and suck out the life of their selected victims. The marks by which a vampire corpse was recognized were the apparent non-putrefaction of the body and effusion of blood from the lips. A suspected vampire was exhumed, and if the marks were perceived or imagined to be present, a stake was driven through the heart, and the body was burned. This, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... lives to it; but when the shadow of death begins to fall upon them, it is as ready to aid in their destruction. Like calumny, which blackens whatsoever is suspected, oxygen pounces upon the failing and completes their ruin. The processes of fermentation and putrefaction cannot commence in any substance, until it has first taken oxygen into combination. Thus, cans of meat, hermetically sealed, with all the air first carefully expelled, undergo no change so long as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... cheerful fire on the hearth, it contains materials for making food for the cottager's tables and new faggots for his fire. The wick of every burning lamp draws up the carbon of the oil to be made into carbonic acid at the flame. All matters in process of combustion, decay, fermentation, or putrefaction, are returning to the atmosphere those constituents, which they obtained from it. Every living animal, even to the smallest insect, by respiration, spends its life in the production of this material necessary to the growth of plants, and at death gives ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring

... not generative. Also we make them differ in colour, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures and copulations of divers kinds, which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction, whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures, like beasts or birds, and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture, what kind of those ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... the more tangible accomplishments of Empedocles, we find it alleged that one of his "miracles" consisted of the preservation of a dead body without putrefaction for some weeks after death. We may assume from this that he had gained in some way a knowledge of embalming. As he was notoriously fond of experiment, and as the body in question (assuming for the moment the authenticity of the legend) must have been preserved without disfigurement, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... science derives suggestive knowledge from the study of mere putrefaction; he places an infusion of common hay-seeds or meat or fruit in his phials, and awaits events; presently a drop from one of the infusions is laid on the field of the microscope, and straightly the economy of a new and strange kingdom is seen by the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... his victory. Shortly after occurred his death, brought on by his own crimes. In his war against Jeroboam he had indulged in excessive cruelty; he ordered the corpses of the enemy to be mutilated, and permitted them to be buried only after putrefaction had set in. Such savagery was all the more execrable as it prevented many widows from entering into a second marriage. Mutilating the corpses had made identification impossible, and so it was left doubtful whether their husbands ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... it. It is an amphibious plant, thriving only in water or wet soils, is very productive, and the stalks after a summer's growth secrete a large quantity of sugar. It has the power, when the stalks are ripe, of resisting putrefaction, and will become blanched and more nutritious by being cut and laid in heaps in the winter season, at which time only it is useful. The cultivator of this plant must not expect to graze his land, but allow all the growth to be husbanded as above; ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... branches ordinarily takes place at the end of from twenty-four to forty-eight hours; sometimes, nevertheless, one must wait for many days. These phenomena are observed in all the diseased tubercles without exception, so long as they have not succumbed to putrefaction, which arrests the development of the parasite ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... problem are presented as completely as possible and are classified with reference to their significant bearings upon the problem. Moreover the facts gathered and the classifications of relationship made are not more or less accurate, more or less true; they are tested and verified results. That putrefaction, for example, is due to the life of micro-organisms in the rotting substance is not a mere assumption. It has been proved, tested, and verified by methods we shall have ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... those places I was met by a smell of putrefaction, a smell so strong that I wished to flee from it. But, conquering myself, I entered the cave whence it came, and beheld Imagine, lord, a man with legs and arms shorter by one half than ours, but thick, awkward, and with claws at their extremities. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... all literature, so to speak—are the letters of the alphabet. How often by changing a letter in a word, by reversing their order, or by substituting one letter for another, we get a word of an entirely different meaning, as in umpire and empire, petrifaction and putrefaction, malt and salt, tool and fool. And by changing the order of the words in a sentence we express all the infinite variety of ideas and meanings that the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... by drinking with too much avidity when they fall in with wells. Owing to this Momia is found in these sands, bring the flesh of such as have been drowned in the sea of sand, which is there dried up by the heat of the sun, and the excessive dryness of the sand preventing putrefaction. This Momia or dried flesh is esteemed medicinal; but there is another and more precious kind of Momia, being the dried and embalmed bodies of kings and princes, which have been preserved in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... that the Parts of rotten Wood, rotten Fish and the like, are also in motion, I think, will as easily be conceded by those, who consider, that those parts never begin to shine till the Bodies be in a state of putrefaction; and that is now generally granted by all, to be caused by the motion of the parts of putrifying bodies. That the Bononian stone shines no longer then it is either warmed by the Sun-beams, or by ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... sat down, with morbid melancholy, in the receptacle for the bodies of those unfortunate persons who had perished in the snow. There would I remain for hours, musing on their fate: the purity of the air admitted neither putrefaction, or even decay, for a very considerable time; and they lay, to all appearance, as if the breath had even then only quitted them, although, on touching those who had been there for years, they ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... deposit of Globigerina skeletons, did not go on very fast. It is demonstrable that an animal of the cretaceous sea might die, that its skeleton might lie uncovered upon the sea-bottom long enough to lose all its outward coverings and appendages by putrefaction; and that, after this had happened, another animal might attach itself to the dead and naked skeleton, might grow to maturity, and might itself die before the calcareous mud ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... Cutbush discussed the formation of cyanogen in processes not previously noticed. He spoke of the appearance of this gas in the putrefaction of animal and vegetable matter, making the following remarkable and in some respects ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith

