United States or Uzbekistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


If this internal molten mass came bursting out and cooled very quickly it became granite; less quickly copper, less quickly silver, less quickly gold, and, after gold, diamonds were made. Said the old priest, "A diamond is a congealed drop of sunlight." Now that is literally scientifically true, that a diamond is an actual deposit of carbon from the sun.

But, to be perfectly clear, I will say that there are live things that must, above all others, be looked after in tunnel work: the air pressure, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, the length of the shifts which the men work, the state of health of the men as near as physical examination can determine it, and the rapidity with which the men come out of the air, so as to prevent carelessness which may cause the bends.

A small semicircle, or horseshoe, of some substance, such as a filament of bamboo reduced to the form of pure carbon, the two ends being attached to the poles of the generating-machine, or dynamo, as the engine is popularly called, is enclosed in a glass bulb, from which the air has been carefully drawn, and is rendered incandescent by the passage of an electric current.

Have not the judicial elements of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen combined to organize on one planet at least courts of equity and judgment seats, and crystalized into prison walls and hand-cuffs the gallows and the hangman?

We think of something in the organic that lifts and moves and redistributes dead matter, and builds it up into the ten thousand new forms which it would never assume without this something; it lifts lime and iron and silica and potash and carbon, against gravity, up into trees and animal forms, not by a new force, but by an old force in the hands of a new agent.

He taught a very famous chemist, Lavoisier, about ninety years ago, how to burn a diamond in oxygen and a very difficult trick that is; and Lavoisier found that the diamond when burnt turned almost entirely into carbonic acid and water, as blacklead and charcoal do; and more, that each of them turned into the same quantity of carbonic acid, And so he knew, as surely as man can know anything, that all these things, however different to our eyes and fingers, are really made of the same thing, pure carbon.

The residue of carbon and thorium on the blast tube walls was stubborn, dirty, and penetrating. It was caked on in a solid sheet, but when scraped, it broke up into fine powder. The Planeteers wore coveralls, gloves, and face masks with respirators, but that didn’t prevent the stuff from sifting through onto their bodies.

If we admit these facts to be established, we can no longer doubt that a deficient produce of carbon, or in other words, the barrenness of a field does not depend upon carbonic acid, because we are able to increase the produce, to a certain degree, by a supply of substances which do not contain any carbon.

Without carbon we should evaporate or flow away and escape. Much of the oxygen and hydrogen enters into living bodies as water; nine tenths of the human body is water; a little nitrogen and a few mineral salts make up the rest.

He could not but wonder where Admiral Selwyn obtained his information, knowing that a theoretically perfect heat engine would only give 23 per cent. of the absolute heat used, and that a pound of the best coal would give but 8,000 and hydrocarbon 13,000 heat units, while hydrogen would give 34,000; and calculating it out, how was it possible to get out of one-sixth of a pound of carbon, or any hydrocarbon, the amount of power stated?