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Thought is combustion. Young Kant, the uncouth, became possessed of an idea that made him the butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe enough, he would be able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone. Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one cause a shortness of breath. In order to think clearly, you must breathe.

It consists of three parts, an interior dark space, in which the elements of the gas are in an unconsumed state; an inner ring around the former, whence the greatest amount of light is obtained, and in which are numerous particles of carbon at a white heat, each awaiting a supply of oxygen in order to bring about combustion; and an outer ring of blue flame in which complete combustion has taken place, and from which the largest amount of heat is evolved.

The crackle and explosive nature of hickory, the hiss of pine, the steady flame from cherry, the hot and rapid disintegration of sycamore, and the steady and thorough combustion of soft apple wood soon become familiar characteristics to those who have the opportunity to lay the fire in variety.

No; for marine plants abounded on the shore, glass-wort, ficoides, and all those fucaceae which form wrack. A large quantity of these plants was collected, first dried, then burnt in holes in the open air. The combustion of these plants was kept up for several days, and the result was a compact gray mass, which has been long known under the name of "natural soda."

It is not every one that can steal the fire from heaven like Prometheus; but, when once he had done the deed, a thousand hearths were kindled by it." It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was the proportion between the physical mass of any given author and the property of brilliant and long-continued combustion.

Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man relieved by this application. Even the scoffer was convinced there was merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters" had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with him.

From first to last, he was a stiff adherent of the phlogiston doctrine which was prevalent when his studies commenced; and, by a curious irony of fate, the man who by the discovery of what he called "dephlogisticated air" furnished the essential datum for the true theory of combustion, of respiration, and of the composition of water, to the end of his days fought against the inevitable corollaries from his own labours.

But so long as France is keeping a suspicious eye upon England, and England upon France, everything will run to combustion, detrimental to their Majesties and to us, and ruinous to all the good inhabitants." To the Treaty of Xanten faithfully executed he held as to an anchor in the tempest until it was torn away, not by violence from without, but by insidious mutiny within.

Without pausing to consider the somewhat puerile theories of Vitruvius, or the myths which testify to the importance attached to fire by primeval man, we are at liberty to suppose that a conflagration caused by lightning or by the spontaneous combustion of vegetable materials in a state of fermentation, or other similar phenomena, made known to man the power of fire, and the use it might be to him.

Using a luminous flame, it is impossible to prevent a deposit of carbon, which is kept by the flame at a red heat on its outer surface, and the carbon dioxide formed by the complete combustion of the carbon already burned up in flame is reduced by this back to carbon monoxide, so that even in the extreme tip of a luminous flame it is impossible to heat a cool body without giving rise to carbon monoxide, although acetylene being absent, gas stoves, in which small flat flame burners are used, have not that subtile and penetrating odor which marks the ordinary atmospheric burner stove, with the combustion checked just at the right spot for the formation of the greatest volume of noxious products.