... falls on plants, that fleas are developed from putrid matter, and so forth. T. J. Parker (Elementary Biology) cites a passage from Alexander Ross, who, commenting on Sir Thomas Browne's doubt as to "whether mice may be bred by putrefaction,'' gives a clear statement of the common opinion on abiogenesis held until about two centuries ago. Ross wrote: "So may he (Sir Thomas Browne) doubt whether in cheese and timber worms are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows' dung; or if butterflies, locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... wealthier classes, and one sees less meat and more vegetable habits as they progress upward in the scale of civilization. Also, on account of their sedentary habits, people find that the ingestion of considerable quantities of animal protein, with the consequent increase in intestinal putrefaction, gives rise to symptoms of toxemia, which have assumed a very definite place in the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... towards this he proceeded, almost overpowered by the horrible stench of the charnel house, As he drew near enough to distinguish objects, what a scene presented itself! In one corner of the vault, lay a quantity of lime used to consume the bodies, whilst nearer the light, lay corpses in every stage of putrefaction. In some, the lime had but half accomplished its purpose; and while in parts of the body, the bones lay bare and exposed; in others, corruption in its most loathsome form prevailed. Here the meaner reptiles—active and prolific—might be seen ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity. Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... ship for cleansing said vessel, and also for washing out the hold when the water of the sea or of a river, in the judgment of the commander of a vessel, confirmed by the statement of the physician, is shown to be surcharged with organic matter liable to putrefaction. With this end in view, if you are unable to send elsewhere for suitable water, you must make use of good and fresh water, but with the greatest economy. In that event the purification of the hold must be accomplished by mechanical means ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various

