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For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpeter into powder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked up, as an alembic, all the juice of the forbidden fruit. Those who did not read him did not believe it, knew nothing of it. Poor creatures! The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the abyss of universal doubt.
Now, Harding having sulphuric acid at his disposal, had already been easily able to produce azotic acid by attacking the saltpeter with which nature supplied him.
It is very important to know just what articles are contraband and what are not; but this is often hard to decide. There is no question about weapons, military equipments and ammunition. These are plainly contraband, and the materials from which they are made are classed with them whenever they seem intended for military uses. Thus sulphur and saltpeter are always contraband.
Grawitz recommends a mixture composed of 2½ ounces of chloride of sodium, 2¾ drachms of saltpeter, and 1 pint of water, to which is to be added 3 per cent. of boric acid. Annales des Travaux Publics.
As to the powder, it is composed of three ingredients one is charcoal, which can be obtained wherever trees grow; another is called by us saltpeter; and the third, sulphur; but I cannot say whether either is found in this land.
Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood. Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded, on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: "Enough, men! Enough!
Most of the cannon ball used in this battle had been made at the old iron furnace in Bath County, near where Owingsville now stands, and a great portion of the powder had been manufactured from the saltpeter leached from the soil in Mammoth Cave, Edmonson County, Kentucky.
The brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of education.
Whether it was that his blood was bad, or there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it, and learned that it was a regular thing it was the saltpeter. Every one felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for that sort of work. The sores would never heal in the end his toes would drop off, if he did not quit.
In hardly a single manual of chemistry is the production of saltpeter attributed to the action of a living ferment existing in the soil. Still more striking is the absence of any recognition of the evidence just mentioned when we turn to the literature and to the public discussions on the subjects of sewage, the pollution of river water, and other sanitary questions.
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