What is "saltpetre"

Usage examples of "saltpetre".

As he lighted one of the cigarettes in that case, filled with so-called Egyptian tobacco, mixed with opium and saltpetre, which he preferred to the tobacco of the American, he mechanically glanced at the card which the servant had left on going from the room-the card of the unknown visitor for whom Madame Steno had left him.

I have charcoal of limewood, the purest of sulphur, and thrice-crystallized saltpetre, I gain no greater strength.

Angers, Poitiers, La Rochelle, Albi, Moulins, Montpellier, Clermont sulphur, saltpetre, steel, and arms.

Every day, there would be new arrivals of coals from Newcastle, rank hoppers of saltpetre from the Indies, fragrant sheaves of tobacco from the Fortunate Isles, barrels of Muscadet, endless sacks of every kind of fruit and produce, some of which, rotting and mouldering, brought plagues of insects even more irritating and ugly than those which commonly alighted on the flesh of every Londoner in those long hot shifterms.

Our furnace eke of calcination, And of waters albification, Unslaked lime, chalk, and *glair of an ey,* *egg-white Powders diverse, ashes, dung, piss, and clay, Seared pokettes, saltpetre, and vitriol.

Ramifications in every direction, crossings of trenches, branchings, goose-tracks, stars as if in mines, cœcums, cul-de-sacs, arches covered with saltpetre, infectious cesspools, a herpetic ooze upon the walls, drops falling from the ceiling, darkness.

Ramifications in every direction, crossings, of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum, blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness.

Our lamps that burned by day and burned by night To bring about our end, if but we might, Our furnace, too, white-hot for calcination, And waters all prepared for albication, Unslaked lime, chalk, and white of egg, I say, Powders diverse, and ashes, dung, piss, clay, Little waxed bags, saltpetre, vitriol.

When he bit the bullet from the cartridge the saltpetre tasted bitter and foul.

Kelp-burning as a source of iodine is a dead industry, owing to a cheaper process of obtaining it from the mother-liquors obtained in the purification of Chile saltpetre, and the use of kelp - an impure carbonate of soda, containing sulphate and chloride of sodium and a little charcoal - as a source of alkalies for soap and glass manufacture has been rendered obsolete by the modern process of obtaining carbonate of soda cheaply from common salt.

The potassium nitrate, saltpetre, was at fault, but that again Killick could not know, but he did know when a gun coughed instead of banged.

Beside him on his left were two portfires - fifteen-inch-long cylindrical tubes filled with a composition of saltpetre, sulphur and gunpowder mealed by treating it with spirits of wine, and which when lit burned steadily like a large Roman candle at the rate of an inch a minute.

He got up when he seen us and went to the willows and come back with a pair of wallets and in one was about eight pounds of pure crystal saltpetre and in the other about three pounds of fine alder charcoal.