... four of the heads of the seven people who had been so much the subject of our enquiries: The hair and flesh were entire, but we perceived that the brains had been extracted; the flesh was soft, but had by some method been preserved from putrefaction, for it had no disagreeable smell. Mr Banks purchased one of them, but they sold it with great reluctance, and could not by any means be prevailed upon to part with a second; probably they may be preserved as trophies, like the scalps in America, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... would be that they must entirely draw off their attention, not only from the government, but from their governors; that the stream of public vigilance, far from clearing and enriching the prospect of society, would by its stagnation consign it to barrenness, and by its putrefaction infect it with death. You have aimed an arrow at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race; why, like the inveterate enemy of Philip, in putting your name to the shaft, did you not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... that was exactly what Mr. Penn would have expected in the circumstances. It was the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our northern region the floating carcasses of the animals of all climates, to sink in unwonted companionship, when putrefaction had done its work, into the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked the fact, that comparative anatomy is in reality a science; and further, that it is a science of which men such as Cuvier and Owen know a great deal more ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... says, 'must of necessity fetch their beginning from Noah's ark, which rested after the deluge, in Asia, seeing they could not proceed by the course of nature, as the imperfect sort of living creatures do, from putrefaction.' Bernard Romans is of opinion that God created an original man and woman in this part of the globe. Doctor Barton thinks they are not specifically different from the Persians; but, taking afterwards a broader range, he thinks, 'that in all the vast ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... periodical plague of London was thinning out the inhabitants of that dirty city. In the lower part of the city skirting the Thames, the sewerage was very bad and but the poorest sanitary rules existed. After a hard rain, the lanes, alleys and streets ran with a stream of putrefaction, as the offal from many tenement houses was thrown in the public highway, where the rays from the hot sun created malarial fever ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... found it to consist of two rusty old corrugated iron buildings, vaguely surrounded by an enormous amount of primaeval desolation and immediately encompassed by several hundred dead cattle (in an advanced state of putrefaction) picturesquely disposed about the outskirts of the premises. But Denison, being by nature a cheerful man, remembered that his brother (who was pious) had alluded to a drought, and said that rain was expected every day, as the ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... take extraordinary pains to preserve the body from putrefaction, in the hope of the soul again joining the body it had quitted." The remark is intrinsically untrue, because the doctrine of transmigration coexists in reconciled belief with the observed law of birth, infancy, and growth, not with the miracle of transition into reviving corpses. The notion is ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... other. A canal has been cut to drain as much rain water (the only water obtainable here) as possible into a small pond, but the pond was nearly dry and only had in it some filthy salt water densely mixed with camel refuse. It was of a ghastly green with patches of brown, and some spots of putrefaction in circular crowns of a whitish colour. The surface was coated with a deposit of sand, dirt ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... Combustion, putrefaction, and the breathing of animals, are processes which are continually diminishing the quantity of vital air contained in the atmosphere; and if the all-wise author of nature had not provided for its continual re-production, ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.

... provided with glands that pour out a juice known as the intestinal juice, which, although not very active in digestion, helps to melt down still further some of the sugars, and helps to prevent putrefaction, or decay, of the food from the bacteria[6] which swarm in this part of ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... latitude of 40. In the months of June and July, the thermometer is at from 88 to 90 degrees. What must it be, then, in the latitude of 6 or 7, under a vertical sun, and where, after the rainy season, the effluvium which arises from the putrefaction of vegetables is productive of the most fatal effects? Sir James L. Yeo agrees with their account, in his statement laid before the Admiralty ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... Arantiae (Malum aureum) Moderately dry, cooling, and incisive; sharpens Appetite, exceedingly refreshes and resists Putrefaction: We speak of the Sub acid; the sweet and bitter Orange being of no use in our Sallet. The Limon is somewhat more acute, cooling and extinguishing Thirst; of all the [Greek: Oxubapha] the best succedaneum to Vinegar. The very Spoils and Rinds of Orange and Limon being shred and ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn

... were those of intestinal putrefaction with local inflammation of the cecum and, as the history of the ease has pointed out, was located in that part of the cecum giving attachment to the appendix, for the autopsy showed that the appendix was surrounded by adhesions and imbedded in fecal pus. Please note particularly: ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.

... describe them—as is still often done—as Schizomycetes, and class them with the true fungi. The Bacteria, like the Chromacea, have no nucleus. As is well-known, they play an important part in modern biology as the causes of fermentation and putrefaction, and of tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, and other infectious diseases, and as parasites, etc. But we cannot linger now to deal with these very interesting features; the Bacteria have no ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel

... less protein and in this particular as well as others which have been mentioned are better prepared to serve as nutrients to the body than are meats. Besides, nuts have the advantage of being clean, free from the products of disease and putrefaction. Meats of all sorts, as found in the market, with the exception of canned meats, abound with putrefactive bacteria to an astonishing degree. This is true of dried, smoked and salted meats as well as of the fresh meats and game which are displayed upon the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various

... uncleanness &c. Adj.; impurity; immundity[obs3], immundicity[obs3]; impurity &c. 961[of mind]. defilement, contamination &c. v.; defoedation|; soilure[obs3], soiliness|; abomination; leaven; taint, tainture|; fetor &c. 401[obs3]. decay; putrescence, putrefaction; corruption; mold, must, mildew, dry rot, mucor, rubigo|. slovenry[obs3]; slovenliness &c. Adj. squalor. dowdy, drab, slut, malkin[obs3], slattern, sloven, slammerkin|, slammock[obs3], slummock[obs3], scrub, draggle-tail, mudlark[obs3], dust- man, sweep; beast. dirt, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... part in small families. To the inhabitants of hot countries, the jackal is of the same service as the vulture and the hyena. He does not scruple to feed upon putrid flesh. Wherever there is an animal in a state of putrefaction, he scents it out from a great distance, and soon devours it. In this way the air is often freed from substances in the highest degree unwholesome and deadly. Nor is this all. One of the habits of this animal is to enter grave-yards, and dig ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth

... the gastric juice, and prepares for that of the pancreas, which can act only in an alkaline medium. The fermentive action of the bile is trifling; it dissolves fats, to a certain extent, and is antiseptic, that is, it prevents putrefaction to which the chyme might be liable; it also seems to ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... 'putrefied to the heart.' Which means that they have one tradition still dear to them (the name of Napoleon) and that they put no faith in the Socialistic prophets. Wise or unwise they may be accordingly; but an affection and an apprehension can't reasonably be said to amount to a 'putrefaction,' I ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... indeed, all fermented liquors have an antiseptic quality. They act in direct opposition to putrefaction, and in proportion to the quantity of alcohol which they contain, so will be their value and beneficial tendency. Now the circulating fluids of our system have a continual tendency to putrefaction; and the food we take, both animal ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various

... Concretionary Nodules. Consolidating Effects of Pressure. Mineralization of Organic Remains. Impressions and Casts: how formed. Fossil Wood. Goppert's Experiments. Precipitation of Stony Matter most rapid where Putrefaction is going on. Sources of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... to have a good product, fish must be fresh when canned. No time should be lost in handling the fish after being caught. Putrefaction starts rapidly, and the fish must be handled promptly. The sooner it is canned after being taken from lake, stream or ocean, the better. Never attempt to can any fish ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray

... the fetor attending copious continued sweats, it is owing to the animalized part of this fluid being kept in that degree of warmth, which most favours putrefaction, and not suffered to exhale into the atmosphere. Broth, or other animal mucus, kept in similar circumstances, would in the same time acquire a putrid smell; yet has this error frequently produced miliary eruptions, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... It is now known they are traps for capturing tiny aquatic creatures: nearly every bladder you examine under a microscope contains either minute crustaceans or larvae, worms, or lower organisms, some perhaps still alive, but most of them more or less advanced toward putrefaction - a stage hastened, it is thought, by a secretion within the bladders; for the plant cannot digest fresh food; it can only absorb, through certain processes within the bladder's walls, the fluid products of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... ordinary chemist to the Emperor, with orders to preserve it, as that of Colonel Morland had been, who was killed at the battle of Austerlitz. For this purpose the corpse was carried to Schoenbrunn, and placed in the left wing of the chateau, far from the inhabited rooms. In a few hours putrefaction became complete, and they were obliged to plunge the mutilated body into a bath filled with corrosive sublimate. This extremely dangerous operation was long and painful; and M. Cadet de Gassicourt deserves much commendation for the courage he displayed under these circumstances; ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... great degree of acrimony: while it lies dormant, this does no more mischiefs, than those named already; but when violent exercise, a fit of outrageous anger, or any thing else that suddenly shocks and disturbs the frame, puts it in motion, it melts at once into a kind of liquid putrefaction. Being now thin, it mixes itself readily with the blood again, and brings on putrid fevers; destroys the substance of the spleen itself, or being thrown upon some other of the viscera, corrodes them, and leads on this way a swift and miserable death. ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill

... between this fact and the equally notorious one that we are the most unhealthy people in the world. An untold amount of disease results from the too free use of flesh during the hot months. Heat promotes putrefaction; and as this change in meat is very rapid in warm weather, we can not be too careful not to eat that which is in the slightest degree tainted. Even when it goes into the stomach in a normal condition, there is danger; for if too much is eaten, or the digestive organs are not sufficiently ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells

... these vain efforts? Solitude sent me to nature, and nature to love. Standing in the street of Mental Observation, I saw myself pale and wan, surrounded by corpses, and, drying my hands on my bloody apron, stifled by the odor of putrefaction, I turned my head in spite of myself, and saw floating before my eyes green harvests, balmy fields, and the pensive harmony of the evening. "No," said I, "science can not console me; rather will I plunge into this sea of irresponsive nature and die there myself by drowning. I will not war ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... an appalling stench of putrefaction rose from a sewer near by that several people were turned sick; a woman was taken ill and handed over in a fainting condition to a couple of National Guards, who carried her off to a pump a few yards away. All held their noses, and fell to growling and grumbling, exchanging ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... air of careless indolence. And as he looked at them all, the markets which he had left behind him that morning seemed to him like a vast mortuary, an abode of death, where only corpses could be found, a charnel-house reeking with foul smells and putrefaction. He slackened his steps, and rested in that kitchen garden, as after a long perambulation amidst deafening noises and repulsive odours. The uproar and the sickening humidity of the fish market had departed ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... front line of Flers," wrote one of these Germans, "the men were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of putrefaction which filled the trench—almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered in a trench recess, and ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... called gases. Some are salutary, but many extremely noxious, especially such as those arising from the putrefaction of animal bodies; the burning of charcoal; corrupted air at the bottom of mines, cellars, &c. The inflammable gas, which lights our streets, churches, shops, &c., is procured chiefly from coal, burnt in furnaces ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... food.—Food that has undergone putrefaction or certain kinds of fermentation or heating, may have become poisonous, producing forage poisoning, meat ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... their respiration from the air, dissolved in sea water, is returned to the water by the vital processes of sea plants; that air is richer in oxygen than atmospheric air, containing 32 to 33 per cent. Oxygen, also, combines with the products of the putrefaction of dead animal bodies, changes their carbon into carbonic acid, their hydrogen into water, and their nitrogen assumes again the ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig

... a preparation of the dark-coloured liquor of the cuttle fish, was also bleached by chlorine, but the black matter of the lungs was not destroyed or bleached in the slightest degree by chlorine, it even survived unimpaired the destruction of the lungs by putrefaction ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar

... 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 died from hydropsy, reared like a whole mountain from her board ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... found these vibrios lived without air. Further experiments showed there were ferments to which air was necessary, called by Pasteur the aerobics, and others to whom oxygen was fatal, the anaerobics. He proved, also, by an exhaustive series of experiments, that what is called putrefaction of animal matter is the result of the combined work of the aerobics and the anaerobics, which reduce that part not taken up by oxygen to dead organic matter, ready in its turn to form ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... distance near Quintero, Lord Cochran, and Mrs. Maria Graham, found that the water, even at high tide, did not reach rocks, on which oysters, muscles, and shells still adhered, the animals inhabiting which, recently dead, were in a state of putrefaction. Finally the whole banks of the lake of Quintero, which communicates with the sea, had evidently mounted considerably above the level of the water, and in this locality the fact could not escape ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... this respect; for they will talk very calmly of an indigestion. It were to be wished, that idleness was not allowed to generate, on the rank soil of wealth, those swarms of summer insects that feed on putrefaction; we should not then be disgusted by the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... youths, Harvard University men and the like, to that accursed war; got them nearly all shot; wrote pretty biographies (to the ages of 17, 18, 19) and epitaphs for them; and so, having washed all the salt out of the nation in blood, left themselves to putrefaction, and the morality of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... infection, carbolic acid strikes at the very root and origin of disease by oxidising and consuming the germs which breed it. So powerful is it that one part in five thousand parts of flour paste, blood, &c., will for months prevent fermentation and putrefaction, whilst a little of its vapour in the atmosphere will preserve meat, as well as prevent it from becoming fly-blown. Although it has, in certain impure states, a slightly disagreeable odour, this ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... comes to a purer intellectual one, so that it can present itself to the mind, without feeling itself befogged by the exhalations of that humour, which, through the exercise of contemplation, has been saved from putrefaction in the stomach and is duly digested. In this state, the present enthusiast shows himself to have remained thirty years, during which time he had not reached that purity of conception which would make him a suitable habitation for the wandering species, which offering themselves ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... the odour of diabetics and other people who suffer from disturbances of digestion, and patients who suffer from cancer and other diseases involving a process of putrefaction. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... the country some of them, I read, have perished—thousands of people in a marriage whose banns have never been published; precipitated conjugality; bigamy triumphant; marriage a joke; society blotched all over with a putrefaction on this subject which no one but ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... divinest form, Which love and admiration cannot view Without a beating heart, whose azure veins Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, 15 Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed In light of some sublimest mind, decay? Nor putrefaction's breath Leave aught of this pure spectacle But loathsomeness and ruin?— 20 Spare aught but a dark theme, On which the lightest heart might moralize? Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers Have charmed ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... important than the correct proportions of the ingredients, is freedom from disease germs and bacteria of putrefaction. Complete sterilization is possible by prolonged boiling; but experience has proved that under prolonged exposure to a temperature near the boiling-point certain changes take place in the albuminoids of the milk which greatly impair its digestibility. Full sterilization of milk for ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... Resurrection of Lazarus, who had been four days dead. Considering the corrupt state of the body, which had been in the tomb three days, he presented the grave clothes bound about him as soiled by the putrefaction of the flesh, and certain livid and yellowish marks in the flesh about the eyes, between quick and dead, very well considered. He also shows the astonishment of the disciples and other figures, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari

... upon every occasion a more uncomplying spirit of independence than any of the other chiefs. It is customary with the New Zealanders to preserve from putrefaction, by a curious method, the heads of the enemies they have slain in battle; and Pomaree had acquired so great a proficiency in this art that he was considered the most expert at it of any of his countrymen. The process, as I was informed, consists ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik

... like begets like. But some things are found generated in nature by a thing unlike to them; as is evident in animals generated through putrefaction. Therefore the form of these is not from nature, but by creation; and the same ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... possessed grace:—do not take me for a disciple of Lord Chesterfield, nor Imagine that I mean to erect grace into a capital ingredient of writing; but I do believe that it is a perfume that will preserve from putrefaction, and is distinct even from style, which regards expression. Grace, I think, belongs to manner. It is from the charm of grace that I believe some authors, not in Your favour, obtained part of their renown; Virgil in particular: and yet I am far from disagreeing with ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... which, from its unwieldiness, they could not remove, and which, from the impenetrability of its shell, they could not destroy: here then their only resource was to deprive it of locomotion, and to obviate putrefaction; both which objects they accomplished most skilfully and securely—and as is usual with these sagacious creatures, at the least possible expense of labor and materials. They applied their cement where alone it was required, round the verge of the shell. In the latter ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... fungus found about the roots of old trees is designated "fairy-butter," because after rain, and when in a certain degree of putrefaction, it is reduced to a consistency which, together with its colour, makes it not unlike butter. The fairy-butter of the Welsh is a substance found at a great depth in cavities of limestone rocks. Ritson, in his "Fairy Tales," speaking of the fairies who frequented many parts ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... saw her but once, and that for a few hours only. When she fell sick shortly afterwards, he was quite unconcerned about visiting her in her illness; and when she died, after promising to attend her funeral, he deferred his coming for several days, so that the corpse was in a state of decay and putrefaction before the interment; and he then forbad divine honours being paid to her, pretending that he acted according to her own directions. He likewise annulled her will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and acquaintance; ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... "It has," he says, "become almost a regular custom to determine the value of manures by the quantity of nitrogen they yield by ultimate analysis. This method is entirely erroneous; for it is based upon the false principle, that by putrefaction all nitrogeneous substances are immediately converted into ammonia, carbonic acid, and water! But these changes sometimes require a number of years. Morphine, for example, is prepared by allowing opium to putrefy; and the process for preparing leucin, a substance ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... leprosy, where it is said, "If the whiteness have overspread the flesh, the patient may pass abroad for clean; but if there be any whole flesh remaining, he is to be shut up for unclean;" one of them noteth a principle of nature, that putrefaction is more contagious before maturity than after; and another noteth a position of moral philosophy, that men abandoned to vice do not so much corrupt manners, as those that are half good and half evil. So in this and very many other places in that law, there is to be found, besides ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... had a statue of Baphomet, identical with that in Ceylon, and the ill-ventilated place reeked with horrible putrescence. Its noisome condition was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... the note of disagreeableness, or of putrefaction, been struck—long duration. Other ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... Maine was the last to leave the wreck, and then all that was left of the mighty ship was beginning to settle in the slime and putrefaction which covers the bottom ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis

... neither savoury nor safe. It was built round a courtyard which consisted of a gigantic hole crammed with manure in all the stages of unpleasant putrefaction. One side is a barn; two sides consist of stables, and the third is the house inhabited not only by us but by an incredibly filthy and stinking old woman who was continually troubling the general because some months ago a French ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... together was poisonous when inhaled by others; and possibly more so, if the men be of different races. Mysterious as this circumstance appears to be, it is not more surprising than that the body of one's fellow-creature, directly after death, and before putrefaction has commenced, should often be of so deleterious a quality that the mere puncture from an instrument used in ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... with the microscopic organisms that infest age-rotten places. Sections of the flooring and woodwork also reeked with mustiness. In one dark, webby corner of the room lay a pile of bleached bones, still tinted with the ghastly grays and pinks of putrefaction. Northwood, overwhelmingly nauseated, withdrew his eyes from the bones, only to see, in another corner, a pile of worm-eaten clothing that lay on the floor in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... we prevent this cry from escaping us? For these hapless ones, enjoy, laugh, sing, please, and love exist, persist; but there is a death-rattle in sing, a grating sound in laugh, putrefaction in enjoy, there are ashes in please, there is night in love. All these joys are attached ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... close they came to modern views of wound infection may be judged from the following: "Upon the solution of Unity in any part the ambient air . . . repleted with various evaporations or aporrhoeas of mixt bodies, especially such as are then suffering the act of putrefaction, violently invadeth the part and thereupon impresseth an exotic miasm or noxious diathesis, which disposeth the blood successively arriving at the wound, to putrefaction, by the intervention of fermentation." With his magnetic sympathy, Van Helmont ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... under the military police were engaged in picking up the corpses, there still lay everywhere around the horribly mutilated bodies of the fallen in the postures in which they had been overtaken by a more or less painful death. An almost intolerable odour of putrefaction filled the air, and mingled with the biting, stifling smoke of the funeral pyres upon which the ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann

... chyle is propelled along the intestine by the worm-like contractions of its muscular walls. A function of the bile, not yet mentioned, is to stimulate these movements, and at the same time by its antiseptic properties to prevent putrefaction of the contents of ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... adds, that, to complete the imitation, he was shut up with a dead cock; and condescends to wonder how the Barbarian could endure the confinement and putrefaction. This absurd tale is unknown to the Latins. * Note: The Greek writers, in general, Zonaras, p. 2, 303, and Glycas, p. 334 agree in this story with the princess Anne, except in the absurd addition of the dead cock. Ducange has already ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... of animal matter when burning is owing to nitrogen. This element combined with hydrogen forms am-mo'ni-a, (hartshorn,) when animal matter is in a state of putrefaction. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... with various symptoms; for there was a gentle fever upon him, and an intolerable itching over all the surface of his body, and continual pains in his colon, and dropsical turnouts about his feet, and an inflammation of the abdomen, and a putrefaction of his privy member, that produced worms. Besides which he had a difficulty of breathing upon him, and could not breathe but when he sat upright, and had a convulsion of all his members, insomuch that ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus

... pencil of light from over Karl's shoulder and the green eyes of the dwarf went wide with horrified surprise. He clutched at his breast where the flame had contacted, then slowly collapsed in a pitiful, distorted heap. Karl recoiled from the odor of putrefaction that immediately filled the compartment. He whirled to face the new danger but saw nothing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... arising from the decomposition of animal matters, I introduced into a balloon containing about 130 pints of air, a piece of flesh weighing four ounces, taken from a human corpse, and in a very advanced state of putrefaction. I withdrew it after a minute; the air in the balloon had acquired a strong and very repulsive odour, shewing that it was charged with an appreciable quantity—at least for the smell—of miasm caused by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various

... momentary emotion in the readers of fiction. But the reality is stern and dreadful, beyond imagination or conception. There is in the cess-pools of the great capitals of Christendom a mass of human creatures who are born, who live, and who die, in moral putrefaction. Their existence is a continued career of sin and woe. Body and soul, mind and heart, are given up to earth, to sense, to corruption. They emerge for a brief season into the light of day, run their swift and fiery career of sin, and then disappear. ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... goes a little farther than the rule that he who deceives injures his good name, and he who gets intoxicated injures his health; that they give a man who still believes in the resurrection of Jesus, to understand that he has not yet learned the first elements of the theory of putrefaction and perishableness. That the adversaries of faith in a God thus express themselves, and try to conquer as much ground as possible for their frosty doctrine, is certainly quite natural; but that even ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... 567. The constituent parts of animal fibres are believed to be earth and gluten. These do not seperate except by long putrefaction or by fire. The earth then effervesces with acids, and can only be converted into glass by the greatest force of fire. The gluten has continued united with the earth of the bones above 2000 years in Egyptian mummies; ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... pardon for the accident, and they protested their innocence of any design. In every way they provided themselves with a plausible defense in case he should recover or they should be suspected. After several days, putrefaction happily settled all their doubts about the mortality of their conquerors, and the glad news was communicated to ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall

... may learn in Dr. Sierich's book the unexpected sequel of the tale. Here is enough for my purpose. Though the man was but new dead, the ghost was already putrefied, as though putrefaction were the mark and of the essence of a spirit. The vigil on the Paumotuan grave does not extend beyond two weeks, and they told me this period was thought to coincide with that of the resolution of the body. The ghost always marked with decay—the danger seemingly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was overwhelming. In looking upon that piece of pasteboard the wife had seen a crime which the mother could never forgive, the partner had seen a crime which the friend could never forgive. Think of a loved face suddenly melting before your eyes into a grinning skull, then into a mass of putrefaction, then into the ugliest fiend of hell, leering at you, distorted with all the marks of vice and shame. That is what I saw, that is ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... economy in arranging the protein content of the diet, it is equally important that we should not go to the other extreme. The consumption of over- large quantities of protein, as would be the case if we lived exclusively upon meat, increases putrefaction in the intestines and throws unnecessary work upon the kidneys, which are the organs chiefly concerned in getting rid of the ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... of the mountain, I found a dead ox the Jayhawkers had left, as no camp could be made here for lack of water and grass, the meat could not be saved. I found the body of the animal badly shrunken, but in condition, as far as putrefaction was concerned, as perfect as when alive. A big gash had been cut in the ham clear to the bone and the sun had dried the flesh in this. I was so awful hungry that I took my sheath knife and cut a big steak ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... "alkaloids of putrefaction," as he called them, from blood which had been allowed to putrefy in a warm place. He found that albuminoids derived from decaying vegetable substances did not ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... recomposition of water is perpetually operating before our eyes, in the temperature of the atmosphere, by means of compound elective attraction. We shall presently see that the phenomena attendant upon vinous fermentation, putrefaction, and even vegetation, are produced, at least in a certain degree, by decomposition of water. It is very extraordinary that this fact should have hitherto been overlooked by natural philosophers and chemists: Indeed, it strongly proves, that, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... enfeebling influence beyond any which I had ever experienced. The drought of unusual duration had bereft the air and the earth of every particle of moisture. The element which I breathed appeared to have stagnated into noxiousness and putrefaction. I was astonished at observing the enormous diminution of my strength. My brows were heavy, my intellects benumbed, my sinews enfeebled, and my sensations ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... are characterized by intermissions and remissions, and thus include our intermittent and remittent fevers; synochus depended theoretically upon putrefaction of the blood in the vessels, and was a continued fever. Synocha, on the other hand, was occasioned by a mere superabundance of hot ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... skeleton of a low order of animal, growing at the bottom of the sea. The sponge is cut from the place of attachment, and the gelatinous matter is washed away after putrefaction. The chief sponge-fisheries are in the neighborhood of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... adult in health exhales by the lungs and skin in the twenty-four hours three pints at least of moisture, loaded with organic matter ready to enter into putrefaction; that in sickness the quantity is often greatly increased, the quality is always more noxious—just ask yourself next where does all this moisture go to? Chiefly into the bedding, because it cannot go anywhere else. And it stays there; because, except perhaps ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale



Words linked to "Putrefaction" :   immorality, biological science, decomposition, putridness, putrefy, corruption, putrescence, rotting, rot, rottenness, biology, depravity, degeneracy, decay



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